The cloud provides two major advantages to load and performance procedures that help testing teams better model realistic behavior: instant infrastructure and geographic location. Cloud-based load testing also lowers the total cost of ownership, increases flexibility and allows testers to understand the impact of third-party components. So you’re sold on using the cloud; here’s what you should look for in a cloud-based load testing solution.
Monthly Archives: April 2016
Salesforce launches Government Cloud Lightning platform
Salesforce has launched Government Cloud Lightning platform, a new offering to which enables US government agencies to connect with citizens and stakeholders anywhere and on any device.
The new product offering is built on the assumption that government agencies are burdened with legacy systems which limit the opportunities to communicate and operate effectively. The team claim the Cloud Lightning platform will enable government agencies to transform their operations to a more modern, mobile and responsive proposition.
In a report published last year, the Government Accountability Office claims $58 billion of their $79 billion IT budget in 2015 maintaining legacy systems, as opposed to investigating and implementing next-generation IT offerings to improve operations. Saleforce has seemingly built its proposition on the idea government agencies are in the process of a transformation to create a more digitally enabled ecosystem.
“Private sector innovation has changed the way citizens expect to interact with their governments, so providing our customers with modern and secure tools is paramount to increasing citizen satisfaction and engagement,” said Vivek Kundra, EVP at Salesforce. “The launch of Government Cloud Lightning, along with extended compliance standards and enhancements, will empower agencies, the aerospace and defense market, and government contractors to digitally transform and connect with citizens in new ways.”
The new offering is built on three key features; The Lightening Experience, the Lightening Platform and the Lightening Ecosystem. From an experience perspective, Salesforce claim the new product will offer users the opportunity to streamline how they communicate and collaborate, as well as create a personalized experience that is consistent across products and devices. The Lightening Platform will help users build apps for desktops and mobile devices, and the final feature will link agencies to Salesforce’s partner ecosystem.
“The Government Cloud Lightning ecosystem is a highly anticipated leap forward for the apps that our federal teams are building on Salesforce,” said Rusty Pickens, Senior Advisor for Digital Platforms at the US Department of State. “Government Cloud Lightning provides us with a modern and clean interface that allows us to build an item once and trust that it will work on any device. Even more importantly, it empowers our diplomats all over the world to access their CRM data right wherever they are, from a mobile device that has all the power of a typical government computer.”
Business Networks Level the Playing Field for Small Businesses | @CloudExpo #Cloud
SAP Ariba offers new ways for small businesses to make and manage the connections that matter to them most using cloud-based networks to bring intelligent buying and digital business benefits to any type of company.
The next BriefingsDirect technology innovation thought leadership discussion examines new ways for small businesses to make and manage the connections that matter to them most using cloud-based networks to bring intelligent buying and digital business benefits to any type of company.
Samsung launches IoT cloud platform
Samsung has launched its Artik Cloud Platform, an open data exchange platform designed to connect any data set from any connected device or cloud service.
Speaking at Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco, the company has launched the service in direct competition with established platforms such as Microsoft’s Azure and IBM’s Bluemix, to capitalize on growing momentum in the IoT market.
“Our vision for the Artik platform is an end-to-end experience that reduces the obstacles, challenges, and time-to-market for IoT solutions,” said Young Sohn, Chief Strategy Officer at Samsung Electronics. “We’re excited to announce the Samsung Artik Cloud after three years of development and feedback from hundreds of developers. Unlike many other IoT cloud platforms, Artik Cloud breaks down data siloes between devices and enables a new class of IoT applications and services.
“The launch of this exciting new platform not only signals Samsung’s foray into the cloud services market but reinforces our belief that, by creating powerful open platforms, we can harness the information generated by IoT to develop new insights and new approaches to address the major global challenges of today and tomorrow.”
The company, which would generally not be considered a major player in the cloud market, claims it now offers an end-to-end solution, which will enable customers to collect, store, and act on any data from any connected device or cloud service. While the company would not appear to have the software capabilities of its now-competitors, the offering is positioned as an open cloud service positioning to counter this concern.
“The need for an open cloud solution that can work with any connected device, and with other cloud services is critical for broader consumer adoption,” said BK Yoon, CEO of Samsung Electronics. “The launch of Artik Cloud is extremely exciting because it promises to not only help Samsung connect our diverse portfolio of products, but also enable other companies to participate in a growing IoT ecosystem.”
