Aria Systems weighs in on the recent decision by the North Carolina Education Lottery to allow players to purchase tickets by subscription for three select games through its website. Lottery officials said they would allow players with computer access to buy tickets for its popular Powerball, Mega Millions and Carolina Cash 5 games in November.
North Carolina’s Education Lottery joins at least 11 other state lotteries in the United States that already provide some kind of subscription service to lottery players.
“Today, when it comes to generating sales and profits, large enterprises such as the North Carolina Education Lottery are discovering that ‘one size does not fit all.’ Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the state’s Education Lottery is adding subscription sales for a better customer experience, not to mention increased ticket sales,” said Andy Eliopoulos, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Aria Systems.
Monthly Archives: September 2013
DreamHost Eases Mobile Website Construction for Users
DreamHost® on Tuesday announced its holistic new mobile blueprint to power its customers’ websites. DreamHost’s new three-pronged approach to supporting mobile websites and apps was created as a direct result of diverse customer feedback among DreamHost’s 375,000 customers.
“Empowering our entrepreneurs and developers to easily create and maintain a great mobile web experience for their customers is essential given over 25% of traffic to sites hosted on DreamHost is mobile,” said Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost. “We’re all about engineering flexibility into our platform, so offering DudaMobile website optimizer alongside WordPress responsive design themes and best practices tips for custom website development presents a comprehensive set of options for mobile web success.”
Website owners can design a mobile-specific website from the ground up, embrace the relatively recent precepts of responsive design, and consider native mobile applications development. DreamHost has worked hard to ensure all of the needs of mobile-savvy customers are met. The ultimate goal is to enable more website owners to provide the best possible experience to their sites’ mobile visitors, thereby improving conversions and increasing engagement.
AppZero Survey Sizes Industry Concerns Around WS2003 End of Life
AppZero, the fastest way to move enterprise applications to the cloud, has opened up its year-long WS2003 end of life industry survey to the IT public. The previously “by invitation only” survey is measuring preparedness among the IT community for the impending end of life for WS2003 set by Microsoft for July 14, 2015. IT professionals can take the #WS2003 eol survey here.
As Windows Server 2003 fast approaches end of life (EOL), the ability to move to a newer version of the OS (WS 2008 R2 or WS 2012) becomes critical. Enterprises may seek to modernize and move to the cloud at the same time. Early survey results from more than 200 Fortune 1,000 companies reveal that 40% of respondents wish to move to the cloud as part of their EOL remediation efforts and 51% are worried about security, compliance and vulnerability management. All survey participants will receive the final research report at no charge. To participate, take “The #WS2003 EOL Survey” here.
Citrix Unifies and Simplifies Cloud Orchestration
Citrix on Tuesday announced the availability of Citrix CloudPlatform™ 4.2, a single, unified cloud orchestration solution powered by Apache CloudStack, and Citrix CloudPortal™ Business Manager 2.1, a web portal that manages the delivery of cloud services. The latest versions of these cloud solutions from Citrix enable organizations to future-proof their cloud services strategy by efficiently running both traditional enterprise and cloud-native workloads via an application-centric approach, while also simplifying the management aspects of offering IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS).
Today’s customers are adopting the cloud to increase efficiency, agility and business growth by rapidly innovating and delivering new cloud services. To realize the full potential of the cloud, businesses realize they must expand beyond the initial cloud-native scale-out use cases such as Dev/Test or Big Data to incorporate the vast base of existing scale-up, enterprise workloads such as ERP apps and Windows workloads into a standardized cloud architecture. The challenge customers face is that most cloud architectures are optimized for one or the other workload, but not both. By focusing on optimizing for all applications versus a specific workload, Citrix CloudPlatform and Citrix CloudPortal Business Manager provide a flexible foundation for the journey toward an ITaaS delivery model.
Is cloud computing meeting its expectations?
One issue relative to cloud computing that keeps critics well fed is the degree to which expectations and realities of the technology all too often don’t sync. Add to the mix a large degree of expected hype around buzzy marketing concepts, and what companies expect going into switching to cloud and what they get can feel problematically let-down-ish.
So what does the internet think?
Excerpt from the Facebook Cloud Computing Group
Facebook surprisingly chimed in with some of the most rapid responses.
The NSA scandal made an appearance, as did security in the “failing expectations” corner of the arena.
PRISM aside, security is still a chief concern for many IT departments. However, cloud security is also a nuanced issue, not a catchall concept.
