The cloud promises new levels of agility and cost-savings for Big Data, data warehousing and analytics. But it’s challenging to understand all the options – from IaaS and PaaS to newer services like HaaS (Hadoop as a Service) and BDaaS (Big Data as a Service).
In her session at @BigDataExpo at @ThingsExpo, Hannah Smalltree, a director at Cazena, provided an educational overview of emerging “as-a-service” options for Big Data in the cloud. This is critical background for IT and data profession...| By John Savageau | Article Rating: |
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| October 28, 2009 07:00 PM EDT | Reads: |
12,846 |
Data Center Automation on Ulitzer
The data center industry continues to evolve with mergers, acquisitions, and a healthy crop of emerging companies. New data center products and services are hitting the street, an aggressive debate on the model of selling space vs. power, and alternatives to physical data center space in the cloud are giving us a confusing maze of alternatives to meet our outsourcing needs.
The data center market is not unique. For example, in Southern California we have a wide variety of supermarkets and grocery stores including VONs, Ralphs, Albertsons, Jons, Trader Joes, Whole Foods, and lots of others. All grocery stores basically sell the same kinds of products, with very few exceptions.
What makes you go to VONs, rather than Whole Foods? Is it location? Prices? Image? A social issue?
The data center industry is not significantly different. In a city such as Los Angeles you have Equinix, Switch and Data, Savvis, BT Infonet, CoreSite, US Colo, Digital Reality, Level 3 – just to name a few. What makes one facility more attractive than another to fulfill your collocation needs?
Data centers, at the most common denominator, have traditionally offered:
- Concrete (space for cabinets, racks, cages, suites, etc)
- Power
- Air conditioning
- Interconnections
If all data centers offer the basic components listed above, then what discriminates the data centers from one another?
Now we can add additional alternatives to the basic data center model - the public cloud services provider/CSP and Software as a Service/SaaS.
As a potential data center tenant (this includes "virtual" data center tenants living in a CSP infrastructure) we have to evaluate all the above components, and determine which collocation or data center provider will best meet our facility, budget, and connectivity needs.
The Sense of Urgency
The CIO of the United States, Vivek Kundra, recently pressed the case for data center consolidation within the US government, as well as offering a strong recommendation that the US data industry strongly consider moving their operations into either consolidated data centers or virtualize within a cloud provider.
It is clear that data centers used by small and medium companies, as well as most content delivery companies, find better efficiencies in bringing their eCommerce and Internet-facing parts of their business into the data center, and locally interconnect with the Internet service provider community.
The cost of building a data center, providing staffing to manage the data center, and ensuring the efficiency of power and cooling usage is beyond the core competence of most companies. The need for disaster recovery plans, offsite storage, and other business continuity planning are just a few of the long list of items we need to consider as part of an overall information technology/IT or general business plan.
The potential waste of operational expenses, capital budgets, and resulting market "opportunity cost" justifies all companies at least consider outsourcing all or some of their IT operations – particularly as data center and CSPs increase their capabilities.
With the availability of netbooks, online applications (SaaS), and server-based office automation products, all companies should put this on their annual review list. Even the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) recently announced their decision to outsource the email to Google. This model does not appear to be going away anytime soon.
The "Selecting Your Data Center" Series
This series will walk through the process of identifying the need for outsourcing, identifying the best location for your data center, discriminating between the alternatives, and finally getting to your decision.
We welcome all comments, experiences, and discussions related to the data center community that would provide productive feedback for a potential data center or CSP tenant.
John Savageau, Long Beach
Published October 28, 2009 Reads 12,846
Copyright © 2009 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.
- Five Tips for Consolidating and Protecting Your Data Center
- Learn What the Missing Link Is in Your Data Center From Wachovia and Tideway Systems at Next Generation Data Center Conference
- Security, Virtualization and Global Floatability: Implications of data theft; ex-HP exec gets 10 yrs jail!
- Selecting Your Data Center Part 2 – Geography and Location
More Stories By John Savageau
John Savageau is a life long telecom and Internet geek, with a deep interest in the environment and all things green. Whether drilling into the technology of human communications, cloud computing, or describing a blue whale off Catalina Island, Savageau will try to present complex ideas in terms that are easily appreciated and understood.
