Bert Loomis was a visionary. This general session will highlight how Bert Loomis and people like him inspire us to build great things with small inventions. In their general session at 19th Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Architect at IBM Bluemix, and Michael O’Neill, Strategic Business Development at Nvidia, discussed the accelerating pace of AI development and how IBM Cloud and NVIDIA are partnering to bring AI capabilities to “every day,” on-demand. They also reviewed two “free infrastructure” programs available to startups and innovators.

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The explosion of new web/cloud/IoT-based applications and the data they generate are transforming our world right before our eyes. In this rush to adopt these new technologies, organizations are often ignoring fundamental questions concerning who owns the data and failing to ask for permission to conduct invasive surveillance of their customers. Organizations that are not transparent about how their systems gather data telemetry without offering shared data ownership risk product rejection, regulatory scrutiny and increasing consumer lack of trust in technology in general.

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Wouldn’t it be great if there were tiny robots that kept track of what you were thinking, then helped you implement your plans automatically? Well, if you’re an admin responsible for monitoring infrastructure, they exist. They’re called chatbots, and they are the key to leveraging ChatOps in order to optimize your monitoring and incident management workflow. This post explains what chatbots and ChatOps do and why they’re so valuable for organizations that are adopting DevOps practices.

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Blockchain is a shared, secure record of exchange that establishes trust, accountability and transparency across supply chain networks. Supported by the Linux Foundation’s open source, open-standards based Hyperledger Project, Blockchain has the potential to improve regulatory compliance, reduce cost and time for product recall as well as advance trade. Are you curious about Blockchain and how it can provide you with new opportunities for innovation and growth?
In her session at 20th Cloud Expo, René Bostic, Technical VP of the IBM Cloud Unit in North America, will discuss the basics of Blockchain, and explore real world use cases across a variety of industries.

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Effective collaboration and communication are highly valued by the DevOps culture, and it’s been like that for a reason. It is an industry where even departments within the same company tend to distrust one another, and where distributed offices full of crucial roles are the norm. Thus, any possible positive improvement in the interaction between people is welcomed, especially for an organization where several moving parts need to collaborate in order to create a product on time and within a budget limitation. You need to master communications if you want to master DevOps. Getting your operations and development teams to work together is the concept on which the success of DevOps hinges. These DevOps tips can help you lay out the basis for a DevOps communication plan that’s sustainable.

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University College London (UCL), ranked consistently as one of the top five universities in the world, is London’s leading multidisciplinary university with more than 10,000 staff , over 26,000 students as well as more than 100 departments, institutes and research centers. With 25 Nobel Prize winners and three Fields medalists among UCL’s alumni and staff, the university has attained a world-class reputation for the quality of its teaching and research across the academic spectrum.

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To more closely examine the variety of ways in which IT departments around the world are integrating cloud services, and the effect hybrid IT has had on their organizations and IT job roles, SolarWinds recently released the SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2017: Portrait of a Hybrid Organization. This annual study consists of survey-based research that explores significant trends, developments, and movements related to and directly affecting IT and IT professionals.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that CA Technologies has been named “Platinum 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, New York, and 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place in November in Silicon Valley, California.

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Digital transformation continues to dominate boardroom discussions as businesses increasingly realise the organisational and cost efficiencies that digitisation can provide.

The concept reflects technology’s role in both shaping and stimulating strategic decision-making, with its ability to automate and simplify business processes, improve customer relationships, enhance productivity, and reap cost savings. In fact, IDC predicts that by the end of 2017, two-thirds of CEOs of global 2000 enterprises will have digital transformation at the centre of their corporate strategy.

However, it can be a challenge for organisations to implement a digitisation strategy against a background of increasingly complex day-to-day IT operations, which often involve managing both cloud and on-premises IT infrastructure. For many, application programming interfaces (APIs) are an essential component of merging the old and the new IT platforms, capturing vast amounts of data and ultimately achieving their digital transformation strategy.

The most common description of an API is a set of functions and procedures that allow applications to access the features or data of an operating system, application or other service to extend its capability or even create an entirely new feature. APIs are everywhere in our personal lives – whether that’s watching YouTube, posting on Facebook or purchasing something online from Amazon. APIs enable our digital lives.

The potential of APIs to deliver business advantage cannot be underestimated, either. APIs are igniting a cultural shift within many organisations, enabling the integration of diverse IT systems, building more collaborative and self-service IT environments, and deriving revenues from existing IT assets.

Analyst firm Gartner claims APIs can minimise the friction often caused by organisations implementing a ‘bimodal’ IT strategy – where legacy applications run alongside more innovative digital solutions. It says APIs are the layer through which ‘Mode 1’ and ‘Mode 2’ can connect, bridging the gap between core data and functionality, and a more experimental, innovative application.

APIs can also help simplify engagement with customers, while at the same time providing them with instant, valuable data insights into their business.

Here at iland we have prioritised the integration of APIs into our secure cloud platform to provide our customers with a simple way to engage with and manage their virtual machines and applications in the iland cloud.

For example, customers can access a wealth of data, reports and services via a single pane of glass. Using VMware’s vCloud Director multitenant platform as a foundation, iland’s custom console taps into more than twenty third-party services, such as the VMware vCenter solution, the VMware NSX Manager solution, Salesforce, and Veeam Software.

Customers can make API calls directly to iland’s console and cloud infrastructure, and access the enormous amount of performance, capacity, security and workload metadata that is stored there. Via a user-friendly interface, customers can quickly provision services, set role-based security, and analyse granular performance and capacity patterns. Through the console’s transparent billing capabilities, they get insight into expenses and ways to reduce costs, and they can also make feature recommendations via the console to improve the solution.

Everything in the interface can be automated through iland’s API or software development kits (SDKs), so customers can automate routine operational tasks without having to invest heavily in automation up-front. Also, because the iland cloud provides SDK for Java, Python, Erlang, and Golang, most of its API consumers can use their favourite language to jump right in and get started.

APIs also enable organisations to automate routing operational cloud management tasks – it’s popular with training companies who frequently spin up classroom templates, for example. The API makes it easy to spin up 100 classroom labs for a week, then spin down the labs when the class session has concluded.

In addition, customers can use APIs to integrate with their existing management tools. With our technology, for example, users can access monitoring data and integrate it with their existing monitoring or management tools, thereby extending their pre-existing tools into the iland Cloud.

Additionally, organisations are using APIs to add automation within a disaster recovery (DR) environment. For example, a customer can upload a virtual desktop template to iland and then automate the deployment of hundreds of copies of that desktop when a DR event is declared. Some DR customers are also using APIs to manage their DNS changes, so that their public services are migrated from production to DR in a failover event.

Finally, users can leverage APIs in a development or test environment; they can use scripts to simply power down the environment in the evenings or at weekends, and power back on in the morning, thereby saving money.

For cloud service providers, value added resellers (VARs) and system integrators (SIs), it’s becoming clear that true API integration is the new value-add. If companies want to build sustainable, profitable businesses in the new world of digitisation, they should consider developing skills that enable them to leverage the power and flexibility of APIs.

A 2016 report claims 44 percent of IT decision-makers believe building and managing APIs is fundamental to IT’s ability to complete digital transformation projects more quickly, and the same number said API reuse would significantly speed up digital transformation.

As digital transformation projects pick up pace, APIs will play an integral role in managing and optimising hybrid IT environments across both cloud and on-premises which is becoming the new reality in most businesses today. 

Read more: Why 2017 is quickly becoming the year of the API economy