Somewhere along the line in between the 1990s and the so-called post-2000 ‘naughties’ a change occurred. This change was subtle but important if you took an interest in enterprise-level management theories, methodologies and delivery mechanisms. Outsourcing, as we once knew it, became Business Process Outsourcing. With an extended name and an accompanying acronym to boot, BPO arrived. Actually that’s not strictly what happened; in between outsourcing and BPO we saw outsourcing become offshore outsourcing. Functions from finance and billing to admin and support started to migrate offshore, along with other non-core operations that could be ‘manageably compartmentalized,’ so-to-speak.
Far too often “the database” is blamed for impacting performance and scalability of applications. In many cases, however, it turns out that it’s not the database itself, but the way the database is accessed by the application. Common problem patterns are requesting too much data, inefficient queries, lack of data caching, and waste connection usage, for example. But, there are cases where the database is to be blamed. This is the scenario of the following story one of our customers shared with me:
Registration is now open for "2ndInternational WebRTC Summit" being held June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is an open source project supported by Google, Mozilla and Opera that aims to enable browser-to-browser applications for voice calling, video chat, and P2P file sharing without plugins. Its mission is "To enable rich, high quality, RTC applications to be developed in the browser via simple Javascript APIs and HTML5."
How do we know if we’re doing DevOps right? Is there a checklist of tools we should deploy, meetings we should schedule, org charts we should implement? DevOps first and foremost involves cultural transformation. But what does that really mean? How do we know if we have a healthy DevOps culture? How does cultural transformation relate to and guide tools and practices? Ultimately, DevOps is about empathy between Dev, QA, and Ops, between IT and the rest of the business, and between the business and its customers. In this session at 2nd DevOps Summit, Jeff Sussna, Founder and Principal of Ingineering.IT, will discuss empathy as the essence of DevOps. It will talk about what that means and how we can put it into practice as IT professionals.
When we first built our MetraNet billing platform our customers (large enterprises and service providers) generally offered services that were clearly defined in terms of character and scope, with fairly stable setup charges, usage charges, and periodic recurring charges. Back then, with some exceptions, it was normal to issue regular periodic invoices that consolidated all of those charges. The invoice would then trigger an entry in the service provider’s Accounts Receivable (AR) ledger. That in turn, again with a few exceptions, would constitute the point at which Revenue Recognition would take place. The few exceptions (for example, an invoice for a payment in advance for a service set-up charge) would be handled by adding a matching journal entry in Deferred (or unearned) Revenue until such time as the services had been delivered. The adjustment could be handled automatically (triggered by a flag from order management or billing) or manually.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Esri 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. Esri inspires and enables people to positively impact the future through a deeper, geographic understanding of the changing world around them. Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10–12, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Over the past few years, enterprises have been moving to the cloud to streamline processes and operations. A study last year by TheInfoPro indicated that there is no sign of cloud investment slowing down – predicting an average growth rate of cloud spending of 36 percent from this year until 2016. As the Internet of Things continues its march to the mainstream, organizations have more opportunities to expand relationships with customers and partners by building and offering new services. These services have the potential to exponentially drive revenue and create business value. The question is, what do CIOs need to do to make sure that their companies can take advantage of this potential? The first step is to look at their existing technical infrastructure to ensure that it can truly enable companies to drive change. One crucial component: security, including identity and access management.
Much of the dialog over net neutrality seems rather dated. This is understandable, since the debate has been going on since last century. The January 14th Federal Appeal Court decision in favor of the Internet access providers gave those companies (apparently) a degree of latitude to selectively block or prioritize edge provider services. We know that they want to do this, even though they might be coy about admitting it. Verizon, the plaintiff in the recent appeal case, issued a statement saying that nothing much will change as a result of this decision. We all expect Verizon and the other ISPs to take advantage of this change to the maximum extent they can. If they don’t their shareholders might be a bit upset, after spending all that time and money.
Federal records management is an increasingly complex undertaking in the era of big data. Three principles are needed for success in records management: capture on creation; manage and secure through the workflow; and archive responsibly.
Global information technology networks that are rich in services are typically complex and require hard-to-manage security solutions. The latest versions of next-generation firewalls now offer multiple security layers that can complicate management, particularly as more and more features are added. This complexity can also serve to reduce the effectiveness of controls by obscuring noteworthy events or failing to recognize trends detected by multiple security systems integrated into the overall system. The answer is a common, unified management approach with granular and contextual access control. Instead of employing multiple and distinct dashboards offering minimal if any integration to manage network security, administrators should be able to access a single dashboard to gain a consistent, unified view across all firewall protected segments. The data must be granular and contextual, empowering IT and network security administrators to execute and control all NGFW operations from a single perspective. And to assure logging of all actions taken and events observed, without regard to operator location.
