Operationalization (which is really hard to say, go ahead - try it a few times) is a concept that crosses the lines between trends and technologies. Both SDN and DevOps share the notion of "operationalization" as a means to achieve the goal of aligning IT with business priorities, like that of accelerating time to market for all important applications. But what does it really mean to operationalize the network, or app deployments, or really, anything? Operationalization is a lot like DevOps in that it's more of an approach to how you deploy and manage operations than it is some concrete, tangible thing. It is a verb, it's something you do that has concrete, measurable impacts on the application environment, aka the data center, and the processes that move an application from development and into the hands of its intended consumers, whether internal or external.
IoT is still a vague buzzword for many people. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mike Kavis, Vice President & Principal Cloud Architect at Cloud Technology Partners, discussed the business value of IoT that goes far beyond the general public's perception that IoT is all about wearables and home consumer services. He also discussed how IoT is perceived by investors and how venture capitalist access this space. Other topics discussed were barriers to success, what is new, what is old, and what the future may hold. Mike Kavis is Vice President & Principal Cloud Architect at Cloud Technology Partners. He has served in numerous technical roles such as CTO, Chief Architect, and VP positions with over 25 years of experience in software development and architecture. A pioneer in cloud computing, Mike led a team that built the world’s first high speed transaction network in Amazon’s public cloud and won the 2010 AWS Global Startup Challenge. An expert in cloud security, he is the author of “Architecting the Cloud: Design Decisions for Cloud Computing Service Models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)” from Wiley Publishing.
Life is difficult. Business life is sometimes argued to be even more difficult. If nothing else, business life is as socially complex as life itself. This truism obviously means that there are different business types – but different in regard to what? Separating the old and the new is good way to look at how the family tree breaks down. At one end of the spectrum we find the old languid non-transformative company (or user) who fails to grasp new digital information empowerment – and at the other end we find the true digital native. But the space in between is populated by a degree of other behavioural types.
The pace of innovation in such big data-driven targeting technology is advancing unabated. There is so much noise in today’s omnichannel world that anything a marketer can do to get your attention is welcome – and furthermore, the more information they can collect about you, the better. For the marketer, big data mean big cha-ching. We've all been there: on our lunch hour we surreptitiously visit our favorite My Little Pony fan site. Then hours later we bring our laptop to a meeting and project our client's corporate web site for all to see - and right there at the top is a banner ad for My Little Pony: The Movie. How did that site know about our secret fetish? How embarrassing! How creepy!
Although the concepts of continuous delivery are well known, organizations with existing applications looking to implement CD still have a lot to consider. Customer demands aren't the only thing pushing development and operations teams into more frequent software releases. It is also need for quicker feedback on product quality, the desire to reduce bottlenecks in operations teams, and the goal to utilize less overhead on projects. The concepts and spirit of continuous delivery are well known. However, organizations with existing applications starting to implement continuous delivery still have a lot to consider.
At first glance, it might seem that the goals of DevOps and regulatory compliance are inherently at odds. Whereas much of the buzz around DevOps advocates delivering software at dizzying rates, compliance and security are concerned with proper oversight of the change management process to ensure that the enterprise isn’t opening itself up to potential vulnerabilities. With the tedious amount of rules and regulations that enterprises are subjected to, compliance can end up being a governor on the release process, defeating the potential benefits from adopting DevOps practices.
The process of getting a successful mobile application deployed can be complex and daunting. Architecting, designing and developing natural user interfaces for touch and gesture on mobile devices is not the same as web and desktop UI design and development. Mobile devices are used in different contexts, and bring different personas to the table. Having web and desktop architecture, development, and UI design experience does not make you a qualified mobile architect, developer, or UI designer.
Moscow-based OpenBank, one of the largest private financial services groups in Russia, has built out a business intelligence capability for wholly new business activity monitoring benefits. The next BriefingsDirect deep-dive big data benefits case study interview explores how Moscow-based Otkritie Bank, one of the largest private financial services groups in Russia, has built out a business intelligence (BI) capability for wholly new business activity monitoring (BAM) benefits. The use of HP Vertica as a big data core to the BAM infrastructure provides Otkritie Bank improved nationwide analytics and a competitive advantage through better decision-making based on commonly accepted best information that's updated in near real-time.
