SYS-CON Events announced today that Striim will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo® | @ThingsExpo New York, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Striim™ (pronounced “stream”) is an enterprise-grade, real-time integration and intelligence platform. Striim makes it easy to ingest high volumes of streaming data – including enterprise data via log-based change data capture – for real-time log correlation, cloud integration, edge processing, and streaming analytics. Companies worldwide use Striim to deliver real-time analysis and visualizations for fraud/cybersecurity, customer experience/QoS, digital transformation, and Internet of Things (IoT) data management and analytics.
Monthly Archives: June 2017
Launching First Vendor-Agnostic Hybrid Data Gateway | @CloudExpo @ProgressSW #Cloud #BigData #Analytics
Join us at Cloud Expo June 6-8 to find out how to securely connect your cloud app to any cloud or on-premises data source – without complex firewall changes.
More users are demanding access to on-premises data from their cloud applications. It’s no longer a “nice-to-have” but an important differentiator that drives competitive advantages. It’s the new “must have” in the hybrid era.
Users want capabilities that give them a unified view of the data to get closer to customers and grow business. They’re dealing with greater volumes of data than ever before, and much of this resides behind corporate firewalls. Traditional approaches for exposing this data, such as VPN and SSH tunneling are difficult to manage and not engineered for the cloud.
Announcing @CASTHighlight “Bronze Sponsor” of @CloudExpo | #SaaS #AI #DX #DevOps
SYS-CON Events announced today that CAST Highlight has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. CAST Highlight is an ultra-rapid code-scanning SaaS offering that identifies potential IT risks and cost savings opportunities across distributed application portfolios. By delivering data and insights on the health of portfolios, CAST Highlight provides IT leaders with objectivity and clarity to make more informed business decisions, prevent risk, and reduce complexity and cost.
Striim to Exhibit at @CloudExpo NY | @StriimTeam #Analytics #IoT #AI #DX
SYS-CON Events announced today that Striim will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Striim is pronounced “stream”, with two i’s for integration and intelligence. The company was founded in 2012 as WebAction, with a mission to help companies make data useful the instant it’s born. The leaders behind the Striim platform thrive on building technology companies that raise expectations for how the world does business. The team include core executives from GoldenGate Software (acquired by Oracle in 2009), Informatica, Oracle, SnapLogic, Embarcadero Technologies, PubNub and WebLogic. It is led by Ali Kutay who was an angel investor, president and CEO of WebLogic, as well as Chairman and CEO of GoldenGate Software.
Melissa Di Donato, SAP: On intelligent ERP and how AI can change society
When Melissa Di Donato, chief revenue officer at SAP, was going through the interview process at Walldorf, the company’s home town, she was asked whether she had been there before. Di Donato took the opportunity to reveal the SAP watch she was wearing, issued the better part of two decades ago, which showed she was a certified consultant through her work at PwC.
While the company had never appeared on her CV per se, starting with a dean at business school who suggested getting into ‘this SAP thing’ as it ‘may catch on’, through consultancy, to a hosting partner, to even the other side of the fence with IBM, Oracle – “as one does” – and Salesforce, SAP has been very close throughout Di Donato’s career.
Hence moving to the company towards the end of last year, to help accelerate the cloud ERP business, felt like coming home.
Today SAP, like the other software behemoths, remains committed to moving its traditional on-premise customers to the cloud. The message is now around ‘intelligent cloud ERP’. As this publication reported in February, SAP is looking to S/4HANA, its public cloud offering, and adding artificial intelligence (AI) to ERP, helping customers to adjust and adopt business processes based on real-time data and insight.
Earlier this month, this went up a notch with the general release of CoPilot, a ‘digital assistant for the enterprise’ as the company’s annual SAPPHIRE conference. Bernd Leukert, executive board member, summed up SAP’s roadmap for attendees. “Openness is the game-changer, driving new business value,” he said. “Openness in every part of the company allows you to reach completely new levels of business process excellence.
“You can inject data and derive insights across every layer of your company, like traffic and other data into logistics, machine learning data into your maintenance plans, and social data from your customer profiles.”
Di Donato puts it this way. “It’s a big, big release for us, and a change I think to the industry,” she tells CloudTech. “Effectively, [CoPilot] learns to become aware of business context, is able to drive efficient collaboration, quickly is able to recognise and connect to business objects, and offers in-context chatting. It’s fast learning and embeds a lot of machine learning, and a lot of new innovative technology that’s intelligent… [to] truly transform the way ERP is.”
