It is one thing to build single industrial IoT applications, but what will it take to build the Smart Cities and truly society changing applications of the future? The technology won’t be the problem, it will be the number of parties that need to work together and be aligned in their motivation to succeed. In his Day 2 Keynote at @ThingsExpo, Henrik Kenani Dahlgren, Portfolio Marketing Manager at Ericsson, discussed how to plan to cooperate, partner, and form lasting all-star teams to change the world and how it starts with business models and monetization strategies.

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Many private cloud projects were built to deliver self-service access to development and test resources. While those clouds delivered faster access to resources, they lacked visibility, control and security needed for production deployments. In their session at 18th Cloud Expo, Steve Anderson, Product Manager at BMC Software, and Rick Lefort, Principal Technical Marketing Consultant at BMC Software, discussed how a cloud designed for production operations not only helps accelerate developer innovation, it also delivers the control that IT Operations needs to run a production cloud without getting in the way.

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Microservices (μServices) are a fascinating evolution of the Distributed Object Computing (DOC) paradigm. Initial design of DOC attempted to solve the problem of simplifying developing complex distributed applications by applying object-oriented design principles to disparate components operating across networked infrastructure. In this model, DOC “hid” the complexity of making this work from the developer regardless of the deployment architecture through the use of complex frameworks, such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM).

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(c)iStock.com/HYWARDS

Global spending on public cloud services and infrastructure will hit $122.5 billion by the end of this year at an increase of almost 25% on 2016, according to the latest note from IDC.

The analyst house argues that discrete manufacturing, professional services, and banking are the primary public cloud service industries based on market share today, while professional services (23.9% compound annual growth rate), retail (22.8%) and media (22.5%) are expected to be the fastest growers. Almost half of all public cloud spending will come from businesses with more than 1,000 employees.

The United States will remain the largest market for public cloud services generating more than 60% of revenue through the forecast period, IDC argues. Yet seven out of eight regions are expected to reach CAGRs of more than 20% over the next five years – with the US lagging behind at a mere 19.9% CAGR.

“European companies have been slower in the adoption of cloud when compared to their US counterparts, but now the market is maturing and it is the right time for cloud providers to target and capture the untapped segments,” said Serena Da Rold, IDC senior research manager for customer insights and analysis.

This missive makes sense when examining the various moves providers have made in the continent over recent months. Last month reports said that Facebook was expanding its data centre empire with a new site in Denmark, while Rackspace moved operations to Germany in November last year and IBM became the latest vendor to build a UK site at the same time.

Software as a service will remain dominant albeit slowing down over time – two thirds of all public cloud spending in 2017, moving to 60% by 2020 – yet the figures also need to be tempered with some lateral thinking, IDC argues.

“As cloud adoption expands over the next four years, what clouds are and what they can do will evolve dramatically – in several important ways,” said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC. “The cloud will become more distributed – through Internet of Things edge services and multicloud services – more trusted, more intelligent, more industry and workload specialised, and more channel mediated.

“As the cloud evolves these important new capabilities – what IDC calls ‘Cloud 2.0’ – the use cases for the cloud will dramatically expand,” Gens added.

According to a note from Synergy Research published at the beginning of this month, quarterly public cloud infrastructure service revenues – including public infrastructure as a service and platform as a service – have hit more than $7 billion, continuing to grow at almost 50% per year.

(c)iStock.com/HYWARDS

Global spending on public cloud services and infrastructure will hit $122.5 billion by the end of this year at an increase of almost 25% on 2016, according to the latest note from IDC.

The analyst house argues that discrete manufacturing, professional services, and banking are the primary public cloud service industries based on market share today, while professional services (23.9% compound annual growth rate), retail (22.8%) and media (22.5%) are expected to be the fastest growers. Almost half of all public cloud spending will come from businesses with more than 1,000 employees.

The United States will remain the largest market for public cloud services generating more than 60% of revenue through the forecast period, IDC argues. Yet seven out of eight regions are expected to reach CAGRs of more than 20% over the next five years – with the US lagging behind at a mere 19.9% CAGR.

“European companies have been slower in the adoption of cloud when compared to their US counterparts, but now the market is maturing and it is the right time for cloud providers to target and capture the untapped segments,” said Serena Da Rold, IDC senior research manager for customer insights and analysis.

