It's now clear that we are entering into a very diverse and even unprecedented work environment -- something the world perhaps has never known. Companies need to prepare for it now. But how do enterprises prepare, and how do they create the means to analyze and manage the transition to very different work environments? BriefingsDirect had an opportunity to learn first-hand at the recent 2014 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas. To learn more about hiring and acquiring talent and managing a diverse and socially engaged -- and even more knowledge-driven workforce -- we sat down with Shawn Price, President for Global Cloud and Line of Business at SAP, and the former President of SuccessFactors, now part of SAP. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Assuming that your organization is well down the road when it comes to adopting the Cloud and in fact, has been utilizing the Cloud for a while, then you are likely a true believer that ultimately all of your applications will be migrated to the Cloud. It is no longer a question of "if" but more a question of "when" and "how." These days, the majority of test, dev, external websites and mobile apps are already born in the cloud. Applications make businesses run. Businesses have tons of applications ranging from purchased (commercial off the shelf) to homegrown (bespoke) and likely some customized, purchased apps that now look a lot like the homegrown ones. One of the big problems with apps is that once they are built and deployed they rarely get replaced or decommissioned. Application sprawl and aging application portfolios are among the root causes for much of the fixed cost in an IT budget and can consume close to 80% of the dollars.
Are you serving .SWF files from your web server and getting complaints from your end users that your flash app is “just slow?” Or has your Ops team wondered why you see such high web request response times for some of the web service calls executed by your Flash Client? I was just working with a bank that uses a Flash Component for one of their internal risk management applications. For years they wondered why users were complaining about very slow response times when executing, e.g., a “Credit Worthiness” check. Our teams helped them figure out the root cause of the performance problem: “Back in the day” they had turned off Apache’s Content Compression (MOD_DEFLATE) in order to avoid a known issue of content compressed flash files that are content compressed. Unfortunately they turned it off completely and not just for .SWF Files. So – all other requests – especially the heavyweight Web Service Responses were not compressed.
SYS-CON Events announced today that MetraTech Corp., the leading global provider of Agreements-Based Billing™ (ABB), Commerce and Settlement solutions, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. Commerce is driven by agreements between sellers and buyers. The best agreements can be fluidly negotiated and flexible enough to meet the needs of both sides. This allows a business to be able to adapt to new markets, new business models, or competition, giving them a distinct advantage.
Two weeks ago I wrote about how the world’s largest exporter of dairy products uses SAP to support their huge delivery chain of dairy products. We recounted how Fonterra used an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool to discover that additional training for employees was necessary to speed up certain critical SAP transactions: some employees weren’t optimizing attributes passed to the reports based on custom T-Codes. Unfortunately, additional SAP training cannot solve all the problems. Separately and unrelated to the training issues, Fonterra started to notice that end-to-end SAP transactions were much slower than usual; especially during the summer months. Correlating long-term network performance data, such as loss rate or RTT measures, with end-to-end SAP transaction response times revealed the actual network problem caused by something nobody thought about.
You hear this everywhere these days: Build applications that are cloud-native – that is, developed specifically for cloud platforms. The trouble is everyone has his or her own definition of "cloud-native." As a result, cloud-hosted applications are all over the place in their use of native features. Many are not designed properly, and they're worse off in the cloud than when they ran in the data center. What are the fundamentals of being cloud-native? As I see it, being cloud-native is more about the application architecture and design than how you code the thing. Sadly, many people – in IT and at the vendors – are missing the boat on both points.
Facebook invested more cash this week when they acquired one of my favourite Kickstarter projects Oculus VR for a seemingly ridiculous $2b. The VR (virtual reality) headset was the best in class technology (in its price range) and had just added a head-tracking software solution to reduce motion sickness. Of course it wasn't just the VR headset that Facebook acquired, but the CTO of Oculus VR, who is no other than the legendary game creator John Carmack.
The Internet of Things is not a single choice of technology, approach or philosophy. Its very existence is the bringing together of multiple platforms, products and protocols, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. One of the challenges of IoT is to make it as easy as possible to allow developers to make things, for play or profit, serious or whimsical, professional or hobbyist. Node-RED is an open source visual tool for wiring the Internet of Things. Built on top of node.js, it provides a lightweight, browser-based editor that makes it easy to integrate different streams of both physical and digital events. Its lightweight nature makes it ideal to run at the edge of the network, such as on the Raspberry Pi. By making use of the huge module eco-system within node.js, it provides a framework for easily adding new nodes into its palette to extends its capabilities.
