What keeps an IT manager up at night? Ghosts, goblins and ghouls? Guess again. It takes more than a few measly monsters to cause a lack of sleep in today’s IT department.
IT used to exist primarily to monitor and maintain systems, protect against data breaches and malware attacks, and repair or replace computers. However, with more automation in today’s always-connected business, IT has assumed an even larger role, graduating from mere maintenance and monitoring to driving and managing numerous mission-critical processes that support core business operations. As a result, a bigger role brings bigger fears. Here is a list of the modern IT manager’s biggest fears:

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Ariba today announced innovations to its cloud-based applications and global business network designed to deliver a personal, contextual and increasingly mobile-first user experience for business applications consumers.
Among the announcements are a newly designed user interface (UI) and a mobile app based on the SAP Fiori approach, both due to be available this summer, for Ariba’s core procurement, spend management, and other line of business apps. Ariba, an SAP company, made the announcements here at the Ariba LIVE conference in Las Vegas.
«This gives us a cleaner approach, more tiles, and a Fiori-like user experience,» said Chris Haydon, Ariba Senior Vice President of Product Management. «Users see all the business network elements in one dashboard, with a native UI for a common, simple experience for Ariba apps upstream and down.»

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You would have to be living under a rock not to notice that everything’s going to the clouds, not the dogs. The cloud industry has continued to demonstrate its “sky-high” potential as intellectual property (IP) rights are becoming important in preserving competitive edges, and sky is the only limit. Is it?
While intellectual property rights remain important to protect many hard-earned innovations, the news from the patent lawyers has not been as cheery. The Supreme Court’s June 2014 decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank and its aftershocks rocked the tech community with the fear of declaring permanent death of patents for all things computer-related. In two other cases also decided in June, the Supreme Court dealt further blows to patent holders by making it harder to prove induced or joint infringement in Limelight Networks, Inc. v. Akamai Technologies, Inc., and by making it easier to find a patent indefinite (and therefore invalid) in Nautilus, Inc. v. Biosig Instruments. All three decisions make it harder to get patents and easier for someone to invalidate the ones you already have.

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For most C-level executives (and most of the rest of the planet too), the concept of ‘risk’ is generally first perceived as a negative. The notion of risk as a business positive (or a ‘business enabler’ even) is fanciful, flaky and fraught with fallibility – isn’t it?
This proposition is not as feeble as it sounds and there are a number of reasons why this is so.
First, let’s be essentially mathematical about this for a minute. If John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, Adam Smith or (insert your favorite economics guru here) have taught us anything, it is that business should be about measurement.

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Back in 2009 I posted about the “Great Cloud Shakeout” and the coming market consolidation into a few very large clouds. Nearly 5 1/2 years later and it’s about (long past?) time I took another look to see how I did. Back then I predicted that the market would be dominated by “mega CSPs” by the name of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Note that this was during a period of Cambrian Explosion in the CSP market – it seems like everybody in the hosting business wanted to be a cloud provider.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that ProfitBricks, the provider of painless cloud infrastructure, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY., and the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
ProfitBricks is the IaaS provider that offers a painless cloud experience for all IT users, with no learning curve. ProfitBricks boasts flexible cloud servers and networking, an integrated Data Center Designer tool for visual control over the cloud and the best price/performance value available. ProfitBricks was named one of the coolest Cloud Providers of 2015 by CRN and was also the recipient of two CODiE awards and a Frost & Sullivan Cloud innovation award for 2014.

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Buzzword alert: Microservices and IoT at a DevOps conference? What could possibly go wrong? Join this panel of experts as they peel away the buzz and discuss the important architectural principles behind implementing IoT solutions for the enterprise. As remote IoT devices and sensors become increasingly intelligent, they become part of our distributed cloud environment, and we must architect and code accordingly. At the very least, you’ll have no problem filling in your buzzword bingo cards.

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One of the unintended consequences of cloud is the operational inconsistency it introduces. That inconsistency is introduced because cloud commoditizes the infrastructure we’re used to having control over and visibility into. everything from the core network to the application services upon which business and operations relies to ensure performance, availability and security are often times obscured behind simplified services whose policies and configurations cannot be reconciled with those we maintain on-premise.

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ActiveState has announced that Stackato was named a finalist for the 2015 SIIA Software CODiE Awards for Best Cloud Platform as a Service. The SIIA CODiE Awards are the premier award for the software and information industries, and have been recognizing product excellence for 30 years. The awards have over 85 categories and are organized by industry focus of Content, Education, and Software.
This year’s program features 29 Software categories, several of which are new or updated to reflect the latest industry trends. Winners will be announced during a special virtual SIIA Software CODiE Awards Ceremony on May 7.

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It’s not just apps that are decomposing, it’s the network, too.
The network is bifurcating. On the one side is rock solid reliability founded on the premise of permanence and infrequent change. On the other is flexibility borne of transience, immutability and rapid change.
There are, by virtue of this change in application architecture from the monolithic to the microservice model, changes necessary in the network. Specifically to the means by which the network delivers the application services upon which apps rely to be themselves delivered in a way that meets the performance, security and availability expectations of business and consumers alike.

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