Savageau is currently focusing efforts on data center consolidation strategies, enterprise architectures, and cloud computing migration planning in developing countries, including Azerbaijan, The Philippines, Palestine, Indonesia, Moldova, Egypt, and Vietnam.
John Savageau is President of Pacific-Tier Communications dividing time between Honolulu and Burbank, California.
A former career US Air Force officer, Savageau graduated with a Master of Science degree in Operations Management from the University of Arkansas and also received Bachelor of Arts degrees in Asian Studies and Information Systems Management from the University of Maryland.
The cloud promises new levels of agility and cost-savings for Big Data, data warehousing and analytics. But it’s challenging to understand all the options – from IaaS and PaaS to newer services like HaaS (Hadoop as a Service) and BDaaS (Big Data as a Service).
In her session at @BigDataExpo at @ThingsExpo, Hannah Smalltree, a director at Cazena, provided an educational overview of emerging “as-a-service” options for Big Data in the cloud. This is critical background for IT and data profession...Jul. 3, 2016 07:45 PM EDT Reads: 990 |
By Pat Romanski Basho Technologies has announced the latest release of Basho Riak TS, version 1.3. Riak TS is an enterprise-grade NoSQL database optimized for Internet of Things (IoT). The open source version enables developers to download the software for free and use it in production as well as make contributions to the code and develop applications around Riak TS. Enhancements to Riak TS make it quick, easy and cost-effective to spin up an instance to test new ideas and build IoT applications. In addition to...Jul. 3, 2016 05:00 PM EDT Reads: 920 |
By Elizabeth White Apixio Inc. has raised $19.3 million in Series D venture capital funding led by SSM Partners with participation from First Analysis, Bain Capital Ventures and Apixio’s largest angel investor. Apixio will dedicate the proceeds toward advancing and scaling products powered by its cognitive computing platform, further enabling insights for optimal patient care.
The Series D funding comes as Apixio experiences strong momentum and increasing demand for its HCC Profiler solution, which mines unstruc...Jul. 3, 2016 03:45 PM EDT Reads: 828 |
By Liz McMillan Extracting business value from Internet of Things (IoT) data doesn’t happen overnight. There are several requirements that must be satisfied, including IoT device enablement, data analysis, real-time detection of complex events and automated orchestration of actions. Unfortunately, too many companies fall short in achieving their business goals by implementing incomplete solutions or not focusing on tangible use cases.
In his general session at @ThingsExpo, Dave McCarthy, Director of Products...Jul. 3, 2016 03:00 PM EDT Reads: 503 |
By Liz McMillan IoT offers a value of almost $4 trillion to the manufacturing industry through platforms that can improve margins, optimize operations & drive high performance work teams. By using IoT technologies as a foundation, manufacturing customers are integrating worker safety with manufacturing systems, driving deep collaboration and utilizing analytics to exponentially increased per-unit margins.
However, as Benoit Lheureux, the VP for Research at Gartner points out, “IoT project implementers often ...Jul. 3, 2016 02:30 PM EDT Reads: 957 |
By Pat Romanski CenturyLink has announced that application server solutions from GENBAND are now available as part of CenturyLink’s Networx contracts.
The General Services Administration (GSA)’s Networx program includes the largest telecommunications contract vehicles ever awarded by the federal government. CenturyLink recently secured an extension through spring 2020 of its offerings available to federal government agencies via GSA’s Networx Universal and Enterprise contracts.
GENBAND’s EXPERiUS™ Application...Jul. 3, 2016 02:00 PM EDT Reads: 712 |
By Elizabeth White SYS-CON Events has announced today that Roger Strukhoff has been named conference chair of Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo 2016 Silicon Valley.
