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Electric power utilities face relentless pressure on their financial performance, and reducing distribution grid losses is one of the last untapped opportunities to meet their business goals. Combining IoT-enabled sensors and cloud-based data analytics, utilities now are able to find, quantify and reduce losses faster – and with a smaller IT footprint. Solutions exist using Internet-enabled sensors deployed temporarily at strategic locations within the distribution grid to measure actual line lo...Jan. 3, 2016 11:00 AM EST Reads: 774
Manufacturing has widely adopted standardized and automated processes to create designs, build them, and maintain them through their life cycle. However, many modern manufacturing systems go beyond mechanized workflows to introduce empowered workers, flexible collaboration, and rapid iteration.
Such behaviors also characterize open source software development and are at the heart of DevOps culture, processes, and tooling. 
Consumer IoT applications provide data about the user that just doesn’t exist in traditional PC or mobile web applications. This rich data, or “context,” enables the highly personalized consumer experiences that characterize many consumer IoT apps. This same data is also providing brands with unprecedented insight into how their connected products are being used, while, at the same time, powering highly targeted engagement and marketing opportunities.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Nathan Trel...
The web app is agile. The REST API is agile. The testing and planning are agile. But alas, data infrastructures certainly are not. Once an application matures, changing the shape or indexing scheme of data often forces at best a top down planning exercise and at worst includes schema changes that force downtime. The time has come for a new approach that fundamentally advances the agility of distributed data infrastructures.
Learn about a new solution to the problems faced by software organizati...
In their Live Hack” presentation at 17th Cloud Expo, Stephen Coty and Paul Fletcher, Chief Security Evangelists at Alert Logic, provided the audience with a chance to see a live demonstration of the common tools cyber attackers use to attack cloud and traditional IT systems.
This “Live Hack” used open source attack tools that are free and available for download by anybody. Attendees learned where to find and how to operate these tools for the purpose of testing their own IT infrastructure. The...
Contrary to mainstream media attention, the multiple possibilities of how consumer IoT will transform our everyday lives aren’t the only angle of this headline-gaining trend. There’s a huge opportunity for “industrial IoT” and “Smart Cities” to impact the world in the same capacity – especially during critical situations. For example, a community water dam that needs to release water can leverage embedded critical communications logic to alert the appropriate individuals, on the right device, as...
Containers have changed the mind of IT in DevOps. They enable developers to work with dev, test, stage and production environments identically. Containers provide the right abstraction for microservices and many cloud platforms have integrated them into deployment pipelines. DevOps and containers together help companies achieve their business goals faster and more effectively.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Ruslan Synytsky, CEO and Co-founder of Jelastic, reviewed the current landscape of De...
While testing is often ignored when it comes to DevOps - it could be the most important aspect of achieving true DevOps success. Without rethinking automated testing from the ground-up, the entire DevOps productivity gain cannot be realized.
Large tech companies build their own rapid test automation that runs in minutes across functional, performance, security and other tests.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Kevin Surace, CEO of Appvance, discussed how we learn from these real-world successes...
Organizations already struggle with the simple collection of data resulting from the proliferation of IoT, lacking the right infrastructure to manage it. They can't only rely on the cloud to collect and utilize this data because many applications still require dedicated infrastructure for security, redundancy, performance, etc.
In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Emil Sayegh, CEO of Codero Hosting, discussed how in order to resolve the inherent issues, companies need to combine dedicated and cl...
There are many considerations when moving applications from on-premise to cloud. It is critical to understand the benefits and also challenges of this migration. A successful migration will result in lower Total Cost of Ownership, yet offer the same or higher level of robustness. Migration to cloud shifts computing resources from your data center, which can yield significant advantages provided that the cloud vendor an offer enterprise-grade quality for your application.
Redis is not only the fastest database, but it has become the most popular among the new wave of applications running in containers. Redis speeds up just about every data interaction between your users or operational systems.
In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Dave Nielsen, Developer Relations at Redis Labs, shared the functions and data structures used to solve everyday use cases that are driving Redis' popularity.