This missive makes sense when examining the various moves providers have made in the continent over recent months. Last month reports said that Facebook was expanding its data centre empire with a new site in Denmark, while Rackspace moved operations to Germany in November last year and IBM became the latest vendor to build a UK site at the same time.

Software as a service will remain dominant albeit slowing down over time – two thirds of all public cloud spending in 2017, moving to 60% by 2020 – yet the figures also need to be tempered with some lateral thinking, IDC argues.

“As cloud adoption expands over the next four years, what clouds are and what they can do will evolve dramatically – in several important ways,” said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC. “The cloud will become more distributed – through Internet of Things edge services and multicloud services – more trusted, more intelligent, more industry and workload specialised, and more channel mediated.

“As the cloud evolves these important new capabilities – what IDC calls ‘Cloud 2.0’ – the use cases for the cloud will dramatically expand,” Gens added.

According to a note from Synergy Research published at the beginning of this month, quarterly public cloud infrastructure service revenues – including public infrastructure as a service and platform as a service – have hit more than $7 billion, continuing to grow at almost 50% per year.

(c)iStock.com/ismagilov

We constantly hear about programs such as Race for the Cure, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, The Ice Bucket Challenge, and other fundraising or awareness initiatives for diseases.  However, hearing a disease has been cured almost never happens. With billions of dollars being used to research diseases around the world, many people started looking for reasons as to why more progress hasn’t been made. Researchers re-examined their processes and realised two things. First, research methods have been largely unchanged in many disease-fighting fields. Foundations, doctors and researchers would conduct studies independent from any other group studying the same disease and draw conclusions from their limited data set.

One example of this was Parkinson’s disease, whereindividual doctors instinctively measured the progression of symptoms during well visits. “Nearly 200 years after Parkinson’s disease was first described by Dr. James Parkinson in 1817, we are still subjectively measuring Parkinson’s disease largely the same way doctors did then,” said Todd Sherer, Ph.D., CEO of The Michael J. Fox Foundation. With few data points and poor collection of that data, Parkinson’s researchers weren’t able to see trends in the data or delve into what treatments were making a positive effect.

The second realisation was that cloud technology was the perfect vehicle to share patient data with other researchers. Big data has been called the “next big tech disrupter” and many companies were already using big data to identify customer trends. Similarly, the scientific community started implementing the cloud to collect data and discover trends in patient and genetic data. Today, the Michael J. Fox Foundation is working on collecting the “world’s largest collection of data about life with Parkinson’s” via smart watches that upload patient data directly to the cloud.

Many disease-fighting organisations are working to implement the cloud as a data sharing vehicle. Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association, explains why the cloud is a game changer when it comes to curing disease. “To push new novel discoveries, we need the ability to allow scientists and researchers to have access to multiple data sets,” Brown said. “There’s a lot of data out there — data from clinical trials, data from hospitals and their electronic health records, data from the Framingham Heart study. Traditionally, all of that has been kept by individual companies or data owners.”

One beauty of the cloud is hybrid cloud computing, which is the ability to share data without compromising intellectual property. This way,individual entities can share data sets with the public cloud, while synonymously maintaining a private use cloud to store their proprietary findings. This way, everyone has access to the large data sets and can download, manipulate and then store the data it within their own private cloud as they do research.

The importance of the cloud is highlighted by the National Cancer Institute’s program, The Cancer Moonshot, headed by former vice president Joe Biden. The program is designed to double the rate of progress in cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment, and to do in five years what might otherwise take a decade. Of the ten “transformative research recommendations” created to achieve the aggressive Cancer Moonshot goal, buildinga national cancer data ecosystem using the cloud is one of them.

Beyond the data sharing capabilities of the cloud are the computing capabilities. Where desktop computers aren’t able to handle and analyse the massive streams of data that are collected, cloud computing is. Mark Kaganovich, founder of SolveBio and a doctoral candidate in genetics,explained the challenge that companies and researchers are actively working on, is building tools to sift through the “data tornado” and take advantage the “huge opportunity to use statistical learning for medicine.”

One real world cloud application is the sharing of how patients with certain genomes react to certain drug treatments. Eric Dishman, Director of Proactive Health Research at Intel,shared that when he had a rare form of kidney cancer doctors tried a variety of treatments without success. It wasn’t until his genome was sequenced were his doctors able to effectively treat him now knowing which drugs were likely to be most effective.