SYS-CON Events announced today that NaviSite, Inc., a Time Warner Cable Company and premier provider of enterprise-class hosting, managed applications, managed messaging and managed cloud services, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. NaviSite, Inc., a Time Warner Cable Company, is a leading international provider of enterprise-class, cloud-enabled hosting, managed applications and services. NaviSite provides a full suite of reliable and scalable managed services, including Application Services, industry-leading Enterprise Hosting, and Managed Cloud Services, for organizations looking to outsource IT infrastructures and helps lower their capital and operational costs. Enterprise customers depend on NaviSite for customized solutions, delivered through a global footprint of state-of-the-art data centers.
While at the RSA Conference this past year I was amazed at the mindshare and enthusiasm that the security industry was giving to DevOps. It seemed that security pros were eager to flock and embrace DevOps. This got me to thinking and I asked my friend Gene Kim about it. Gene said DevOps represented something of an “escape hatch” to security pros. An escape hatch? What are they escaping from? This got me thinking some more (too much thinking hurts my head). Then it came to me, DevOps is the last best hope for security. Once again this year security has taken a beating. It seems every day we hear about another high-profile breach, more exposed confidential data, another class of malware, government sponsored cyber-snooping, etc. In spite of record spending on security, oodles of new security companies and technologies, is security winning the war? The answer I am afraid is no. In fact there is a significant movement in security that says we should spend more resources planning for a breach instead of preventing breaches.
APIs are transforming businesses to extend the reach of their information systems and data. In technical terms, APIs are rather finite, allowing two software applications to exchange data and execute procedures. Yet their business impact is so great that API management requires a far from finite thought process. A “soup to nuts” approach is needed to help companies determine how to achieve the most business success with APIs. An API enables applications to access back-end systems using lightweight, standards-based protocols such as REST and JSON. For example, if you were in food distribution, the actual business of soup and nuts, you could develop an API that lets mobile app developers tap directly into your ERP system. They could build consumer apps for recipes that showed ingredients that you had in stock. Grocery stores could build apps that gave their shoppers bulk discounts on large orders and so forth. The API extends your food distribution business into customer realms where you’ve never played before. This is fantastic. But it also presents a number of challenges to the management of the business.
You are moving workloads to the public or private cloud to save money, but you realize that the change from traditional IT to cloud means fundamental changes in the way you think about and operate the business. IT needs to be even more “service oriented,” because cloud is about providing infrastructure, platforms, or Software as a Service. This focus on services drives fundamental changes to processes, policies, governance, security, chargeback / showback, provisioning / orchestration, monitoring, configuration, licenses, procurement, resource/capacity management, etc.
A recent Forbes article by Andrew Dailey at MGi Research reinforces the importance of “agile billing” to businesses that are serious about creating new revenue streams, meeting customers’ needs and doing it fast and well. The term agile is a good description of what businesses need from their billing systems in order to meet these challenges. At MetraTech, we’ve been an agile billing solution from day one with our “metadata-based” approach, which is what makes MetraNet flexible and responsive as well as business model and industry agnostic. So “agile” is a good description of how the system should perform and “metadata” is how the billing system actually delivers the agility. Metadata enables you to configure your data model, transaction processing, and user interface through web services compliant APIs and, as a result, enables the billing system to conform to your business model and existing systems. No need to compromise, you can simply innovate.
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.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Basic6 will exhibit at SYS-CON's 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. Basic6, the tool that securely consolidates the management and control of Linux/Unix and Windows servers across Data Center, Virtual, and Cloud environments from one easy to use console, announces its extended ability to now remotely manage, control and re program Embedded Devices across the Internet of Things as well.
Enterprises build applications with the latest tools, people and processes yet failures riddle the headlines. If state of the art fails us, it means we need a “New State of the Art.” In his Opening Keynote at 2nd DevOps Summit, John Michelsen, CTO of CA Technologies, will discuss how DevOps hopes to instill a new culture that defines the new way of managing application delivery. It’s time Enterprise IT learns from every other industry and begins to use simulation, supply chain governance, continuous delivery and feedback loops to build better products.