WebRTC services have already permeated corporate communications in the form of videoconferencing solutions. However, WebRTC has the potential of going beyond and catalyzing a new class of services providing more than calls with capabilities such as mass-scale real-time media broadcasting, enriched and augmented video, person-to-machine and machine-to-machine communications.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Luis Lopez, CEO of Kurento, introduced the technologies required for implementing these id...
Enterprises can achieve rigorous IT security as well as improved DevOps practices and Cloud economics by taking a new, cloud-native approach to application delivery. Because the attack surface for cloud applications is dramatically different than for highly controlled data centers, a disciplined and multi-layered approach that spans all of your processes, staff, vendors and technologies is required. This may sound expensive and time consuming to achieve as you plan how to move selected applicati...
An edge gateway is an essential piece of infrastructure for large scale cloud-based services.
In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Mikey Cohen, Manager, Edge Gateway at Netflix, detailed the purpose, benefits and use cases for an edge gateway to provide security, traffic management and cloud cross region resiliency. He discussed how a gateway can be used to enhance continuous deployment and help testing of new service versions and get service insights and more. Philosophical and architectural ap...
Clearly the way forward is to move to cloud be it bare metal, VMs or containers. One aspect of the current public clouds that is slowing this cloud migration is cloud lock-in. Every cloud vendor is trying to make it very difficult to move out once a customer has chosen their cloud.
In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Naveen Nimmu, CEO of Clouber, Inc., advocated that making the inter-cloud migration as simple as changing airlines would help the entire industry to quickly adopt the cloud without ...
There are so many tools and techniques for data analytics that even for a data scientist the choices, possible systems, and even the types of data can be daunting.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Harrold, Global CTO for Big Data Solutions for EMC Corporation, showed how to perform a simple, but meaningful analysis of social sentiment data using freely available tools that take only minutes to download and install. Participants received the download information, scripts, and complete end-t...
In their session at 17th Cloud Expo, Hal Schwartz, CEO of Secure Infrastructure & Services (SIAS), and Chuck Paolillo, CTO of Secure Infrastructure & Services (SIAS), provided a study of cloud adoption trends and the power and flexibility of IBM Power and Pureflex cloud solutions.
In his role as CEO of Secure Infrastructure & Services (SIAS), Hal Schwartz provides leadership and direction for the company.
WebRTC: together these advances have created a perfect storm of technologies that are disrupting and transforming classic communications models and ecosystems.
In his session at WebRTC Summit, Cary Bran, VP of Innovation and New Ventures at Plantronics and PLT Labs, provided an overview of this technological shift, including associated business and consumer communications impacts, and opportunities it may enable, complement or entirely transform.
When it comes to IoT in the enterprise, namely the commercial building and hospitality markets, a benefit not getting the attention it deserves is energy efficiency, and IoT’s direct impact on a cleaner, greener environment when installed in smart buildings. Until now clean technology was offered piecemeal and led with point solutions that require significant systems integration to orchestrate and deploy. There didn't exist a 'top down' approach that can manage and monitor the way a Smart Buildi...
Overgrown applications have given way to modular applications, driven by the need to break larger problems into smaller problems. Similarly large monolithic development processes have been forced to be broken into smaller agile development cycles. Looking at trends in software development, microservices architectures meet the same demands. Additional benefits of microservices architectures are compartmentalization and a limited impact of service failure versus a complete software malfunction. Th...
The broad selection of hardware, the rapid evolution of operating systems and the time-to-market for mobile apps has been so rapid that new challenges for developers and engineers arise every day. Security, testing, hosting, and other metrics have to be considered through the process.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Walter Maguire, Chief Field Technologist, HP Big Data Group, at Hewlett-Packard, discussed the challenges faced by developers and a composite Big Data applications builder, focusing...
The revocation of Safe Harbor has radically affected data sovereignty strategy in the cloud.
In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Jeff Miller, Product Management at Cavirin Systems, discussed how to assess these changes across your own cloud strategy, and how you can mitigate risks previously covered under the agreement.
