The Physical Web incorporates beacons that can be put in any small retail store, for example, so that every store now has “an app” for its customers.
In this Birds-of-a-Feather session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Scott Jenson, Product Designer at Google, will discuss the Physical Web and how it is an open standard so any device can broadcast a URL wirelessly, so any phone/tablet/watch nearby can see, and rank those devices. When the user taps on one, they just go to that web page. It’s really that simple. It’s about thinking small, enabling micro-information (what is in my prescription bottle) or micro interaction (can I buy a candy bar).

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Harbinger Systems, a leading provider of software engineering services, returns to Silicon Valley this November to participate in Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, the high-octane Cloud Computing, IoT & Big Data event produced by SYS-CON Events. The event will be held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, from November 4-6.
Harbinger Systems is participating as a speaker and an exhibitor at the event. Attend our technical session ‘New Possibilities with Cloud-based Healthcare Records’ on November 5th from 8.30-9:05 AM. The session will provide insights about cloud adoption in healthcare revolving around Electronic Health Record [EHR] based systems.

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Located in booth #314, the Bsquare team will present DataV demos and discuss how DataV will help customers put their data to work to improve business outcomes. DataV is unlocking new initiatives across a wide landscape of customers in industries such as industrial manufacturing, transportation, retail and mobile. The solution is designed to complement a new project start or help to enrich an existing machine investment.

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ServiceRocket, a provider of training, utilization and support technology and services to maximize Customer Success, today unveiled TrainingRocket 4. Used by fast growing software companies and enterprise organizations alike, TrainingRocket is a highly effective, on-demand learning platform powering the online universities at many of today’s fast growing software companies, including Cloudera, NGINX, Mulesoft and Pentaho. The company’s innovative customer training platform is a comprehensive, enterprise-ready Learning Management System (LMS) consolidating disparate functions within a friendly and easy-to-use user interface. The solution was designed by a training company for training departments to grow and service their customers by enabling end-users to get up and running on software applications quickly, and start using them proficiently.

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In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Ibrahim Sallam, VP Sales Engineering at Objectivity, will describe a distributed graph management platform that utilizes InfiniteGraph as the scalable distributed graph database with distributed processing built on top of a Mesos framework using Amazon EC2. He will discuss the challenges in managing a large scale graph and the performance advantages of using the right technologies.

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And so time passes and we find ourselves nearing the end of 2014, and getting ready for the latest, greatest edition of Cloud Expo in Santa Clara.

“Are you familiar with our hotel?” asked the nice young woman at the check-in counter last night.. Why yes, I remember it when it was first built, actually, and have seen it go through many incarnations. Just tell me I have free wireless and I’ll be a non-whining, happy camper—she did.

Cloud Expo is now in its 15th or 16th iteration, having itself morphed out of the JavaEdge and WebServices Edge shows of almost 20 years ago. This year’s version also has three tracks devoted to the Internet of Things in a co-located @ThingsExpo event, it has a separate @DevOpsSummit and several sessions connecting WebRTC and the IoT.

There are also a pair of hackathons: the IBM Bluemix Developer Playground on Wednesday, and the ElasticBox hackathon on Thursday. All attendees can get into both.

I’ve been associated with this event and its production team in one way or another since the beginning, missing a few years when I was sick, but having the honor of serving as Conference Chair this year. We’ve put together about 150 breakout sessions, keynotes, general sessions, and Power Panels. This show rocks, as my generation might have put it when we were young.

This industry makes me feel young again, as the massive (and I use this word precisely) movements toward Cloud Computing, Big Data & Analytics, the Internet of Things, and DevOps commingle and converge into one great big ball of transformation.

I doubt anyone in enterprise IT is still ignoring cloud, with the majority now embracing and implementing it in one form or another. My mother’s even heard of cloud computing, and my non-tech sister keeps asking me about the Internet of Things because she’s hearing about it and wants to know what it can do for her small business.

We’re going to have beacons and things, and lots of “technology and stuff” at the show this week. You can google the show and find out all about our “rockstar” promotional efforts, and the panoply of technology that will on on view at the Santa Clara Convention Center this week.

I frankly am annoyed by the emergence of the monster single-sponsor technology event that highlights aging rock bands and politicians at the expense of a serious technology and business focus. Cloud Expo and its co-located events represent the largest independent technology event in the world, serious as a heart attack and focused as a high-end Nikon.

So come one, come all. It’s not too late to register. Either do it now or just show up anytime Tuesday through Thursday. I’ll be trying to be everywhere at once, but am never too busy to talk to our customers—our attendees are what make the show great, and I’d love to be able to take up some of your time and listen to what you have to say.

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Picture credit: iStockPhoto

Human error is responsible for one in five data loss errors, according to the latest study from cloud provider Databarracks.

The study, the fifth annual Data Health Check report, found that employee idiocy was the third most popular reason for data going missing with 18% of the vote, behind software failure (19%) and hardware failure (21%). Interestingly, corruption and theft were responsible for 15% and 7% of the poll respectively.

Yet it’s the larger companies who continue to foul up. 22% of large organisations listed human error as the main cause of data loss over the last 12 months, compared to 6% of small organisations.

