We talk a lot about Windows, but did you know that you can run more than just Windows in your virtual machine? Well, you can! Apart from Windows, Parallels Desktop supports numerous other major operating systems. You may have heard of a few of them: Slideshow images in order: Linux, Ubuntu, Chrome OS, Mageia, FreeBSD, […]
The post Alternative OSes in Parallels Desktop appeared first on Parallels Blog.
Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 3/23/2015.
A new breed of Point of Sale malware has been spotted in the wild by security researchers at Cisco’s Talos Security Intelligence & Research Group. Microsoft Apps are coming to Android smartphones and tablets. The White House has named Twitter veteran Jason Goldman as the first Chief Digital Officer. Eric Schmidt says that Google Glass will return. The Human Rights Council at the United Nations has voted to appoint an independent watch dog to monitor privacy rights in the digital age.
In other news, our CEO Ron Dupler is now on Twitter! Follow him @Ron_Dupler
Are you looking for more information around Windows Server 2003 End-of-Life? Read our whitepaper from Microsoft expert & GreenPages blogger David Barter.
By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist
If you have a Network Operations Center (or NOC, as the kids call it), you have a skilled set of eyes monitoring your system and alerting your engineers when things go wrong. (If you have something like a NOC, such as a first tier team that processes tickets, we’re looking at you, too). You also probably have strict SLAs and a need for high availability at all times. You can’t waste a second when things go down. Solutions like PagerDuty that help you identify and resolve incidents faster can help you improve your Network Operations Center performance. These solutions can shave minutes off your time to detect incidents (one of our customers took 8 minutes off theirs) and can make it easier for NOC personnel to escalate to experts when needed.
Manufacturing comprises 17 to 18% of the global economy, and is set to rack up about $13.5 trillion in revenues this year. China assumed leadership in the sector a few years ago and will account for about $2.5 trillion this year; manufacturing revenues in the US will approach $2 trillion.
The developed world and China continue to dominate the sector. Things are less good among developing nations. As an example, the Philippines (where I have family and an office) produces about 1% of US revenue in manufacturing, with about 33% of the US population. There are slightly more than 1 million manufacturing jobs in the Philippines, compared to perhaps 14 million in the US.
So the US, which has notoriously seen its manufacturing sector gutted since the year 2000, has roughly 14 times the number of manufacturing jobs with only three times the population of the Philippines. This provides a good illustration of the yawning economic gap that remains between a highly developed nation and a classic developing nation.
Will It Be Fashionable Again?
It’s been fashionable for a couple of decades to dismiss manufacturing, instead repeating the common wisdom that we’ve moved into a services-oriented economy. Everybody wants to build the Knowledge Society today.
I agree with the truism that old-style 1950s labor-intensive manufacturing will neither be returning to the US nor will elevate others into the modern age. Even China is now experiencing dramatically lower economic growth, and is finally starting to grapple with the enormous pollution problems the last two decades of growth have created. Meanwhile,
But, we still have to make stuff. Even as automated processes, robots, and emerging IoT feedback loops bring about productivity increases, there remains a need by so many of us pesky humans to have a job that can feed us and our families. Not everyone will be a Java programmer or PHP jockey. Not everyone will complete four years of college.
Meanwhile, recent studies by Circle Research and Vodafone indicate that 20% of manufacturing companies have taken up M2M. On a related note, Gartner has estimated there are already about 370 “things” in use in the global automotive business alone, with an anticipated rise to 3.5 billion by the year 2020.
Reality Bites
But the actual, physical challenge in developing a global manufacturing sector for the 21st century is amazingly daunting, in my view.
When I’m in Silicon Valley, safely ensconced in my office or at an event, I hear and see the fantastical visions being created there for the future. But when I’m driving around the now-barren streets of west Rockford, IL (a former small manufacturing hub located close to one of my US offices) or walking the streets of Metro Manila (where my research institute is headquartered), I see the challenge up close. There is nothing virtual or abstracted about it.
There are constitutional and structural barriers impeding the growth of a healthy economy in the Philippines, and a legacy of obtuse thinking in much of the US Midwest.
