• Sales, marketing and operations are most active early adopters of IoT today.
• Early adopters most often initiate pilots to drive revenue and gain operational efficiencies faster than anticipated.
• 32% of enterprises are investing in IoT, and 48% are planning to in 2019.
• IoT early adopters lead their industries in advanced and predictive analytics adoption.

These and many other fascinating insights are from Dresner Advisory Services’ latest report,  2018 IoT Intelligence® Market Study, in its 4th year of publication. The study concentrates on end-user interest in and demand for business intelligence in IoT. The study also examines key related technologies such as location intelligence, end-user data preparation, cloud computing, advanced and predictive analytics, and big data analytics.

“While the market is still in an early stage, we believe that IoT Intelligence, the means to understand and leverage IoT data, will continue to expand as organisations mature in their collection and leverage of sensor level data,” said Howard Dresner, founder, and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services. 70% of respondents work at North American organisations (including the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico). EMEA accounts for about 20%, and the remainder is distributed across Asia-Pacific and Latin America. Please see pages 11, 15 through 18 of the study for specifics regarding the methodology and respondent demographics.

Key insights gained from the study include the following:

Sales, marketing and operations are most active early adopters of IoT today

Looking to capitalise on IoT’s potential to gain real-time customer feedback on products’ and services’ performance, Sales and marketing lead all departments in their prioritising IoT’s value in the enterprises. 12% of operations leaders say that IoT is critical to attaining their goals. Executive management and finance have yet to see the value that sales, marketing and operations do.

Manufacturers see IoT as the most critical to achieving their product quality, production scheduling and supply chain orchestration goals

Insurance industry leaders also view IoT as critical to operations as their business models are now concentrating on automating inventory and safety management. Insurance firms also track vehicles in shipping and logistics fleets to gain greater visibility into how route operations can be optimised at the lowest possible risk of accidents. Financial Services and Healthcare are the next most interested in IoT with Higher Education and Business Services assign the lowest levels of importance by industry.

Investment in IoT analytics, application development and defining accurate, reliable metrics to guide development is the most critical aspect of IoT adoption today

Investments in the data supply chain including data capture, movement, data prep, and management is the second-most critical area followed by investments in IoT infrastructure.  Analytics, application development, and accurate, reliable metrics guiding DevOps are consistent with the study’s finding that early adopters have an excellent track record adopting and applying advanced and predictive analytics to challenging logistical, operations, sales, and marketing problems.

IoT early adopters or advocates prioritise dashboards, reporting, IoT use cases that provide data streams integral to analytics, advanced visualisation, and data mining

IoT early adopters and the broader respondent base differ most in the prioritisation of IT analytics, location intelligence, integration with operational processes, in-memory analysis, open source software, and edge computing. The data reflects how IoT early adopters quickly become more conversant in emerging technologies with the goal of achieving exponential scale across analytics and IoT platforms.

The criticality of advanced and predictive analytics to all leaders surveyed is at an all-time high

Attaining a (weighted-mean) importance score of 3.6 on a 5.0 scale, advanced and predictive analytics is today considered “critical” or “very important” to a majority of respondents. Despite a mild decline in 2017, importance sentiment (the perceived criticality of advanced and predictive analytics) is on an uptrend across the five years of our study. Mastery of advanced and predictive analytics is a leading indicator of IoT adoption, indicating the potential for more analytics pilots and in-production IoT projects next year.

The most valuable features for advanced and predictive analytics apps include support for a range of regression models, hierarchical clustering, descriptive statistics, and recommendation engine support

Model management is important to more than 90% of respondents, further indicating IoT analytics scale is a goal many are pursuing. Geospatial analysis (highly associated with mapping, populations, demographics, and other web-generated data), Bayesian methods, and automatic feature selection is the next most required series of features.

Access to advanced analytics for predictive and temporal analysis is the most important usability benefit to IoT adopters today

Second is support for easy iteration, and third is a simple process for continuous modification of models. The study evaluated a detailed set of nine usability benefits that support advanced and predictive activities and processes. All nine benefits are important to respondents, with the last one of a specialist not being required important to a majority of them at 70%.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their IoT use-cases? Attend the IoT Tech Expo World Series events with upcoming shows in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Clare Hopping

Wayne Williams

Run Windows 95 on any computer

Windows 95 gave us many of the elements of a modern operating system, including a Start menu, desktop and taskbar, but it’s very different from the bells and whistles of Windows 10.

You probably haven’t used the groundbreaking OS in a good 20 years, but you can take it for a spin once more thanks to an enterprising developer who has wrapped it inside a virtual machine. The program is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux, which means you can revisit the joys of Win95 on any computer, within a window on your desktop.

Most features, including WordPad, Calculator, FreeCell and Media Player work just like they used to, with the notable exception of Internet Explorer, which opens but is unable to loads web pages. When you’re ready to go back to your modern operating system, just tap Esc to free your cursor from inside the virtual space.

