Continuous Innovation | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #CD #ContinuousDelivery

Businesses have always had to transform to find better and more efficient ways to deliver value faster to their users, customers or consumers. The motivating factors are shorter lead times, automated and streamlined value flow, as well as reduction of overall costs and bound capital, requiring enterprises to transition to a continuous innovation and optimization model.

read more

Announcing @Catchpoint Named “Silver Sponsor” of @CloudExpo New York | #APM #Cloud #DevOps

SYS-CON Events announced today that Catchpoint, a leading digital experience intelligence company, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Catchpoint Systems is a leading Digital Performance Analytics company that provides unparalleled insight into your customer-critical services to help you consistently deliver an amazing customer experience. Designed for digital business, Catchpoint is the only end-user experience monitoring (EUM) platform that can simultaneously capture, index and analyze object-level performance data inline across the most extensive monitor types and node coverage, enabling a smarter, faster way to preempt issues and optimize service delivery. More than 350 customers in over 30 countries trust Catchpoint to strengthen their brand and grow their businesses.

read more

Announcing @MobiDev_ to Exhibit at @CloudExpo NY & Silicon Valley | #Cloud #Mobile

SYS-CON Events announced today that MobiDev, a client-oriented software development company, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place October 31-November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
MobiDev is a software company that develops and delivers turn-key mobile apps, websites, web services, and complex software systems for startups and enterprises. Since 2009 it has grown from a small group of passionate engineers and business managers to a full-scale mobile software company with over 200 developers, designers, quality assurance engineers, project managers in house, specializing in the world-class mobile and web development.

read more

How to run Microsoft SQL & Visual Studio on Mac using Parallels Desktop

At Parallels, we love sharing our customers’ success stories! Recently, Tim Goldstein, a leading business intelligence analyst, database architect, and senior developer specializing in the Microsoft SQL server tool set, implemented a more agile development process with Parallels Desktop for Mac. Goldstein’s new process has been a great success and proven Parallels Desktop to be […]

The post How to run Microsoft SQL & Visual Studio on Mac using Parallels Desktop appeared first on Parallels Blog.

Parallels Desktop Holiday Mac Bundle – $489 worth of savings!

 ‘Tis the season for savings! Here at Parallels we want to how our immense appreciation to our customers by offering a holiday lineup of premium applications to save you some money this season. From now until December 31st we will offer 7 free applications when you buy Parallels Desktop for Mac. That’s a 91% discount […]

The post Parallels Desktop Holiday Mac Bundle – $489 worth of savings! appeared first on Parallels Blog.

IBM adds three new advancements to Watson Cloud platform

IBM has added three new advancements to the Watson Cloud platform: real-time Speaker Diarisation (beta) support available via the Watson Speech to Text API, Visual Recognition tagging with a built-in set of visual labels, and the Watson Discovery Service.

With these new capabilities, developers will be able to add intelligent visual recognition and speech to text capabilities to web and mobile applications.

Speaker diarisation is basically used for speech transcription. IBM describes the process as “the algorithms used to identify and segment speech by speaker identity.” By adding speaker diarisation to the Watson Speech to Text API, developers will be able to build applications capable of analysing conversations and taking action while the conversation is happening between two people in real-time.

IBM has updated Visual Recognition tagging and now includes a built-in library of tens of thousands of visual labels, allowing the platform to recognise various visual concepts such as objects, people, places, activities, scenes. Watson Visual Recognition can recognise broad visual concepts and objects in photos and understand visual scenes based on context. It also features custom training and classification capabilities.

The Watson Discovery Service converts, normalises, and betters streams of data so that the content can be analysed to gain insights, discover patterns, and contextualised. This happens via using integrated Watson APIs such as the AlchemyLanguage API and Document Conversion API. Developers can upload their own sets of data to the service or use publicly available datasets.

G-Cloud Sales Soar in the UK

G-cloud is making a big impact in the UK, as is evident from the recent sales figures released by the company. For the first time since its inception in 2012, G-cloud has passed the £1.5 billion mark, and much of it comes from its  small and medium enterprise (SME) customers. According to the release £875 million came from SMEs, while £702 million came from large enterprises.

These numbers, in many ways, reflect the strength of the British economy, and its ability to stand firm despite Brexit. Also, it shows the growing presence of G-cloud, and the cloud industry at large in the UK. The rate of adoption of technology, especially cloud, is fairly high in the Western world, and these numbers are yet another indicator of it.