SAP illustrates the product’s capabilities in various videos. One looks at monitoring and extending purchase contracts. Di Donato says that by 2020, the company is aiming for many financial functions to become ‘completely automated’. “At the end of the day, when I go out and speak with customers and say to them ‘what are you looking for in ERP?’, what can we give you to transform your business besides being less expensive, being less expensive is not the crux of where our customers are looking for benefit,” she says.
“The international finance reporting standards requirements are so extensive and so time-consuming that something basic – i.e. I want to close my books – is quite complex when you’re dealing with international reporting standards,” Di Donato adds. “Being able to offer faster time to close your books, taking away a lot of the functions and steps necessary with machine learning is hugely beneficial…detailed data in context to be able to make fast decisions…those are real business benefits that folks are seeing and asking for.”
Mention artificial intelligence in a business context, and while much of the conversation will discuss the potential benefits and efficiencies, another thought naturally occurs: will it affect my job? Back in January, Japanese company Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance made headlines after announcing it would replace more than 30 of its staff with IBM’s Watson Explorer AI.
The more optimistic view, as cited by respondents to an Adecco survey in April, is that AI will remove the duller, less palatable tasks and free up employees to be more creative. It’s a view with which Di Donato agrees. “It will be beneficial, and do I think they’ll be letting people go and that there’ll be a huge turn of events, saving money by not having people in the company? No, that’s not how we think necessarily at all,” she says.
“What we want to do is be able to allocate the mundane tasks to machines and machine learning technology, whilst taking the people and making them much more impactful on the business…giving them strategic roles, high impact roles, roles that can touch customers and service customers in a way that a machine can’t. It’s a reallocation of intelligence, if you will.”
Moreover, the rise of AI may represent a great opportunity for enhancement. Di Donato frequently speaks with young people, and the consistent message of the earlier the better in learning technical skills comes through. “I think we have the ability as a society to increase the value that everyone has to bring and bear,” she says. “When we take the mundane tasks away, it’s a perfect opportunity for our society to be upskilled and to learn more.
“Whilst yes, 99% of jobs are ‘mundane’, I venture to believe that not 99% of people want to do mundane tasks. We just have to do them, and we get used to them.”
SAP is also looking at other emerging technologies, with many coming under the banner of Leonardo, an innovation portfolio. This includes blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT) – or not quite, as Di Donato explains. “I came on board and I was like ‘yawn’, I’m so sick of hearing about IoT,” she explains. “It’s not the Internet of Things anymore anyhow, it’s the Internet of Everything.
“What is true is that there are components of the Internet of Everything, IoT, machine learning, that the enterprise has not been able to consume,” she adds. “The problem was everyone talked a good game, but it wasn’t anywhere being used, and I think the difference now is that it was educational for 10 years, and now it’s consumption.
“We went from hypothesising about the business benefit of what IoT, and machine learning, and AI, and all of these things can do for the enterprise, and then all of a sudden it’s become embedded into our ERP.”
Picture credit: SAP
[session] Getting Public Cloud Benefits By @Cloudistics | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Analytics #DataCenter
You know you need the cloud, but you’re hesitant to simply dump everything at Amazon since you know that not all workloads are suitable for cloud. You know that you want the kind of ease of use and scalability that you get with public cloud, but your applications are architected in a way that makes the public cloud a non-starter. You’re looking at private cloud solutions based on hyperconverged infrastructure, but you’re concerned with the limits inherent in those technologies.
Test Environment Management | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #ContinuousTesting
Imagine that you have hundreds of development, testing, and operations teams spread across the globe that rely on each other to execute software testing. You have 245 test environments and you release to pre-production several times a day and deploy to production once a week. How do you manage all the software tests, test data, and test environments? Traditionally, the answer would be to fill out spreadsheets or siloed tools, send emails, and hope that everything and everyone is ready at each stage of the software testing lifecycle (STLC).
[session] Real-World Hybrid IT | @CloudExpo @Peak_Ten #DataCenter #AI #DX
Everywhere we turn in our industry we can find strong opinions about the direction, type and nature of cloud’s impact on computing and business. Another word that is used in every context in our industry is “hybrid.” In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Alvaro Gonzalez, Director of Technical, Partner and Field Marketing at Peak 10, will use a combination of a few conceptual props and some research recently commissioned by Peak 10 to offer a real-world consideration of how the various categories of cloud can be relevant to your business.
