Announcing @Cedexis to Exhibit at @CloudExpo | #CloudNative #DevOps #DX

SYS-CON Events announced today that Cedexis will exhibit 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.
Cedexis is the leader in data-driven enterprise global traffic management. Whether optimizing traffic through datacenters, clouds, CDNs, or any combination, Cedexis solutions drive quality and cost-effectiveness.

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[session] Scheduling in #Kubernetes | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #Docker #DX

Is advanced scheduling in Kubernetes achievable?
Yes, however, how do you properly accommodate every real-life scenario that a Kubernetes user might encounter?
How do you leverage advanced scheduling techniques to shape and describe each scenario in easy-to-use rules and configurations?
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Oleg Chunikhin, CTO at Kublr, will answer these questions and demonstrate techniques for implementing advanced scheduling. For example, using spot instances and cost-effective resources on AWS, coupled with the ability to deliver a minimum set of functionalities that cover the majority of needs – without configuration complexity.

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Announcing @Yuasa_System to Exhibit at @CloudExpo | #DX #IoT #Wearables

SYS-CON Events announced today that Yuasa System will exhibit at the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) 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.
Yuasa System is introducing a multi-purpose endurance testing system for flexible displays, OLED devices, flexible substrates, flat cables, and films in smartphones, wearables, automobiles, and healthcare.

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How artificial intelligence is revolutionising business in 2017

  • 84% of respondents say AI will enable them to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage.
  • 83% believe AI is a strategic priority for their businesses today.
  • 75% state that AI will allow them to move into new businesses and ventures.

These and many other fascinating insights are from the Boston Consulting Group and MIT Sloan Management Review study published this week, Reshaping Business With Artificial Intelligence. An online summary of the report is available here. The survey is based on interviews with more than 3,000 business executives, managers, and analysts in 112 countries and 21 industries. For additional details regarding the methodology, please see page 4.

The research found significant gaps between companies who have already adopted and understand Artificial Intelligence (AI) and those lagging. AI early adopters invest heavily in analytics expertise and ensuring the quality of algorithms and data can scale across their enterprise-wide information and knowledge needs. The leading companies who excel at using AI to plan new businesses and streamline existing processes all have solid senior management support for each AI initiative.

Key takeaways include the following:

72% of respondents in the technology, media, and telecommunications industry expect AI to have a significant impact on product offerings in the next five years

The technology, media and telecommunications industry has the highest expectations for AI to accelerate new product and service offerings of all industries tracked in the study, projecting a 52% point increase in the next five years. AI-based improvements are expected to deliver Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) gains in the Financial Services and Professional Services industries as well. The following graphic compares expectations for AI’s expected contributions to business offerings and process improvements over the next five years by industry.


Customer-facing activities including marketing automation, support, and service in addition to IT and supply chain management are predicted to be the most affected areas by AI in the next five years

Demand management, supply chain optimisation, more efficient distributed order management systems, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that can scale to support new business models are a few of the many areas AI will make contributions to the in the next five years. The following graphic provides an overview of operations, IT, customer-facing, and corporate center functions where AI is predicted to contribute.


84% of respondents say AI will enable them to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage

75% state that AI will allow them to move into new businesses and ventures. The research shows that AI will be the catalyst of entirely new business models and change the competitive landscape of entire industries in the next five years. 69% of respondents expect incumbent competitors in their industry to use AI to gain an advantage. 63% believe the pressure to reduce costs will require their organisations to use AI in the next five years.

Despite high expectations for AI, only 23% of respondents have incorporated it into processes and product and service offerings today

An additional 23% have one or more pilots in progress, and 54% have no adoption plans in progress, 22% of which have no current plans. The following graphic provides insights into the current adoption of AI with survey respondents.


By completing a cluster analysis of survey respondents based on AI understanding and adoption questions, four distinct maturity groups emerged including Pioneers, Investigators, Experimenters, and Passives

19% of the respondent base is Pioneers or those organisations who understand and are adopting AI. The study says that “these organisations are on the leading edge of incorporating AI into both their organisation’s offerings and internal processes.” Investigators (32%) are organisations that understand AI but are not deploying it beyond the pilot stage. Experimenters (13%) are organisations that are piloting or adopting AI without deep understanding. Passives (36%) are organisations with no adoption or much knowledge of AI.