In the race to implement Continuous Delivery, emphasis on build-and-deploy has overshadowed Continuous Testing. Service Virtualization's simulation technology allows you to test your component in a complete environment—any time you want. "Part of the problem with service virtualization is that the word ‘virtualization' has a strong attachment to the data center. Everyone knows the economic benefits of server virtualization," said Lanowitz, founder of analyst firm Voke, who's been talking about the topic since 2007. "A lot of people don't know about service virtualization yet... It's moved from providing virtual lab environments to being able to virtualize a bank in a box or a utility company in a can so there are no surprises when you go live."
The Open Group, at its conference in San Francisco, will announce a new initiative to help bridge gaps in healthcare industry data sharing to provide a boundaryless flow of information. And so the next BriefingsDirect discussion explores what it takes to bring rigorous interactions, process efficiency, and governance to data and workflows that must extend across many healthcare participants with speed and dependability. Learn now how improved cross-organization collaboration plays a huge part in helping to make healthcare more responsive, effective, safe, and cost-efficient. And also become acquainted with what The Open Group’s new Healthcare Industry Forum is doing to improve the situation.
Agile software development isn’t really a “new” trend anymore. I mean, the Agile Manifesto turns 13 years old next month and while that might be early adolescence in human years, it’s downright ancient as far as trends in IT are concerned. However, one area that has yet to fully mature is the implementation of non-functional testing practices in a Continuous Testing sort of way that can keep pace with more Agile development teams. Load and performance testing definitely fall into that category. You might be a performance tester on a team that is just starting to do more iterative development or a more experienced Agile tester looking to add load and performance testing to your workflow; either way, you’ll likely want to know what you’re in for. Agile development practices can help teams achieve faster time to market, adapt to changing requirements, provide a constant feedback loop, etc. The benefits of load and performance testing include determining how much load an application can handle before it crashes in production, when to add another server, when to reconfigure the network, where code needs to be optimized, etc. What is less well known is the fact that the combination of the two practices can lead to additional benefits that go beyond just the sum of the benefits of each practice, i.e. 1+1=3.
Internet of Things known as IoT is expected to gain momentum in the year 2014 and will continue to find a mainstream adoption in the coming years. From a definition perspective, IoT is about the integration of more devices that are already prevalent using the RFID and other kinds of machine-generated messages, and to ensure that these devices are given the appropriate intelligence to guide themselves without human intervention. The main reason for the increased realization of IoT is the proliferation of cloud and Big Data as part of our ecosystem, so that the massive quantities of data that these devices generate can be sourced and processed and intelligence can be derived out of them. The adoption of IoT will increase in-line with the adoption of cloud and Big Data.
What follows is a list of concepts pertaining to System Thinking that we’ve rallied around in providing our database change management solution Datical DB. Instead of the black box, database change management can become a transparent and flexible part of your value delivery system. The First Way: Systems Thinking - This Way stresses the performance of the entire system of value delivery. Instead of becoming laser focused on the part of the process for which an individual or team is responsible, the individual or team works to understand the entire process from requirements generation to customer delivery. The goal is to eliminate the delivery impediments that arise when a project transitions from one isolated silo to another. Understanding the entire system allows business, development, and operations to work towards a common goal in a consistent manner.
I don’t listen to music before I buy it anymore. I don’t need to – as long as I’m purchasing it from Amazon. Based on algorithms that crawl my purchasing history, the online retailer knows what I like as well as I do and, dare I say, better than my wife. A company develops this intimate knowledge by using Big Data to improve the customer experience in an economical and adaptable way. Amazon has integrated this agility into every aspect of its business, from running its warehouses to its revolutionary ability to publish on demand. Game-changing innovation happens when you simplify everyday processes. But managing a large, traditional application portfolio – however crucial it is to your business – disrupts innovation. The cloud virtualizes your software, protecting you from the inefficiencies associated with IT. As a result, you spend less time and money introducing and maintaining applications and more resources innovating and advancing your business. Whether you implement a software-designed data center, a hybrid cloud approach or and end-user computing strategy, you’re taking the burden off of your own team and into the virtual world.
The Big Data and Cloud market has been growing at a staggering pace. Data is becoming unmanageable and too big to be handled by relational database systems alone and there is a need to effectively provision, manage elastic and scalable systems. Information technology is undergoing a major shift due to new paradigms and a variety of delivery channels. The drivers for these technologies are social networks, proliferation of devices such as tablets and phones. Social business and collaboration are continuing to develop further to enhance productivity and interaction. There has been a big void in the Big data area and a need to come up with solutions that can manage Big Data. Part of the problem has been that there was so much focus on the user interfaces that not many organizations were thinking further about the core - Data. So now with the proliferation of large and unstructured data, it is important to extract and process large data sets from different systems expeditiously. To deliver strategic business value, there should be the capability to process Big data and have the analytics for enhanced decision making. In addition, Big Data can rely on the Cloud to rapidly provision and deploy elastic and scalable systems.
