SYS-CON Events has announced today that Roger Strukhoff has been named conference chair of Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo 2016 Silicon Valley.
The 19th Cloud Expo and 6th @ThingsExpo will take place on November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
“The Internet of Things brings trillions of dollars of opportunity to developers and enterprise IT, no matter how you measure it,” stated Roger Strukhoff. “More importantly, it leverages the power of devices and the Internet to enable us all to improve the state of the world and lives of people.”
Monthly Archives: July 2016
Serverless #Microservices IoT | @ThingsExpo #IoT #ML #LowCode #Serverless
When people aren’t talking about VMs and containers, they’re talking about serverless architecture. Serverless is about no maintenance. It means you are not worried about low-level infrastructural and operational details. An event-driven serverless platform is a great use case for IoT.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Animesh Singh, an STSM and Lead for IBM Cloud Platform and Infrastructure, will detail how to build a distributed serverless, polyglot, microservices framework using open source technologies.
Cloud data backup: Inexperience and ignorance key fear factors
(c)iStock.com/-MG-
Organisations’ fears of cloud-based backup are mostly down to inexperience or ignorance of how the systems work rather than technological issues, according to new survey results released by analyst house Clutch.co.
The research, which surveyed more than 300 small to medium US businesses to measure the benefits and challenges of cloud-based backup, found that 87% of respondents said online backup was either equally or more secure than on-premises equivalents. 24% argued it was “much more” secure, with 32% opting for “somewhat” and 31% equally secure. Only 2% argued online backup was much less secure.
In terms of benefits to cloud backup, greater data security (31%) was most frequently cited, ahead of data space (21%) and simpler backup (21%), while more than a third (37%) of businesses polled said they had experienced no problems when utilising cloud backup, with downtime and bugs (36%) cited most often ahead of limited data space (22%), security issues (19%), and data recovery problems (14%).
Despite this, the research argues these factors can be improved upon. “It’s often very disconcerting if there’s any downtime with getting to the provider to get the data,” said Bob Lamendola, general manager of infrastructure services at MindShift. “It makes people very uneasy if the solution is not reliable and stable…it really casts a dark shadow and can create a barrier to adoption.”
Almost half (49%) of respondents say they back their data up on a daily basis, according to the research, compared with 34% who say weekly. Perhaps worryingly, 2% of firms polled said they back up their data annually. On a similar theme, backup services are usually tested weekly (34% of respondents) or monthly (34%). One in 10 ensure to perform a test daily, while 3% admit they have never done it.
Clutch argues a mix of frequent monitoring and annual, or semi-annual, testing by fully simulating a data leak and checking if the data can be fully restored. “[You should] simulate the ‘loss’ of a critical file, folder, database, or system, and document the exact steps and amount of time it takes to recover this data completely,” said Mark Anderson, of Anderson Technologies. “Go through every step necessary to get the data back on a system in-house and completely usable again.”
The concept of companies fearing change, rather than technology, is one which has been covered extensively in this publication. Matthew Finnie, CTO of Interoute, argued as much when speaking to CloudTech last month. “It’s all transitionary,” he said. “From our experience, the speed of [cloud] transformation has got nothing to do with technology…[but] many times the fear and loathing of the IT department.”
You can read the full Clutch report here.
AWS assures customers its UK expansion plans are on track after Brexit vote
(c)iStock.com/Tuomas Kujansuu
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has said it will continue its plans to build a data centre in the UK despite the referendum vote to leave the European Union last month.
The news was disclosed by AWS UK&I managing director Gavin Jackson at the AWS Summit in London earlier today. The UK data centre region, first announced in November last year, is part of AWS’ expansion plans which also include new bases in Montreal, Ohio, and Ningxia in China.
AWS’ confirmation that the UK data centre will be built – scheduled to arrive either at the end of this year or the beginning of next – arrives after Gartner issued a bleak warning over IT spending after the UK voted to Brexit. In a note, the analyst house argues that “with the UK’s exit, there will likely be an erosion in business confidence and price increases which will impact UK, Western Europe and worldwide IT spending.”
If that wasn’t bad enough, IDC adopted a similarly cautious tone in a forecast released earlier this week, arguing the UK faces a ‘challenging transition’ in terms of how organisations will spend their IT budget. Neither analyst firms’ figures took Brexit into account, however IDC warned that the following quarter could see a downturn for the UK.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, AWS has also announced greater support for EU-based ISVs through the AWS Marketplace, meaning ISVs that have legal entities in EU countries can register, list, and sell their products through AWS. The full list of vendors that have already signed up is available on the AWS blog, including Germany-based in-memory database provider EXASOL. “Companies of all sizes can now take advantage of EXASOL’s performance-beating in-memory analytic database on the world’s most significant cloud platform,” said Dr. Jens Graupmann, EXASOL VP product management.
“This is of great benefit to organisations that want to get started with data analytics fast but cannot invest upfront in analytic infrastructures, and it will be interesting to see what new data-driven businesses are created as a result,” he added.
IoT Speaking Opportunities | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #BigData #InternetOfThings
Internet of @ThingsExpo, taking place November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, is co-located with the 19th International Cloud Expo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world and ThingsExpo Silicon Valley Call for Papers is now open.
