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Top Stories
Containerization Is More than the New Virtualization
Docker offers a new, lightweight approach to application portability.
Applications are shipped using a common container format and managed with a
high-level API. Their processes run within isolated namespaces that abstract
the operating environment independently of the distribution, versions,
network setup, and other details of this environment.
This "containerization" has often been nicknamed "the new virtualization."
But containers are more than lightweight virtual machines. Beyond their
smaller footprint, shorter boot times, and higher consolidation factors, they
also bring a lot of new features and use cases that were not possible with
classical virtual machines.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Jerome Petazzoni, Senior Engineer at Docker,
will focus on one of those features: separation of operational concerns... (more)
Cloud and Things and Big Operational Data
Software-defined architectures are critical for achieving the right mix of
efficiency and scale needed to meet the challenges that will come with the
Internet of Things
If you've been living under a rock (or rack in the data center) you might not
have noticed the explosive growth of technologies and architectures designed
to address emerging challenges with scaling data centers. Whether considering
the operational aspects (devops) or technical components (SDN, SDDC, Cloud),
software-defined architectures are the future enabler of business... (more)
SYS-CON Events announced today that SAP will join SYS-CON's 15th
International Cloud Expo® as a "Gold Sponsor." Cloud Expo will take place
on November 4-6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara,
CA.
Contact @SAPinMemory for your FREE @CloudExpo pass.
What is SAP HANA?
SAP HANA combines database, data processing, and application platform
capabilities in-memory. The platform provides libraries for predictive,
planning, text processing, spatial, and business analytics.
This new architecture enables converged OLTP and OLAP data processing within
a single in-me... (more)
GIS & IoT Sensors Deliver Innovations for Utilities
I love sensors. In my opinion we write too little about the role sensors play
in the whole Internet of Things discussion. Sensors are what measure things
in the physical world and convert the information to digital. This process is
a key component of digital transformation which enables algorithms,
artificial intelligence and machine learning to be implemented to help us
more effectively manage our environments. They are our eyes, ears, nose,
etc., in remote places capturing activities, events and behaviors that help
us elimina... (more)
Consumer Internet of Things and Wearables
SYS-CON Events announced today that IDenticard will exhibit at SYS-CON's 15th
International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4-6, 2014, at
the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Contact @IDenticard for your FREE @CloudExpo pass.
IDenticard Access Control is a leading manufacturer of integrated access
control solutions and wearable wrist bands to protect employees, visitors,
and facilities. Owned by Brady Corporation (NYSE:BRC), a $1.15 billion
manufacturer of identification products, IDenticard Access Control ... (more)
Latest Stories from IoT Journal By Elizabeth White Docker offers a new, lightweight approach to application portability. Applications are shipped using a common container format and managed with a high-level API. Their processes run within isolated namespaces that abstract the operating environment independently of the distribution, versions, network setup, and other details of this environment. This "containerization" has often been nicknamed "the new virtualization." But containers are more than lightweight virtual machines. Beyond their smaller footprint, shorter boot times, and higher consolidation factors, they also bring a lot of new features and use cases that were not possible with classical virtual machines. Aug. 27, 2014 07:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,044 | By Yeshim Deniz  An entirely new security model is needed for the Internet of Things, or is it? Can we save some old and tested controls for this new and different environment? In his session at @ThingsExpo, New York's at the Javits Center, Davi Ottenheimer, EMC Senior Director of Trust, reviewed hands-on lessons with IoT devices and reveal a new risk balance you might not expect. Davi Ottenheimer, EMC Senior Director of Trust, has more than nineteen years' experience managing global security operations and assessments, including a decade of leading incident response and digital forensics. He is co-author of the book "Securing the Virtual Environment: How to Defend the Enterprise Against Attack," published in May 2012 by Wiley. He formerly was responsible for security at Barclays Global Investors (BGI), the world's largest investment fund manager. Prior to BGI he was a "dedicated paranoid" at Yahoo! and responsible for managing security for hundreds of millions of mobile, broadband and digital home products. Davi received his postgraduate academic Master of Science degree in International History from the London School of Economics. Aug. 26, 2014 11:00 PM EDT Reads: 2,010 | By Yeshim Deniz IDenticard Access Control is a leading manufacturer of integrated access control solutions to protect employees, visitors, and facilities. Owned by Brady Corporation (NYSE:BRC), a $1.15 billion manufacturer of identification products, IDenticard Access Control draws on its 30 years of experience in security software development to provide innovative products based on its customers’ requirements and the needs of the marketplace. With an in-house engineering team, IDenticard Access Control has developed a patent-pending, revolutionary physical security solution that secures and monitors server rack access at the cabinet level. The system features easy-to-use dynamic mapping and customizable reporting capabilities to identify and track who accesses server racks and specifically where, when, and for how long. Aug. 26, 2014 09:00 PM EDT Reads: 931 | By Liz McMillan SAP HANA combines database, data processing, and application platform capabilities in-memory. The