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.

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Kirk Byers at SDN Central writes frequently on the topic of DevOps as it relates (and applies) to the network and recently introduced a list of seven DevOps principles that are applicable in an article entitled, «DevOps and the Chaos Monkey. » On this list is the notion of reducing variation. This caught my eye because reducing variation is a key goal of Six Sigma and in fact its entire formula is based on measuring the impact of variation in results. The thought is that by measuring deviation from a desired outcome, you can immediately recognize whether changes to a process improve the consistency of the outcome.Quality is achieved by reducing variation, or so the methodology goes.

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Over the last two decades, needs of workers and workplace has evolved. The current set of collaboration tools (e.g. email, SharePoint) are outdated, restrict information distribution, create silos and are the exact opposite of what is needed to effectively work together in this decade.

From the very beginning, our goal with MangoApps was to bring as profound a change in how we collaborate as email did almost 20 years ago. We wanted MangoApps to be a place where employees could not only talk about work, but do work! Our goal was to make work life easy by providing a single tool employees could use thru’ out the day for all their communication and collaboration needs.

After years of hard work, investments and product iterations, MangoApps 8.2 takes a giant step towards this goal. MangoApps 8.2 combines traditional intranet features like structured publishing with team collaboration and social networking making it the only product to provide a complete collaboration solution.

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Ixia develops amazing products so its customers can connect the world. Ixia helps its customers provide an always-on user experience through fast, secure delivery of dynamic connected technologies and services. Through actionable insights that accelerate and secure application and service delivery, Ixia’s customers benefit from faster time to market, optimized application performance and higher-quality deployments.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Prashanth Chandrasekar GM of Rackspace’s DevOps Business Segment joined DevOps Summit Silicon Valley faculty. Chandrasekar’s session abstract will be published on Monday. Below please find an exclusive interview with Prashanth Chandrasekar, conducted by Cloud Expo Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff.

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Dasher Technologies is committed to being the best technology solution company in the United States by operating with the highest integrity and building lasting relationships with its customers and partners. Since 1982, Dasher Technologies helped public, private and nonprofit organizations implement technology solutions that speed and simplify their operations. As one of the fastest growing system integrators in the country, Dasher have gained a reputation for effortless implementations with relentless follow-through and enduring support. Dasher’s strong technical expertise and vendor independence allows the company to integrate best-of-breed software, hardware and services into a custom solution that directly impacts the business. Dasher was recently named the HP 2012 ESSN Partner of the Year and is the #1 provider of HP High Performance Computing solutions and HP Open Source/Linux solutions in the US. The company has grown to five offices nationwide with locations in California, Oregon, Washington, Alabama, and Florida. Dasher is listed as a certified Women Owned Business.

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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.

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I look at the IoT as having three great components: M2M, wearables, and grids. The components can also be seen (roughly) as enterprise, personal, and government/organizational.I’ll examine each area in follow-up articles. I’ll start with the third, as it applies to research I’ve been conducting for the past three years and dovetails with the very high-level view of the IoT being taken by the largest technology companies in the world. And I’m looking forward to discussing issues great and small with all in attendance at the upcoming @ThingsExpo, for which I serve as Conference Chair.

A Dismal Look
Smart grids, cities, and nations hold transformational potential, especially but exclusively for the developing world. It that holds the promise of fixing the millenium-old human problems of poverty, disease, violence, and poor leadership.

Right?

But to examine the IoT’s potential to transform society means starting with a big-picture look at economics, or the “dismal science,” as it’s lovingly known by its practitioners.

Global economics is not a zero-sum game, although it can feel that way when a competitor is eating your lunch. It can also look that way when comparing the extremes of the wealth of nations.

But I think the IoT can not only solve a particular company’s problems but is also the key to long-term, fair-minded global economic growth and societal development.

