SYS-CON Events announced today that NetApp has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of 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.
NetApp is the data authority for hybrid cloud. NetApp provides a full range of hybrid cloud data services that simplify management of applications and data across cloud and on-premises environments to accelerate digital transformation. Together with their partners, NetApp empowers global organizations to unleash the full potential of their data to expand customer touchpoints, foster greater innovation and optimize their operations.
Monthly Archives: September 2017
People Bar Support in Parallels Desktop 13
For many years, Parallels Desktop® for Mac has made Windows even more usable for Mac users by bringing cool Mac features over to Windows. Some notable examples have been Mac gesture support in Windows applications (in Parallels Desktop 7) and Retina™ display support for Windows (in Parallels Desktop 8). In 2015, for the first time […]
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Announcing @B2CloudSA to Exhibit at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #IoT #M2M #Cloud
SYS-CON Events announced today that B2Cloud 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.
B2Cloud specializes in IoT devices for preventive and predictive maintenance in any kind of equipment retrieving data like Energy consumption, working time, temperature, humidity, pressure, etc.
Suzuki Inc. to Exhibit at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #ML #IoT #M2M #DataCenter
SYS-CON Events announced today that Suzuki Inc. 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.
Suzuki Inc. is a semiconductor-related business, including sales of consuming parts, parts repair, and maintenance for semiconductor manufacturing machines, etc. It is also a health care business providing experimental research for dementia, etc. For more information, visit http://www.e-suzuki.co.jp/en/.
Oracle introduces new cloud pricing models with further glance at beating AWS
Oracle OpenWorld may still be a couple of weeks away, but Larry Ellison gave a glimpse of what to expect in San Francisco with the announcement of new licensing and pricing structures – promising to beat Amazon by at least 50% on cost.
Ellison, Oracle’s CTO, took to the stage to not only discuss the new structures, but reaffirm the company’s strategy, as well as its next generation, fully autonomous database, to be fully unveiled at OpenWorld.
One of the new models is ‘universal credits’ (below), which provides Oracle customers “the industry’s most flexible buying and consumption model for cloud services”, as the company itself puts it. In other words, you give Oracle what you want to spend without having to explicitly say where it’s going, whether it’s the infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), or which data centre you will be using. “You don’t have to in advance figure out what you’re going to buy,” Ellison told attendees. “The contract is incredibly simple.”
Also announced was a ‘bring your own license’ (BYOL) model which enables Oracle customers to reuse their existing software licenses for Oracle’s PaaS. Customers who have existing on-premises licenses can leverage their investment to move to Oracle’s cloud options at ‘a fraction of the old PaaS price’, the company added.
All this is put alongside the much-vaunted database to shape Oracle’s cloud strategy. The database was previously referenced during the company’s most recent financial results last week, whereby Ellison told analysts the new Oracle will be a “totally automated self-driving system that does not require a human being either to manage the database or tune the database.”
The elimination of human labour – and the mistakes human make – was a theme the Oracle CTO kept returning to. “Human error can have devastating consequences,” he explained, referencing the Equifax data breach as a recent example. Another theme was around explaining what Amazon Web Services (AWS) couldn’t do; whence during the financial results announcement only occasional sideswipes were made at AWS, this time around pretty much the entire half hour presentation was built upon it.
Ellison said it will be ‘guaranteed’ in Oracle’s SLAs going forward that, firstly, the price will be half that of Amazon’s, and, secondly, the uptime on the new autonomous database will be 99.995%, or only 30 minutes of – planned – downtime.
“There’s nothing close in the cloud industry,” said Ellison. “There’s nothing remotely close. Our approach to the cloud business is to lower your costs and lower your risks by fully automating all sorts of platform services completely, with completely autonomous software that runs itself, eliminates the cost of human error, and eliminates the opportunity for human error.
“This is very different to what Amazon is trying to do,” he added. “They’re not even working on this.”
You can view the full presentation here.
Picture credits: Oracle
SIGMA Corporation to Exhibit at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #IoT #M2M #Cloud #Analytics
SYS-CON Events announced today that SIGMA Corporation 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.
uLaser flow inspection device from the Japanese top share to Global Standard! Then, make the best use of data to flip to next page. For more information, visit http://www.sigma-k.co.jp/en/.
Why businesses need to subscribe to the consumer subscription model
It is no secret that everything from consumer technology to business services are moving toward a service-based or subscription model, but now it’s not uncommon to bemoan this as a method of industry maximising revenue, which is one way of looking at it. However, it is important to recognise this trend for what it delivers to the consumers: value.
The success of consumer subscriptions
If we truly want to understand the value of subscriptions, let’s start by looking at the biggest players in the consumer sphere – Spotify, Amazon and Netflix. Although these are essentially entertainment options, with the partial exception of Amazon, it is interesting how many and how much people are willing to spend their hard-earned cash on these commodity services.
Spotify had 40 million paid subscribers as of September 2016. Amazon Prime had a healthy 63 million customers as of July 2016, with an increase of 19 million from the year before. This figure is so high now that it is estimated that Prime members now outnumber non-Prime members. When services such as Netflix and Spotify started to emerge, there were many worries. What would happen to CD and DVD sales? Well, time has told that sad story, unfortunately for those industries. However, it has resulted in consumers being able to access the content they want more easily, quickly, and affordably than ever. So, when we ask ourselves why we spend our disposable income on these services, the answer is obvious. They deliver more value than any other delivery method, and give continuously add to this.