platform provides libraries for predictive, planning, text processing, spatial, and business analytics. This new architecture enables converged OLTP and OLAP data processing within a single in-memory column-based data store with ACID compliance, while eliminating data redundancy and latency. By providing advanced capabilities, such as predictive text analytics, spatial processing, data virtualization, on the same architecture, it further simplifies application development and processing across big data sources and structures. This makes SAP HANA the most suitable platform for building and deploying next-generation, realtime applications and analytics. Aug. 26, 2014 08:15 PM EDT Reads: 980 | By Liz McMillan  The Eclipse IoT community is growing community of open source projects focused on providing the building blocks for the IoT industry. The goal of the community is to provide open source implementations of important IoT standards, frameworks that implement key services for IoT applications and tools to make it easier for developers to create IoT applications. If IoT is going to achieve success and interoperability then the industry will need these basic building blocks.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Ian Skerrett, Director of Marketing at the Eclipse Foundation, will introduce the Eclipse IoT open source community. He will provide a detailed introduction to the 12 different open source projects already at Eclipse, including support for IoT standards such as MQT, CoAP, One M2M and Lightweight M2M. He will also discuss how companies and individuals can use the Eclipse open source building blocks to build IoT applications. Aug. 26, 2014 04:45 PM EDT Reads: 7,942 | By Roger Strukhoff  Violence is the great disruptor, the great destroyer of people, nations, and hope. Some places on earth, say Somalia, are simply off-limits to outsiders and practically uninhabitable to those having to live there. Others, say Democratic Congo or Iraq, are perilous enough to defy rational investment. Others, say Syria or Ukraine or perhaps Egypt, are being disrupted enough by violence to make investors and certainly visitors back away. The spectrum continues; through a wide variety of developing nations, then through the “safe” developed world. Although the largest of the developed nations, the United States, certainly has its own serious issues with violence, bad news from developing nations such as Kenya and the Philippines, as magnified by television and reverberated through the Web's echo chamber, often make things seem worse than they are.
Unlikely, or Inevitable?
Getting people to consider all options is a prime drive of our research at the Tau Institute, which has data and rankings on the ICT infrastructures and dynamics of 102 nations.
But it can be difficult to get companies and individuals seeking new markets, sources, locations, and investments to consider more “da... Aug. 26, 2014 02:45 PM EDT Reads: 931 | By Yeshim Deniz  Qubell, an innovator in application deployment and configuration management, empowers online companies to do what they have never been able to do before: put into consumers' hands innovative new features and services, almost as fast as they can conceive them, without sacrificing control, reliability or uptime. Qubell emerged from stealth in the summer of 2013 (see related press release) and announced that Kohl's completed its initial implementation (see press release). Founded by pioneers in enterprise cloud applications and services, Qubell has its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. For more information, visit qubell.com. Aug. 26, 2014 01:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,686 | By Kevin Benedict I love sensors. In my opinion we write too little about the role sensors play in the whole Internet of Things discussion. Sensors are what measure things in the physical world and converts the information to digital. This process is a key component of digital transformation which enables algorithms, artificial intelligence and machine learning to be implemented to help us more effectively manage our environments. They are our eyes, ears, nose, etc., in remote places capturing activities, events and behaviors that help us eliminate blind spots and that give us situational awareness. Aug. 26, 2014 12:45 PM EDT Reads: 720 | By Yeshim Deniz  A lot of people are heralding IoT as the future, but what can your business do today? Quite a lot, it turns out, if you know what to look for and how to talk about it. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Reid Carlberg, Senior Director at Salesforce.com, will discuss business processes ripe for IoT style solutions and provide real-world examples in operation today. He'll also cover several fun ways to inspire your organization, share some lessons learned about solution development and offer several next steps designed to get you started. Join us and learn how to kick start your company's IoT efforts into high gear. Aug. 26, 2014 12:30 PM EDT Reads: 1,950 | By Pat Romanski  Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, Bitium was founded by Kriz and Erik Gustavson. The 1,500 cloud-based application using Bitium’s analytics, app management, and single sign-on services include bug trackers, customer service dashboards, Google Apps, and social networks. The firm states website administrators can do multiple tasks online without revealing passwords. Bitium’s advisors include Microsoft’s former CMO and the former senior vice president of strategy, the founder and CEO of Like.com, a product strategist at IBM and Oracle, Hootsuite’s CEO, and the founder and CEO of KISSMetric, among others. More about Bitium can be found on its website at www.bitium.com. Aug. 26, 2014 11:30 AM EDT Reads: 1,525 Replies: 1 | By Yeshim Deniz  The Domain Name Service (DNS) is one of the most important components in networking infrastructure, enabling users and services to access applications by translating URLs (names) into IP addresses (numbers). Because every icon and URL and all embedded content on a website requires a DNS lookup, loading complex sites necessitates hundreds of DNS queries. In addition, as more Internet-enabled ‘Things’ get connected, people will rely on DNS to name and find their fridges, toasters and toilets.