Optimism and great vision alone cannot improve things, and Silicon Valley’s optimism should be taken in certain-sized doses only. It is especially difficult to swallow when accompanied by the self-centered Randianism or invasive Fabianism that are so popular in the region.
As I ride a jeepney along MacArthur Blvd. through the barrios of slightly industrialized Pampanga Province, Philippines, where factory workers in my family make about $70 per month, I wonder how M2M and the IoT can elevate the masses here. I have the same thoughts as I drive through the burned-out, greened-in former middle-class neighborhoods of west Rockford.
Optimism may be the least bad choice available.
(c)iStock.com/WebSubstance
It’s the morning after the night before. You’ve had a bit too much, your head’s pounding, and you’re frantically searching your brain for anything you might have said or did that you’ll be paying for later.
We’ve all been there. Yet according to new research from Sungard Availability Services, it’s a similar effect at work when the IT department buys cloud solutions. 87% of the 150 UK-based senior IT decision makers polled say they have encountered some form of unplanned cloud spend.
All this improved productivity and efficiency is great, but there are plenty of hidden costs and issues lurking around the corner – and it’s not going to be solved by an aspirin and a glass of water before you go to bed. On average, each organisation polled was spending £200,000 a year to ensure their cloud services run effectively. Yet this isn’t the full story.
Anyone who has ever tried to piece together the remnants of the night before always has a first port of call; the receipts. All manner of weird and wonderful items can appear on these pieces of paper. Sungard’s research showed organisations spent an extra £270,000 on unforeseen costs over the last five years, including adding resources to manage deployment (44%), internal software maintenance (42%) and systems integration (40%). Suffice to say it was a bit more than a takeaway and a taxi.
This wasn’t the case elsewhere in Europe however. Only 54% of respondents in Ireland had encountered unplanned spend on cloud, with £150,000 spent on extra resources. IT decision makers in France had a whopping £430,000 of unexpected spend.
Almost half (45%) of UK-based respondents said cloud had increased the complexity of their IT infrastructure, while 70% admitted cloud had added a bunch of new challenges to the IT department. 28% of those polled said their IT costs had not gone down overall, as an expected return on investment in adopting cloud services.
Keith Tilley, executive vice president at Sungard, noted how, like the barfly who goes back for just one more, it’s more often than not the customer’s fault for getting into that state in the first place.
“By getting caught up in the hype, some organisations were quick to adopt the cloud without linking it back to their wider business goals and failed to see the additional considerations such as interoperability, availability and the operational expenditure linked to cloud,” he said.
“Whilst organisations can indeed see incredible benefits from cloud computing including agility, flexibility and cost savings, the cloud needs to be deployed on a case-by-case basis in line with business goals and the nature of the application or the workload,” Tilley added.
As this publication has examined before, cloud computing is not a magic cure all and due diligence has to be applied. Questions over data residency and data sovereignty have to be asked. The benefits are clear to see, and organisations continue to adopt aggressively, but this research shows how hidden costs remain an issue.
You can take a look at the effects of the ‘cloud hangover’ in the full report here.
(c)iStock.com/tumpikuja
By Adam Spearing, VP Platform EMEA, Salesforce
Let’s face it – until very recently big data has been a big letdown. Data warehouses and data analytics tools have historically proven difficult to design, build, and maintain. How much storage space will be necessary? How much data is there? What data management tools can the organisation afford and, just as important, what expertise is available in-house to build and run the data warehouse or data analytics platform?
InformationWeek recently outlined eight reasons why big data projects often fail. The article cited a survey from Gartner that found an astonishing 92% of organisations are stuck in neutral when it comes to their big data initiatives. Why? Because enterprises are spending a lot of money on big data technologies, or plan to, but don’t have the right skills or strategies in place to drive the initiatives forward.
That’s a shame because, when done right, good analytics can improve customer experience, drive sales, mitigate financial risks, and streamline business efficiencies.
