FinTechEXPO Blockchain Silicon Valley 2019 will cover all of these tools, with the most comprehensive program and with 222 rockstar speakers throughout our industry presenting 22 Keynotes and General Sessions, 250 Breakout Sessions along 10 Tracks, as well as our signature Power Panels. Our Expo Floor will bring together the leading global 200 companies throughout the world of Cloud Computing, DevOps, IoT, Smart Cities, FinTech, Digital Transformation, and all they entail.
Monthly Archives: October 2018
Announcing @Darktrace “Silver Sponsor” of @CloudEXPO New York | #Cloud #CIO #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning #SmartCities
Darktrace is the world’s leading AI company for cyber security. Created by mathematicians from the University of Cambridge, Darktrace’s Enterprise Immune System is the first non-consumer application of machine learning to work at scale, across all network types, from physical, virtualized, and cloud, through to IoT and industrial control systems. Installed as a self-configuring cyber defense platform, Darktrace continuously learns what is ‘normal’ for all devices and users, updating its understanding as the environment changes.
Kubernetes Keynote with Sheng Liang | @CloudEXPO #DevOps #APM #CIO #CloudNative #Serverless #Docker #Kubernetes
In his keynote at 19th Cloud Expo, Sheng Liang, co-founder and CEO of Rancher Labs, discussed the technological advances and new business opportunities created by the rapid adoption of containers. With the success of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and various open source technologies used to build private clouds, cloud computing has become an essential component of IT strategy. However, users continue to face challenges in implementing clouds, as older technologies evolve and newer ones like Docker containers gain prominence. He explored these challenges and how to address them, while considering how containers will influence the direction of cloud computing.
IBM’s quarterly growth rebound comes to an end – yet cloud revenues continue to tick over
So much for that run of quarterly growth: IBM’s latest financials show a 2% decline in revenues, yet cloud revenues continue to perform solidly.
Overall revenue was at $18.8 billion (£14.3bn) for the quarter, with cloud revenues at $19bn across the past 12 months. This is ticking over compared with the previous quarter’s figure of $18.5bn.
The company’s message, as this publication reported earlier this week, was focused around helping customers in the ‘emerging, high value’ segments of the IT industry – of which cloud is an integral part knitting it together.
“Our performance this quarter was driven by the offerings in hybrid cloud, in security, in digital, and in analytics and AI – a testament to our ability to deliver differentiated value to our clients through innovative technologies with the skills and expertise to implement these technologies,” said Jim Kavanaugh, IBM chief financial officer in an earnings call. “We see the results in our strategic imperatives revenue growth of 13% over the last 12 months.
“We also see this playing out in higher operating margin over the last few quarters, which supports both our long-term investment and return to shareholders,” Kavanaugh added. “With our success in these higher value areas and our focus on delivering consistent operational performance, we remain on track to our full-year expectations of earnings per share and free cash flow.”
Hybrid cloud was certainly the term of choice in the earnings call. Kavanaugh noted the statistic which the company pulled out with its recently released Multicloud Manager product – more of which shortly – around enterprises only being 10% to 20% through their cloud journey.
“Progress [is] slow by the lack of interoperability across cloud environments and concerns about the ability to manage data privacy and security in multiple cloud environments,” added Kavanaugh. “So clients need a cloud partner that can offer a hybrid cloud for workloads that cut across public, private and traditional, a secure cloud for mission-critical workloads and highly sensitive data and an open cloud to run complex, multi-cloud environments.”
Multicloud Manager, launched to fanfare earlier this week, aims to not provide ‘scale for the sake of scale’, but help customers launch new business services or enter new markets at pace. As John Considine, IBM general manager for cloud infrastructure services, put it when speaking to CloudTech in February, the company is positioning itself as ‘the enterprise cloud’ – putting emphasis on helping organisations grow through emerging technologies. Indeed, with Multicloud Manager, enabling workloads on AWS, Azure and more, this publication surmised the possibility of IBM accepting it was not going to overtake the big cloud infrastructure leaders.