Contextual Analytics of various threat data provides a deeper understanding of a given threat and enables identification of unknown threat vectors.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, David Dufour, Head of Security Architecture, IoT, Webroot, Inc., discussed how through the use of Big Data analytics and deep data correlation across different threat types, it is possible to gain a better understanding of where, how and to what level of danger a malicious actor poses to an organization, and to determ...
As more intelligent IoT applications shift into gear, they’re merging into the ever-increasing traffic flow of the Internet. It won’t be long before we experience bottlenecks, as IoT traffic peaks during rush hours. Organizations that are unprepared will find themselves by the side of the road unable to cross back into the fast lane. As billions of new devices begin to communicate and exchange data – will your infrastructure be scalable enough to handle this new interconnected world? 
Most of the IoT Gateway scenarios involve collecting data from machines/processing and pushing data upstream to cloud for further analytics. The gateway hardware varies from Raspberry Pi to Industrial PCs. The document states the process of allowing deploying polyglot data pipelining software with the clear notion of supporting immutability.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Shashank Jain, a development architect for SAP Labs, discussed the objective, which is to automate the IoT deployment proces...
The Internet of Things (IoT), in all its myriad manifestations, has great potential. Much of that potential comes from the evolving data management and analytic (DMA) technologies and processes that allow us to gain insight from all of the IoT data that can be generated and gathered. This potential may never be met as those data sets are tied to specific industry verticals and single markets, with no clear way to use IoT data and sensor analytics to fulfill the hype being given the IoT today. 
For it to be SOA – let alone SOA done right – we need to pin down just what "SOA done wrong" might be. First-generation SOA with Web Services and ESBs, perhaps?
But then there's second-generation, REST-based SOA. More lightweight and cloud-friendly, but many REST-based SOA practices predate the microservices wave.
Today, microservices and containers go hand in hand – only the details of "container-oriented architecture" are largely on the drawing board – and are not likely to look much like S...
With containerization using Docker, the orchestration of containers using Kubernetes, the self-service model for provisioning your projects and applications and the workflows we built in OpenShift is the best in class Platform as a Service that enables introducing DevOps into your organization with ease.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Veer Muchandi, PaaS evangelist with RedHat, provided a deep dive overview of OpenShift v3 and demonstrated how it helps with DevOps.
Everyone talks about continuous integration and continuous delivery but those are just two ends of the pipeline. In the middle of DevOps is continuous testing (CT), and many organizations are struggling to implement continuous testing effectively. After all, without continuous testing there is no delivery. And Lab-As-A-Service (LaaS) enhances the CT with dynamic on-demand self-serve test topologies. CT together with LAAS make a powerful combination that perfectly serves complex software developm...
Microservices are a very exciting architectural approach that many organizations are looking to as a way to accelerate innovation. Microservices promise to allow teams to move away from monolithic "ball of mud" systems, but the reality is that, in the vast majority of organizations, different projects and technologies will continue to be developed at different speeds.
How to handle the dependencies between these disparate systems with different iteration cycles? Consider the "canoncial problem"...
How do you securely enable access to your applications in AWS without exposing any attack surfaces? The answer is usually very complicated because application environments morph over time in response to growing requirements from your employee base, your partners and your customers.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Haseeb Budhani, co-founder and CEO of Soha, shared five common approaches that DevOps teams follow to secure access to applications deployed in AWS, Azure, etc., and the friction and...
"As a technology provider we believe that business comes first and customers should start thinking that technology is something that helps them to enable new business models," stated Ermanno Bonifazi, Founder and CEO of Solgenia, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 17th Cloud Expo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Developing software for the Internet of Things (IoT) comes with its own set of challenges. Security, privacy, and unified standards are a few key issues. In addition, each IoT product is comprised of (at least) three separate application components: the software embedded in the device, the backend service, and the mobile application for the end user’s controls. Each component is developed by a different team, using different technologies and practices, and deployed to a different stack/target – ...