Along with the private enterprise, the Central Government also has adopted cloud in a big way. In fact, the central government uses G-cloud more than any other area of public sector. The percentage of sales made through the central government on G-cloud is a whopping 74 percent, while the remaining sectors account for a mere 26 percent. Through this large spending, the central government has set the right example for private and public sectors in the UK.

Much of this spending comes through the Digital Outcomes and Specialists (DOS) agreements that cam into being in April of this year to replace the Digital Services framework (DSF) that was in place since 2012. The new agreement is wider and more encompassing than its predecessor, and it aims to ensure greater adoption of tech among UK governments and businesses. The next iteration of DOS is expected to be released in February 2017 by the Crown Commercial Service (CCS), and this iteration is likely to have the spending figures under the framework in the future. From a cloud perspective, this is good news, as the iteration’s budget for cloud is expected to increase to give a boost to the economy as a whole.

It is significant to note that AWS opened its new cloud data center in London to cater to the growing demands of its UK businesses. This also means that others like G-cloud and Microsoft are already taking steps or are in the process of doing it.

For G-cloud, though the sales numbers are impressive, it still has its task cut out. Local government spending is just short of £85 million, and this is abysmally low when compared to the potential. Local governments and other council services can tap into the power of cloud to improve their offering and streamline their operations, yet they are not willing to move forward. This is something that G-cloud should look into and address if they want to have a larger customer base. It’s best for the company to reach out to individual governments to see what is stopping them from using more cloud services, and how G-cloud can best address them.

In all, G-cloud has a firm grip on the market, but it still has a long way to go, especially in the public sector.

The post G-Cloud Sales Soar in the UK appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

A guide to unlocking the managed cloud opportunity

Cloud is rapidly becoming the standard way of doing business and organisations globally are utilising it as a tool for innovation and business transformation.

Those who successfully use the cloud to achieve growth will have a mature, strategic view of how best to implement and integrate it across their organisations.

As cloud strategies mature and the business benefits of implementing cloud throughout the organisation become clear, hybrid cloud has emerged as the consensus choice to support business growth.

Nearly half of enterprises globally already use some form of hybrid cloud and 72% of enterprises are expected to pursue a hybrid strategy. Hybrid cloud solutions make it easy to deploy new business models and technologies like cognitive analytics, which have the power to transform businesses.

Managed cloud

Managed cloud as part of a wider hybrid cloud strategy allows organisations to utilise cloud computing without having to employ an expert in every area. Companies that use managed cloud can focus on their core business rather than having to divert their cash reserves employing large teams IT experts, technical engineers and system administrators and other experts to manage their IT.

A managed cloud provider will offer its customers a range of expertise as well as large economies of scale as the provider’s engineers manage not only the customers’ computing, storage, networks, and operating systems, but also the complex tools and application stacks that run on top of that infrastructure.

These can include the latest databases and ecommerce platforms, as well as automation tools. Managed cloud allows each individual customer to choose which IT functions it wishes to manage in-house, leaving all the rest to its chosen service provider.

By partnering with a managed cloud provider, specialists can work with organisations to design and tailor an architecture specific to a customer’s application needs.

The provider will also update an organisational architecture on an on-going basis as its requirements evolve and as new features and cloud services become available.

The provider should be able to offer services across a broad range of technologies and deployment models — including dedicated hosting, private cloud platforms like OpenStack and leading public clouds like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Cloud as a delivery mechanism

The combination of choice and expertise means that the provider will deliver an architecture designed to meet an organisation’s application’s specific performance, availability and scalability requirements while eliminating the need for them to retain costly architects in-house.

According to IDC, by 2018, cloud will become a preferred delivery mechanism for analytics, increasing public information consumption by 150% and paving the way for thousands of new industry applications.

New industry applications mean more data will be created and with this comes the challenges around the management of data. Data has little value if it is not available to be analysed and used to help grow the business.

From a tactical point of view, the challenge is to set about finding the best way to ensure data is stored, managed and analysed, without incurring expensive overheads and in a scalable way to allow for rapid future growth.

A managed cloud infrastructure combined with a powerful database that has the speed and flexibility to deploy complex, analytics, can address all these concerns and help an organisation quickly innovate and build new analytical applications.