When was the last time you went to your favorite office superstore to buy a piece of packaged software? Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud storage have completely changed the consumer computing market. Other than Microsoft Office and a few resource-intensive applications for photo and video editing, everything else is either running in the cloud, delivered and managed from the cloud, or storing data in the cloud. The same trend is coming to enterprise IT. While many organizations have moved their packaged software to IaaS providers like AWS and Azure, many more will simply adopt pure SaaS offerings. These new services align with user and organizational demands, and their pay-as-you-go pricing model fits current business budgeting and purchasing needs. They also get IT departments out of the costly business of building, maintaining, and securing datacenters.
If you thought the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) craze was a headache, just wait until button cameras, smart watches, and spy glasses (already here) are a daily occurrence in the office. Workplace #Wearables will be a huge challenge in the coming years as more devices, clothing and pretty much any ‘thing’ with a chip or sensor become commonplace in our society. The device explosion with IoT (Internet of Things) will be much larger than any of these mobile phones we carry around. A couple new reports examine the impact of IoT on businesses.
Due of the rise of Hadoop, many enterprises are now deploying their first small clusters of 10 to 20 servers. At this small scale, the complexity of operating the cluster looks and feels like general data center servers. It is not until the clusters scale, as they inevitably do, when the pain caused by the exponential complexity becomes apparent. We've seen this problem occur time and time again.
The recent trends like cloud computing, social, mobile and Internet of Things are forcing enterprises to modernize in order to compete in the competitive globalized markets. However, enterprises are approaching newer technologies with a more silo-ed way, gaining only sub optimal benefits. The Modern Enterprise model is presented as a newer way to think of enterprise IT, which takes a more holistic approach to embracing modern technologies. This model makes use of Composable Enterprise framework put forward by Jonathan Murray of WMG.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Mark Hinkle, Senior Director, Open Source Solutions at Citrix Systems Inc., will provide overview of the open source software that can be used to deploy and manage a cloud computing environment. He will include information on storage, networking(e.g., OpenDaylight) and compute virtualization (Xen, KVM, LXC) and the orchestration(Apache CloudStack, OpenStack) of the three to build their own cloud services.
There are 182 billion emails sent every day, generating a lot of data about how recipients and ISPs respond. Many marketers take a more-is-better approach to stats, preferring to have the ability to slice and dice their email lists based numerous arbitrary stats. However, fundamentally what really matters is whether or not sending an email to a particular recipient will generate value. Data Scientists can design high-level insights such as engagement prediction models and content clusters that allow marketers to cut through the noise and design their campaigns around strong, predictive signals, rather than arbitrary statistics. SendGrid sends up to half a billion emails a day for customers such as Pinterest and GitHub. All this email adds up to more text than produced in the entire twitterverse. We track events like clicks, opens and deliveries to help improve deliverability for our customers – adding up to over 50 billion useful events every month. While SendGrid data covers only about 2% of all non-spam email activity in the world, it gives SendGrid a unique snapshot of email activity spanning from the senders to the recipients and inbox providers like gmail and yahoo. To cope with data of this scale SendGrid has designed and implemented custom data structures to store 10s of billions of items in memory on a single commodity machine.
As Platform as a Service (PaaS) matures as a category, developers should have the ability to use the programming language of their choice to build applications and have access to a wide array of services. Bluemix is IBM's open cloud development platform that enables users to easily build cloud-based, creative mobile and web applications without having to spend large amounts of time and resources on configuring infrastructure and multiple software licenses. In this track, you will learn about the array of services to support and accelerate application development, as well as building applications on Bluemix using Java and node.JS. Learn more about Bluemix at www.bluemix.net.
With the explosion of the cloud, more businesses are transitioning to a recurring revenue model to generate reliable sales, grow profits, and open new markets. This opportunity requires businesses to get to market quickly with the pricing and packaging options customers want. In addition, you will want to take advantage of the ensuing tidal wave of data to more effectively upsell, cross-sell and manage your customers. All of this is possible, but only with the right approach. At 15th Cloud Expo, Brendan O'Brien, Co-founder at Aria Systems and the inventor of cloud billing panelists, will lead a panel discussion on what it takes to launch and manage a successful recurring revenue business. The panelists will offer their insights about what each department will need to consider, from financial management to line of business and IT. The panelists will also offer examples from their success in recurring revenue with companies such as Audi, Constant Contact, Experian, Pitney-Bowes, Telekom Denmark and others. This panel will include Brendan O’Brien from Aria Systems, Chief Architect and inventor of cloud billing, and a host of executives with varying subject matter and department expertise.