Pioneers and Investigators are finding new ways to use AI to create entirely new sources of business value

Pioneers (91%) and Investigators (90%) are much more likely to report that their organisation recognises how AI affects business value than Experimenters (32%) and Passives (23%). One of the most differentiating aspects of the four maturity clusters is understanding the differences and value of investing in high-quality data and advanced AI algorithms. Compared to Passives, Pioneers are 12 times more likely to understand the process for training algorithms and ten times more likely to comprehend the development costs of AI-based products and services.


Organisations
 in the Pioneer cluster excel at analytics expertise versus competitors and have exceptional data governance processes in place, further accelerating their AI-driven growth

Pioneers are excellent at change management, citing their senior management’s vision and leadership as a foundational strength in accomplishing their AI-based initiative Early adopter Pioneers are also adept at product development, capable of changing existing products and services to take advantage of new technologies.


61% of all organisations interviewed see developing an AI strategy as urgent, yet only 50% have one done today

The research found that regarding company size, the largest companies (those with more than 100K employees) are the most likely to have an AI strategy, but only half (56%) have one. The following graphic compares the percentage of respondents by maturity cluster who say developing a plan for Al is urgent for their organisation relative to those that have a strategy in place today.


70% of respondents are personally looking forward to delegating the more mundane, repetitive aspects of their jobs to AI

84% believe employees will need to change their skill sets to excel at delivering AI-based initiatives and strategies. Taking this approach provides career growth and a chance to become more marketable for many whose jobs that are being increasingly automated. Cautious optimism regarding AI’s effects on employment dominates early adopter organisations, not dire fatalism. The bottom line is that AI is providing opportunities for career growth that will only accelerate in the future. Those that seize the chance to learn and earn more will end up having AI removing the mundane tasks from their jobs, leaving more time for the most challenging and rewarding work.

Editor’s note: To read more about artificial intelligence news, analysis and opinion, visit our sister publication AI News.

Stronger cloud security and guaranteed uptimes? Yes we’ll pay more, say organisations

Three quarters of organisations would be willing to pay a premium to enhance their cloud services, according to the latest note from 451 Research.

In the latest from its Voice of the Enterprise series – this time around organisational dynamics in hosting and cloud managed services – the research firm found that companies were most likely to pay more for security guarantees than anything else.

Just under half (48.7%) of those polled said they would pay to enhance their security, ahead of guaranteed uptime and performance metrics (43.3%), enhanced customer service (33.6%), and operational management (26.4%). Yet when it came to how much organisations were prepared to pay, customer service came out on top, ahead of security, uptime and operational management respectively.

The research also found gaps between current offerings and customer expectations. More than half (58.1%) of the 600 IT professionals polled said they see managed services, or security services, bundled in with infrastructure or applications as important to them, yet only two in five (38.8%) say their current vendors offer this capability to a satisfactory level. Only one in five said their vendors meet their expectation when it comes to migrating workloads to and from data centres.

“We frequently talk about pricing competition in cloud infrastructure and applications, which leaves many service providers wondering how they can differentiate themselves,” said Liam Eagle, study author and research manager at 451. “The good news is that many customers tell us they’re evaluating vendors on value, rather than cost. That value can reside in services like guaranteed levels of performance, security and support.”

This is the latest in the company’s missives around cloud and hosted services and strategy. Last month, 451 argued the majority of IT managers were examining a mix of on- and off-premises computing resources in their organisations, rather than “blindly following the pack” to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) et al. Two thirds of respondents said they found recruiting for roles across both traditional servers and converged infrastructure difficult.

Islands Are Wasteful in #DevSecOps | @DevOpsSummit @CAinc #DevOps #DX

DevSecOps – a trend around transformation in process, people and technology – is about breaking down silos and waste along the software development lifecycle and using agile methodologies, automation and insights to help get apps to market faster. This leads to higher quality apps, greater trust in organizations, less organizational friction, and ultimately a five-star customer experience.
These apps are the new competitive currency in this digital economy and they’re powered by data. Without data or data-based interactions, these apps would be of little value to the user and would be just static one-dimensional bulletin boards. Imagine a banking app, for example, that does not give you data about your account or let you take some action. How much value is this bringing to the user?