The 19th Cloud Expo and 6th @ThingsExpo will take place on November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
"The Internet of Things brings trillions of dollars of opportunity to developers and enterprise IT, no matter how you measure it," stated Roger Strukhoff. "More importantly, it leverages the power of devices and the Interne...Jul. 3, 2016 01:00 PM EDT Reads: 841 |
By Elizabeth White Ask someone to architect an Internet of Things (IoT) solution and you are guaranteed to see a reference to the cloud. This would lead you to believe that IoT requires the cloud to exist. However, there are many IoT use cases where the cloud is not feasible or desirable.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Dave McCarthy, Director of Products at Bsquare Corporation, will discuss the strategies that exist to extend intelligence directly to IoT devices and sensors, freeing them from the constraints of ...Jul. 3, 2016 12:00 PM EDT Reads: 540 |
By Liz McMillan "There's a growing demand from users for things to be faster. When you think about all the transactions or interactions users will have with your product and everything that is between those transactions and interactions - what drives us at Catchpoint Systems is the idea to measure that and to analyze it," explained Leo Vasiliou, Director of Web Performance Engineering at Catchpoint Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York Ci...Jul. 3, 2016 12:00 PM EDT Reads: 501 |
By Pat Romanski The Internet of Things will challenge the status quo of how IT and development organizations operate. Or will it? Certainly the fog layer of IoT requires special insights about data ontology, security and transactional integrity. But the developmental challenges are the same: People, Process and Platform and how we integrate our thinking to solve complicated problems.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Craig Sproule, CEO of Metavine, will demonstrate how to move beyond today's coding paradigm ...Jul. 3, 2016 12:00 PM EDT Reads: 911 |
By Elizabeth White Presidio has received the 2015 EMC Partner Services Quality Award from EMC Corporation for achieving outstanding service excellence and customer satisfaction as measured by the EMC Partner Services Quality (PSQ) program. Presidio was also honored as the 2015 EMC Americas Marketing Excellence Partner of the Year and 2015 Mid-Market East Partner of the Year.
The EMC PSQ program is a project-specific survey program designed for partners with Service Partner designations to solicit customer feedbac...Jul. 3, 2016 12:00 PM EDT Reads: 918 |
By Pat Romanski The IoT is changing the way enterprises conduct business.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Eric Hoffman, Vice President at EastBanc Technologies, discussed how businesses can gain an edge over competitors by empowering consumers to take control through IoT. He cited examples such as a Washington, D.C.-based sports club that leveraged IoT and the cloud to develop a comprehensive booking system. He also highlighted how IoT can revitalize and restore outdated business models, making them profitable ...Jul. 3, 2016 11:30 AM EDT Reads: 910 |
By Elizabeth White Machine Learning helps make complex systems more efficient. By applying advanced Machine Learning techniques such as Cognitive Fingerprinting, wind project operators can utilize these tools to learn from collected data, detect regular patterns, and optimize their own operations.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Stuart Gillen, Director of Business Development at SparkCognition, discussed how research has demonstrated the value of Machine Learning in delivering next generation analytics to imp...Jul. 3, 2016 11:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,195 |
By Pat Romanski Internet of @ThingsExpo has announced today that Chris Matthieu has been named tech chair of Internet of @ThingsExpo 2016 Silicon Valley.
The 6thInternet of @ThingsExpo will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.Jul. 3, 2016 10:30 AM EDT Reads: 740 |
By Liz McMillan When people aren’t talking about VMs and containers, they’re talking about serverless architecture. Serverless is about no maintenance. It means you are not worried about low-level infrastructural and operational details. An event-driven serverless platform is a great use case for IoT.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Animesh Singh, an STSM and Lead for IBM Cloud Platform and Infrastructure, will detail how to build a distributed serverless, polyglot, microservices framework using open source tec...Jul. 3, 2016 10:15 AM EDT Reads: 973 |
By Liz McMillan The idea of comparing data in motion (at the sensor level) to data at rest (in a Big Data server warehouse) with predictive analytics in the cloud is very appealing to the industrial IoT sector. The problem Big Data vendors have, however, is access to that data in motion at the sensor location.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Scott Allen, CMO of FreeWave, discussed how as IoT is increasingly adopted by industrial markets, there is going to be an increased demand for sensor data from the outermos...Jul. 3, 2016 09:30 AM EDT Reads: 826 |
By Liz McMillan A strange thing is happening along the way to the Internet of Things, namely far too many devices to work with and manage. It has become clear that we'll need much higher efficiency user experiences that can allow us to more easily and scalably work with the thousands of devices that will soon be in each of our lives.