While technology changes on a regular basis, IT teams have had a standard approach to administration. In recent years, however, there has been a drastic shift in data center administration. One of the biggest shifts is the adoption of private and public clouds. In part one of this series, we will examine private cloud architectures. Today, companies keep more and more data electronically in lieu of hard copies. Whether they are large multi-layer Photoshop images or files that need to be kept in order to comply with medical or financial regulations, files are getting bigger and there are certainly more of them. Historically, companies would have a series of onsite servers, a backup and retrieval system, miscellaneous supporting hardware, and lots of documented procedures. This would ultimately lead to a never-ending need for new capital expenditures. Above all, one of the biggest issues IT admins wrestle with is managing and adding server space to accommodate all those ever-growing files. Enter the cloud.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Chris C. Kemp, former NASA CTO and co-founder of OpenStack, will explore the origins of OpenStack, diving into how this technology advanced NASA’s mission and helped the White House ignite a cloud computing revolution across the federal government. He’ll take a close look at how the fastest growing open source project in history evolved – and where it’s going – before turning our attention to the forces that have catalyzed this revolution and are reshaping enterprise computing. Finally he will look at some examples of cloud technologies and architectures that are enabling the most successful (and often newest) companies to challenge their largest and most entrenched competitors.
We first discussed Super Bowl lessons learned around bloated web pages that brought down sites like Kia.com. On the other side, GoDaddy did a great job in reducing the page load just for the time of the Super Bowl to ensure that their site wouldn’t go down. But there is more to learn from than bloated websites: Esurance, for example, was impacted by their choice of CDN Partner which didn’t scale as needed and impacted page load time. Securing page content via SSL was done by three companies. Doritos did it in a way that their page load time was about 400% slower than Hyundai or TurboTax who also decided to go SSL.
Auto racing powerhouse NASCAR has engineered a way to learn more about its many fans -- and their likes and dislikes -- using big-data analysis. The result is they can rapidly adjust services and responses to keep connected best to those fans across all media and social networks. It's a story of getting at all the information and data that's generated constantly from social media, news media, broadcast media -- and then making the analysis instantly available as easy-to consume and relate visualizations.
At the Geneva Motor Show Apple officially launched its new “CarPlay” product for cars, to some excitement. Apple has enlisted a number of big name auto manufacturers into the program, so you can expect to see CarPlay in your new vehicle sometime soon. But what’s new here? At first glance this is just a computer company providing its interface expertise to car companies, just like the deal between Microsoft and Ford that was announced way back at CES 2007. The list of features – entertainment, maps, messaging, voice control – looks very similar. So what’s different, and why is Apple coming along seven years later?
John Felker is the Director, Cyber and Intelligence Strategy, at HP Enterprise Services, U.S. Public Sector. He works to develop cyber intelligence strategies to better integrate a broad range of cyber intelligence inputs to improve defensive cyber and business operation efforts, in direct support of the public sector and critical infrastructure industries. SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thank you for joining us today, John. Before we drill down into your perspectives on cybersecurity trends and the current threat landscape, please tell us about your background and your role at HP.
There seems to be two main groups of thought as to when wearable technology will become mainstream. The first group are those that believe that wearable technology is here today and are engaging both hobbyists and future entrepreneurs in building all parts of the ecosystem now. These people are creating their own hardware and working with systems to communicate with third party hardware right as we speak. The second group of people are more commercially minded and are looking at creating a full platform for the future. They are looking at big data style real-time analytics, next generation IP, and constrained REST architectures with cast iron security.
Java 8 has been reengineered and the most significant enhancement in this release is Project Lambda Expressions for the Java Programming Language. To be more comprehensive, the standout features of JDK 8 are Project Lambda the Nashorn JavaScript Engine and a new Date and Time API. Al Hilwa is program director for software development research at IDC and he says that right now, with this release, the changes related to Lambda expressions are the most important single new thing in SE 8.
Cloud computing powered by open source is of growing interest all over the world. Enterprise customers are frustrated with growing costs and limitations of traditional IT software. This problem is exacerbated when start-ups appear out of nowhere to compete with agile businesses powered by the cloud. To meet customers' needs, I have seen a number of legacy IT vendors extend the OpenStack cloud platform to give their customers a viable cloud computing operating system that does not lock customers in with a single provider and limited options.