The earliest challenge to the original homebrew microcomputer geeks was to get little indicator lights to flash. Then, by toggling several switches to turn the lights on and off, the computer would start doing other things, processing instructions within the confines of several hundred or a few thousand bytes of memory.

Fast forward to today, and we’re revisiting that age within the IoT, albeit with much more power and sophistication.

I was struck by this thought when reading the line, “We’ll help you get your Windows application
running on a Galileo—and blinking LEDs in no time.”

This clear nod to history is part of Microsoft’s Windows Developer Program for IoT. The goal is to get Intel Galileo boards into developers’ hands, and get people “to create their own cool device,” in Microsoft’s words. The effort is part of the emerging Maker’s Movement, a sort-of 21st century effort to create a guild culture of practicing craftsmiths, using hardware and software tools rather than gold, silver, tin, or leather.

But it also appears to be more than that. Microsoft, along with every other major technology provider, is committing serious resources to the IoT, and what promises to be a mad battle for market share, if not supremacy, throughout the spectrum of what the IoT will do.

The “blinking LEDs” will be found in the tens of billions of sensors expected to be deployed worldwide within just a few years.

There are significant challenges in security, of course, but many others as well:
Getting a a compact OS to function in the micro-micro-environment of sensors
Deliver applicatino and enable real-time communications in what will be hives of IoT data generators
Deliver updates and and figure out how to forestall or eliminate device obsolescence
Get a handle on all the incoming data—how to process it, analyze it, act upon it, and archive it if necessary.

For Microsoft’s part, the company says, “if you’re a hardware developer who dabbles in software, you can bring your Arduino sketches and shields directly into your project, while leveraging Windows code for cloud connectivity and other computing-intensive tasks. If you’re already a software dev, you can write a regular Windows application that also has easy, direct access to hardware through the Arduino Wiring API set, extending your solution into the physical world.”

Perhaps most important, the company also notes that “this first program is just the beginning.”

Here’s to a future of blinking LEDs!

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In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Mark Hinkle, Senior Director, Open Source Solutions at Citrix Systems Inc., will provide overview of the open source software that can be used to deploy and manage a cloud computing environment. He will include information on storage, networking(e.g., OpenDaylight) and compute virtualization (Xen, KVM, LXC) and the orchestration(Apache CloudStack, OpenStack) of the three to build their own cloud services.

Speaker Bio:
Mark Hinkle is the Senior Director, Open Source Solutions, at Citrix Systems Inc. He joined Citrix as a result of their July 2011 acquisition of Cloud.com where he was their Vice President of Community. He is currently responsible for Citrix open source efforts around the open source cloud computing platform, Apache CloudStack and the Xen Hypervisor. Previously he was the VP of Community at Zenoss Inc., a producer of the open source application, server, and network management software, where he grew the Zenoss Core project to over 100,000 users and 20,000 organizations on all seven continents. He also is a longtime open source expert and author having served as Editor-in-Chief for both LinuxWorld Magazine and Enterprise Open Source Magazine. His blog on open source, technology, and new media can be found at http://www.socializedsoftware.com.

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IBM on Monday announced it has acquired the business operations of Lighthouse Security Group, LLC, a premier cloud computing security services provider. Lighthouse Security Group’s Gateway platform protects identity and data in an increasingly complex IT environment where more company information is being stored in the cloud and accessed from mobile devices. Lighthouse Security Group is a subsidiary of long-time IBM Business Partner Lighthouse Computer Services, Inc. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Today’s news follows IBM’s acquisition of CrossIdeas, a privately held provider of security software that governs user access to applications and data across on-premise and cloud environments. CrossIdeas combines business-driven governance and analytics capabilities to give customers greater control for securing enterprises. By integrating the businesses of Lighthouse Security Group and CrossIdeas with IBM’s identity and access management offering, IBM will offer a full suite of security software and services that protect and manage a user’s identity.

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IBM announced a $1.2 billion project in January to build 15 SoftLayer datacenters around the world. One of thosse is scheduled to go online today in Toronto. This is the fifth of a scheduled 15 this year, and is the first SoftLayer datacenter in Canada. It will deploy more than 15,000 servers.

IBM claims more than 1,000 clients for these services in Canada, and not just the usual suspects. In addition to financial services, insurance, retail and public sector organizations as, the company will serve startups who participate in the SoftLayer Catalyst Program. The roster of these companies includes Mnubo, Epilogger, Brika, Greenoffon, Zilyo, TeachIt, maegan and kiwiwearables.

IBM says Catalyst also has established relationships with several Canadian accelerators and incubators, including GrowLab, Communitech, Ryerson University Digital Media Zone (DMZ), JOLT, FounderFuel, Extreme Startups and TheNext36 as well as those affiliated with the Ontario Network of Excellence (ONE).

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Today’s workplace is an entirely different animal to just five years ago – and it’s growing and changing at a rapid rate.