The move does also follow a number of product launches over the last twelve months to bring Samsung into the IoT ecosystem. Last year the company launched three chips, Artik 1, 5 and 10, which were designed specifically to be embedded in IoT products. Although a new player to the market, the team also released a case study for Artik cloud with lighting company Legrand where it claimed to have saved months of development time as well as a notable amount of investment.
“To be connected to the ARTIK Cloud is another step in our openness strategy, which aims to make Legrand’s legacy devices and new smart devices interoperable with other connected products, and increases the value we deliver to our users,” said Ernesto Santini, Legrand VP Innovation and Systems.
The team would also appear to have learnt lessons from the Microsoft IoT strategy, targeting a broad range of potential customers from top-end enterprise organizations through to star-ups and also hobbyists. Hobbyists can connect up to 25 devices, collecting up to 150 messages from each device per day, for free. While Samsung does have ground to catch up when compared to the more established competitors such as Microsoft and IBM, such a flexible pricing plan will seemingly broaden the appeal of the brand.
Hong Kong overtakes Japan as most mature Asia Pacific cloud nation
(c)iStock.com/luxizeng
Hong Kong is the most ‘cloud-ready’ Asia Pacific nation with an overall ranking higher than that of the US and UK, according to the latest analysis from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA).
Japan, previously the leader, moved down four places to #5 in the chart with an overall score of 73.0 compared to Hong Kong’s 78.1, with the latter scoring top markets in broadband quality, privacy, and data centre risk. Singapore (76.7), New Zealand (74.4) and Australia (73.2) comprised the top five, with the other categories focusing on sustainability, cybersecurity, government and regulation, intellectual property, business sophistication and freedom of information.
Looking at the other countries, there was minimal change, with the likes of Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand only moving one place up or down over the past year. South Korea, a certainly developed market and the second most cloud ready Asia Pacific nation in 2012, has dropped into mid-table obscurity with an overall position of #7 in 2016. The researchers argue the scoring “reflects the fact that South Korea has been moving slowly in the development of its infrastructure for cloud service[s] in the past few years.” However, ACCA did praise the “strong showing” in South Korea’s government initiatives.
At the bottom of the table, Vietnam finished last on 44.0 points overall, with China surprisingly slipping into the relegation zone on 45.4 points. China achieved the lowest score on a single metric, a measly 1.6 out of 10 on internet connectivity, with India (1.7 and #12 overall) and Indonesia (1.8, #11) faring similarly poorly.
This publication has in the past explored the cloud computing acumen of both China and India, with the former, back in 2013, noting evident weaknesses but expecting them to be overcome in time. The result is particularly surprising, however, given the amount of investment that has been made by major vendors in the country. According to a report from China Daily earlier this week, Microsoft announced it now has more than 65,000 corporate clients in China, raging the fuels of fire against Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has data centres in the country, and local vendor Alibaba Tencent.
Overall however, the prognosis is more than adequate for the Asia Pacific region. “The results put Asia in a very strong position to lead the next wave of global innovation and technology,” said ACCA chairman Bernie Trudel. “The next phase for markets is to put in place strong forward-looking policies which enable international data transfers, and address cybersecurity and privacy concerns from consumers and business.”
The report, which has been produced annually for the past several years, reflects the maturation of cloud globally in terms of its content, and for the first time compared its Asia Pacific metrics with other cloud markets, developed or otherwise. The association sees the UK as having an overall score of 75.7, which would put it in third place overall, and surprisingly the US with 71.6, putting it in fifth place.
You can download the full report (no registration required) here.
Facebook outlines user experience objectives for AI
Facebook has outlined its ambitions for artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to enhance user experience.
The recent introduction of bots through the Facebook platform is one of first steps on the journey to artificial intelligence, which the team believe can evolve into an AI platform which can learn and automate specific activities. The Facebook team ultimately want to build computer services that have better perception than people, whether this is predicting what content would be relevant to a user or products would be of interest, which it believes is possible within the next 5-10 years.
