Consider the following integration scenarios: Moving medical records between EMR systems; financial information between banking systems; HR information between ERP systems; and software development information between SDLC tools.
At first glance the approaches required for these integrations may seem the same. But if you look slightly deeper you will realize that this can’t be the case because of impedance mismatch. I’m defining impedance mismatch as the friction that occurs when trying to align two things or concepts that don’t naturally/actually match. Because many of the hardest impedance mismatches are domain specific, to overcome them you have to have a layer of domain understanding “baked into” your integration software to address business problems.

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The “Internet of Things” depends on the “Cloud” for the processing and storage of data. The Cloud’s backbone, however, is the network. This logic train reveals the importance of professional rigor and solid System Engineering (SE) of the network.

Imagine a sea of sensors, put out in the field by multiple independent vendors. Complying with specifications only in an informal sense, these sensors are sending Terabytes of data to the cloud. The availability of this data to anyone globally is impressive enough. But even more amazing is the fact that anyone in the world can also develop an application or a powerful API to filter out the “nuggets” of valuable information.

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Although we often write about and discuss digital transformation, we often fail to identify the end goal we are really trying to achieve. We talk at great length about data, analytics, speed, information logistics systems and personalized user experiences, but none of these are the end goal. Ultimately we must digitally transform so we can remove the “fog of war,” and have clear visibility and insights into our businesses and the needs of our customers. The end goal of digital transformation, however, is the ability to rapidly act and react to changing data, competitive conditions and strategies fast enough to succeed.

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Those that lead are able to collect and analyze data that followers can’t. Think about the first climber to reach the top of the mountain, they have a new and different view slower followers don’t. If you believe, as I do, that understanding data is the secret sauce of the digitally transformed enterprise, then having data not available to your competitors is a treasure!
Those that achieve digital transformation before their competitors will have advantages – and advantages have advantages. Not only do they have new experiences and new data to analyze and understand, they are able to develop and implement new strategies that make no sense to slower competitors without access to the new data. The digitally transformed can act on data invisible to slower competitors.

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The pace of technology today means organizations are increasingly tasked with delivering applications that are fast, efficient, and capable of doing more than ever to keep up with the demands of the business. They’re looking to improve existing applications and add new ones. But how can IT guarantee application availability or create new applications when so much has already been invested in current programs and infrastructures?

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An expert panel discussion examines the value and direction of The Open Group IT4IT initiative, a new reference architecture for managing IT to help business become digitally innovative.
IT4IT was a hot topic at The Open Group San Francisco 2016 conference in January. This panel, conducted live at the event, explores how the reference architecture grew out of a need at some of the world’s biggest organizations to make their IT departments more responsive, more agile.

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xMatters for the Enterprise DevOps toolchain stitches together the disparate operational tools to help orchestrate hand-offs between the tools and team members. Customers like us because we understand the need for DevOps or NoOps automation at enterprise scale and recognize that humans are still involved when something goes wrong.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that ReadyTalk, a leading provider of online conferencing and webinar services, has been named Vendor Presentation Sponsor at the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
ReadyTalk delivers audio and web conferencing services that inspire collaboration and enable the Future of Work for today’s increasingly digital and mobile workforce. By combining intuitive, innovative technology with unmatched customer service, ReadyTalk provides a seamless collaboration experience for anyone, across any device, platform or location. Everything you need, anywhere you are, for before, during and after your online event. ReadyTalk is headquartered in Denver, CO and was founded in 2001.

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It has been a particularly busy year for database platform provider Couchbase – and the company hopes that things will become a whole lot busier.

Earlier this week Couchbase launched 4.5, which continues its move to create joins between NoSQL and SQL through the SQL-based query language N1QL. The latest iteration includes greater security capabilities, alongside faster queries and graphical tools to more easily explore data models.

In March, the Mountain View-based firm announced the conclusion of a $30 million series F funding round; in all probability the last before Couchbase commits to an IPO, according to CEO Bob Wiederhold. “We’re continuing to grow our business very fast – we think this is going to be a multi-billion dollar industry, and we certainly want to continue to invest in the product [and] continue to invest in our sales and technical support channels,” he told CloudTech. “This financing gives us the runway that we need to have what we think will be a very successful IPO in the not too distant future.”

When that is remains to be seen; tech firms going public has tailed off in 2016, which may go to explain why Twilio’s move to IPO earlier this week was met with such initial acclaim. Couchbase has frequently been aggressive and bullish not only on its own position, but the positions of its competitors; and the N1QL query language is seen by the firm as another key differentiator.

“The query language is not only helpful to our existing customers and existing use cases, but it also opens up many other use cases for use with Couchbase,” said Wiederhold. “We’re seeing the downloads and the adoption of Couchbase rise significantly now that we have a query language, and as we expected the fact that it’s a SQL-compliant language significantly lowers the barriers to adopting NoSQL.”

This is a similar view with which Dave Starling, CTO of video sharing platform Seenit, agrees. “One of the biggest difficulties we had originally with Couchbase was hiring people with any level of skillset on knowing how to write MapReduce views [a system of generating large data sets] or knowing how to query manually,” he tells CloudTech, “and so having a technology like N1QL means that it’s far easier for us to train up new developers, or developers who want to start working on NoSQL technologies because it’s a language that they’re going to be familiar with.”

Seenit has not only been using the beta version of 4.5 before launch, but Starling is a certified Couchbase developer expert. The community aspect and camaraderie is vital, says Wiederhold – “that’s how technologies go viral, particularly open source technologies” – but ultimately the rise of Couchbase is indicative of the rise in NoSQL itself.

Wiederhold explains that there are three distinct phases of development, from grass roots developers, to initial deployment, and mission critical and very broad deployment. “We’re now clearly in phase three,” he said. “We had our first hand customer making [the move] from phase two to phase three – they did much larger business deals with us that will allow them to expand their usage of Couchbase very broadly onto their digital economy business.

“We think that a number of other customers will go into phase three with us this year, so we think that’s a very good sign for our business and for the growth of the NoSQL industry.”