Enter the conversational interface revolution, combining bots we can literally talk with, gesture to, and even direct with our thoughts, with embedded artificial intelligence, wh...Jul. 3, 2016 09:15 AM EDT Reads: 1,536 |
By Elizabeth White "delaPlex is a software development company. We do team-based outsourcing development," explained Mark Rivers, COO and Co-founder of delaPlex Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.Jul. 3, 2016 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 869 |
By Elizabeth White Whether your IoT service is connecting cars, homes, appliances, wearable, cameras or other devices, one question hangs in the balance – how do you actually make money from this service? The ability to turn your IoT service into profit requires the ability to create a monetization strategy that is flexible, scalable and working for you in real-time. It must be a transparent, smoothly implemented strategy that all stakeholders – from customers to the board – will be able to understand and comprehe...Jul. 3, 2016 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 674 |
By Pat Romanski IoT is rapidly changing the way enterprises are using data to improve business decision-making. In order to derive business value, organizations must unlock insights from the data gathered and then act on these.
In their session at @ThingsExpo, Eric Hoffman, Vice President at EastBanc Technologies, and Peter Shashkin, Head of Development Department at EastBanc Technologies, discussed how one organization leveraged IoT, cloud technology and data analysis to improve customer experiences and effi...Jul. 3, 2016 08:45 AM EDT Reads: 994 |

Basho Technologies has announced the latest release of Basho Riak TS, version 1.3. Riak TS is an enterprise-grade NoSQL database optimized for Internet of Things (IoT). The open source version enables developers to download the software for free and use it in production as well as make contributions to the code and develop applications around Riak TS. Enhancements to Riak TS make it quick, easy and cost-effective to spin up an instance to test new ideas and build IoT applications. In addition to...
Apixio Inc. has raised $19.3 million in Series D venture capital funding led by SSM Partners with participation from First Analysis, Bain Capital Ventures and Apixio’s largest angel investor. Apixio will dedicate the proceeds toward advancing and scaling products powered by its cognitive computing platform, further enabling insights for optimal patient care.
The Series D funding comes as Apixio experiences strong momentum and increasing demand for its HCC Profiler solution, which mines unstruc...
Extracting business value from Internet of Things (IoT) data doesn’t happen overnight. There are several requirements that must be satisfied, including IoT device enablement, data analysis, real-time detection of complex events and automated orchestration of actions. Unfortunately, too many companies fall short in achieving their business goals by implementing incomplete solutions or not focusing on tangible use cases.
In his general session at @ThingsExpo, Dave McCarthy, Director of Products...
IoT offers a value of almost $4 trillion to the manufacturing industry through platforms that can improve margins, optimize operations & drive high performance work teams. By using IoT technologies as a foundation, manufacturing customers are integrating worker safety with manufacturing systems, driving deep collaboration and utilizing analytics to exponentially increased per-unit margins.
However, as Benoit Lheureux, the VP for Research at Gartner points out, “IoT project implementers often ...
CenturyLink has announced that application server solutions from GENBAND are now available as part of CenturyLink’s Networx contracts.
The General Services Administration (GSA)’s Networx program includes the largest telecommunications contract vehicles ever awarded by the federal government. CenturyLink recently secured an extension through spring 2020 of its offerings available to federal government agencies via GSA’s Networx Universal and Enterprise contracts.
GENBAND’s EXPERiUS™ Application...
SYS-CON Events has announced today that Roger Strukhoff has been named conference chair of Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo 2016 Silicon Valley.
The 19th Cloud Expo and 6th @ThingsExpo will take place on November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
"The Internet of Things brings trillions of dollars of opportunity to developers and enterprise IT, no matter how you measure it," stated Roger Strukhoff. "More importantly, it leverages the power of devices and the Interne...
Ask someone to architect an Internet of Things (IoT) solution and you are guaranteed to see a reference to the cloud. This would lead you to believe that IoT requires the cloud to exist. However, there are many IoT use cases where the cloud is not feasible or desirable.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Dave McCarthy, Director of Products at Bsquare Corporation, will discuss the strategies that exist to extend intelligence directly to IoT devices and sensors, freeing them from the constraints of ...
"There's a growing demand from users for things to be faster. When you think about all the transactions or interactions users will have with your product and everything that is between those transactions and interactions - what drives us at Catchpoint Systems is the idea to measure that and to analyze it," explained Leo Vasiliou, Director of Web Performance Engineering at Catchpoint Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York Ci...
The Internet of Things will challenge the status quo of how IT and development organizations operate. Or will it? Certainly the fog layer of IoT requires special insights about data ontology, security and transactional integrity. But the developmental challenges are the same: People, Process and Platform and how we integrate our thinking to solve complicated problems.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Craig Sproule, CEO of Metavine, will demonstrate how to move beyond today's coding paradigm ...
