Explosive growth in connected devices. Enormous amounts of data for collection and analysis. Critical use of data for split-second decision making and actionable information. All three are factors in making the Internet of Things a reality. Yet, any one factor would have an IT organization pondering its infrastructure strategy.
How should your organization enhance its IT framework to enable an Internet of Things implementation? In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, James Kirkland, Chief Architect for the Internet of Things and Intelligent Systems at Red Hat, will describe how to revolutionize your architecture and create an integrated, interoperable, reliable system of thousands of devices. Using real-world examples, James will discuss the transformative process taken by companies in moving from a two-tier to a three-tier topology for IoT implementations.

read more

Cloud storage provider Box has announced compatibility with iOS 8 on day one, including support for iOS App Extensions, which allows apps to “lend” functionality with each other.

This means users can access Box content from any other app on their iDevice, provided it supports the Extensions framework. Users can select a document on Box and open it in an editor, or work on Box content from a mobile project management tool, for instance.

“This gives you unprecedented freedom and control when it comes to your information, while maintaining the security you expect with Box and iOS,” wrote Aaron Levie, Box CEO, in a blog post.

“This is a huge milestone for interoperability, and we’re thrilled to support iOS 8 on day one to transform productivity and collaboration for individuals, businesses and industries,” he added.

With the release of iOS 8 yesterday, plenty of companies have announced their support. Enterprise mobility management (EMM) provider MobileIron noted in a blog that iOS 8 was “the first sign of Phase III of mobile enterprise computing.”

In other words, we’ve moved on from only being able to do wireless email, and we’ve moved on from the more recent trend of using standalone apps for working on mobile. Now it’s about workflow. It was a point Levie referenced to close his blog.

“We’re just at the beginning of the post-PC technology shift, with many more years of innovation to come,” he wrote. “What Apple introduced [yesterday] is crucial to the health and success of this transition.”

Box is evidently ramping up its collaboration tools. Box Notes, a tool which allows users to compare notes across mobile, has recently been made available for both iOS and Android-powered devices.

You can find out more about Box’s iOS 8 integration here.

Today, almost every company has a directory that needs to be managed. Spending valuable company time monitoring servers, provisioning and deprovisioning users, auditing, and assessing security concerns takes away from the core competency of the team – building product and delivering to customers quickly. DaaS takes on the burden of those tasks, and allows the team to focus on what they do best. In his session at DevOps Summit, Rajat Bahargava, Co-Founder, Chairman, and President & CEO of JumpCloud, will talk about what DaaS is, how it eases the pain caused by AD and LDAP, and why cloud-based directories are where the industry is heading.

read more

BlueData aims to “democratize Big Data” with its launch of EPIC Enterprise, which it calls “the industry’s first Big Data software to enable enterprises to create a self-service cloud experience on premise.”

This self-service private cloud allows enterprises to create 100-node Hadoop and Spark clusters in less than 10 minutes. The company is also offering a Community Edition via free download.

We had a few questions for BlueData CEO Kumar Sreekanti about all this, and here’s what he had to say:

Cloud Computing Journal: It looks like you’re on a mission to simplify Big Data.

Kumar Sreekanti: Yes, simple is our goal

As the pioneer in Big Data private clouds, BlueData’s mission is to simplify, and thus democratize, Big Data by streamlining and simplifying Big Data infrastructure and eliminating complexity as a barrier to adoption.

CCJ: Who are your target customers?

Kumar: Our target customers are enterprises of all sizes that want to build agile, secure and cost-effective Big Data deployments that deliver value in days, instead of months, and at a cost savings of 50%-75% compared with traditional approaches.

By making Big Data accessible to all, enterprises can get the same value out of their on-premise Big Data as companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo at a fraction of the cost, and with far fewer resources.

Specifically, we are targeting Fortune 1000 enterprises in retail, financial services, healthcare, pharmaceutical, insurance, media, telco and federal.

These are companies with large volumes of existing structured data, such as sales transactions and supply chain metrics, as well as semi-structured and unstructured data, such as log files, emails, social media, documents, sensor data and audio/video.

These companies will have large volumes of structured and unstructured data stored in on-premise enterprise storage systems such as NAS, Gluster and Ceph

Within the companies, we’re looking at enterprise IT and line-of-business IT departments with business initiatives that require Big Data analytics and processing to validate new market opportunities and/or create new products and services.

CCJ: How do you and they define Big Data?

Kumar: The most immediate opportunity is to combine existing structured data with large volumes of underutilized unstructured data to identify patterns or insights in a cost-effective manner previously not possible with traditional data warehousing platforms.

We also see ways to continue to expand the use of Big Data. Our target customers see a tremendous opportunity to use data in new ways: to learn about customers, speed business cycles, and transform themselves to gain a competitive advantage.

