Make room for IoT. It’s a necessary step to moving any business forward. What can the world expect from IoT technology in the upcoming year? IoT implementations that bring in new revenue streams and deliver real-time business insights. We’ll see a rising trend in the intersect of virtualization and IoT. As the number of connected things continues to rise, it has been projected to reach 50.1 billion things in 2020, and there is estimated to be 44 trillion gigabytes of data from all those connected things—that’s equal to the number of stars in the universe. It’s incredible!
As the number of connected things continues to rise, it has been projected to reach 50.1 billion things in 2020, and there is estimated to be 44 trillion gigabytes of data from all those connected things—that’s equal to the number of stars in the universe. It’s incredible!
Monthly Archives: January 2017
Cloud #Serverless Architecture | @CloudExpo @AccentureCloud #AI #DevOps
Contrary to conventional wisdom, we are not entering a new era of technology. We’re already there. We are living in the midst of one of the most disruptive periods in enterprise IT, and cloud is the leading catalyst. There are several trends marking this dramatic transition in 2017, five of which warrant close scrutiny. Public cloud use continues to grow at hyper-scale. A global survey from Accenture of nearly 1,900 executives across 15 industries reveals massive growth in public cloud. In the study, four out of five executives indicated that they intend to move more of their operations to the cloud within the next several years.
Evaluating Hybrid Cloud | @CloudExpo #SDN #DataCenter #Compliance
Technology is advancing at a rapid pace. To keep up, organizations must now take more strategic approaches to their business management solutions that support respective requirements. Today, in every organization, conflicting interests, misinformation, and fear of change make it difficult to know how to navigate the cloud safely. That’s why, when making a sensible technology plan for the times ahead, it’s crucial to ask the following questions to wade through the confusion.
[slides] #DevOps Agility | @DevOpsSummit @SungardAS #Monitoring
Whether they’re located in a public, private, or hybrid cloud environment, cloud technologies are constantly evolving. While the innovation is exciting, the end mission of delivering business value and rapidly producing incremental product features is paramount. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Kiran Chitturi, CTO Architect at Sungard AS, discussed DevOps culture, its evolution of frameworks and technologies, and how it is achieving maturity. He also covered various styles and stacks in DevOps with examples and live demos – on AWS using tools/techniques for continuous integration, configuration management and delivery orchestration.
[slides] The #IoT Factory | @ThingsExpo @Cisco_IoT #BigData #AI #IIoT #M2M
IoT offers a value of almost $4 trillion to the manufacturing industry through platforms that can improve margins, optimize operations & drive high performance work teams. By using IoT technologies as a foundation, manufacturing customers are integrating worker safety with manufacturing systems, driving deep collaboration and utilizing analytics to exponentially increased per-unit margins. However, as Benoit Lheureux, the VP for Research at Gartner points out, “IoT project implementers often underestimate the complexity of IoT integration and overestimate the built-in integration capabilities of their IoT platforms.”
[slides] #IoT Opportunities | @ThingsExpo @Numerex #IIoT #M2M #API #AI
The IoT industry is now at a crossroads, between the fast-paced innovation of technologies and the pending mass adoption by global enterprises. The complexity of combining rapidly evolving technologies and the need to establish practices for market acceleration pose a strong challenge to global enterprises as well as IoT vendors. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Clark Smith, senior product manager for Numerex, discussed how Numerex, as an experienced, established IoT provider, has embraced a new model to address this challenge – IoT as a Service
[slides] Fast with #Microservices | @DevOpsSummit @Wercker #AI #DevOps
As software becomes more and more complex, we, as software developers, have been splitting up our code into smaller and smaller components. This is also true for the environment in which we run our code: going from bare metal, to VMs to the modern-day Cloud Native world of containers, schedulers and micro services. While we have figured out how to run containerized applications in the cloud using schedulers, we’ve yet to come up with a good solution to bridge the gap between getting your containers from your laptop to the cloud.
How do we build software for containers? How do we ship containers? How do we do all of it without shooting ourselves in the foot?
Swift Transportation Benefits from Cloud
There are many case studies of companies that have benefited from the use of cloud technology, and today, we’re going to see about a transportation and logistics company that has transformed its business with cloud. Swift Transportation is the largest common carrier in the United States, and operates more than 18,000 trucks. Founded in 1966 by Carl Moyes, this company has seen tremendous growth over the last four decades. It is a publicly listed company and is headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona.
Not so long ago, commercial drivers of Swift Corporation spent more time doing data-entry and other mundane tasks, than diving, and this will lowering their overall productivity and morale. The process entailed drivers to go to a customer’s site and browse through more than 60 forms to identify the right one for each kind of load. After taking out the form, the driver has to manually enter the details of the trip. This process was time-consuming and was also prone to manual data-entry errors. Sometimes, drivers have to make four to five trips a day, and this data-entry was frustrating them because they are paid to drive and not enter data.
To address this problem, Swift Transportation turned to the cloud. As a first step, it issued new Android-powered Samsung tablets to the drivers of all 18,000 trucks, and all the apps were connected to Microsoft Azure.