Presidio has received the 2015 EMC Partner Services Quality Award from EMC Corporation for achieving outstanding service excellence and customer satisfaction as measured by the EMC Partner Services Quality (PSQ) program. Presidio was also honored as the 2015 EMC Americas Marketing Excellence Partner of the Year and 2015 Mid-Market East Partner of the Year.
The EMC PSQ program is a project-specific survey program designed for partners with Service Partner designations to solicit customer feedbac...
The IoT is changing the way enterprises conduct business.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Eric Hoffman, Vice President at EastBanc Technologies, discussed how businesses can gain an edge over competitors by empowering consumers to take control through IoT. He cited examples such as a Washington, D.C.-based sports club that leveraged IoT and the cloud to develop a comprehensive booking system. He also highlighted how IoT can revitalize and restore outdated business models, making them profitable ...
Machine Learning helps make complex systems more efficient. By applying advanced Machine Learning techniques such as Cognitive Fingerprinting, wind project operators can utilize these tools to learn from collected data, detect regular patterns, and optimize their own operations.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Stuart Gillen, Director of Business Development at SparkCognition, discussed how research has demonstrated the value of Machine Learning in delivering next generation analytics to imp...
Internet of @ThingsExpo has announced today that Chris Matthieu has been named tech chair of Internet of @ThingsExpo 2016 Silicon Valley.
The 6thInternet of @ThingsExpo will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
When people aren’t talking about VMs and containers, they’re talking about serverless architecture. Serverless is about no maintenance. It means you are not worried about low-level infrastructural and operational details. An event-driven serverless platform is a great use case for IoT.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Animesh Singh, an STSM and Lead for IBM Cloud Platform and Infrastructure, will detail how to build a distributed serverless, polyglot, microservices framework using open source tec...
The idea of comparing data in motion (at the sensor level) to data at rest (in a Big Data server warehouse) with predictive analytics in the cloud is very appealing to the industrial IoT sector. The problem Big Data vendors have, however, is access to that data in motion at the sensor location.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Scott Allen, CMO of FreeWave, discussed how as IoT is increasingly adopted by industrial markets, there is going to be an increased demand for sensor data from the outermos...
A strange thing is happening along the way to the Internet of Things, namely far too many devices to work with and manage. It has become clear that we'll need much higher efficiency user experiences that can allow us to more easily and scalably work with the thousands of devices that will soon be in each of our lives.
Enter the conversational interface revolution, combining bots we can literally talk with, gesture to, and even direct with our thoughts, with embedded artificial intelligence, wh...
"delaPlex is a software development company. We do team-based outsourcing development," explained Mark Rivers, COO and Co-founder of delaPlex Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Whether your IoT service is connecting cars, homes, appliances, wearable, cameras or other devices, one question hangs in the balance – how do you actually make money from this service? The ability to turn your IoT service into profit requires the ability to create a monetization strategy that is flexible, scalable and working for you in real-time. It must be a transparent, smoothly implemented strategy that all stakeholders – from customers to the board – will be able to understand and comprehe...
IoT is rapidly changing the way enterprises are using data to improve business decision-making. In order to derive business value, organizations must unlock insights from the data gathered and then act on these.
In their session at @ThingsExpo, Eric Hoffman, Vice President at EastBanc Technologies, and Peter Shashkin, Head of Development Department at EastBanc Technologies, discussed how one organization leveraged IoT, cloud technology and data analysis to improve customer experiences and effi...
Time and again, those keeping a pulse on the Internet of Things (IoT) space frequently hear about the “rise of the machines.” Humanity is not only discovering fascinating ways to integrate machines into our daily lives, but also finding new uses for machines as well. How? Machines are now “internet-connected” just like the smartphones we carry around in our pockets. And this isn’t just on the commercial side with the likes of smart thermostats or connected vehicles – even tractors and oil and gas machinery are industrial examples of where new “things” are now on the digital network. ...
Machine-to-machine (M2M) learning is an integral apart of the expanding world of Industrial IoT. Over the past few months we have given attention to manufacturing and its current digital disruption, but have failed to show the direct impact smart M2M and IoT technology is having on the industry. So, this week we are diving deeper into the term machine learning and how it connects to manufacturing both today and in the future.
Cloud Expo 2016 New York at the Javits Center New York was characterized by increased attendance and a new focus on operations. These were both encouraging signs for all involved in Cloud Computing and all that it touches.
