Data is the fuel that drives the machine learning algorithmic engines and ultimately provides the business value.
In his session at Cloud Expo, Ed Featherston, a director and senior enterprise architect at Collaborative Consulting, discussed the key considerations around quality, volume, timeliness, and pedigree that must be dealt with in order to properly fuel that engine.

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In IT, we sometimes coin terms for things before we know exactly what they are and how they’ll be used. The resulting terms may capture a common set of aspirations and goals – as “cloud” did broadly for on-demand, self-service, and flexible computing. But such a term can also lump together diverse and even competing practices, technologies, and priorities to the point where important distinctions are glossed over and lost.

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Without lifecycle traceability and visibility across the tool chain, stakeholders from Planning-to-Ops have limited insight and answers to who, what, when, why and how across the DevOps lifecycle. This impacts the ability to deliver high quality software at the needed velocity to drive positive business outcomes. In his session at @DevOpsSummit 19th Cloud Expo, Eric Robertson, General Manager at CollabNet, showed how customers are able to achieve a level of transparency that enables everyone from Planning-to-Ops to make informed decisions based on business priority and leverage automation to accelerate identifying issues and fast fix to drive continuous feedback and KPI insight.

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Internet-of-Things discussions can end up either going down the consumer gadget rabbit hole or focused on the sort of data logging that industrial manufacturers have been doing forever. However, in fact, companies today are already using IoT data both to optimize their operational technology and to improve the experience of customer interactions in novel ways. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Gordon Haff, Red Hat Technology Evangelist, will share examples from a wide range of industries – including energy, transportation, and retail – of using IoT to create new business opportunities and improve efficiency.

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Jumping on the Agile bandwagon might help, but only if done right. What makes a good Agile project and what makes a bad one?
The move to Agile in the last decade has resulted in projects that finish faster, produce better software, and come in under budget. Look up any new, hot tech company and you’ll find articles lauding their Agile philosophy. You might think that success is guaranteed if you get your team to commit the Agile Manifesto to memory.
The problem with looking at this in a single dimension is that you’re affected by survivor bias. As you research, you look at successful projects and the logical next step is to look at what makes them successful. The problem that plagues most people is that they never ask the opposite – the darker, but equally important question – what causes projects to fail?

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Between 2005 and 2020, data volumes will grow by a factor of 300 – enough data to stack CDs from the earth to the moon 162 times. This has come to be known as the ‘big data’ phenomenon. Unfortunately, traditional approaches to handling, storing and analyzing data aren’t adequate at this scale: they’re too costly, slow and physically cumbersome to keep up. Fortunately, in response a new breed of technology has emerged that is cheaper, faster and more scalable. Yet, in meeting these new needs they break many of the traditional security approaches on which enterprises depended. In these massive data volumes, how are organizations going to ensure that their customer information is safe from people looking to exploit it? Is it possible to adopt big data technologies while demonstrating compliance with industry regulations? Will security get in the way of the analytics tools organizations need to make this data useful?

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20th Cloud Expo, taking place June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. 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.

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Major trends and emerging technologies – from virtual reality and IoT, to Big Data and algorithms – are helping organizations innovate in the digital era. However, to create real business value, IT must think beyond the ‘what’ of digital transformation to the ‘how’ to harness emerging trends, innovation and disruption. Architecture is the key that underpins and ties all these efforts together. In the digital age, it’s important to invest in architecture, extend the enterprise footprint to the cloud, and create a digital technology platform.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mark Casey, President and CEO of CFN Services, discussed how disruptive enterprises are enabling highly distributed, software-defined architectures that fuel innovation and growth.

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You have great SaaS business app ideas. You want to turn your idea quickly into a functional and engaging proof of concept. You need to be able to modify it to meet customers’ needs, and you need to deliver a complete and secure SaaS application. How could you achieve all the above and yet avoid unforeseen IT requirements that add unnecessary cost and complexity? You also want your app to be responsive in any device at any time.
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Mark Allen, General Manager of the Progress Corticon and Rollbase businesses, discussed and provided a deep understanding of the low-code application platforms that address these concerns.

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Everyone knows that truly innovative companies learn as they go along, pushing boundaries in response to market changes and demands. What’s more of a mystery is how to balance innovation on a fresh platform built from scratch with the legacy tech stack, product suite and customers that continue to serve as the business’ foundation.
In his General Session at 19th Cloud Expo, Michael Chambliss, Head of Engineering at ReadyTalk, discussed why and how ReadyTalk diverted from healthy revenue and more than a decade of web conferencing product development to start a project that reflects shifts in customer needs, cloud, dev tools, web standards, enterprise mobility and video. He covered the upsides, downsides and learnings in terms of investment, resource allocation, talent retention and technical considerations.

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