As modern data analytics technologies are built on cloud infrastructure, they don’t require dedicated hardware or sophisticated applications
For a moment, consider how the typical data warehouse is run in today’s enterprise. Delivery of information from the data warehouse is often performed within a two-step process. Those needing new business insight tools would first send a request to their analysts, who then would turn to their IT team and ask it to provision the hardware and data platforms necessary. Then, those analysts or data scientists would perform all of the associated integration work and schema development. Remember, just building the most basic data warehouse can take eight months to a year.
If anyone in the organisation needed access to data or had questions they’d like answered, they’d always have to go to the gatekeepers — the data scientists.
Legacy data analytics tools have also fallen short when it comes to the promises made regarding so-called “big data solutions.” These tools have proven themselves to be difficult to use. They’re too reliant upon on-premise technologies, and they are not available where their insights are needed most: in the field, at customer locations, within the factory, before the big presentation, or wherever employees, executives, and teams happen to be when they need answers.
Fortunately, there have been so many advancements in enterprise technology in recent years that the impediments between the data that enterprises hold and the insight it can produce are disappearing.
Currently, three technological trends are driving this change: data analytics tools are now cloud native, they are mobile, and they are within reach to everyone.
When done right, good analytics can improve customer experience, drive sales, mitigate financial risks, and streamline business efficiencies
As modern data analytics technologies are built on cloud infrastructure, they don’t require dedicated hardware or sophisticated applications. They are always available as required and in the capacity they are needed.
Access to the data and being able to query it is no longer something that happens in the data center, or behind the corporate firewall. Data and the associated insight can be accessed securely from anywhere, which means comprehensive answers to the business’s most important and unexpected questions are available through mobile devices on engineering sites, in the manufacturing plant, or at a customer location.
Because modern analytics tools are based on cloud technologies and available on mostly any device, the insight they provide is accessible to anyone. This is a profound change. Now, salespeople, business managers, designers, engineers — whoever is in need of answers — can query the data and get the most actionable insight they need to succeed for their specific jobs without having to send requests through an analyst.
Of course, these cloud native, mobile, and insight-accessible data analytics technologies are incredibly powerful. Essentially, they provide unlimited power to consume billions and billions of rows of data that were never possible before. And this data can be surveyed from anywhere, delivered on mostly any mobile device, and comprehended by anyone. This intelligent collection, analysis, and mobile distribution of data analytics enables enterprises to not only stay a step or two ahead of the competition, but to leap far away from it.
Countless business models have spawned from the IaaS industry. Resell Web hosting, blogs, public cloud, and on and on. With the overwhelming amount of tools available to us, it’s sometimes easy to overlook that many of them are just new skins of resources we’ve had for a long time.
In his General Session at 16th Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Lead Developer Advocate at SoftLayer, will break down what we’ve got to work with and discuss the benefits and pitfalls to discover how we can best use them to design hosted applications.
Vicom Computer Services, Inc. was awarded an 11 year contract with the MTA.
The MTA launched a request for proposal in September 2013 for a project encompassing and creating a fully redundant core data network across the three core data centers and upgrade user access to applications and facilities throughout NYC Transit.
Vicom will design, install and maintain data communications hardware, software and a comprehensive enterprise management system for a network infrastructure upgrade at three NYC Transit core data center locations, six concentrator locations, 58 major facilities and approximately 250 smaller remote network locations throughout NYC Transit.
SYS-CON Media announced today that @WebRTCSummit Blog, the largest WebRTC resource in the world, has been launched.
@WebRTCSummit Blog offers top articles, news stories, and blog posts from the world’s well-known experts and guarantees better exposure for its authors than any other publication.
@WebRTCSummit Blog can be bookmarked ▸ Here
@WebRTCSummit conference site can be bookmarked ▸ Here
SYS-CON Events announced today that Akana, formerly SOA Software, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo® New York, which will take place June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Akana’s comprehensive suite of API Management, API Security, Integrated SOA Governance, and Cloud Integration solutions helps businesses accelerate digital transformation by securely extending their reach across multiple channels – mobile, cloud and Internet of Things. Akana enables enterprises to share data as APIs, connect and integrate applications, drive partner adoption, monetize their assets, and provide intelligent insights into their business and operations.