According to a recent IDG Research Services Survey this rate of traffic will only grow. What’s driving this increase? The growth in volume is largely attributed to the roll out of new services and applications along with expanding migration to the cloud and traffic spikes. The Internet of Things will also place a strain on DNS services. Aug. 26, 2014 03:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,475 | By Yeshim Deniz  SYS-CON Events announced today that Harbinger Systems will exhibit at SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Harbinger Systems is a global company providing software technology services. Since 1990, Harbinger has developed a strong customer base worldwide. Its customers include software product companies ranging from hi-tech start-ups in Silicon Valley to leading product companies in the US and large in-house IT organizations. Aug. 25, 2014 11:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,354 | By Roger Strukhoff  Samsung promises to be one of the 800-pound gorillas of the IoT, if its success in recent years with Android devices and other consumer electronics is any guide. Showing its willingness to be a big IoT player, the company recently acquired SmartThings, a recent startup that's developed an open smarthome appliation that currently supports 1,000 devices and 8,000 apps. SmartThings will now work under the auspices of Samsung's Open Innovation Center (OIC). SmartThings Founder and CEO Alex Hawkinson said that Samsung “fully supports (our) vision” and that “we'll continue to run things as we always have: by embracing our community of customers, developers, and device makers.” SmartThings will relocate its headquarters from Washington, DC to Palo Alto, CA. We had a few questions for Alex, which he answers below. Separately, we interviewed Samsung VP Jacopo Lenzi, who headed the OIC acquisitions team.
IoT Journal: SmartThings was founded only in 2012, yet I imagine there's some history behind its vision and team. What are its roots and the sources of the thinking you've put into the company?
Alex Hawkinson: The roots of the company stem from a personal incident when my family cabin ... Aug. 25, 2014 10:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,266 | By Pat Romanski  RTI Connext™ messaging software forms the core nervous system for smart, distributed applications. RTI Connext allows devices to intelligently share information and work together as one integrated system. RTI was named "The Most influential Industrial Internet of Things Company" in 2014 by Appinions and published in Forbes. RTI customers span the breadth of the Internet of Things, including medical, energy, mining, air traffic control, trading, automotive, unmanned systems, industrial SCADA, naval systems, air and missile defense, ground stations, and science. The total value of system designs that trust RTI for their fundamental architecture exceeds $1 trillion. Aug. 25, 2014 10:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,213 | By Liz McMillan  Cloud and Big Data present unique dilemmas: embracing the benefits of these new technologies while maintaining the security of your organization's assets. When an outside party owns, controls and manages your infrastructure and computational resources, how can you be assured that sensitive data remains private and secure? How do you best protect data in mixed use cloud and Big Data infrastructure sets? Can you still satisfy the full range of reporting, compliance and regulatory requirements? Aug. 25, 2014 09:45 PM EDT Reads: 1,427 |
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When we talk about the impact of BYOD and BYOA and the Internet of Things, we often focus on the impact on data center architectures. That's because there will be an increasing need for authentication, for access control, for security, for application delivery as the number of potential endpoints (clients, devices, things) increases. That means scale in the data center.
What we gloss over, what we skip, is that before any of these "things" ever makes a request to access an application it had to execute a DNS query. Every. Single. Thing. 
When Instagram was sold to Facebook in 2012, it employed only 13 people and maintained over 4 billion photos shared by its 80 million registered users.
Internally, Instagram was a small business. Externally, it was a web monster. Filling the gap between those two contradictory perspectives is DevOps.
Now to be fair, Instagram (like many other web monster properties today) has it easier than most other businesses because it supported only one application. One. That's in stark contrast to large enterprises which are, by most analyst firms, said to manage not one but one hundred and even one thousand applications - at the same time. Our own data indicates an average of 312 applications per customer, many of which are certainly integrated and interacting with one another.
If you listen to the persistent murmur in the market surrounding the Internet of Things right now, you'd believe that it's all about sensors. Sensors and big data. Sensors that monitor everything from entertainment habits to health status to more mundane environmental data about your home and office.
to a certain degree this is accurate. The Internet of Things comprises, well, things. But the question that must be asked - and is being asked in some circles - is not only where that data ends up but how organizations are going to analyze it and, more importantly, monetize it.
But there's yet another question that needs to be asked and answered - soon. Assuming these things are talking to applications (whether they reside in the cloud or in the corporate data center) and vice-versa, there must be some way to identify them - and the people to whom they belong.
