Although it has gained significant traction in the consumer space, IoT is still in the early stages of adoption in enterprises environments. However, many companies are working on initiatives like Industry 4.0 that includes IoT as one of the key disruptive technologies expected to reshape businesses of tomorrow. The key challenges will be availability, robustness and reliability of networks that connect devices in a business environment. Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) is expected to play a key role in overcoming these challenges.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mike Wood, vice president for VeloCloud Networks, discussed how SD-WAN can offer a simple, agile, cost-effective approach for enterprise IoT networks.
Monthly Archives: December 2016
Delivering Comprehensive Intelligent Search | @CloudExpo #BI #Cloud #DigitalTransformation
WWT reached deep into its applications, data, and content to rapidly and efficiently create a powerful Google-like, pan-enterprise search capability and engender a more productive and proactive digital business culture.
How to test a Windows app in Parallels Desktop for FREE
A question that I am regularly asked is: “Will an old Photoshop Version for Windows work in Parallels Desktop on the Mac?” (with the named app being almost any type of app: line-of-business app, educational app, productivity app, or game, among many other categories). My standard response is: “It is highly likely that this app for […]
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Amazon to Use Xilink’s FGPA
Cloud industry is growing at a rapid rate, and this is most evident in the performance and revenue numbers of the Big Seven providers, namely, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, and Facebook. To meet the growing demand from their customers, these companies are increasingly moving their operations to super-fast accelerators that can provide more than ten times the performance of a powerful CPU, and these accelerators are called Field Programmable Gate Array (FGPA) and Graphics Processing Units (GPU).
NVIDIA is one of the leading manufacturers when it comes to GPU, and many companies tap into its processing power for machine learning and AI applications. It’s little wonder that its revenue rose by almost 193 percent year-on-year.
Some companies like Microsoft and Amazon prefer to use FGPA instead of GPU, and this has led to their pervasive use. Xilink is one of the leading providers of FGPA, and so far, Microsoft, Baidu, and Amazon are known to use it for their complex data analysis, Deep Neural Networks (DNN), and AI.
Recently, Amazon announced that it will be offering Xilink services to its customers, and this can be a significant one for Xilink as well as the FGPA industry as a whole. So, what makes this announcement significant?
First off, AWS is the leading cloud provider, so its adoption is sure to give FGPA a big boost. Second and most importantly, Amazon is the first company to offer these services to their customers. Though Microsoft adopted it earlier, they have not yet offered it as a service to their Azure customers, but Amazon has already started building custom servers on it. As of now, it plans to offer new public F1 Elastic Cloud instances using eight 16nmXilink Ultrascale+ FGPAs for every instance. This will be initially offered as a developer’s platform, so the experienced FGPA community can start building on it.
At this point though, Amazon has made no mention of OpenCL – Xilink’s reconfigurable acceleration stack, but adding these capabilities in the future can create huge opportunities for the early adopters of this technology.
This adoption by Amazon is obviously big business for Xilink, and it helps it to score over its arch-rival, Altera that was acquired by Intel last year. Ironically, Intel announced at the time of acquisition of Altera that more than one-third of cloud nodes would be powered by FGPAs by 2020, and it looks like Xilink maybe the major beneficiary of this growth. If you’re wondering why AWS chose Xilink over Altera, it’s purely from a business standpoint. Xilink is almost a year ahead than Altera in terms of manufacturing technology, and this explains why many leading cloud providers prefer to work with Xilink. But, this doesn’t mean we can rule out Altera, or Intel now, completely. Some reports show that Intel is working hard on its FGPA business, as it believes this could drive its future business interest.
In short, Xilink is the clear leader when it comes to FGPA, though Intel may catch up soon.
The post Amazon to Use Xilink’s FGPA appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Dish Network is Thriving Because of Transformation
Today I was working from home and waiting on the repair of a recalled Samsung washer (if you don’t know about the recall the washer can “explode” under heavy load on fast spin cycle, click here). When the repair technician arrived in a Dish Network van and sporting natty Dish Network attire, you can imagine my head was spinning (get it? washer humor!). Of course, the first thing I did was ask the technician why Dish Network was performing this service. His answer is the reason for this post.