A Brief History
We’ve come a long way since Adam Smith’s first articulated his principles of enlightened self-interest and an “invisible hand” that guides economic development without the need for government regulation or intervention. Even seemingly altruistic acts are ultimately done with a personal, self-centered goal in mind, in this view.

The Keynesian revolution (ie, government stimulation is desirable) followed by a few decades of increasingly scientific, mathematically inclined studies of societies and their economics has led to much re-intepretation of Smith’s original thinking.

Recent economic developments, led by Joseph Stiglitz and centered around the power of “information assymetry” can lead to almost the opposite conclusion; there’s nothing enlightened about self-interest, people with an upper hand won’t play fair, and only tough, enforceable government regulation can address it, in this view.

Ha Joon-Chang is another modern-day economist who, in essence, thinks the developed world is not playing fair as developing nations struggle to lift their way out of poverty. I interviewed him a few years ago 864350

On a separate tangent, Dambisa Moyo is another modern-day economist who has taken the controversial stance that altruism is, in fact, damaging to the people it ostensibly tries to help.

Does IT Matter?
Meanwhile, it’s been more than 30 years since the personal computer entered the scene in a big way.

Yet to this day, academic research on “IT economics” seems sparse. Even though so many of us in the industry believe in the rising tide of technology that lifts all boats, and utopian dreams flow out of Silicon Valley and its mimickers with each new gadget or app, it’s hard to find pure research that connects the dots between the aggressive use of technology, economic development, and societal progress.

There’s plenty of history at this point. The 80s were famous for $1 trillion worth of PC sales, with no apparent productivity increase in the global economy. The 90s showed that the benefits of this technology took awhile to become apparent; they did become apparent once widely connected to networks and with the invention of the Worldwide Web.

The 2000s were a disaster, with the dot-com meltdown, the post-Y2K technology recession, the Great Recession, and war disaster by the US. Even so, enterprise IT—including tens of millions of personal computers sold each year—rose by the end of the decade to several trilliions of dollars.

Now, as we progress through the second decade of the 21st century, we see cloud computing, Big Data, and the Internet of Things. It’s time for economists to study the “IT effect” with rigor.

As a non-academic with perhaps just enough graduate school experience to be dangerous, I won’t be the person who seizes this field of study and emerges as the Joseph Steiglitz of IT economics. But to paraphrase the Dennis Hopper character in True Romance, I find this stuff to be fascinating.

Relatively Speaking
Our research at the Tau Institute is socio-economic in nature, but as of yet lays out no grand theories.

We abide by the principle that technology is not only inevitable but inevitably good for the human species; though Google Glass today is seen as having great comedic value, the same twitters could be heard (well before Twitter) with images of people lugging around computers, talking on wireless phones, and seeking hotspots.

The big cavaet, of course, is that our political and societal leaders don’t abuse the wonders of technological progress. Wishful thinking, perhaps.

Yet the net gain to the world economy brought by personal computing devices is enormous. Mobile phones are the only way to communicate in much of the developing world, and are also used as virtual banks. Mobile computers in the developed world have surely reduced the number of people—an therefore, congestion–showing up to work every day in central cities.

Wireless connectivity has freed people to work and access information from almost wherever they choose, and it’s cut down on the time people watch television—a development that cannot, on the whole, be deleterious.

(More to come in future postings!)

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As we make the shift to the cloud era, computing’s traditional building blocks are increasingly abstracted away. This is fueled by the advent of hypervisors, virtual machines, public clouds, and application containers. Despite being roughly sixty years old and existing in an industry that sees tectonic shifts at least once a decade, the operating system remains a rock solid foundation and the underpinning of modern information technology. Why is it that this core building block will not quietly go away?

The functions that the operating system provides are critical to computing – as long as there are systems with memory to manage, I/O to arbitrate, processes to schedule, and storage or networks with which to interface, the operating system remains vital.

Does abstracting the operating system make these functions less important?