For instance, any industry dealing with client information, proprietary personal information, patient health records, or those who does not want their infrastructure hacked (which should include …
Survey Infographic: Cloud, PaaS Adoption Failing the Modern Worker
Eccentex Corporation, a provider of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) applications for Dynamic Case Management (DCM), today announced results of a survey that consisted of over 200 respondents and found that modern workers do not have the necessary tools in place to do their jobs.
Brightlink Chooses Net Optics Director Pro to Raise Performance Levels
Net Optics on Monday announced that its Director Pro™, advanced Network Packet Broker (NPB) and Monitoring Access Switch was chosen by Brightlink Communications, to help manage soaring bandwidth demands and maintain consistently high Quality of Service (QoS) – a key determinant of customer satisfaction and market success.
“Net Optics Director Pro allows us to pull only the data that is critical to understanding call flows and providing network operations team what it needs for trouble shooting,” said Joe White, VP of Operations, Brightlink Communications. “By ‘peeling’ off the signaling only, we are able to monitor 100% of all calls in the network and reduce the bandwidth hitting the monitor from 20Gbps to 1.”
How IT Operations is Like Auto Racing
By John Dixon, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne
If you’ve ever tried your hand at auto racing like I did recently at Road Atlanta, you’ll know that putting up a great lap time is all about technique. If you’ve ever been to a racing school, you’ll also remember that being proactive and planning your corners is absolutely critical in driving safely. Lets compare IT operations to auto racing now. Everyone knows how to, essentially, drive a car. Just as every company, essentially, knows how to run IT. What separates a good driver from a great driver? Technique, preparation, and knowing the capabilities of your driver and equipment.
The driver = your capabilities
The car = your technology
The track = your operations as the business changes
Preparation
Lets spend a little bit of time on “preparation.” As we all know, preparation time is often a luxury. From what I have seen consulting over the past few years, preparation is not just installed in the culture of IT. But we’d all agree that more preparation leads to better outcomes (for almost everything, really). So, how do we get more preparation time? This is where the outsourcing trend gained momentum – outsource the small stuff to get more time back to work on strategic projects. Well, this didn’t always work out very well, as typical outsourcing arrangements moved large chunks of IT to an outside provider. Why didn’t we move smaller chunks first? That’s what we do in auto racing – the reconnaissance lap! Now we have the technology and arrangements to do a reconnaissance lap of sorts. For example, our Cloud Management as a Service (CMaaS) has this philosophy built-in – we can manage certain parts of infrastructure that you select, and leave others alone. Maybe you’d like to have your Exchange environment fully managed but not your SAP environment. We’ve built CMaaS with the flexible technology and arrangements to do just that.
Technique
| Auto Racing | IT Operations |
| Safety first! Check your equipment before heading out, let the car warm up before increasing speed | Make sure your IT shop can perform as a partner with the business |
| Know where to go slow! You can’t take every turn with full throttle. Even if you can, its worth it to “throw away” some corners in preparation for straight sections | Know where to allocate investment in IT – its all about producing results for the business |
| First lap: reconnaissance (stay on the track) | Avoid trying to tackle very complex problems with brand new technology (e.g., did you virtualize Exchange on your very first P2V?) |
| Last lap: cool down (stay on the track) | An easy one, manage the lifecycle of your applications and middleware to avoid be caught by a surprise required upgrade |
| Know where to go fast! You can be at full throttle without any brake or steering inputs (as in straight sections), so dig in! | Recognize established techniques and technologies and use them to the max advantage |
| Smooth = fast. Never stab the throttle or the brakes! Sliding all over the track with abrupt steering and throttle inputs is not the fastest way (but it IS fun and looks cool) | Build capabilities gradually and incrementally instead of looking to install a single technology to solve all problems today. |
| Know the capabilities of your car – brakes, tires, clutch, handling. Exceed the capabilities of your equipment and see what happens. | Take the time to know your people, processes, and technology – which things work well and which could be improved? This depends greatly on your business, but there are some best practices to run a modern IT shop. |
| Improve time with each lap | This is all about continuous improvement – many maneuvers in IT should be repeatable (like handling a trouble ticket), so do it better every time. |
| Take a deep breath, check your gauges, check your harnesses, check your helmet | Monitoring is important, but it is not an endgame for most of us. Be aware of things that could go wrong, how you could mitigate risk, which workarounds you could implement, etc. |
| Carry momentum around the track. A high horsepower car with a novice driver will always lose to a great driver in a sedan | Technology doesn’t solve everything. You need proper technique and preparation. |
| Learn from your mistakes – they aren’t the end of the world | With well-instrumented monitoring, performance blips or mistakes are opportunities to improve |
Capabilities
A word on capabilities. Capabilities are not something you simply install with software or infrastructure. Just as an aspiring racecar driver can’t simply obtain the capability required to win a professional F1 race with a weekend class. You need assets (e.g., infrastructure, applications, data) and resources (e.g., dollars) to build capabilities. What exactly is a capability? In racing, it’s the ability to get around a track, any track, quickly and safely. In IT, this would be the ability to handle a helpdesk call and resolve the issue to completion, for a basic example. An advanced IT capability in a retail setting might be to produce a report on how frequently shoppers from a particular zip code purchase a certain product. Or, perhaps, it’s an IT governance capability to understand the costs of providing a particular IT service. One thing I’ve seen in consulting with various shops is that organizations could do a better job of understanding their capabilities.
