Guest blog by Manoj Kumar Suresh, Parallels Support Team Easy ways to backup your virtual machine There are many perks of using a virtual machine over a regular PC. One of my favorites being how easy it is to backup and to restore my virtual machines. Below I’ll go over several ways to backup your […]
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How many IT projects did your team accomplish last year? With 2015 behind us and 2016 already moving at break-neck speed, why not scratch one more project off the list and start managing your Macs before the end of Q1? What does it really take to get started? Purchase Parallels Mac Management today and have […]
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When major companies start getting into the nitty gritty of updating their software delivery processes, governance always pokes its head into the mix. The ability to control and secure a software release has traditionally been a hands-on experience due to its many complexities. But at what costs?
As more software delivery processes become automated, the traditional manual processes used for corporate governance are creating bottlenecks that slow down software releases and promote inefficiency. Forrester recently released a new report on this subject: “Use DevOps And Supply Chain Principles To Automate Application Delivery Governance Processes: The Modern Application Delivery Playbook.” The report aims to give companies insight into state of governance processes in the software release process today, and understand how they need to evolve in order to meet the needs of tomorrow.
Mobile operators, telcos and service providers could soon stem the tide of subscriber defections thanks to a new cloud based predictive analytics service from Hitachi Data Systems (HDS). By forecasting customer behaviour, HDS aims to improve subscriber satisfaction and reduce churn for its clients.
The new offering, announced at the 2016 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, will run as the Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) 6000 for Predictive Analytics system. It uses the latest analytics software to find the patterns characteristic of unhappy customers and predict customer attrition. The system uses predictive scoring – based on events such as constant use of the help desk and failures of the network – in order to give support staff the information needed for real-time decision making. Once identified, the churn-prone subscribers can be targeted with compensatory offers before they defect.
The Hitachi UCP 6000 for Predictive Analytics is built on SAP’s HANA converged infrastructure which can conduct in-memory data interrogations of big data. HDS claims its UCP 6000 for SAP HANA can simplify the deployment of SAP solutions for telcos, which in turn will help them minimise the IT infrastructure disruption and maximise application performance.
As part of the solution, SAP HANA and SAP Predictive Analytics will allow users to run predictive models on massive amounts of data from external data points. However, as a consequence of the crunching of data in flash memory, the clients will get their insights in seconds and can nip customer uprisings in the bud. SAP’s Predictive Analytics software will automatically handle the wide dataset and make predictive modelling more effective, according to HDS.
HDS described the churn-busting service as an ‘immense opportunity’ to translate data into tangible business outcomes.
IBM has unveiled a raft of new announcements today at Interconnect 2016, its largest ever cloud event. The rally, in Las Vegas, attracted 25,000 clients, partners and developers who were briefed on new partnerships with VMWare, IBM’s work with Apple’s Swift language, Bitly, Gigster, GitHub, Watson APIs and a new platform, BlueMix OpenWhisk.
The Bluemix OpenWhisk is IBM’s answer to Amazon Web Services’ event driven system Lambda, which allows developers to create automated responses to events when certain conditions are met. Automated responses have become a critical area for public cloud service providers and BCN recently reported how Google launched Google Cloud Functions in order to match the AWS offering to developers. All the systems aim to give developers a way to programme responses without needing to implement integration-related changes in the architecture, but IBM claims OpenWhisk is the only one whose underlying code will be available under an open-source license on the code publishing site Github.
By allowing all users open access to inspect code IBM says it can inspire greater levels of developer collaboration. IBM said OpenWhisk is highly customisable through either web services or using commands and it can be adapted to company requirements rather than being an inflexible cloud services.
OpenWhisk will work with both the server-side JavaScript framework and Apple’s increasingly popular Swift programming language. With a range of application programming interfaces (APIs) IBM claims the OpenWhisk service will have greater flexibility than the rival services from Google and AWS.
In a statement IBM explained the next phase of its plan to bring Swift to the Cloud with a preview of a Swift runtime and a Swift Package Catalog to help enable developers to create apps for the enterprise. The new Swift runtime builds on the Swift Sandbox IBM launched in December and allows developers to write applications in Swift in the cloud and create continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) condition that run apps written in Swift in production on the IBM public cloud.