Home pay network television delivered by traditional cable or satellite is on a downturn with the advent of internet streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and HBO Go. Dish Network has built a large field services capability that today is under-utilized due to slowdown in their core services. While many organizations may have scaled back on their services and cut their teams to only what was necessary to service current customers, Dish saw an opportunity to expand their value and brand by instead leveraging what they had spent millions building.
Dish branched into services areas that they had no direct expertise in. You could say that at the time they had the core ability to perform these services but no specific knowledge of how to complete the tasks. What they did have was capacity in the form of people, trucks, equipment, and customer service and logistics experience. And by combining that ability with capacity you get a new capability.
Ok, but what does this have to do with IT? It’s simple, really. The type of transformation that Dish services are undertaking is in response to market demands and a need to optimize the investments they have made in their core service delivery. IT can learn a valuable lesson from this by creating new ways for their delivery capabilities to service their constituents. For example, if you have an IT help desk that is manned 24/7, why wouldn’t you enable that team to perform infrastructure tasks or administration duties during down time? This can be achieved via development of Knowledge Centric Services (KCS) methodologies and has the added benefit of averaging down the costs of performing those tasks. Or, maybe, because the help desk has the soft skills necessary to interface with users, they can become a vehicle for advancing user training or community adoption of policies such as security awareness.
Likewise, in the operations teams, if the user community (“market”) is consuming cloud services (“shadow IT”), what really is the lift for IT to regain control of these new compute and service assets? With today’s service platforms such as Vistara and on-demand, consumption based services for SysOps and DevOps, the old traditional barriers for IT operations, are greatly reduced. The teams you have invested in can acquire new delivery skills through service brokerage without giving up control or governance. Sometimes, all it takes is finding the right partner to do that delivery on your behalf.
And that is the story here. Samsung had a need to fix 3 million washers in the US, therefore they brokered the service to Dish Network because of that company’s capability. Not because Dish is known as the appliance repair mecca of the free world, but because they had all the tools and resources necessary and could be educated to perform the actual task. And while a Dish service technician may not have gotten into his career to fix washers, he recognized an opportunity to expand his skills and retain his value to his employer.
You can now have your smartphone screen repaired in your home via a Dish technician, and soon, Dish might be installing your homes solar panels. By expanding their vision of what it means to be valuable to their customers, and leveraging what they already had invested in, they have expanded their market and created new revenue streams. IT can do this too, by taking off the traditional operational blinders and re-imagining a future state where all of the business technology requirements can be fulfilled simply and effectively through an expanded services portfolio.
With the advent of next-gen technologies, aaS offerings, and self-healing infrastructures, many in IT operations may feel that their days are numbered, and that their value is slipping. However, it doesn’t need to be this way. The future of IT operations is bright, as long as you are willing to expand your horizons and adapt to the “new normal” of information technologies consumption, and just as importantly user expectations.
Click here to learn about how modern IT Help Desk approaches and how cloud platforms and a tech-savvy workforce have fundamentally changed the support game
By Geoff Smith, Director of MS Business Development
Goldilocks, Serverless and DevOps | @CloudExpo @NewRelic #IoT #Cloud #DevOps #BigData
Technological innovation drives every business, industry and sector – mostly positively, but not always. 2016 was no exception – from the first long-haul driverless cargo delivery to automated retail locations to the stiffening competition among ‘smart assistants’ we’re seeing big technological leaps at a breakneck pace.
At the same time, many of the enterprise trends of the last few years are continuing, such as traditional businesses leading big digital transformation and the move to public clouds, with the continued market dominance of Amazon’s $13B AWS business.
Announcing @TS_Embedded to Exhibit at @ThingsExpo | #IoT #AI #Embedded
SYS-CON Events announced today that Technologic Systems Inc., an embedded systems solutions company, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s @ThingsExpo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Technologic Systems is an embedded systems company with headquarters in Fountain Hills, Arizona. They have been in business for 32 years, helping more than 8,000 OEM customers and building over a hundred COTS products that have never been discontinued. Technologic Systems’ product base consists of a wide variety of off-the-shelf PC/104 single board computers, computer-on-modules, touch panel computers, peripherals and industrial controllers. They also offer custom configurations and design services. Technologic Systems specializes in the ARM and X86 architectures, FPGA IP-core design, and open-source software support based on Linux, Android, and Windows, providing advanced custom solutions using hardware-software co-design strategies.