Salesforce puts $50 million aside to help ‘next generation’ of cloud consulting firms
Cloud software giant Salesforce has announced a new $50 million (£38.8m) fund from Salesforce Ventures, the company’s corporate investment arm, to provide growth for the ‘next generation’ of cloud consulting organisations.
The SI [system integrator] Trailblazer Fund will “provide the next generation of cloud consulting companies with the capital required to build and scale their Salesforce services capabilities for the future – and empower customers to transform their businesses with Salesforce,” as the press materials put it.
Naturally, it’s not an especially altruistic venture, although among the companies Salesforce is already helping in this regard are 7Summits, an online community consulting partner for the Salesforce Community Cloud, and Arxxus, a provider of Salesforce professional services in Australia.
Another company getting involved is ATG, a company which provides quote to cash (CPQ) advisory and implementation services. This is a particularly interesting area on which this publication has recently focused; in a piece last month, contributor Louis Columbus noted how CPQ “continues to be one of the hottest enterprise apps today, fuelled by the relentless need all companies have to increase sales while delivering customised orders profitably and accurately.”
Alongside the money, Salesforce is also launching the SI Trailblazer Alliance Initiative, giving companies in the portfolio a wide range of training and tools, including accelerated onboarding and marketing and sales mentorship from company experts.
The company cites an IDC note which argues that Salesforce and its ecosystem of customers and partners will drive more than $389 billion in new GDP impact and 1.9 million new jobs worldwide by 2020. It’s therefore not the ‘software economy’ so much as the ‘Salesforce economy’.
“Consulting firms play a pivotal role in the Salesforce ecosystem, implementing Salesforce solutions that meet the needs of customers of all sizes, industries and geographies,” said John Somorjai, EVP of corporate development and Salesforce Ventures in a statement. “This new fund will foster the next generation of SIs and supercharge the growth of the Salesforce ecosystem.”
Encryption is mandatory for healthcare data
More hospitals are turning to cloud-based services to store their data. They want to tap into the existing infrastructure and convenience, not to mention reduced costs and lesser maintenance hassles that come with this transition.
That’s not all. The data that is stored on the cloud can be analyzed quickly to get meaningful insights. For example, it’ll be easy to know the rate of child obesity or the demographic groups that are more vulnerable to diseases like diabetes. With such deep insights, providing care will become streamlined and focused. At the same time, the government and the healthcare industry can come together to create a way to prevent such diseases from plaguing those demographic groups.
In fact, the above situations are just a tip of the iceberg as cloud storage and analytics opens the world for all kinds of possibilities in the medical world. Little wonder that more companies are moving to the cloud to leverage these benefits.
To cater to this growing demand from hospitals to store and analyze patient data, many companies have setup public healthcare cloud. But how safe are these cloud services?
A report called Cloud Infrastructure Security Trends released by cybersecurity vendor RedLock shows that 31 percent of databases in public healthcare clouds are easily accessible over the Internet and 40 percent of organizations have one or more cloud storage services exposed to the general public. In fact, this study looked at multiple verticals and were able to access 4.8 million records that includes many sensitive data about patients.
You may wonder what happened to the many privacy regulations including HIPAA?
HIPAA lays down certain regulations when it comes to public healthcare cloud, of which, a primary one is to ensure that the data you store is safe. Though these healthcare clouds have to comply with these regulations, it’s not completely foolproof. HIPAA as such faces many challenges, so the onus is on you to take measures to protect the safety and integrity of your data.
One way to ensure that your data is safe is to keep it encrypted. The report further states that 82 percent of databases are not encrypted, so the chances for accessing information with low to medium effort is fairly high. As a hospital authority, you have to make sure that all your data and databases are encrypted. This should be one of the most important aspects that you should talk about before signing a contract with a service provider.
Another option is to go with a zero-knowledge provider. If you’ve never heard this term before, don’t worry as you’re not alone.
Zero-knowledge providers are those that encrypt your data using AES algorithm and only you have the key to decrypt them. In other words, no other person other than you, not even the employees of your service provider or any other third party such as your Internet Service Provider or the NSA can access your data. Since this service doesn’t even store your username and password, you can ensure that you’re records are safe.
That said, not many zero-knowledge providers are out there and even among those, not many abide by HIPAA regulations. All this means, you’ll have to put in more time and effort before you park your healthcare data online.
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