As Conference Chair, I work with the Cloud Expo team to structure three keynotes, numerous general sessions, and more than 150 breakout sessions along 10 tracks. Our job is to balance the state of enterprise IT today with the trends that will be commonplace tomorrow.
Mobile Computing, Big Data and Analytics, the Internet of Things, Platforms and Microservices and Containe...
Fog Computing is being touted as the data communication solution our Internet of Things (IoT) devices are asking for by bringing the power of cloud computing closer to the end user. The fact is, the number of connected devices is going to continue to grow exponentionally. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020 IoT will include 26 billion connected things. Consider the impact that amount of data collected and processed will have.
One look at the comments section of an April column on digital marketing in TechCrunch, and it becomes obvious that contributor Samuel Scott, the marketing and communications director for data analytics software firm Logz.io, pushed a few hot buttons with his take on marketing tech.
Scott argues for a back-to-basics approach to marketing that roots digital strategies firmly in old-school tradition and PR principles. He calls out the communications industry for its reliance on “an echo chamber of meaningless buzzwords” in a piece now shared nearly 16,000 times, with more than 140 comments from...
Too many myths and hypes create the confusion around digital transformation. Digital transformation isn't a technology change matter, it's primarily about transforming business models: infrastructure and operating model. Digital transformation when tackled with proven methodologies and approaches isn't as complex as it seems, they provide the step-by-step guide, the logic, and the tools to make it easy.
Karen Field, Penton Communications' IoT Institute director, in her article "Start Small to Gain Big," postulated an oil drilling platform with 30,000 sensors would generate about 1 Terabyte of data per day. She also stressed that only 1% of that data would likely be used. From a systems engineering point of view this data flow is multiplied by the trillions of other IoT sensors in the cloud, introducing unprecedented data processing and data transport stress. Industries and competing companies within those industries will also be forced to weigh the economic impact of paying for this transport...
IoT networking requirements are vastly different from those supported by today's cloud network. The processing and transport levels are multiple orders of magnitude higher than ever seen before. More importantly though, societal economic and the safety ramifications of making mistakes during this transition are off the scale. This is why system engineering of the cloud computing network is now an immediate global imperative.
Consider the following integration scenarios: Moving medical records between EMR systems; financial information between banking systems; HR information between ERP systems; and software development information between SDLC tools.
At first glance the approaches required for these integrations may seem the same. But if you look slightly deeper you will realize that this can’t be the case because of impedance mismatch. I’m defining impedance mismatch as the friction that occurs when trying to align two things or concepts that don’t naturally/actually match. Because many of the hardest impedance ...
Although we often write about and discuss digital transformation, we often fail to identify the end goal we are really trying to achieve. We talk at great length about data, analytics, speed, information logistics systems and personalized user experiences, but none of these are the end goal. Ultimately we must digitally transform so we can remove the “fog of war,” and have clear visibility and insights into our businesses and the needs of our customers. The end goal of digital transformation, however, is the ability to rapidly act and react to changing data, competitive conditions and strat...
The "Internet of Things" depends on the "Cloud" for the processing and storage of data. The Cloud's backbone, however, is the network. This logic train reveals the importance of professional rigor and solid System Engineering (SE) of the network.
Imagine a sea of sensors, put out in the field by multiple independent vendors. Complying with specifications only in an informal sense, these sensors are sending Terabytes of data to the cloud. The availability of this data to anyone globally is impressive enough. But even more amazing is the fact that anyone in the world can also develop an appli...
Those that lead are able to collect and analyze data that followers can't. Think about the first climber to reach the top of the mountain, they have a new and different view slower followers don't. If you believe, as I do, that understanding data is the secret sauce of the digitally transformed enterprise, then having data not available to your competitors is a treasure!
Those that achieve digital transformation before their competitors will have advantages - and advantages have advantages. Not only do they have new experiences and new data to analyze and understand, they are able to develo...
An expert panel discussion examines the value and direction of The Open Group IT4IT initiative, a new reference architecture for managing IT to help business become digitally innovative.
IT4IT was a hot topic at The Open Group San Francisco 2016 conference in January. This panel, conducted live at the event, explores how the reference architecture grew out of a need at some of the world's biggest organizations to make their IT departments more responsive, more agile.