This was by no means the only piece of news IBM announced this quarter. The company also had various initiatives in AI, with the launch of AI OpenScale technology to manage the lifecycle of all forms of AI applications and models, while on the business side IBM partnered up with CenturyLink in August to solidify enterprise connectivity in emerging markets.
You can read the full IBM investor release here (pdf).
Read more: IBM launches multi-cloud management tool, continues to emphasise open, AI-driven future
Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.
Gartner’s strategic tech trends show the need for an empowered edge and network for a smarter world
Opinion Earlier this week, Gartner released its top 10 strategic technology trends for 2019, and looking at the list, I was not surprised to see edge and blockchain technologies continuing into 2019 from last year.
In 2018, Gartner mentioned the technology trends as ‘cloud to the edge’ where the shift to edge-based infrastructure was predicted from centralised cloud platforms to address challenges related to bandwith constraints, connectivity and latency. Now this year, Gartner is emphasising the empowerment of edge-focused infrastructure due to ongoing substantial growth in digital devices, especially those devices which require analysis response after computation at the data centre end in no time.
Technologies which have enabled intelligence into operations or in devices is what we have been listening to for a long time. Like intelligent or autonomous things, quantum computing, and AI-driven development. In fact, we have seen such imaginary stuff in movie and TV ads as well.
But to actually enable 100% accuracy and delivery of services to end users, it needs a higher capacity network, computational power, and lower latency. Intelligent technologies will be useful only when a response will be real time – otherwise it won’t be much use for people who will engage with AI-based autonomous robots who will think first and respond after ‘some’ time. That would be disastrous.
Take an example of an autonomous car where manufacturers are evangelising its usage across the world to reduce mishaps and allow luxurious long rides. What if a network fails to respond in time which is bringing ‘intelligent’ instruction to the car so that it will take the corresponding action?
All such digital innovation will not be possible without two things; a communication network having lightning speed, almost giving real time experience and, most importantly, an agile response from computing resources of processed ‘intelligent’ data.
This is impossible with cloud, but can be enabled using edge computing. How? Cloud is a centralised data centre equipped with all computing infrastructure with higher capacity to support multiple types of digital communications. Many of the current cloud-based applications are not affected with bandwidth and latency constraints. For example, SaaS applications may not need a rapid response where it will only store data in the application. But the enablement of cognitive technologies for autonomous ‘things’ will be time and latency sensitive. Such possibilities can occur by bringing edge computing into the current communication network.
Looking at a future of having all digital devices serving to end users, there was a need for such edge topology which can give cloud-like performance closer to devices and reduce the burden on network usage. The upcoming 5G, and its feature of multi-access edge computing, will address exactly this.
Take any leading tech vendors – they are all indulged around these technology trends Gartner has listed. They are actively optimising or innovating existing solutions, offering new revolutionary products to support digital growth. But I believe that all the innovation will be consumed by the end user at its fullest when there is continuous upward innovation in IT infrastructure and communication networks. Smart devices can only be smart if they have capabilities to communicate in real time.
Editor’s note: You can find out more about the basics of edge computing architectures, types, use cases, as well as the market ecosystem in 2018, with this eBook which can be downloaded here.
Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.
Announcing @ClaySys to Exhibit at @CloudEXPO New York | #Cloud #CIO #NoCode #LowCode #Metadata #APM #DevOps #Monitoring
ClaySys Technologies is one of the leading application platform products in the ‘No-code’ or ‘Metadata Driven’ software business application development space. The company was founded to create a modern technology platform that addressed the core pain points related to the traditional software application development architecture. The founding team of ClaySys Technologies come from a legacy of creating and developing line of business software applications for large enterprise clients around the world.
Cloud Academy launches new tools to aim to close the cloud skills gap
The skills gap has been a thorn in cloud computing’s side for longer than many in the industry would care to remember. Cloud Academy hopes to create a change in mindset with its latest release.