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How to build a successful private cloud?

We hear so much about the public cloud industry. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Oracle are in the news almost every day for a new service, data center or even a new partnership or acquisition. Of late, we’ve also been hearing a lot about a hybrid cloud strategy where some data and applications are in the public cloud while the rest, mostly mission-critical data, is stored in a company’s data center. But what about private cloud? Where does it stand?

Well, to start with, private cloud is an infrastructure that offers the same benefits as that of a public cloud service, but the underlying architecture is proprietary and is designed for the use of a single company only. For example, Walmart has its own private cloud architecture and doesn’t use any of the public cloud services offered by companies like AWS and Microsoft. IN fact, it’s even urging some of its vendors to stay away from public cloud thereby triggering a war of words between Walmart and AWS.

Private cloud is more prevalent than we think. In fact, a report by Yankee Group shows that twice the number of companies prefer a private cloud than a fully managed public cloud system.

Why?

Simply because private cloud offers the best of both worlds. You get the benefits of public cloud such as scalability, uptime and reduced maintenance and at the same time, your data is more than secure than a public cloud environment. Due to these increased benefits, many companies are moving to the private cloud sphere.

If you’re one such company looking to transition to private cloud, here are some things to keep in mind while building your own private cloud.

Start with a vision

Write down the goals of your private cloud strategy as that’ll always guide you towards the right implementation. Work with different teams, understand the existing problems for your developers and IT administrators and create a set of solutions to mitigate these problems.

Create a flexible private cloud

A common problem with many private cloud architectures is the lack of flexibility. Eventually, this is what causes the cloud to fail completely. So, have a clear idea for your architecture and more importantly, make sure it is flexible enough to accommodate unknown challenges and complex failures.

Automate your infrastructure

One of the pain points of private cloud is maintenance. To avoid this, try to automate many of your routine maintenance tasks. Also, have a plan to maintain your data center, network and procurement, as these are potential bottlenecks that can slow down your overall implementation.

Test, test and test

It’s absolutely important that you build out a stable private cloud. So, test your cloud multiple times and plug in all the loopholes that comes with it. If you overlook a known bug or fail to fix something due to lack of time, then there’s a possibility for your entire system to collapse.

Overall, building a private cloud is a journey by itself that comes with pitfalls. Steer away from these pits with our suggestions.

The post How to build a successful private cloud? appeared first on Cloud News Daily.

Parallels Mac Management Is Ready for macOS High Sierra

It’s that time of year—iPhone pre-order season, and the release of a new macOS. Just like the new iPhone X, this year’s macOS release has IT administrators excited, as well as nervous. This year, there is ample reason to be excited, with the release of Apple File System (APFS). If you have not yet heard […]

The post Parallels Mac Management Is Ready for macOS High Sierra appeared first on Parallels Blog.

The End of Business Process in the Digital Era | @CloudExpo #Cloud #DigitalTransformation

With the modern notion of digital transformation, enterprises are chipping away at the fundamental organizational and operational structures that have been with us since the nineteenth century or earlier.
One remarkable casualty: the business process. Business processes have become so ingrained in how we envision large organizations operating and the roles people play within them that relegating them to the scrap heap is almost unimaginable, and unquestionably transformative.

In the Digital Era, however, everything you thought you knew about business processes, and thus how human effort drives productivity and profit in the organizations we work for, is wrong.

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How to Build a Modern 24/7 Help Desk

Check out the infographic below to learn how GreenPages’ Help Desk helped a customer drastically improve service desk support while saving 30%. Learn how we can help you lower cost, reduce risk, and increase services efficiency. 

If you’d like to decrease time to resolution, measure service improvement, build a first-class knowledgebase, and leverage support communities, listen to this recent presentation from Jay Keating, SVP of Cloud and Managed Services, and Steven White, Director of Customer Service.

GreenPages Help Desk

 

By Jake Cryan, Digital Marketing Specialist