Currently, cancer organisations are working on sharing data on how cancer patients with similar genomic patterns are reacting to their treatments enabling doctor to effectively choose treatments for future patients. AsClay Christensen explains in his book on health care disruption, the cloud has the ability to take our current system of intuitive medicine and transform it to precision medicine.

(c)iStock.com/ismagilov

We constantly hear about programs such as Race for the Cure, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, The Ice Bucket Challenge, and other fundraising or awareness initiatives for diseases.  However, hearing a disease has been cured almost never happens. With billions of dollars being used to research diseases around the world, many people started looking for reasons as to why more progress hasn’t been made. Researchers re-examined their processes and realised two things. First, research methods have been largely unchanged in many disease-fighting fields. Foundations, doctors and researchers would conduct studies independent from any other group studying the same disease and draw conclusions from their limited data set.

One example of this was Parkinson’s disease, whereindividual doctors instinctively measured the progression of symptoms during well visits. “Nearly 200 years after Parkinson’s disease was first described by Dr. James Parkinson in 1817, we are still subjectively measuring Parkinson’s disease largely the same way doctors did then,” said Todd Sherer, Ph.D., CEO of The Michael J. Fox Foundation. With few data points and poor collection of that data, Parkinson’s researchers weren’t able to see trends in the data or delve into what treatments were making a positive effect.

The second realisation was that cloud technology was the perfect vehicle to share patient data with other researchers. Big data has been called the “next big tech disrupter” and many companies were already using big data to identify customer trends. Similarly, the scientific community started implementing the cloud to collect data and discover trends in patient and genetic data. Today, the Michael J. Fox Foundation is working on collecting the “world’s largest collection of data about life with Parkinson’s” via smart watches that upload patient data directly to the cloud.

Many disease-fighting organisations are working to implement the cloud as a data sharing vehicle. Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association, explains why the cloud is a game changer when it comes to curing disease. “To push new novel discoveries, we need the ability to allow scientists and researchers to have access to multiple data sets,” Brown said. “There’s a lot of data out there — data from clinical trials, data from hospitals and their electronic health records, data from the Framingham Heart study. Traditionally, all of that has been kept by individual companies or data owners.”

One beauty of the cloud is hybrid cloud computing, which is the ability to share data without compromising intellectual property. This way,individual entities can share data sets with the public cloud, while synonymously maintaining a private use cloud to store their proprietary findings. This way, everyone has access to the large data sets and can download, manipulate and then store the data it within their own private cloud as they do research.

The importance of the cloud is highlighted by the National Cancer Institute’s program, The Cancer Moonshot, headed by former vice president Joe Biden. The program is designed to double the rate of progress in cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment, and to do in five years what might otherwise take a decade. Of the ten “transformative research recommendations” created to achieve the aggressive Cancer Moonshot goal, buildinga national cancer data ecosystem using the cloud is one of them.

Beyond the data sharing capabilities of the cloud are the computing capabilities. Where desktop computers aren’t able to handle and analyse the massive streams of data that are collected, cloud computing is. Mark Kaganovich, founder of SolveBio and a doctoral candidate in genetics,explained the challenge that companies and researchers are actively working on, is building tools to sift through the “data tornado” and take advantage the “huge opportunity to use statistical learning for medicine.”

One real world cloud application is the sharing of how patients with certain genomes react to certain drug treatments. Eric Dishman, Director of Proactive Health Research at Intel,shared that when he had a rare form of kidney cancer doctors tried a variety of treatments without success. It wasn’t until his genome was sequenced were his doctors able to effectively treat him now knowing which drugs were likely to be most effective.

Currently, cancer organisations are working on sharing data on how cancer patients with similar genomic patterns are reacting to their treatments enabling doctor to effectively choose treatments for future patients. AsClay Christensen explains in his book on health care disruption, the cloud has the ability to take our current system of intuitive medicine and transform it to precision medicine.

Serverless Computing or Functions as a Service (FaaS) is gaining momentum. Amazon is fueling the innovation by expanding Lambda to edge devices and content distribution network. IBM, Microsoft, and Google have their own FaaS offerings in the public cloud. There are over half-a-dozen open source serverless projects that are getting the attention of developers. This year, expect to see new platforms emerging in

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