While we do not notice the electricity and water that sustain our homes and office buildings every day, no one would dare say that they are irrelevant. As the sources for these and other utilities have been abstracted, we’ve grown accustomed to their availability; we take them for granted.

The operating system has also evolved to become such a utility. It is pervasive and ubiquitous, and we don’t notice it because it just works.

Critical not only to the function of enterprise IT, the operating system lies at the core of our daily lives, serving as the underlying force of IT consumerization. The operating system is everywhere – it is in our mobile phones, our cars, our smart DVD players, and our thermostats. IDC predicts that there “will be approximately 212 billion ‘things’ globally by the end of 2020”, including a large percentage of intelligent systems that will be installed and collecting data across consumer and enterprise applications. The operating system helps us to control and connect with the Internet of Things around us.

And let’s not forget the application, which needs an operating system to provide system services as well as linkage to its dependencies — the required software libraries, run time components, and device drivers. The application may be king, but the operating system is its castle – providing the foundation, the resources, and the security for the application to thrive.

Those who claim that the operating system is irrelevant are trying to shift your focus from this critical technology because it’s in their best interest to do so. Beer manufacturers will point out that drinking beer after exercise will hydrate you slightly better than water – of course, beer is 95% water.

Regardless of technical advancements, the operating system remains at the core of enterprise computing. It is here to stay, and will forever be foundational to our interconnected world.

A blog post on the gov.uk website has outlined a hazy date of the end of September when G-Cloud migrates from the CloudStore to the new shiny Digital Marketplace.

G-Cloud’s new home, which made alpha back in March, aims to replace the CloudStore as well as the Digital Services Store, a home for finding people who can design digital projects and services.

As Ivanka Majic wrote on the government’s official blog, the move will start at the end of this month, with plans to turn the lights off on the CloudStore by the end of September, should things run smoothly.

“Digital Marketplace is reaching a stage which allows us to consider making it the route for G-Cloud purchases,” the blog reads. “We are considering a staged approach to its launch and will be making sure there is a four week transition period during which people will be able to choose whether they buy through CloudStore or Digital Marketplace.”

Andy Powell, head of product marketing at Eduserv, a G-Cloud supplier, was generally positive about the proposed change yet admitted his company was still in a “wait and see” position.

“It’s good to see consolidation across the G-Cloud and Digital Services frameworks,” he told CloudTech. “My initial reaction to the interface is that it has been streamlined quite nicely.

“The major caveat to that is that we have yet to see how Cabinet Office is going to implement their approach to the 14 cloud security principles, and associated claims made by suppliers, in terms of filtering search results,” he added.

“Given that security is likely to remain one of the key characteristics by which buyers differentiate available services, this is critical to the overall success of the marketplace as a tool for both buyers and suppliers.”

Databarracks managing director Peter Groucutt expressed similar concerns regarding search functionality in the old CloudStore.

“The truth is, vendors offering services on the G-Cloud framework had little idea as to how their services would be displayed within the CloudStore,” he said. “As a result, the simple option for vendors was to revisit old SEO tricks in a bid to boost their position.

“By improving the way vendors input information about their offerings, it provides buyers with a more accurate understanding of the services available to them,” he added.

“The improvements demonstrate that real thought is being put into the process; how the buyers buy, how the vendors will want to sell, and ensuring those on the framework have access to the right services to suit their specific needs.”

G-Cloud 5 went live back in May, with CloudTech at the time gauging the opinions of various suppliers. Most were of the opinion that while G-Cloud had made it easier for cloud providers to sell their services to government, there was still work to do in terms of procurement and education.

At the time of launch, G-Cloud programme director Tony Singleton railed against the idea of the government cloud marketplace becoming “business as usual.”

“There is much to be done in transforming the way IT is not only bought but also consumed across the wider public sector,” he warned.

The government has also urged users and suppliers to keep testing and finding bugs as the Digital Marketplace moves from alpha to beta. You can find out more about that here.