The training company has announced the launch of Cloud Roster and Cloud Catalog, two products which aim to provide a fuller picture of the cloud jobs and skills landscape.
Cloud Roster is a job roles matrix which analyses tens of thousands of public job postings per week to give a basis for the top trending technology skills as they develop. Cloud Catalog, meanwhile, focuses on the technologies themselves, providing a stack ranking of technologies by popularity and geography based on data from various developer community platforms.
The company cited figures from IDC, who predicted cloud investment to grow at a 22% computing growth rate until 2021. As a result the importance of closing the skills gap – or at least ensuring it does get any wider – is key.
“We talk a lot about the cloud skills gap with our customers, and the fact that there’s a need for technical talent is well documented,” wrote Alex Brower, Cloud Academy VP marketing in a blog post announcing the news. “We wanted to dive a layer deeper and use data to qualify and quantify the nature of the technical skills gap in a way that’s meaningful and objective.”
In a blog post from the start of this year, Cloud Academy noted the importance of partnerships and patience in putting a successful cloud migration plan together. “Do not be excessively aggressive,” the company wrote. “While you may be tempted to go for the quick win, realise that cutting corners will almost certainly guarantee failure for your cloud migration project. Baby steps, logical steps, are very important.”
According to a study from IT provider Softchoice earlier this month, organisations are still hitting roadblocks with their cloud implementations despite extensive preparation. More than two in five (43%) of the 250 respondents admitted they had difficulty in knowing how to create an effective cloud management strategy.
Fintech and the data centre
17 Oct, 2018
The financial services sector, once one of the most stable and slow-moving industries in the world, is currently in the middle of a vast upheaval. A status quo which has remained largely unchanged for decades – if not longer – is being turned on its head, and it’s all thanks to fintech.
Fintech (or financial technology) has undergone an explosion in recent years. Widespread connectivity and the growing ubiquity of mobile devices have enabled an unprecedented growth in the number, sophistication and accessibility of fintech tools and services, and it’s having a noticeable impact on the financial services sector.
These tools have allowed new digital-native companies to disrupt the market, as well as letting existing companies bolster their offerings with an increased range of financial services. Digital-only ‘challenger banks’ like Monzo, Starling and Revolut, for example, have started drawing customers away from traditional consumer banking firms, and mobile-based trading platforms have opened up the stock market to everyday people who otherwise would never have considered buying shares.
Established financial institutions are now having to rethink how they operate in light of these new developments. Customers are demanding faster, more convenient and more secure experiences from their financial providers, and many are choosing to ditch their existing banks when they don’t meet these new, evolving standards.
It’s not hard to see why; the new capabilities being unlocked by emerging fintech are very attractive. The combination of AI-driven chatbots and advanced data analytics allow customers to have 24/7 access to their own personal financial adviser who can give them insights into their personal spending patterns. Moreover, it can help them set and control their budgets, while a digital-only bank means no longer having to make inconvenient in-branch appointments to manage your money.
Fintech offers the key to increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction, but having the right technology is key. Even if you introduce the kind of advanced features that customers demand from their financial service providers, a poor experience thanks to long wait times, dodgy security or frequent errors is just as likely to drive them away as not having them in the first place.
So how can you ensure that your fintech tools are speedy and reliable enough to keep up with your users’ needs? Many businesses in other sectors have turned to the cloud for this, but in many cases, compliance and regulatory issues will mean that financial services companies simply aren’t able to enlist the services of a public cloud provider like Google, Microsoft or Amazon.
Instead, financial firms should be looking to modernise their own in-house data centres. Extra investment in data centre transformation projects can pay dividends for the performance of financial applications in particular, such as data analytics. The bedrock of any modern business strategy, data analytics is especially essential for financial services, allowing organisations to rapidly analyse market trends and real-time transaction data, as well as their customers’ banking information in order to provide them with new insights into their finances.
In order for this to be effective, however, your analytics model needs to perform at lightning speed, crunching through your datasets as quickly as possible to ensure your business retains a competitive edge. Similarly, you need to ensure that transactions and transfers are processed as quickly as possible; there’s nothing more frustrating for a customer than having to wait hours – or even days – before the money that a friend sent over for their share of a bill arrives in their account.