Apixio Closes $19.3 Million in Series D Funding | @CloudExpo @Apixio #Cloud #CognitiveComputing
Apixio Inc. has raised $19.3 million in Series D venture capital funding led by SSM Partners with participation from First Analysis, Bain Capital Ventures and Apixio’s largest angel investor. Apixio will dedicate the proceeds toward advancing and scaling products powered by its cognitive computing platform, further enabling insights for optimal patient care.
The Series D funding comes as Apixio experiences strong momentum and increasing demand for its HCC Profiler solution, which mines unstructured medical records, for an accurate view of a patient’s chronic conditions so payers and providers can deliver better care. Apixio’s cognitive computing platform has analyzed data from more than six million patients, achieving 210 percent year-over-year growth in patients analyzed.
Rebecca Thompson of @AvereSystems | @CloudExpo #AWS #Azure #DataCenter
“Avere Systems is a hybrid cloud solution provider. We have customers that want to use cloud storage and we have customers that want to take advantage of cloud compute,” explained Rebecca Thompson, VP of Marketing at Avere Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Announcing @ChrisMatthieu Tech Chair of @ThingsExpo | #IoT #M2M #RTC
Internet of @ThingsExpo has announced today that Chris Matthieu has been named tech chair of Internet of @ThingsExpo 2016 Silicon Valley.
The 6thInternet of @ThingsExpo will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Google adds image recognition to growing AI portfolio
Google has continued its charge on the artificial intelligence market through purchasing French image recognition startup Moodstocks, reports Telecoms.com.
Moodstocks, founded in 2008, develops machine-learning based image recognition technology for smartphones, which has been described by developers as the ‘Shazam for images’. Financials of the agreement have not been confirmed to date.
“Ever since we started Moodstocks, our dream has been to give eyes to machines by turning cameras into smart sensors able to make sense of their surroundings,” Moodstock said on its website. “Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to join forces with Google in order to deploy our work at scale. We expect the acquisition to be completed in the next few weeks.”
Artificial intelligence is one of the focal points of the Google strategy moving forward, which was confirmed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the company’s recent earnings call, though the focus can be dated back to the $625 million DeepMind acquisition in 2014. Although DeepMind is arguably the most advanced AI system in the industry, Telecoms.com readers recently confirmed in a poll Google was the leader in the AI segment, it has seemingly been playing catch up with the likes of Watson and AWS whose offerings have been in the public eye for a substantially longer period of time.
The recognition tools are most likely to be incorporated into the Android operating system, though Moodstocks customers will be able to continue to use the service until the end of their subscription. Moodstocks will be incorporated into Google’s R&D centre in France, where the team will work alongside engineers who are focusing on the development of Youtube and Chrome, two offerings where there could be a link to the Moodstocks technology.
“Many Google services use machine learning (or machine learning) to make them simpler and more useful in everyday life – such as Google Translate, Smart Reply Inbox, or the Google app,” said Vincent Simonet, Head of R&D centre of Google’s French unit. “We have made great strides in terms of visual recognition: now you can search in Google Pictures such as ‘party’ or ‘beach’ and the application will offer you good pictures without you and have never needed to categorize them manually.”
Last month, Google also announced it was expanding its machine research team by opening a dedicated office in Zurich. The team will focus on three areas specifically, machine intelligence, natural language processing & understanding, as well as machine perception.
Elsewhere in the industry, Twitter completed the acquisition of Magic Pony last month reportedly for $150 million. Magic Pony, which offers visual processing technology, was one of the more public moves made by the social media network, which could be seen as unusual as the platform lends itself well to the implementation of AI. Microsoft also announced the purchase of Wand Labs, building on the ‘Conversation-as-a-Platform’ proposition put forward by CEO Satya Nadella at Build 2016.
BT and Daisy announce £70mn partnership
BT has announced a £70 million partnership with Daisy Group which will offer customers of the latter to BT’s Wholesale Hosted Centrex (WHC) platform, reports Telecoms.com.
Daisy’s customers will be integrated to the platform over the next 18 months, which provides customers with cloud-based unified communications services including cloud call recording, HD voice services, call analytics and web collaboration.
“Many businesses are now hosting their communication services using cloud technology to make them accessible to all, using any fixed or mobile device, at any time, wherever they might be,” said Gerry McQuade, CEO of BT Wholesale and Ventures. “BT and Daisy Group have been pioneers of that trend, so I’m delighted that we’re coming together to bring customers a powerful combination of experience, scale and expertise.
“We believe the rapid pace of change will continue over the coming years, and we’re looking forward to helping both Daisy and BT customers reap the benefits that change will bring.”
The cloud of clouds initiative launched by BT has been one of the cornerstones of its enterprise business strategy for some time. Last month , Oracle and BT announced a new partnership which allows customers to use features of BT Cloud Connect environment to gain direct connectivity to the Oracle Cloud.
The relationship between the two companies has been in place long-term, however was extended in 2011 when the pair announced a strategic partnership which allowed BT to sell wholesale calls, Ethernet and broadband products to Daisy’s customers. As part of the initial partnership, Daisy became a third party supplier of PBX telephone systems related maintenance and engineering services to BT.
“We are committed to supporting our customers and partners as the business digitisation journey continues to unfold,” said Neil Muller, CEO of Daisy Group. “This collaboration with BT ensures that we are at the forefront of providing the latest in cloud solutions, increasing customers’ levels of capability and confidence as they continue to manage the relentlessness of technological change. I am hugely proud of Daisy’s relationship with BT and this is a perfect opportunity to further enhance our capability and provide our customers and partners with an industry leading cloud solution.”