The report examines the cost of backup and disaster recovery. While a third (32%) of respondents spend less than half an hour on backup, a similar number (33%) take more than two hours or employ dedicated staff.

Worryingly, 41% of small organisations don’t have a business continuity plan and don’t intend to implement one in the next year. A third (35%) of respondents don’t test their disaster systems due to lack of time, compared with 18% for cost and 18% for lack of relevant skills.

“This isn’t a case of security becoming less important as you adopt more cloud services – data security is always going to be a priority for both the organisation and the provider,” said Peter Groucutt, managing director of Databarracks. “What we’re actually seeing is organisations moving past the ‘fear of the unknown’, as they experience cloud services first-hand.”

A fat finger can still have the power to bring down the cloud, at least temporarily. Back in May Joyent’s entire US-East-1 data centre hit the skids because of a typo. The command may have been mistyped, yet there was no override or verification: a reboot command to every server in the US-East-1 zone was sent, to the chagrin of commentators.

“There are broader systemic issues that allowed a fat finger to take down a data centre,” Joyent CTO Brian Cantrill wrote.

This case wasn’t so much data loss as data inconvenience, but plenty of cases in recent memory have proved employees are a serious risk to your corporate data, by accident or design. British supermarket chain Morrisons had data of employee salaries breached by an employee, while a study from EE in March found that employees were more of a threat to businesses than cyber criminals.

Databarracks released a complete disaster recovery kit tool last month in a bid to help smaller businesses get themselves organised in the case of a data breach.

You can take a look at the full set of survey results here.

Picture credit: iStockPhoto

A report from the Campaign for Clear Licensing (CCL) has found that the majority of Oracle licensees have an “arms length, impoverished relationship” with the software giant.

The report found an alarming number of complaints, the majority of which resulting from poor communication between seller and client. 92% of those polled argued Oracle does not clearly communicate licensing changes, while 88% disagreed that Oracle audit requests were clear and easy to manage.

“Whilst every organisation entering into contracts must be accountable for the agreements they purchase, a disproportionate amount of risk and management overhead appears to be placed on the customer by Oracle,” the report notes. “Similarly, many customers have not invested, or are not capable of investing, sufficient resource to manage their Oracle estate, or are aware of the investment in management overhead that they will require prior to engaging with Oracle.”

Naturally the researchers gave Oracle right of reply, and it was the expected rebuttals. The charge of unknown compliance got the reply “Oracle LMS state they are there to help customers.” With the charge of poor contract terms, Oracle argued some customers didn’t have time to read their contracts.

There were also positives, however, including plenty of public information available on Oracle.com, and the fact that Oracle verifies third party tools.

In all, there were three positive points and 11 negatives, with seven calls to action. Oracle needs to ensure there is only one corporate voice, to invest in a well organised knowledge base, and to provide better business communications among others.

“Based on our research and conversations over the last six months, we have found that customers’ relationships with Oracle are hostile and filled with deep-rooted mistrust,” said report author Martin Thompson in a canned quote. “So entrenched is this feeling of mistrust that some organisations were fearful of speaking to us in case of any audit repercussions.”

It’s strong stuff, but it’s worth noting this isn’t just a hatchet job from CCL. Back in February, Oracle became the first software publisher to meet with the group, with the aim “to build a mutually beneficial feedback mechanism with constructive dialogue over the longer term.”

According to a source: “Oracle was first in the firing line as they are notorious for their licensing practices and were willing and open to cooperating with the campaign.”

The CCL confirmed to CloudTech it was looking at engaging with other software vendors in due course. Microsoft, SAP and IBM were mentioned, but nothing concrete has been announced. A seminar has been organised on November 21 to go through some of the report’s pain points.

In a few years time, of course, Oracle will want this to be ancient history. After being slow movers in the cloud space, the company is making a swift about turn and slowly culling its legacy software revenue. It’s a long term strategy but it hits the short term bottom line, as the company’s most recent financial results proved. Net income stood still while total revenues were up only 3% – lower than Wall Street was expecting.

Despite that the company’s aggressive push to cloud is evident. The company hired former Google App Engine chief Peter Magnusson and ex-SAP head of cloud Shawn Price in recent weeks.

You can read the full report here.

Postscript: The report also catalogued the various pieces of anecdotal evidence from survey respondents. One of the most damning, when asked what they liked about Oracle licensing, was: “Nothing. Such practices should be considered illegal.”

Dasher Technologies is committed to being the best technology solution company in the United States by operating with the highest integrity and building lasting relationships with its customers and partners. Since 1982, Dasher Technologies helped public, private and nonprofit organizations implement technology solutions that speed and simplify their operations. As one of the fastest growing system integrators in the country, Dasher have gained a reputation for effortless implementations with relentless follow-through and enduring support. Dasher’s strong technical expertise and vendor independence allows the company to integrate best-of-breed software, hardware and services into a custom solution that directly impacts the business. Dasher was recently named the HP 2012 ESSN Partner of the Year and is the #1 provider of HP High Performance Computing solutions and HP Open Source/Linux solutions in the US. The company has grown to five offices nationwide with locations in California, Oregon, Washington, Alabama, and Florida. Dasher is listed as a certified Women Owned Business.

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