“We’re focused not on what Facebook is, but on what it can be and on what it needs to be, and that means doing bold things,” said Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg. “A lot of what we’re building today in areas like connectivity, artificial intelligence, and virtual and augmented reality may not pay off for years, but they’re important to our mission of connecting the world. And I’m committed to seeing this mission through and to leading Facebook there over the long term.”
While true artificial intelligence could be perceived as a long-term ambition of the tech industry, Facebook has incorporated various AI and machine learning capabilities into its services over recent months. The Moments app is using face recognition to help users share pictures with friends, while also using AI to drive relevant content through a user’s news feed and filter spam. One of the more advanced applications of the technology is helping blind people comprehend what is in a photo by reading explanations of them aloud.
In terms of long-term ambitions for AI and machine learning capabilities will be to enhance the user experience and continue to drive more relevant content through their Facebook accounts. The team believe the future of AI will be able to understand the content of articles or videos in a more complex manner, linking the specific content with a user’s defined interests and previous use of the platform.
Currently, AI can potentially list what content is within an article, picture or video, but it doesn’t fundamentally understand what this content is, and thus cannot draw conclusions as to which users it would be relevant for. This intuition and perception would appear to be the next step in Facebook’s AI journey.
“One obvious thing I think over time is if you just look at the way that we rank News Feed, today we use some basic signals like who you’re friends with and what pages you like as some of the most important things for figuring out what – out of all of the millions and millions of pieces of content that are on Facebook, what we’re going to show and what are going to be the most interesting things to you,” said Zuckerberg.
“That’s because today our systems can’t actually understand what the content means. We don’t actually look at the photo and deeply understand what’s in it or look at the videos and understand what’s in it or read the links that people share and understand what’s in them, but in the future we’ll be able to, I think in a five or 10-year period.”
From a financial perspective, revenues for the quarter grew by 52% year on year to $5.4 billion, and advertising revenue grew by 57% to $5.2 billion. Mobile advertising revenue reached $4.2 billion, up 75% year over year, and is now approximately 82% of total advertising revenues for the business. The company now claims to have 3 million active advertisers on Facebook and over 200,000 on Instagram.
Guest Blog: ArcGIS on Parallels Desktop for Mac
Guest blog by Micah Williamson, Geospatial Services Manager at Cloudpoint Geographics Inc. I really “grew up “ in the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) field using ArcGIS. I started using Esri Products in college in spring of 2000, That was my first GIS class at Illinois State University. We used ArcView 3.1 and ArcInfo 7.0.1. I […]
The post Guest Blog: ArcGIS on Parallels Desktop for Mac appeared first on Parallels Blog.
Overcoming Network Limitations: A New Approach By @SDietric | @CloudExpo #Cloud
More is being required today of network infrastructure than ever before, due in part to the changing latency and bandwidth needs of modern applications. Wide area networks (“WANs”) are feeling the pressure, especially those that use many technologies from different services providers, are geographically diverse and are stretched to the limit by increased video and cloud app usage.
In view of these challenges, hybrid WAN architectures with advanced application-level traffic routing are of particular interest. They combine the reliability of private lines for critical business applications with the cost-effectiveness of broadband/Internet connectivity for non-critical traffic.
Developing IoT Devices | @ThingsExpo #IoT #IIoT #M2M #API #WearableTech
IoT device adoption is growing at staggering rates, and with it comes opportunity for developers to meet consumer demand for an ever more connected world. Wireless communication is the key part of the encompassing components of any IoT device. Wireless connectivity enhances the device utility at the expense of ease of use and deployment challenges. Since connectivity is fundamental for IoT device development, engineers must understand how to overcome the hurdles inherent in incorporating multiple wired and wireless interfaces into a single connected solution.
[session] Get Guaranteed Performance from Storage in Your Cloud By @Tintri | @CloudExpo #Cloud
See storage differently! Storage performance problems have only gotten worse and harder to solve as applications have become largely virtualized and moved to a cloud-based infrastructure. Storage performance in a virtualized environment is not just about IOPS, it is about how well that potential performance is guaranteed to individual VMs for these apps as the number of VMs keep going up real time.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Dhiraj Sehgal, in product and marketing at Tintri, will discuss how a few folks have started using application-aware storage that does everything at the VM level to help them solve their most vexing storage problems and create an infrastructure that scales to meet the needs of your applications with predictable, manageable storage performance.