These mobile devices are connected the truck’s dashboard, so drivers cannot take them out and use it for external inspections. The software installed in these tablets have a more navigated workflow, so drivers can find what they want, enter pertinent information, and can get on the road within minutes. Such a streamlined process saves time, and reduces frustration for drivers as they don’t have to spend a ton of time looking for the right form and entering elaborate manual data in it.
The software was developed in partnership with a company called Blue Dot Solutions. Developers of this software sat with drivers and got a feel of what they want and the problems they face. So, the software completely caters to the needs of drivers, and is undoubtedly much faster than the manual process of entering data.
In addition, these mobile devices collect information about the truck on which they are installed. Such information can include engine performance, mileage, and other pertinent data, so it can be shared with the driver, and also can help the company to get a first-hand idea of the state of each truck. Such a data can identify maintenance problems even before they occur, and can be fixed right away. This way, downtimes and late deliveries can be avoided, not to mention the improved safety that comes with it.
On top of it, such data can help the company to get a better insight into its business operations, revenue and more, using which strategic decisions can be made to fill any existing gaps.
In all, cloud is changing the nature of operations of Swift Transportation and is streamlining the processes and making it more efficient.
The post Swift Transportation Benefits from Cloud appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
What Is an Application Delivery Controller: Part 2 | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Virtualization
One of the unfortunate effects of the continued evolution of the load balancer into today’s application delivery controller (ADC) is that it is often too easy to forget the basic problem for which load balancers were originally created—producing highly available, scalable, and predictable application services. We get too lost in the realm of intelligent application routing, virtualized application services, and shared infrastructure deployments to remember that none of these things are possible without a firm basis in basic load balancing technology. So how important is load balancing, and how do its effects lead to streamlined application delivery?
Three major cloud trends for 2017: SMBs, vendors, and architecture
(c)iStock.com/Leslie Achtymichuk
With adoption growing, service provision changing and the emergence of true cloud architecture, this is going to be a big year for cloud computing. Here is the story behind each trend:
SMBs drive cloud adoption
Small and medium-sized businesses will be the driving force behind the cloud adoption not only because the cloud presents an amazing and cost-effective opportunity to utilise the services they are not able to afford in-house, but also because it’s the easiest and scalable market demographic for service providers to drive sales.
Take for example the widespread adoption of Microsoft Office 365. It is a direct cloud replica of what everybody is used to in a classical office infrastructure sense — Microsoft Exchange email. Office 365 provides the same functionality, except there is no need to buy hardware or purchase licensing for the entire server. Just hosting a few mailboxes through another hosting provider is the easiest way to adopt the service. Attached to that, comes a myriad of add-on services extending the functionality of Office 365 mailboxes. Backup, analytics, additional file storage and many other tools make the service more attractive to all users across the board. This provides an attractive opportunity for service providers to increase recurring revenue and for end users to adopt and use the service without any large investments.
There are many other examples that will drive the cloud adoption by SMBs in the next 12-18 months. This will be the largest service adoption shift in the whole of the IT market space.
Traditional distributors give way to cloud service providers
The classical distribution model, which involves moving physical boxes of hardware and software to provide service to customers, is rapidly changing shape. To stay in the game, traditional distributors are turning their focus from physical goods onto service provision. Not only in a sense that they start providing services from their own datacenters, but also in a sense that they are turning into aggregated cloud distribution companies to provide their reseller channels with all the available Independent Software Vendor (ISV) services they are able to consolidate under one invoice.
This will create a completely new trend where cloud services will be more predominant and focused on the traditional distribution channels. When choosing a cloud vendor, service providers will be giving preferences to services that come with easy management, integration, and flexible onboarding tools.
True cloud architecture emerges
We are going to see a big shift in the understanding of the true cloud architecture. Cloud has become a buzz world over the last few years, but in its essence, it’s not much different from what’s been on the market for about 15-20 years: a model of providing services from a centralised location, from a shared platform, to take of case of IT needs of SMBs and enterprises.
In the next 12-18 months we’ll see a strong trend toward creating a true cloud architecture, which will become the foundation of the cloud industry. It’s very different from just provisioning individual services to individual customers. It’s all about the management and service delivery layer that sits on top of the actual commodity cloud services.
Cloud vendors who are not able to offer a white-labeled, multi-tiered, multi-tenant, securely separated, and management-delegated solution will miss out on new business in 2017. Service providers and SMB customers will be looking for a solution that allows them to sign in their own distributors and sub-distributors, resellers and sub-resellers, and has a capacity to create multiple user roles for multiple user departments. This functionality will be a critical service differentiation in the cloud space in the coming months.
This year’s developments in the cloud space will create unprecedented opportunities for service providers and SMB customers. Service providers will be able to grow their business by packaging and reselling ISV hosted services through existing channel ecosystems, without any capital investment. This will also open new opportunities for SMBs, who will continue replacing in-house IT infrastructure with cloud-based services, taking advantage of the Opex model of service consumption.