"In the DevOps area there are a lot of people looking to adopt more and new efficient processes and that's worked well for us and the technology we provide," explained Charles Kendrick, CTO and Chief Architect at Isomorphic Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
"We've made it easy for customers that want to build their own cloud infrastructure by delivering a fully integrated software and hardware in a rack," explained Stefaan Vervaet, Director of Strategic Alliances at HGST, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 17th Cloud Expo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
As organizations shift towards IT-as-a-service models, the need for managing and protecting data residing across physical, virtual, and now cloud environments grows with it. CommVault can ensure protection and E-Discovery of your data – whether in a private cloud, a Service Provider delivered public cloud, or a hybrid cloud environment – across the heterogeneous enterprise.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Randy De Meno, Chief Technologist - Windows Products and Microsoft Partnerships at Com...
The now mainstream platform changes stemming from the first Internet boom brought many changes but didn’t really change the basic relationship between servers and the applications running on them. In fact, that was sort of the point.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Gordon Haff, senior cloud strategy marketing and evangelism manager at Red Hat, will discuss how today’s workloads require a new model and a new platform for development and execution. The platform must handle a wide range of rec...
"IoT is really hitting its stride. The adoption rates are increasing and Vitria is in a good position to help people deliver on the value of IoT," explained Mike Houston, Marketing & Product Marketing Professional at Vitria Technology, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
This video highlights IBM's capabilities for managing and optimizing hybrid cloud environments. Learn how to balance the needs of business with the needs of corporate IT departments. Now you can maximize speed while maintaining the ability to deploy complex applications quickly in a controlled and secure way across a variety of cloud implementations.
"We're seeing a lot of activity in IoT in the healthcare space - a lot of new devices coming in. We are seeing a huge demand in building smart offices, smart infrastructures, smart cloud applications," explained Shrikant Pattathil, President of Harbinger Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 17th Cloud Expo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
@DevOpsSummit taking place June 7-9, 2016 at Javits Center, New York City, and Nov 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, is co-located with the 18th International @CloudExpo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world.
This redpaper discusses how IBM Bluemix™ cloud platform offers technologies that make it easy for cloud-based SoEs to securely connect to on-premises IBM mainframes, creating a fully secure, end-to-end, SoE-SoR environment. 
Between the compelling mockups and specs produced by analysts, and resulting applications built by developers, there exists a gulf where projects fail, costs spiral, and applications disappoint. Methodologies like Agile attempt to address this with intensified communication, with partial success but many limitations.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Charles Kendrick, CTO and Chief Architect at Isomorphic Software, presented a revolutionary model enabled by new technologies.
Shadow IT is here to stay. IT departments need to appreciate that it is so culturally inbuilt that shutting it down is now impossible; in fact, policies punishing the use of third-party apps would more likely push rogue users deeper into the darkness. The battle that can be won is to better educate staff and make Shadow IT an integral part of the company’s wider security awareness program. Some staff are aware of the problems, and will ignore them, but many just simply won’t understand why what they are doing could affect the whole business.
2015 has been a busy year for us at Electric Cloud, as we continue to innovate on the Product front to transform the way organizations deliver software to market.
2015 saw the launch of ElectricFlow Deploy - the industry's most powerful deploy automation and ARA solution, soon followed by ElectricFlow Release - which provides DevOps teams across the organization an easy way to coordinate software releases, enabling a clear, intuitive, view of your Path to Production and the state of your Release at any given time.
In today's rapidly changing IT world, database experts who wish to remain relevant must keep up-to-date on all kinds of technology - both database-related and other.
DBAs should understand new data-related technologies but also other newer technologies that interact with database systems. Don't ignore industry and technology trends simply because you cannot immediately think of a database-related impact. Many non-database-related "things" eventually find their way into DBMS software and database applications. An example for that is Agile methodologies, such as DevOps and Continuous Delivery w...
We thought it’d be fun to offer a look back at some of 2015’s biggest performance testing stories. Or in some cases, maybe all that was tested was our patience. Either way, here’s a quick trip down memory lane.