Microsoft Office 365 wins cloud game in Europe
(c)iStock/MrIncredible
Google is losing ground to Microsoft in the game of “cloud”.
The company – which broke the mould with a cloud-based office productivity pack, the G Suite – is behind Microsoft Office 365 in Europe. According to a research from data protection company Bitglass, adoption of the Microsoft suite in the region has more than doubled in the past year.
The study is based on analysis of 8,000 mail servers to determine the cloud apps being used in businesses.
Bitglass stated that, in the UK, adoption of Office 365 grew from 16.4% in 2015 to 35% in 2016, while G Suite’s adoption increased from 7.2% in 2015 to 18.7% in 2016.
In France, adoption of Office 365 grew from 22.4% in 2015 to 49.8% in 2016, while German adoption grew from 16.2% to 40%. French adoption of G Suite grew from 14.5% in 2015 to 32.3%, while in Germany the adoption of G Suite grew from 6.3% to 23.3%.
From an industry sector perspective, Google is said to have seen major wins in media companies previously, boasting businesses such as News Corp as early adopters. Google holds 31.7% share in media and 24.9% in technology, but Microsoft’s cloud-based Office Suite showed the larger share of adoption in all sectors.
Bitglass further reported that 49% of organisations with 1,000+ employees have deployed Office 365, while only 20% have deployed G Suite.
The study also found a higher cloud usage in large public companies than in small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as well as higher rates of adoption for Office 365 than for G Suite.
Adoption of Office 365 has grown 9% among public companies to 55.4% on a year-over-year basis, while G Suite deployments is at a much slower rate in both public and private organisations.
Cisco to Stop Intercloud by March 2017
Cisco has announced that it will stop its Cisco Intercloud Services (CIS) in March 2017, and the existing workloads will be moved to other infrastructure. A spokesperson of the company confirmed that some may even be moved to the public cloud, depending on the nature of the workload, though it did not specify which public cloud will be chosen for this move.
This is a part of Cisco’s cloud strategy, and has been in the pipeline for some time now. In October, it announced a timeline to move its workloads to other private and public, and according to that document, the last date to order CIS through point-of-sale mechanism is March 31, 2017. It is not known if support for CIS would also end on the same date, or if there will be an extension based on a case-by-case basis. According to Kip Compton, Vice-President for Cloud Platform and Services, all clients on CIS would be fully migrated by the specified deadline.
Cisco has stated that it’s evolving customer demands have led the company to change its cloud strategy. According to a release, Cisco believes that the cloud industry has undergone massive transformation over the last two years, and many of its customers are looking to develop applications that would drive their digital transformations. In the light of these developments, the company believes its best to move away from CIS, and focus on other aspects of it cloud business. Some reports show that Cisco is planning to focus extensively on enterprise hybrid cloud and SP network virtualization, to ensure that its existing resources are being utilized to the optimum.
The concept of intercloud was introduced by Cisco in 2014, to make it easy for cloud providers to move their data between different clouds. This was hugely beneficial to many companies, as they could offer better service to their customers by moving workloads to clouds that were closer to the customers’ location.
CIS’ Intercloud comprises of computing, storage, and networking services, that are on par with some of the leading cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. CIS offered Virtual Machine instances that were optimized for general purpose workloads, as well as instances that were optimized for compute, storage, and memory. In addition, it gives customers a wide range of operating system choices that include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, and Windows operating system. It is based on OpenStack – the open source cloud software.
It is worthy to note that HP also launched an intercloud service in the past and killed it, while Dell made plans to launch an Openstack-based cloud, but later moved away from it. Rackspace, the company that helped develop OpenStack, has stopped offering cloud services on it. All these companies have moved away from intercloud, as they believe that it does not play an important role in the cloud market at this point in time. In the future, if the cloud industry transforms to accept intercloud, then maybe they will start thinking about it again.
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Crossing the Line from Virtual to Real | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #AI #Sensors
I was on a high-rise construction site 34-floors above the city. I was talking to the construction crew when a fight broke out. There was an explosion and the floor collapsed. I removed the virtual reality (VR) goggles and laughed. It was so real. The VR solutions provided an incredible experience, almost like being there. As good as my experience was, it was not reality. It was a controlled pre-programmed experience – a notional idea. Today, however, VR and sensor technologies enable a notional idea to become reality – a Real-Reality.