Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday’s debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy. Meanwhile, 94% of enterprises are using some form of XaaS – software, platform, and infrastructure as a service.

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As ridesharing competitors and enhanced services increase, notable changes are occurring in the transportation model. Despite the cost-effective means and flexibility of ridesharing, both drivers and users will need to be aware of the connected environment and how it will impact the ridesharing experience. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Timothy Evavold, Executive Director Automotive at Covisint, will discuss key challenges and solutions to powering a ride sharing and/or multimodal model in the age of connected vehicles.

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Modern IT departments have enormous budgets and there’s a veritable feast of technology out there to choose from. IT spending worldwide will total $3.5 trillion this year, according to Gartner. The challenge lies in selecting the right technology to drive your business forward and successfully integrating it into your stack. The proliferation of new cloud services, with countless small niche players working to maximize cloud value, has led to a serious management challenge.
Thankfully, IT departments do have a way out – they can look for vendor partnerships that do some of the integration legwork for them, or they can consider service orchestration and work with a systems integrator.

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In this strange new world where more and more power is drawn from business technology, companies are effectively straddling two paths on the road to innovation and transformation into digital enterprises.
The first path is the heritage trail – with “legacy” technology forming the background. Here, extant technologies are transformed by core IT teams to provide more API-driven approaches. Legacy systems can restrict companies that are transitioning into digital enterprises. To truly become a leader in the space, it’s necessary to accommodate, incorporate, and exploit the new breed of enterprise technologies — cloud, Big Data, and APIs.

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According to Forrester Research, every business will become either a digital predator or digital prey by 2020. To avoid demise, organizations must rapidly create new sources of value in their end-to-end customer experiences. True digital predators also must break down information and process silos and extend digital transformation initiatives to empower employees with the digital resources needed to win, serve, and retain customers.

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Great Western Railway (GWR) has enlisted the help of CoreStream to provide a new system for its compliance and regulations.

Like many organisations, ensuring compliance is vital – but for GWR it may count more than others. The railway operator is governed by a franchise agreement which includes more than a thousand obligations – and failing to comply with them can result not only in fines, but also disqualification from future franchise bids.

As a result, the company needed to overhaul its current infrastructure, which relied on a single Excel spreadsheet and, more often than not, information off the top of employees’ heads. Hence the arrival of CoreStream in August last year, going live just a month later, which offers as part of its portfolio Rail Franchise Manager; naturally specific to the rail industry, but can also be tweaked further for each operator.

“The solution becomes a train operating company’s system for managing their compliance with franchise obligations,” says Richard Eddolls, head of platforms at CoreStream. “Being able to record obligations – in excess of one thousand items – and being automatically prompted when action is required helps to solve a major data problem that previously required a great deal of manual effort.”

The Rail Franchise Manager covers risk, workflow and regulation management while the firm’s other bespoke product, the Digital Governance Portal, covers policy, controls, risk and workflow. Eddolls explains the importance of this: “The ability to not only extend to other modules, such as audit action tracking, risk and policy management, but also to integrate them into the franchise content is key. Readily available views of the policies that help govern elements of franchise compliance, and any risks or issues associated with it is the vision.”

Closer to home, the recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) ruling affects many firms in terms of compliance. If companies don’t get up to speed within two years, they could face a fine of up to 4% of worldwide annual turnover.

Eddolls argues the proposals are much needed, adding that further down the line he expects CoreStream’s information asset management (IAM) technologies to gain greater traction because of it.

“I think it is time organisations took their responsibility to keep the data [and] information they hold seriously and legislation that enforces this can only be a good thing,” he says. “I personally believe the GDPR provides much needed, updated, and relevant data protection and regulation laws. You only have to look at the number of high profile data breaches over the last couple of years to realise that a lot of [breaches] could have been prevented if organisations and businesses took the appropriate steps to secure and manage data correctly.”

For now however, CoreStream’s vision is to continue to bring its platform to market in this way, offering guidance on best practice but with the flexibility to accommodate change, as well as to become the ‘go to provider’ for consolidating line of business applications into its platform. “The path we are on is to meet and satisfy the most complex of business requirements without needing to write a single line of code,” says Eddolls. 

Apache Hadoop is a key technology for gaining business insights from your Big Data, but the penetration into enterprises is shockingly low. In fact, Apache Hadoop and Big Data proponents recognize that this technology has not yet achieved its game-changing business potential.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, John Mertic, director of program management for ODPi at The Linux Foundation, will explain why this is, how we can work together as an open data community to increase adoption, and the importance of open source-based Big Data standardization to help unlock more business value for Apache Hadoop initiatives.

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DevOps and microservices are permeating software engineering teams broadly, whether these teams are in pure software shops but happen to run a business, such Uber and Airbnb, or in companies that rely heavily on software to run more traditional business, such as financial firms or high-end manufacturers.
Microservices and DevOps have created software development and therefore business speed and agility benefits, but they have also created problems; specifically, they have created software security issues.

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Web Real-Time Communication APIs have quickly revolutionized what browsers are capable of. In addition to video and audio streams, we can now bi-directionally send arbitrary data over WebRTC’s PeerConnection Data Channels.
With the advent of Progressive Web Apps and new hardware APIs such as WebBluetooh and WebUSB, we can finally enable users to stitch together the Internet of Things directly from their browsers while communicating privately and securely in a decentralized way.

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