Same buck, more bang
The worth here of these services is that unlike buying a DVD or CD and being stuck with that one option, they continuously refresh their offerings. When Amazon Prime launched, the service was based around the idea of free one-day delivery on any eligible items. Then Amazon acquired LoveFilm and produced an instant video streaming service, now including proprietary content, like Netflix does. After this success, the firm also bundled in a music service to rival both Spotify and the less successful Apple Music. The important part of all these additions is that it at no point affected the membership cost. So, customers were continuously offered a more valuable service simply as part of their existing subscription. Netflix recently added $800 million of debt to help fund more and more original content, leading to hit shows such as “Narcos,” new series of un-renewed shows such as “Black Mirror,” and many more original ideas.
Suddenly, Netflix is not just a streaming site for all the TV shows you love, or movies you want to see – but a channel in and of itself. Subscribers want the promise of new seasons of content that can’t be obtained anywhere else. These subscription-based services deliver value to the customer by continuously improving their offerings, bringing out new features, and delivering more and more of this value to subscribers.
What does this mean for businesses?
It’s no secret that businesses tend to lag behind consumer trends. Systems often are scattered throughout an organization, and the requirement for due diligence over every penny spent. However, we can already see some of this shift occurring; for example, in Microsoft’s Office 365. Office is the industry standard for word processing, spreadsheets and PowerPoints, even when a non-Microsoft presentation is still called a PowerPoint is evidence of this — sort of like every copy machine is called a “Xerox” and every tissue is called a “Kleenex.”
This suite has taken businesses into the first step of cloud reliance, with a 70 percent increase in subscribers, bringing its numbers up to 18.2 million. No longer do those 18.2 million organizations need to worry about paying to upgrade to the next numbered product, when it just updates automatically.
And this trend is ever widening. Most business support systems, whether they be ITSM, CAFM, eHR, ERP, accounting software or what have you, are starting to offer robust service-based models. Not so long ago, for any of these systems, a business would be urged to pay a huge capital expenditure, with an operational expenditure support contract to use these systems. Now at the time this was all fine and dandy. Budget was found, used and a new system was installed.
Great. Now it’s four, five or even eight years later. The world has moved on, but the way of working hasn’t changed. Was that investment really as valuable as it seemed at the time? Being cutting edge for a year, but then what?
Another issue raises its ugly head: the sales person on the other end of the phone trying to get their hands in the business’ pockets to move from one version to another.
It seems it might be time to learn from the consumer model. Lower operation expense expenditures in a subscription format to produce the Amazon Prime of business support systems. Don’t let your departments stagnate until they are forced to spend their budgets just getting back up to speed. Especially when a lower level investment can remain on the cutting edge with the ever-expanding portfolio of functionality. You have already switched to this at home, why not in your home away from home – the office?
Is artificial intelligence an apocalypse or just noise?
Open any tech site and you’ll have at least a dozen articles that talk about artificial intelligence. Undoubtedly, it’s the next big wave of technology that could alter the way we live, just like how Internet, social media and smartphones changed lives for us.
But this time though, it’s not just the positive thoughts and impact that’s being discussed. In fact, no piece on AI is complete without the user having to read through the negative impact of it. To top it, there are hundreds of discussions and interviews about how artificial intelligence could destroy human jobs, cause unemployment and maybe even wipe us off the planet. It’s touted as machines that can take over the human race, just like what happened in the Matrix series.
But is this reality? Will artificial intelligence really harm us so much?
Well, if you’re a pragmatist who goes by facts, the answer is a big no. Artificial intelligence is not a apocalypse that can control us or even worse, wipe us off the planet simply because it is something we’ve created and we always have the power to destroy it.
To top it, machines can never show complex emotions like empathy, decisiveness based on emotions, love, anger, stress and more. All this means, they will remain only as machines and can never replace humans as the next race to rule earth.
So, going back to our question – is artificial intelligence an apocalypse or just noise? Well, it’s definitely not an apocalypse, but it’s a lot more than just noise.
There’s some concrete and good work happening in this field and that could possibly wipe out some jobs, especially in the manufacturing and travel industry. We’ll have to view AI more as a technology like Internet, rather than one that can potentially harm us. If you look back, every major invention did bring about a shift in the nature of jobs, and AI will also be one such technology. But that’s where it ends.
We have to adapt to new jobs and a new work environment, like we’ve always done in the past. That’s it because artificial intelligence is not anywhere close to the capabilities of the human brain. In fact, John Giannandrea from Google says that AI machines are worse off than the four-year olds in terms of what they can do and understand.
But, will it get better? Yes, hopefully we’ll have AI systems that have the brains of a mature adult, minus the teenage ramblings. But by when, humans would have evolved to become more intelligent and capable to handle these machines.
To answer our question, artificial intelligence is nowhere near an apocalypse, but definitely a lot of people are generating noise around it. In reality though, the developments are concrete and happening, so it’s not just talks about intelligent systems.
So, don’t worry. Just sit back and embrace this wave as it comes.
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Ryobi Systems to Exhibit at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #Cloud #Mobility #Analytics
SYS-CON Events announced today that Ryobi Systems 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.
Ryobi Systems Co., Ltd., as an information service company, specialized in business support for local governments and medical industry. We are challenging to achive the precision farming with AI. For more information, visit http://www.ryobi-sol.co.jp/en/.
Nihon Micron to Exhibit at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #DX #Cloud #Analytics
SYS-CON Events announced today that Nihon Micron 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.
Nihon Micron Co., Ltd. strives for technological innovation to establish high-density, high-precision processing technology for providing printed circuit board and metal mount RFID tags used for communication devices. For more information, visit http://www.nihon-micron.co.jp/.