Here we are - just a day away from 2016. It's hard to believe the year is over.
It's even harder to believe everything that happened this year. If you build and test software you probably powered through a ton during these past 12 months, to the point where you can't even understand where the time went. Yet if you pick your head up and think about all that's transpired, you might be s...
The relentless doubling of compute horsepower every 18 - 24 months known as Moore’s Law is one of the trends that has shaped the IT industry. Machine virtualization and cloud computing have combined to reduce the time it takes to create a new machine that harnesses the latest in computing power to nearly zero. These mammoth forces plus a bit of application developer productivity have resulted in a huge explosion in the number of machines running applications over the past 10 to 15 years.
The benefits of staying current and adopting the latest foundational technologies are undeniable. Faster c...
Collaboration is a big focus area among technology start-ups. The past five years have seen a range of new products in this area that have completely transformed the way businesses work. Thanks to the likes of Trello and Slack, team members do not even have to live in the same city or even country any longer. Start-ups like Zapier operate with a completely remote workforce thanks to these telecommuting tools.
While these tools help with keeping team members updated on the status of various tasks and work well as project management tools, they do not actually help with decision making and st...
IoT is the next development of how the Internet is applied to the world. TAM for M2M/IoT is estimated at $19 trillion. The IoT device count is in the billions but will not traverse the service providers’ networks. Service providers and vendors are struggling to understand how to map the TAM dollars to real use cases, optimal technology approaches, and profitable business models.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Dennis Ward, IoT analyst, strategist at DWE, focused on the SP transformations that will occur. In Phase I SP infrastructure virtualization. In Phase II SPs will focus on monetization. ...
The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to be a major topic of discussion in the tech industry. Many people want to know: how is the IoT influencing me already? That’s one of the themes of this week’s conversation between Electric Cloud CTO Anders Wallgren and Software Engineering Daily Host Jeff Meyerson.
IoT continues to grow, with the proliferation of smart homes, wearables, smart cars, mHealth devices and more. For example, new cars today come pre-wired with hundreds of millions of lines of code already, and much of the embedded software is already connected to the Internet. This always-on...
Although corporate giants realized the danger of cyber attacks and cyber crime in general, especially after attacks on Sony and Zappos, as well as the very sensitive data breach that struck Ashley Madison website, small businesses still don't do much for making their networks more secure.
Statistics say that more than half of all small businesses in the US don't provide security training for their employees, only one quarter conduct outside party security tests, and more than 40% don't produce backup copies of their most important business files, in case something goes wrong.
Every physical object or “thing” that can be embedded with sensors will be embedded with sensors. Whether you call it the Internet of Things, the Internet of Everything, M2M, a smarter planet, the Industrial Internet or something else, the trend is clear. With so much activity and interest, it is unfortunate that a de facto communications standard has not emerged. However, there is progress (or managed conflict) in the right direction.
It's never easy to predict the future. But if you want to plan for the future, you need to keep an eye on what's coming next.
This month, we reached out to people from different areas of the software industry to get their thoughts on what to expect in 2016.
From DevOps to automation, security, and open API - these experts discuss new and continuing developments, changes, and trends that will impact that software industry in 2016.
Here are thirteen software industry predictions.
One thing I have learned so far this holiday season is that a 15 pound turkey is too big for only 4 people! I love this time of year as it’s a chance for me to take time and read a number of the predictions articles that have come out in recent weeks. Here are some that have caught my attention and I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.
"We specialize is business process automation and our focus today is the Internet of Things and we are promoting a platform called Connect2me," stated Yasser Khan, Founder of Plasma, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Data has changed our world.. From our cars, homes, pets, and even our own bodies, data has opened our eyes to behavior patterns and allowed us to catch on to small issues before they become bigger problems. This phenomenon has made huge waves in the healthcare industry, including reducing operational costs, improving independent living, and increasing early detection of diseases. With the wildfire set by the Internet of Things, healthcare data from wearables and other mHealth devices are helping patients take a more informed and active role in their healthcare, and give doctors more insight in...