Some companies are still hanging on to the belief that they can manage their own data centers better than the various cloud providers out there.This state of denial should all but go away when the influx of petabyte scale data becomes a reality for enterprises. Enterprises are going to have to ask themselves, “Do we want to be in the infrastructure business?” because that is what it will take to provide the appropriate amount of bandwidth, disk storage, and compute power to keep up with the demand for data ingestion, storage, and real-time analytics that will serve the business needs. If there ever was a use case for the cloud, the IoT and Big Data is it. Check out my latest post on Forbes that discusses Big Data strategies for tackling the IoT.
The Internet of Things could get out of control pretty fast. We’re still pretty far from self-aware homes trying to procreate, but as Gigaom Research analyst Craig Foster noted in his recent report on IoT security, the dangers are already very real. Take a look at the maritime industry. Earlier this yea, hackers tilted and... 
So far, 2014 has turned into a banner year for CIOs that have invested the time and effort to plan for hybrid cloud services, while building strong strategic relationships with their Line of Business leadership. Their approved capital investment budget spend is on-track and operational expenses are contained, as planned.
Savvy senior executives across the globe continue to make selective investments in new business technology. In fact, there could be a moderate IT infrastructure spend over the next 12-18 months, which will likely increase the demand for open source software and professional services as new cloud service projects are approved.
Worldwide IT spending is now forecast to increase by 4.5 percent in 2014 at constant currency, that's according to updated projections from the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). By and large, this enterprise growth is still being driven by smartphones, apps and the mobile cloud.
IT systems will need to adapt, and evolving — or simply adding on to the existing relational database management system architecture — isn’t going to cut it. What does this mean, if not Hadoop or in-memory as the end-all, be-all? TechTarget writer Nicole Laskowski sums it up nicely: Architecture matters. It turns out, even that simple statement will require something of a revolution, as Jason Bloomberg explains in a Forbes column.
Internet of Things is the current hip phrase of technology evangelists, geeks and all kinds of clairvoyants. If, according to tech blogs and websites, 2013 was the year of big data, then 2014 certainly is the year of Internet of Things. New projects, big funding rounds, the general hype and excitement are everywhere. And yet, we don’t really get the whole thing right. The general media seem more concerned with new smart thermostats design than how the concept of IoT is changing our lives. It’s time to approach this massive subject properly and start avoiding common misconceptions. The problem with Internet of Things is that everyone seems concerned only about the Things, maybe because the name, which kind of implies that.
There has been a lot of talk in the venture capital industry about automating the home and leveraging Internet-enabled devices for various functions. The first wave of this was the use of the smartphone as a remote control to manage, for instance, a thermostat. The thermostat then begins to recognize user habits and adapt to... 
For many of us old enough to remember, the early days of life online had little to do with the internet. Before we browsed the open web, we dialed into Prodigy or CompuServe or AOL with a 1400-baud telephone modem.
Once connected to a particular service, we used its proprietary software to play inside its members-only club, and we couldn’t visit any other service. We lacked a certain amount of freedom.
One of my earliest cyber-memories: getting my mom’s AOL account suspended by the moderator of a chat room I was trolling. By today’s standards, such a tightly controlled experience seems quaint—and pretty silly. But that early-’90s scenario could very well repeat itself today, with the so-called Internet of Things.
I love The Internet of Things. You do, too, even if you don’t know exactly what it is yet. Hardly a day goes by where I don’t find a story about some awesome company creating some new awesome gadget that taps into The Internet of Things. Scrolling through these stories is like taking a peek at the world (and our homes!) three to five years down the line.
But, uh, what exactly is The Internet of Things? And why should you care?
My favorite writer, Gil Press, sums it up with, “It’s Official: The Internet Of Things Takes Over Big Data As The Most Hyped Technology” where he talks about how Gartner released its latest Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, and how big data has moved down the “trough of disillusionment,” replaced by the Internet of Things at the top of the hype cycle.
The term Internet of Things was coined by the British technologist Kevin Ashton in 1999, to describe a system where the Internet is connected to the physical world via ubiquitous sensors.
It is only fitting that the 20th anniversary of the Gartner Hype Cycle has the Internet of Things right at the top of the coaster. IoT is currently at the peak of Inflated Expectations. The Gartner Hype Cycle give organizations an assessment of the maturity, business benefit and future direction of more than 2,000 technologies. The theme for this year’s Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle is Digital Business.
Back when we were doing DB2 at IBM, there was an important older product called IMS which brought significant revenue. With another database product coming (based on relational technology), IBM did not want any cannibalization of the existing revenue stream. Hence we coined the phrase “dual database strategy” to justify the need for both DBMS products. In a similar vain, several vendors are concocting all kinds of terms and strategies to justify newer products under the banner of Big Data.