For most organizations, developing a cloud strategy is no longer a matter of “if,” but a matter of how. The right cloud strategy can significantly reduce costs, offer instant scalability, and improve business agility. But to get the most from the cloud and position their businesses for the future, IT leaders must understand the trends that are shaping the rapidly changing landscape. Here are five considerations that should be top of mind for any IT decision-maker in the coming year. 1. Providing the best possible user experience. When it comes to cloud, there’s only one thing that matters and that’s the user experience. It’s easy to forget about the end user while getting caught up in the “arms race” of building and brokering cloud services. When consulting about cloud strategy for a healthcare R&D firm, my colleagues and I were asked the question: “Amazon offers these services, so why don’t we?”
It’s the age old battle of top-down or bottom-up. IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) is clearly being driven from the top down in organizations. Large vendors and consultants are working with their executive counterparts to change expectations for how IT provides services to the enterprise. DevOps, on the other hand, is the traditional bottom-up grassroots movement that like Linux and virtualization has disrupted the status quo and changed forever how IT services can be delivered. In this case, both efforts are working toward a common goal of agility and speed. So, will one effort supersede the other? Will they merge and deliver together?
Siemens Brazil in São Paulo has learned several valuable lessons from its mobile app development experiments and subsequent full roll-out of high-demand work flow apps for business managers. As enterprise IT departments scramble to meet demand for more mobile applications, many are charting entirely new terrain. Lessons from applications development and support from PCs and notebooks don't necessarily provide a guide for the mobile tier. Indeed, mobile apps are very different in what end users expect from them. So how to learn new best practices and simultaneously meet the demand for rapid mobile apps development?
SYS-CON Events announced today that WSM, the pioneer and global leader in web and data server migrations, 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. WSM – Website Movers International is the first and largest web/data server migration services provider in the industry. The company has progressively evolved under the same founder since 1996, initially as a hosting services provider. Following a sale of the hosting company, Website Movers Incorporated was established in 2003 as the first ever specialized web/data server migration company.. Now doing business as WSM, the company has over 60 technical staff in 4 locations, as well as established partnerships with industry-leading hosting service providers such as Rackspace, SoftLayer/IBM, Peer1, Hosting.com and many others. WSM expanded service solutions include web/application configuration, development, load testing, performance tuning, proactive and responsive security audits/remediation, maintenance and support delivering most comprehensive ‘Server-to-Browser’ service experience for all WSM customers and partners.
Employees using mobile devices to access popular and often times essential cloud applications continue to increase in the workplace, both via private devices and those owned by the enterprise. This increase in use brings with it important data security issues for the enterprise. Some enterprises find themselves scrambling to implement mobile device management (MDM) technologies to address the data security concerns that go along with employees using mobile devices in everyday business. The end goal of these MDM solutions is to allow for the enterprise to securely capitalize on the benefits of mobile devices while not stifling the widely accepted bring your own device (BYOD) policy.
As businesses look to leverage cloud technology to drive growth, many times the questions IT leaders within the company ask are: “Where do I start? What part of my infrastructure should I move into the cloud first?” IT leaders must pick a place to begin with cloud adoption. The decision becomes easier when teams focus on incremental adoption, starting with small, low-risk applications that can be easily tested and improved through an iterative approach before fully launching. Here are some best practices businesses should consider when getting started with cloud technology.
In this webinar, our featured guest Kim Celestre, Sr. Analyst at Forrester Research will share findings from the new report: "Benchmark B2B Social Marketing Efforts," just released this month. Kim will highlight the top social marketing tactics that have achieved the highest level of satisfaction and positive business outcomes for B2B Marketers. Join us to see which tactics made the list - you may be surprised at what they are. Kim will also share her predictions on the future of communities as they move beyond just the customer support function and start influencing buying behaviors earlier in the customer lifecycle through strategies such as gamification, and ultimately driving higher ROI. Liz Courter, Community Manager at Marketo, will showcase how her company has been successfully leveraging online communities to grow customer lifetime value.
Recent commentaries by cloud industry luminaries Reuven Cohen & Krishnan Subramanian address key issues related to relative importance and potential longevity of an independent Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). In his commentary, Reuven poses, "Do consumers really care about the difference between IaaS and PaaS?" The answer to this question is most likely, no, but that doesn't eliminate the need for distinction, it merely is a matter of how best to deliver the value of cloud computing to users. In his commentary, Krishnan does an excellent job of exploring one way to classify PaaS as either service or container orchestration. However, in some ways, the distinction introduces more confusion. For example, his use of Docker illustrates how convergence of IaaS and PaaS actually makes sense for the industry and, thus, diminishes his key point that there's value in the cloud application layer existing as a distinct layer within the cloud stack.