CCJ: How much data are we talking about here?

Kumar: Most companies in our target market have at least 50TB of unstructured data locked away in their enterprise repositories that can be utilized for data-driven strategies.

CCJ: What are the key things you’ve done to simplify all this for people and enterprises, while also imbuing flexibility into it?

Kumar: Big data no longer means “big moves” or “big storage” so our target customers can gain immediate value from their terabytes of unstructured data in their existing storage systems at the lowest cost.

The BlueData EPIC platform can connect any enterprise data source to the big data app of choice. That means no more moving and replicating data.

The BlueData EPIC platform helps IT to deliver Big Data as a high-performing on-premise service to run any distributed application on any server from any storage.

CCJ: How does your vision interact with the IoT, which seems to be driving a lot of Big Data today?

Kumar: The IoT requires the ability to collect and reason over large volumes of real-time data generated by sensors and other embedded systems.

In addition to demanding new Big Data architectures and real-time processing run times beyond Hadoop, IoT introduces significant level of complexity to an already rigid, inflexible infrastructure that can barely meet the existing requirements for batch processing.

CCJ: And how do you address this issue?

Kumar: Our vision around enabling any application on any server with any storage provides enterprises the foundation to adapt as well as scale their infrastructure to meet Big/Fast Data characteristics of the IoT.

By supporting quick provisioning and scaling of distributed applications like Apache Spark that provide fast in-memory processing (e.g. Spark Streaming) and noSQL technologies (e.g Hbase, Cassandra), BlueData enables enterprises to support the fast data and time series processing requirements of the IoT.

Further, by enabling an agile infrastructure that can simultaneously support real-time (Spark), noSQL (Hbase) and batch (Hadoop) analytics, customers gain unprecedented levels of flexibility to create solution architectures that can easily combine IoT data with the rest of the enterprise data (e.g. transactions, social media, text/email etc) as opposed to silos.

CCJ: Please tell us more about the Community Edition. How to access it, what it does, why people should try it.

Kumar: We offer EPIC One, a full-featured community edition, which allows users to  experience the power of multi-app, multi-version instant clusters on a single physical node.

Users can deploy a Big Data private cloud in a matter of seven steps and create distributed application clusters ranging from Hadoop to Hbase and Spark in a matter of minutes versus the typical weeks or months for each type of cluster. It can be downloaded directly from www.bluedata.com

read more

Data is arguably the most prolific and most valuable of resources. As such, it needs to be protected both as a company asset and in keeping with data privacy laws. Data protection is most acute in healthcare, which is something of a latecomer to fast-evolving heterogeneous electronic environments in the cloud. Indeed, healthcare had to “fast forward” to meet a rush of legislation and new working methodologies. In the blink of an eye, the playing field has changed dramatically. It continues to evolve as medical practitioners bring their own devices into hospitals and surgeries, patients consult with their physicians over Skype and online chat, and Electronic Health Records transit between healthcare Business Associates and government and reimbursement agencies.

read more

Gridstore has announced that NAC, Inc. and Sky Tech have joined its innovative Accelerate Partner Program. Both new members cite Gridstore’s expertise in enabling the Hybrid Cloud and their solution purpose-built for Hyper-V as the key criteria for their decision to join the program. Integrating seamlessly with business clients, these new partners provide industry-proven storage solutions that promote satisfied customers, profitable businesses, and communities that thrive.

read more

Open source cloud provider Rackspace has dismissed all merger and acquisition discussion to continue with its current independent trajectory – and has named Taylor Rhodes as new chief executive.

Rhodes joined Rackspace in 2007 and was appointed president of the company back in January. He takes over from Graham Weston, CEO from 1999 to 2006, who had temporarily held the fort since the shock retirement of Lanham Napier in February.

“Our board conducted a thorough search of highly qualified internal and external candidates, and we are confident that Taylor is the right person to lead Rackspace through its next phase of growth,” said Sam Gilliland, lead independent director of the Rackspace board in a statement.

“Throughout his tenure, Taylor has proven himself to be an inspiring leader, a strategic thinker and a committed Racker,” he added.

There had been talk of potential merger or acquisition activity at Rackspace, with the company disclosing that multiple parties were interested.

Former CEO Weston explained the updates. “We talked to a diverse group of interested parties and entertained different proposals,” he said in a statement, adding: “None of these proposals were deemed to have as much value as the expected value of our standalone plan.

“We concluded that the company is best positioned to drive value for shareholders, customers and Rackers through the continued execution of its strategic plan to capitalise on the growing opportunity for managed cloud services,” he added.

The wording of the press material indicates that Rackspace has taken this decision on its own merits – but not all are convinced. Rackspace shares have plummeted in the aftermath of the announcements, according to Business Insider.