Now picture yourself in the in the driver’s seat (of your IT shop). Know your capabilities, but really think about your technique and continuously improving your “lap times.”
- Where are your straight sections – where you can just “floor it” and hang on? These might be well-established processes, projects, or tasks that pay obvious benefits. Can you take some time to create more straight sections?
- How much time do you have for preparation? How much time do you spend “studying the track” and “knowing your equipment?” Do you know your capabilities? Can you create time that you can use for preparation?
- Where are your slow sections? The processes that require careful attention to detail. This is probably budget planning time for many of us. Hiring time is probably another slow section.
- Do you understand your capabilities? Defining the IT services that you provide your customer is a great place to start. If you haven’t done this yet, you should — especially if you’re looking at cloud computing. GreenPages and our partners have some well-established techniques to help you do this successfully.
As always, feel free to reach out if you’d like to have a conversation just to toss around some ideas on this topic.
Now for the fun part, a video that a classmate of mine recorded of a hot lap around Road Atlanta. The video begins in turn 11 (under the bridge in this video).
- Turn 11 is important because it is a setup to the front straight section. BUT, it is pretty dangerous too as it leads downhill to turn 12 (the entrance to the straight). Position the car under the RED box on the bridge and give a small amount of right steering input. Build speed down the hill.
- Clip the apex of turn 11 and pull the car into turn 12. Be gentle with turn 12 – upset the car over the gators and you could easily lose control.
- Under the second bridge and onto the front straight section. Grab 5th gear if you can. Up to ~110mph. Position the car out to the extreme left side of the track for turn 1.
- Show no mercy to the brakes for turn 1! Engage ABS, downshift, then trail brake into the right hander, pull the car in to the apex of the turn in 4th gear, carrying 70-80mph.
- Uphill for turn 2. Aim the nose of the car at the telephone pole in the distance, as turn 2 is blind. Easy on the throttle!
- Collect the apex at turn 2 and downhill for turn 3. Use a dab of brakes to adjust speed as you turn slight right for turn 3.
- Turn slight left for turn 4, hug the inside
- Track out and downhill for “the esses” – roll on the throttle easily, you’ve got to keep momentum for the uphill section at turn 5.
- The esses are a fast part of the track but be careful not to upset the car
- Brake slightly uphill for turn 5. It is the entrance to a short straight section where you can gain some speed
- Stay in 4th gear for turn 6 and bring the car to the inside of the turn
- Track way out to the left for the crucial turn 7 – a slow part of the track. Brake hard and downshift to third gear. Get this one right as it is the entrance to the back straight section.
- Build speed on the straight – now is the time to floor it!
- Grab 5th gear midway down the straight for 110+ mph. Take a deep breath! Check your gauges and harnesses.
- No mercy for the brakes at turn 10a! Downshift to 4th gear, downshift to 3rd gear and trail brake as you turn left
- Slight right turn for turn 10b and head back uphill to the bridge – position the car under the RED box and take another lap!
Using Big Data to Improve Healthcare
MZI Healthcare shows how the HP Vertica Analytics Platform leads to high-performance and cost-effective big-data processing, which forms a foundational element to improving overall healthcare quality and efficiency.
To discover more about how high-performance and cost-effective big-data processing forms a foundational element to improving overall healthcare quality and efficiency, join Greg Gootee, Product Manager at MZI Healthcare, based in Orlando.
WebRTC Summit Extends Cloud Expo Innovation
The 1st International WebRTC Summit is being produced by SYS-CON Media and WebRTC Journal on November 6-7, co-located with the 13th International Cloud Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley. Cloud Expo continues to ride the leading edge of global IT, offering the most current topics in a comprehensive way. WebRTC is the latest superhot topic emerging from Cloud Expo, and emerging from the world’s of open-source development and cloud computing worldwide. The distinguished lineup of expert speakers will focus on topics such as:
WebRTC for telcos – is there a real business opportunity? Is Skype a WebRTC Killer, or is WebRTC a Skype killer?