Over the summer Gartner released its much anticipated annual Hype Cycle report and the big news is that Internet of Things has now replaced Big Data as the most hyped technology. Indeed, we’re hearing more and more about this fascinating new technological paradigm. Every other IT news items seems to be about IoT and its implications on the future of… Read the full post
Despite the data privacy protections supposedly conferred by regulations like HIPAA and HITECH, consumers’ confidential health and personal information is still not safe enough. That’s the lesson to be learned from Franklin, TN-based Community Health Systems’ (CHS) August 18 regulatory filing. In the filing, CHS disclosed that the names, SSNs, addresses, birth dates, and phone numbers of approximately 4.5 million people across 28 states have been stolen, according to Computerworld. Those 4.5 million victims, whom Computerworld reported had either received or been referred for services to CHS-affiliated physicians, are now at risk of identity theft, thanks to the security weaknesses of their healthcare provider. This latest large-scale data breach serves to highlight just how critical data security is in today’s connected age.
When an enterprise builds a hybrid IaaS cloud connecting its data center to one or more public clouds, security is often a major topic along with the other challenges involved. Security is closely intertwined with the networking choices made for the hybrid cloud. Traditional networking approaches for building a hybrid cloud try to kludge together the enterprise infrastructure with the public cloud. Consequently this approach requires risky, deep "surgery" including changes to firewalls, subnets and other modifications to the corporate security infrastructure. Connecting a public cloud to the enterprise requires infrastructure changes to limit how deep into the enterprise it can see. For those who have dealt with it, it’s time consuming and risky, requiring a complete InfoSec review of the new structure. More important, even if an enterprise does it once successfully, it has to be repeated for each new project and cloud service provider.
The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to evolve the way the world does business; however, understanding how to apply it to your company can be a mystery. Most people struggle with understanding the potential business uses or tend to get caught up in the technology, resulting in solutions that fail to meet even minimum business goals. In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Jesse Shiah, CEO / President / Co-Founder of AgilePoint Inc., will show what is needed to leverage the IoT to transform your business. He will discuss opportunities and challenges ahead for the IoT from a market and technical point of view, including the various connectivity technologies, microcontrollers and processors available with a strong focus on applications. He will also show you how to get started from a business and technology perspective so you can quickly bring to market connected solutions that expand business revenue, optimize operations and delight customers and users.
SYS-CON Events announced today that IBM is holding a Bluemix Developer Playground on November 5, 10:30 am to 5:30 pm at 15th Cloud Expo. 15th Cloud Expo, co-located with @ThingsExpo, Big Data Expo, and DevOps Summit is taking place Nov. 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. The labs, for developers of all levels, will highlight the ease of use of Bluemix, its services and functionality and provide short-term introductory projects that developers can complete between sessions. Developers will be able spend as much time as they want working on specific DevOps projects, and store their code within the IBM DevOps cloud.
Here’s is a quote from the About page of the Web site ehow.com: “eHow is your one-stop online resource for life’s challenges. Professionals in every field come together to offer expert advice, backed by the additional support of a can-do eHow community.“ Experts are also human beings and sometimes they make mistakes too. But when […]
How do APIs and IoT relate? The answer is not as simple as merely adding an API on top of a dumb device, but rather about understanding the architectural patterns for implementing an IoT fabric. There are typically two or three trends: Exposing the device to a management framework Exposing that management framework to a business centric logic • Exposing that business layer and data to end users. This last trend is the IoT stack, which involves a new shift in the separation of what stuff happens, where data lives and where the interface lies. For instance, it’s a mix of architectural styles between cloud, APIs and native hardware/software configurations. In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Sumit Sharma, Director of API Strategy at MuleSoft, will describe the different types of relationships between IoT, cloud, APIs and integration.
BSQUARE is a global leader of embedded software solutions. We enable smart connected systems at the device level and beyond that millions use every day and provide actionable data solutions for the growing Internet of Things (IoT) market. We empower our world-class customers with our products, services and solutions to achieve innovation and success. For more information, visit www.bsquare.com.
From a software development perspective IoT is about programming "things," about connecting them with each other or integrating them with existing applications. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Yakov Fain, co-founder of Farata Systems and SuranceBay, will show you how small IoT-enabled devices from multiple manufacturers can be integrated into the workflow of an enterprise application. This is a practical demo of building a framework and components in HTML/Java/Mobile technologies to serve as a platform that can integrate new devices as they become available on the market.