The huge amount of enterprise mobility solutions on the market are enabling employees to do various tasks on their smartphones and tablets; as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on the unveiling of the Salesforce1 app, he could run his entire business from his phone.

Yet none of this could be possible without the cloud powering it, as Backupify has been investigating. The cloud provider notes that in the pre-cloud office, “computers were a mess of tangled cords and colossal towers.”

This is of course a bit of a generalisation – you can still be using towers while adopting a corporate file-sharing solution, naturally – but there are some interesting stats. It’s easy to forget that a whopping 13 floppy disks were needed to install Windows 95.

With 93% of US small and medium businesses backing up some portion of their data to the cloud, it’s evident where the trend is going. Take a look at this infographic from Backupify to see how they envisage the cloudy office:

Every healthy ecosystem is diverse. This is especially true in cloud ecosystems, where portability and interoperability are more important than old enterprise models of proprietary ownership. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Mark Baker, Server Product Manager at Canonical/Ubuntu, will discuss how single vendors used to take the lead in creating and delivering technology, but in a cloud economy, where users want tools of their preference, when and where they need them, it makes no sense.

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In order to foster high levels of innovation that lead to adaptation to both internal and external disruption, you must foster an organization with low connectivity and furthermore, give them flexible, loosely coupled technology tools. In such environments, teams have the leeway to self-organize, and their innate creativity will foster innovations that will lead over time to the best solutions. And the role of management in this process? Give people the right tools and get out of their way.

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The focus of a BI professional in an organization is to help get the right information to the right decision makers at the right time. In modern times, Big Data analytics has been one of the primary sources of business intelligence acquisition. Tools like Hadoop have revolutionized the way enterprise businesses interpret the millions of data points that they own about customer behavior and turn them into meaningful inferences. But before the data reaches this stage, it passes through the several modules of an ERP system – an ERP system handles the whole gamut of operations right from demand estimation, to inventory purchase, stockpiling, distribution, sales and revenue generation.
As a result, cloud ERP plays quite a crucial role in generating the most accurate information for business intelligence. Here are some ways it is done.

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“There’s the cloud, then there’s your cloud.”

So goes a tagline from SingleHop, which provides public and private cloud services, dedicated servers, and managed hosting to customers throughout the world. As enterprise IT organizations increasingly recognize the flexibility and agility inherent to services offered by cloud computing providers for their clouds, we can expect the market for such services to continue to grow and competition to continue to heat up. In that context, we asked a few questions of SingleHop EVP Mark Cravotta: Cloud Computing Journal: There’s been a lot of talk recently of the merging of PaaS and IaaS. Where do you stand in this discussion?
Mark Cravotta: SingleHop is focused on delivering IaaS solutions via our bare metal, public cloud and private cloud platforms, coupled with managed services and security services. Our focus is on the Enterprise production systems versus development platforms. The PaaS market is evolving and we will continue to look at strategies as options solidify.
CCJ: You have some fairly serious competitors in your space, and one of them is now owned by one of the largest technology companies in the world. How do you differentiate and win in your marketplace?
Mark: We differentiate by delivering well architected, customer IaaS solutions coupled with high touch services and support, what we call our Service Beyond Support Model. In the end our solutions address specific business needs and are not pre-packaged, are delivered rapidly which enables business agility and are priced competitively based on our underlying cost model being lower than the world’s largest technology companies. We partner with our customers and are flexible and transparent at all points in the relationship. This is also hard to do as companies get larger.
CCJ: On that same note, how fast do you see the need for IaaS growing in the next few years? And do you break it down by regions? For example, Southeast Asia is very dynamic, and all regions of Africa are getting some technology and economic traction these days as well.
Mark: IaaS is constantly growing and that demand will continue to grow consistently. We see demand on six continents. Each market has its own drivers—economic, proximity, global, etc.—based on its sophistication in the global market. We serve customers in 124 countries today.
CCJ: You received a funding round of $14.8 million a few months ago. What gives investors confidence in SingleHop, and how do you apply those investments for your customers?
Mark: We are constantly evaluating and deploying the latest technologies designed to enable our customers to solve their business challenges. This includes expansion into new markets, data center improvements, platform evolution, and network expansion in both capacity and throughput. We also invest heavily in our employees, who make the difference with our customers every day.

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Want VM agility with near bare metal performance? How about [milli]second provision/stop/start/restart times? Looking to achieve greater VM density on your hardware assets, or provision applications without worry of dependency hell? Look no further than next-gen virtualization with Linux Containers. In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Boden Russell, an Advisory Software Engineer at IBM Global Technology Services, will provide a Linux Container technology overview including underpinnings, throttling, monitoring, tooling/commoditization, images, security, use cases, pros/cons and why containers are poised as “the next VM” in our modern cloud era. By the end of this session you will have a firm understanding of the Linux Container landscape in today’s industry and an appreciation for their realization.

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