IBM also announced a new option for users to run GitHub Enterprise on top of IBM Bluemix and in a company’s own data centre infrastructure.
In another announcement IBM gave details of a new partnership with VMware aimed at helping enterprises take better advantage of the cloud’s speed and economics. A new working arrangement means enterprise customers will find it easier to extend their existing workloads from their on-premises software-defined data centre to the cloud. The partnership gives IBM users the option to run VMware computing, storage and networking workloads on top of the IBM cloud. The new level of integration applies to vSphere, Virtual SAN, NSX, vCenter and vRealize Automation. In addition the IBM cloud is now part of the vCloud Air Network from VMware and the two partners will jointly sell hybrid cloud.
A thought leadership discussion on the rise of business networks and how that requires new models of busing and selling as well as new ways of discovering and relating to customers and partners.
The next BriefingsDirect innovation thought leadership discussion focuses on the rise of business networks and how that requires new models of buying and selling as well as new ways of discovering and relating to customers and partners.
Quite rapidly, we’ve entered a business world where unprecedented connectivity leads to instant analysis. These insights across entire industries provide powerful new ways for businesses to innovate and to adapt to markets, supply chains, and customer demands.
Open source machine learning software vendor PredictionIO has announced it is to become part of Salesforce. The Palo Alto start up has stressed that the software will continue to be available under an open source Apache license.
The addition of analytics and machine learning has become a key strategy to Salesforce as it bids to build on its cloud offerings. Last year BCN reported how Salesforce was adding new Wave Actions to its Analytics Cloud intelligence tool. More recently it bought machine learning companies RelateIQ and Tempo AI and integrated staff into its data science teams.
Machine learning, which can be used in many cloud applications, has become an area of contention in the cloud industry with other start ups in this area, such as H2O and Skytree, the subject of takeover rumours.
California based PredictionIO was formed in 2013 and a year later received $2.5 million in backing from investors including Azure Capital Partners. Other backers include CrunchFund, the Stanford-StartX Fund and Kima Ventures. Dropbox is PredictionIO’s most prominent client.
CEO Simon Chan explained the rationale for selling the firm on his company blog. As part of Salesforce, PredictionIO’s machine learning system will get immediate access to the entire Salesforce clouds. The opportunity to extend SalesforceIQ’s machine learning and intelligence was a chance not to be passed up, he said. “Being a part of Salesforce will give us an amazing opportunity to continue building our open source machine learning platform on a much larger scale,” said Chan.
Chan’s objective will be the same within Salesforce – to simplify development of machine learning technology and build it up. PredictionIO now has 8,000 developers creating over 400 apps. Chan pledged that PredictionIO’s open source technology will stay that way and will continue to be free to all users. To mark the Salesforce deal it is to dropping the PredictionIO Cluster software fee on AWS Cloudformation, which will is now free for the first time in the company’s history.
Recently, Forbes contributing writer and enterprise software, application development, and data management expert Adrian Bridgwater discussed how important it is to understand what freedom really means in the open source world. In open source, the word “free” refers to the liberty that users have in running, distributing, changing and improving the software, rather than its price.
In fact, while “free” is an appealing word to many C-suite executives, it’s of prime importance that those who are just now considering implementing open source software in their organization understand that it’s the liberty that open source allows that benefits the enterprise, not necessarily the price tag. Open source allows for great freedom for how software is modified, used and shared within an organization, which can lead to greater creativity, innovation, and productivity free from licensing or functionality concerns.
After more than five years of DevOps, definitions are evolving, boundaries are expanding, ‘unicorns’ are no longer rare, enterprises are on board, and pundits are moving on. Can we now look at an evolution of DevOps? Should we? Is the foundation of DevOps ‘done’, or is there still too much left to do? What is mature, and what is still missing? What does the next 5 years of DevOps look like?
In this Power Panel at DevOps Summit, moderated by DevOps Summit Conference Chair Andi Mann, panelists looked back at what DevOps has become, and forward at what it might create next.
Whether you’re in high school, college, or getting your Masters, you need these student tools if you’re hitting the books on the regular. From apps that help you write like Hemingway to a way to run Windows on your Mac, we’ve got you covered—just check out our list of top twelve tools every student needs […]
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