When shopping for a new data processing platform for IoT solutions, many development teams want to be able to test-drive options before making a choice. Yet when evaluating an IoT solution, it’s simply not feasible to do so at scale with physical devices. Building a sensor simulator is the next best choice; however, generating a realistic simulation at very high TPS with ease of configurability is a formidable challenge. When dealing with multiple application or transport protocols, you would be looking at some significant engineering investment.
On-demand, serverless computing enables developers to try out a fleet of devices on IoT gateways with ease. With a sensor simulator built on top of AWS Lambda, it’s possible to elastically generate device sensors that report their state to the cloud.

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Like me, I’m sure that many of you nerds have read the book “I, Robot.” “I, Robot” is the seminal book written by Isaac Asimov (actually it was a series of books, but I only read the one) that explores the moral and ethical challenges posed by a world dominated by robots.
But I read that book like 50 years ago, so the movie “I, Robot” with Will Smith is actually more relevant to me today. The movie does a nice job of discussing the ethical and moral challenges associated with a society where robots play such a dominant and crucial role in everyday life.

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IT teams define success as solving problems quickly. To enable ITSM modernization we have to think of adopting the tools and methods that will enable resolution of ITSM issues more quickly. To be clear, modernization does not mean stepping away from SLAs or DevOps. Instead, modernization means bringing on automation of key IT processes and capturing information that can be used to improve future customer interactions or product launches or methodologies.

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Google has announced the launch of Network Service Tiers, offering customers cheaper, lower performance networking.

The move is claimed to be the first from a major public cloud provider offering a tiered cloud network.

Current Google Cloud customers are automatically on the ‘premium’ tier, with the new ‘standard’ tier – “an attractively-priced network with performance comparable to other leading public clouds”, as the company puts it – becoming available. Pricing for outbound traffic is priced up to 33% lower in standard than in premium.

“You enjoy the same infrastructure with Premium Tier. But for some use cases, you may prefer a cheaper, lower-performance alternative,” said Urs Holzle, Google SVP technical infrastructure, in a blog post. “With Network Service Tiers, you can choose the network that’s right for you, for each application.”

Google enlisted the help of Cedexis, an internet performance monitoring provider, to assess the differences between the premium and standard tiers for latency and throughput. For HTTP load balancing traffic at the 50th percentile (below), premium throughput was at 5,401 kbps, compared to standard of 3,223 kbps.

Elsewhere, marketing automation software provider Marketo is to go all-in on Google’s cloud, as part of a wider six year ‘alliance’ seeing expanded use of Marketo at Google internally, as well as Google’s tools being integrated into Marketo’s products.

“Our alliance with Google will simplify and improve how enterprises engage with their customers,” said Steve Lucas, Marketo CEO in a statement. “Marketo customers use our Engagement Platform to deliver personalised experiences, fuelling revenue growth and improving brand impact, while scaling to support the demands of today’s digital landscape.

“This collaboration with Google takes that capability to new heights, and I’m incredibly excited about what we’ll provide together for our customers,” Lucas added.

Last month, announcing Q2 financial results, Google said it had tripled the number of cloud deals above $500,000 year over year. CEO Sundar Pichai said Google Cloud Platform “continues to experience impressive growth across products, sectors and geographies and increasingly with large enterprise customers in regulated sectors.”

In his session at @ThingsExpo, Dr. Robert Cohen, an economist and senior fellow at the Economic Strategy Institute, presented the findings of a series of six detailed case studies of how large corporations are implementing IoT. The session explored how IoT has improved their economic performance, had major impacts on business models and resulted in impressive ROIs. The companies covered span manufacturing and services firms. He also explored servicification, how manufacturing firms shift from selling a product to offering it as a service and discussed methods you can employ to estimate how investing in IoT will affect your firm.

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“You can’t stop the incessant march of economics” – Bill Schmarzo

Okay, so it’s probably not cool to quote oneself, but hey, this is my blog and I get to do what I want. And for anyone who follows me knows, I love to “riff” on the game-changing power of economics. The “economics of big data” – where the cost to store, manage and analyze data is 20x to 100x cheaper than traditional analytics – started this big data and data science craze. But ultimately it is the economics of value, or to be specific, “value in use” where the economics really become a game changer.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that JETRO will showcase Japan Digital Transformation Pavilion at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. The Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) is a non-profit organization that provides business support services to companies expanding to Japan. With the support of JETRO’s dedicated staff, clients can incorporate their business; receive visa, immigration, and HR support; find dedicated office space; identify local government subsidies; get tailored market studies; and more.

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