Midway through the decade, the experts from Veeva Systems – a leader in cloud-based software for the global life sciences industry – look at what’s on the horizon over the next five years. Their forecasts are informed by a vision for what’s next in technology and insight gleaned from Veeva’s 200+ life sciences customers worldwide. Overall, these predictions reflect how new innovations will enable faster time to market, evolving commercial models, and new ways to support physicians and patients.

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CodeFutures has announced Dan Lynn as its new CEO. Lynn assumes the role from Founder Cory Isaacson, who has joined RMS and will now serve as chairman of CodeFutures. Lynn brings more than 14 years of advanced technology and business success experience, and will help CodeFutures build on its industry leadership around its Agile Big Data initiatives. His technical expertise will be invaluable in advancing CodeFutures’ AgilData platform and new processes for streamlining and gaining value from growing amounts of mission-critical data.
Isaacson states, “Dan Lynn has the experience and passion to lead CodeFutures into the next chapter of its growth, and to help organizations simplify the increasingly complex set of challenges that bog Big Data initiatives down. Dan’s mix of business experience and deep technology leadership is a perfect fit for CodeFutures as it delivers new innovation to the Big Data market space.”

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An operations group tasked with accepting and supporting a software release. This group wants a predictable process, they view releases as incidents to be managed, and they answer to a business that wants predictability and accountability.

One or more development groups tasked with creating software to be released. These groups tend to be more diverse. You might have one development group that is using bleeding-edge technology to create a next-generation website that is more research than development, and another group developing applications against Oracle that is more predictable.

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The term culture has had a polarizing effect among DevOps supporters. Some propose that culture change is critical for success with DevOps, but are remiss to define culture. Some talk about a DevOps culture but then reference activities that could lead to culture change and there are those that talk about culture change as a set of behaviors that need to be adopted by those in IT. There is no question that businesses successful in adopting a DevOps mindset have seen departmental culture change, the question remains, is culture the leading edge of this change? I posit that in large enterprises, culture change is the result of effective process and organizational change fostered by good IT leaders and is not the front end of change.

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15th Cloud Expo, which took place Nov. 4-6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, expanded the conference content of @ThingsExpo, Big Data Expo, and DevOps Summit to include two developer events.
IBM held a Bluemix Developer Playground on November 5 and ElasticBox held a Hackathon on November 6. Both events took place on the expo floor.
The Bluemix Developer Playground, for developers of all levels, highlighted the ease of use of Bluemix, its services and functionality and provide short-term introductory projects that developers can complete between sessions.

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The move in recent years to cloud computing services and architectures has added significant pace to the application development and deployment environment. When enterprise IT can spin up large computing instances in just minutes, developers can also design and deploy in small time frames that were unimaginable a few years ago. The consequent move toward lean, agile, and fast development leads to the need for the development and operations sides to work very closely together. Thus, DevOps becomes essential for any ambitious enterprise today.

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Our last post defined customer lifetime value (CLV) as the metric critical in measuring the success or failure of a recurring revenue program. In order for your company to routinely return significant revenue, maximizing CLV needs to be at the top of your priority list. A CLV-supported strategy boosts many aspects of your business, from sales to customer service. When it comes to increasing customer retention and customer satisfaction, the two keys to driving long-term results, this same strategy works to increase both at every available opportunity.

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Enterprise Initiatives Episode: Our guest on the podcast this week is John Willis, Founder and VP of Customer Enablement at SocketPlane. We discuss the effort needed to implement a grassroots DevOps initiative.

Listen in to find out how to gain the essential support of leaders for your project. (Make sure you have both headphones in to hear the full audio of this episode.)

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I’ve spent the past few years looking at clouds on the ground and in the air. On the ground, I’m immersed in OpenStack’s global innovation and momentum. Doing so involves lots of time in the air, looking at literal clouds as I fly around the world talking with OpenStack developers, community members and users.
Yet most of my conversations don’t reside in the clouds. They reside squarely in reality, as users want clear answers on how OpenStack-based solutions can help with their everyday challenges. I’m fortunate to spend my time talking about the critical issues that matter, which often differs from the political, technical and governance issues we read about more frequently.

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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently identified four keys areas in which to focus for the next 15 years: Health, Farming, Banking, and Education. Bill himself holds forth on a regular basis about the challenges facing many billions of people in the world, particularly in Africa, as well as the opportunities to save lives and change lives.

He does not seem naïve about the enormity of the challenges, and does not offer technology as a simple panacea to what ails the world. He also seems committed to respecting national sovereignty in implementing programs, difficult as that may be sometimes. And he seems to understand very clearly that even the vast wealth of his and his wife’s foundation and its allies cannot hope to achieve signficant results on its own.

I would add Energy, Transportation, and Government to Bill’s and Melinda’s list–aware that the Foundation supports these areas and many others as well. In our efforts at the Tau Institute, we then focus on how the Internet of Things will play a role in these areas as well as societal improvement and transformation overall. We’ve also chosen a 25-year timeframe, an thus use the term IoT 2040 to describe our activities.

Our program includes research, events, consulting, and technical education. We have four overriding goals:

1. To spur beneficial economic development in all corners of the world
2. To reduce poverty & disease
3. To curtail violence as a way of settling disputes
4. To produce political and societal leaders who will maintain progress

We think a good way to measure progress is through the research we’ve been conducting for the past few years, which creates relative,»pound-for-pound» rankings that show how well nations are doing with respect to their available resources.

Our rankings reflect a lot of time spent, by me and by our associates and advisors, living in the various corners of the world. We integrate several technology and social factors into our algorithms — on the one hand including average bandwidth, access to broadband, number of dataservers, on the other hand including income disparity, perception of corruption, human development, and the local cost of living.

The most dynamic countries should correlate well over time with those most quickly growing their economies in an equitable way.

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