Achieving this is no mean feat, however, and it’s not just about adding more racks to your data centre. Making sure your data centre is running on the right infrastructure can be at least as important as its size, if not more so. Intel’s Xeon® Scalable platform, for example, is built specifically to support the kind of high-intensity data analytics workloads that modern financial services firms depend on.
Xeon® Scalable’s all-new Mesh architecture enables faster and more efficient data transfer between CPU cores – an essential benefit when dealing with high-volume datasets – and scales easily. In addition, Intel’s new AVX-512 instructions offer a 1.6x performance boost for data-driven HPC workloads and 2.2x speed increase for AI and machine learning tasks.
It’s also designed to couple seamlessly with Intel Optane™ storage and memory, slashing latency to the bone and processing instructions in a flash. It’s also super high-density, allowing you to put more memory in a given rack, thereby reducing data centre expenditure.
Another feature that will be particularly useful for financial firms is the added efficiency that the new Xeon® Scalable generation brings to security operations. In particular, the new instructions can process encryption tasks much faster than previous components thanks to a huge increase in the amount of floating-point operations that can be processed.
Encryption of network connections and data is essential for any financial services firm, but up until now, companies would be forced to suffer an increase in transaction time of up to 10% as a trade-off. Now, however, the improvements introduced by Xeon® Scalable and Optane™ mean that this time penalty is significantly reduced, resulting in faster and more secure transactions for your customers.
Financial firms are now more at risk of being overtaken and disrupted than they’ve ever been, but the same tools that are allowing their competitors to threaten them so greatly can also open up a world of new opportunities, increased revenues and more satisfied customers – for businesses that can embrace them.
Discover more about the technology powering Fintech at Intel.co.uk
Announcing @NexumInc to Exhibit at @CloudEXPO New York | #Cloud #CIO #Cybersecurity #DevOps #SmartCities #DigitalTransformation
Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Chicago, Nexum® takes a comprehensive approach to security. Nexum approaches business with one simple statement: “Do what’s right for the customer and success will follow.”
Nexum helps you mitigate risks, protect your data, increase business continuity and meet your unique business objectives by:
Detecting and preventing network threats, intrusions and disruptions
Equipping you with the information, tools, training and resources you need to effectively manage IT risk
Nexum, Latin for an arrangement by which one pledged one’s very liberty as security, Nexum is committed to ensuring your security. At Nexum, We Mean Security®.
Cloud Academy guide will help match skills with business needs
17 Oct, 2018
The Cloud Academy has launched two benchmarking tools to help match cloud talent and skills with the needs of businesses, ensuring firms trying to become more digital savvy have the resources they need.
Comprising Cloud Roster and Cloud Catalog, the tools use data to identify holes in business skillsets and technology trends, plus identify the roles needed to plug those gaps. It will build profiles of the skills required in each job role, plus the responsibilities, non-tech skills and likely certifications required of that position and matches these to the upcoming tech trends.
Cloud Roster analyses public job listings to build a job landscape overview, identifying which roles are in demand and what tech skills businesses are looking for.
This data includes certifications required for candidates and non-technical skills employers are looking for. It then combines this data with expert interviews, plotting trends to help people understand which skills they need in order to
Cloud Catalog works alongside Cloud Roster as a worldwide tech trend index. It collates information about the popularity of cloud technologies, frameworks, and vendor platforms from a number of different sources including developer communities to help businesses understand how they need to adapt to the changing technology landscape.
“Cloud Roster and Cloud Catalog empower our broader community to visualize the impressive changes brought about by increased multi-cloud adoption, the evolution of technical job roles, and the dynamic nature of skill demand,” said Stefano Bellasio, CEO at Cloud Academy.
“Building these tools by leveraging proven data techniques allows us to continue to serve forward-thinking enterprises in their efforts to achieve digital transformation.”