Ben Kepes, writing for Forbes, noted pessimistically: “I was worried about Rackspace’s future before this potential sellout was announced, and nothing I’ve seen since has changed my perspective.”

The company’s ethos, stated at the start of the year, was to continue its push towards OpenStack and hybrid cloud models. This time around, with analysts inevitably about to ask questions over why M&A never materialised, Rackspace is pointing towards gaining increased share in the managed cloud market, as CloudTech reported earlier this year, as well as an upturn in figures.

Rackspace added more than $20m of new revenue in a single quarter in Q214, the first time this has happened in the firm’s history. Sequential revenue growth of 4.3% in the same quarter was the highest since 2012. But is this all short term gain masking long term pain?

The company also fiercely cultivates its relationship with customers – the term Rackers for instance, and claims of ‘fanatical support’. With this strength in branding, Rackspace remains on a sure enough footing for now. But as Rhodes steps into the hot seat, it may be a baptism of fire for the seven year veteran.

A recent Time magazine essay on the Apple Watch said, “The Apple Watch represents a redrawing of the map that locates technology in one place and our bodies in another…  The Apple Watch signals the advent of of an “always-on Internet”, … Continue reading →

read more

Yesterday IBM unveiled Watson Analytics, a freemium data science tool for businesses of all sizes utilising the power of Watson’s supercomputer technology.

As we reported, for a company which isn’t averse to bigging itself up, Watson Analytics appears to be a release of which Big Blue is particularly proud, with IBM exec Oliver Oursin calling it a ‘breakthrough’.

The main talking point is that Watson uses natural language to spit out its analysis, meaning everyone in the business can get results. Whether you’re in sales, marketing, or the CEO, and whether your knowledge of code, mathematics and algorithms is spotty at best, Watson Analytics aims to make your job easier.

Ask Watson a question such as ‘Which sales are likely to close?’, or a statement such as ‘Show me revenue by time period’, and it will come back with similar results in plain language, not a bunch of code.

Gene Villeneuve, European predictive & business intelligence sales and brand leader at IBM, explained to CloudTech the various types of algorithms used in Watson, from analytical techniques such as correlations, trending, forecasting, and scoring of the data, to SPSS algorithms, a data mining software application built by IBM.

“By embedding capabilities around advanced algorithms, we are giving guided analytics directly in the box for end users,” says Villeneuve. “That’s the intent: not only is it really easy to get started, but once you’re in there and having this very immersive dialogue with the data, Watson Analytics will guide you to see other things you wouldn’t have been able to see with other capabilities on the market today.”

Oliver Oursin, global predictive and business intelligence solutions, explained how the type of question asked in the front end will influence what Watson digs through in the back end.

“When you ask the question, the real language question to us, what we’re doing is trying to go after key concepts in that question,” he says. “If I say ‘can you compare the quarters and the revenue?’, you get a bar chart, or something similar. If I say ‘can you give me the trend of the revenue over the quarters?’, then I would have to bring a line chart.

“That’s a very simple example, how the analytics of the question drives the results,” he adds.

“As we go into the mathematical end of it, obviously we have a lot of algorithms in there that are used in parallel, and they’re used where they make most sense,” Oursin continues. “As we do analytics, we don’t just think of revenue. I want to understand it by geography, I want to understand it by sales, product, channel.

“We also do multi-variant analytics in the back end, which means we specifically search for combinations that drive revenue to bring you real insight.”

Watson can’t tell you whether the data is right or wrong, Oursin adds – it’s not psychic, after all – but it can tell you whether your data is good enough to help you make key business decisions.

Another key aim of Watson Analytics is to take the hassle out of data science – cutting out the middle man. When asked how it will benefit sales and marketing professionals, Oursin replies: “I would think this makes it easier in many ways.

“The first thing is, it’s very easy to touch. Using Watson Analytics, you have no pre-knowledge that’s required, you just need to understand your business, and you have to have your data. That’s the only thing you need to bring to the table.

“The fact that it’s cloud makes it very accessible,” he adds. “You don’t have to think about us sending you software, us giving you an install guide…you just connect to it and off you [go].”

Above all, IBM sees a trend developing in terms of key stakeholders and decision makers in modern business. Gone are the days when the CEO or CIO would be solely responsible for making a decision. In some companies, the marketing manager will have lots of power; in others, not. Bringing new technology into the business used to sit with IT and IT only. It all makes for a more democratic line of business approach.

“10, 15 years ago, it was really IT driving a lot of these systems, and the power sat with IT in most of those decisions,” Oursin says. “But that has changed. Today the budget, the power, the decision making sits in the business, which means they want to make a decision, and they want to act on it right away.

“And that will make it much easier for us,” he adds.