Travel back 23 years in time by running Windows 95 on your current computer

Run Windows 2000 Professional in your browser

While consumers were running the dreadful Windows Me back at the start of the new millennium, businesses, professionals and those in the know were using the superior Windows 2000. It wasn’t the fanciest of operating systems, but it was stable and fast, meaning you could rely on it when you needed to get things done.

You can run the old operating system directly in your browser by going to bit.ly/win2000-460. This emulator works brilliantly on desktop computers, and you can even run it on your phone or tablet, although your results might vary. Because it’s running in a browser, it isn’t amazingly fast – but that only helps reinforce the idea that you’re using an operating system from 18 years ago.

If you never got the chance to use Windows 2000, you can now give it a go

Download Windows XP for free

Windows 7 comes with Windows XP Mode, a compatibility feature designed to run XP and its software inside a virtual window. If you’re using Windows 10, this option isn’t available to you, but you can still download and run the ancient OS inside your current one, although it takes a little time to set up.

To get started, first download VirtualBox and 7-Zip, if you don’t have them already, and download Windows XP Mode from Microsoft.

When XP has finished downloading, right-click the executable file, select 7-Zip, ‘Open archive’ and pick ‘cab’ in the context menu. Go into the sources folder and double-click ‘xpm’ – the XP Mode virtual hard drive folder – and extract all the files inside to a folder on your hard drive. Click VirtualXPVHD in that folder, and press F2. Insert a full stop between P and V – VirtualXP.VHD – and hit Enter.

Next, install and run VirtualBox. Go to New and name the virtual machine Windows XP. The rest of the information will be filled in automatically below. Use the slider to increase the available memory to 2048MB and select ‘Use an existing virtual hard disk file’ at the bottom. Click the folder icon to the right of the box below, and navigate to, and select, the VirtualXP.VHD file. Click Open.

Hit the Create button. Now click Settings at the top, select System in the new Window, and untick Floppy. Move Hard Disk to the top of the list, select Display and increase the Video Memory to 128MB (the maximum). Close this window, select XP on the left and click Start above. Windows XP will load in the window.

You will need to use your keyboard to navigate the installation pages (tab is especially helpful here) as the mouse won’t work properly. When you see a black screen, press Right Ctrl+R to reset the OS. Select Cancel on all the windows that appear, and then in VirtualBox, go to Devices, ‘Install Guest Additions CD Image’, and install it (select the ‘Continue Anyway’ option when warnings appear). When finished, reboot and you can start using XP, just like in the early Noughties. Switch between full-screen, seamless and scaled modes via the View menu.

Windows 10 users nostalgic for XP can run the classic OS as a virtual machine

Get back classic Windows themes

If you don’t like the modern look of Windows and hanker for the old-school style sported in the likes of Windows 98, you can download a ‘Windows classic‘ theme for Windows 8.1 and 10. Unzip it and move the file to the ‘C:\Windows\Resources\Ease of Access Themes’ folder. Right-click a blank area of the desktop, select Personalise and select High Contrast. Enable the High Contrast option, and then select Classic from the list of themes.

It’s worth pointing out that this more basic theme won’t actually make Windows 10 run any faster, but it will push your nostalgic buttons.

Apply a classic theme to make your modern desktop look like Windows 98

Restore the classic Start menu

Not everyone loves Windows 10’s tiled Start menu as much as Microsoft clearly does. If you prefer the old-style menus found in XP and Windows 7, you can get them back by installing Open-Shell (previously Classic Start).

If it looks familiar that’s because it’s a continuation of the popular Classic Shell app which was discontinued (and open sourced) late last year. The software gives you a choice of three different menu styles – Classic, Two Columns and Windows 7 – as well as other options for customizing various elements of your operating system, including File Explorer.

To complete the retro look, download a high-res version of Bliss – the famous green and blue wallpaper used by Windows XP – from bit.ly/bliss460.

Undo Microsoft’s unwanted changes to the Start menu using Open-Shell

Run Windows Essentials tools in Windows 10

Windows Essentials (also known as Windows Live Essentials) was a suite of desktop applications that included various Microsoft-developed programs, such as Messenger, Mail, Movie Maker, Photo Gallery, Writer and OneDrive. The last version of the suite was released in 2012, with the final update in 2014, and Microsoft removed it from its website last year.

However, you can still download and install the pack by visiting the Internet Archive. The direct download is pretty slow, but there’s a BitTorrent version on offer if you prefer. Some tools, such as Messenger, no longer work, but Movie Maker and Windows Photo Viewer run perfectly on Windows 10.

Make Windows Essentials essential again by grabbing it the Internet Archive

Get Office assistant Clippy on your desktop

Remember Clippy, Microsoft’s amusing/annoying (delete as applicable) Office assistant from the Nineties? He would spring into life and try to assist you whenever you started a task such as writing a letter or making a spreadsheet. He would also change his shape and perform funny little actions to entertain you.

Well, now you can bring him back, and run him on your desktop for endless nostalgic larks (until he starts to irritate you again). You don’t need to be using Windows either, as he’s also available for MacOS and Linux. Download Clippy from bit.ly/clippy460. 

Bobby Hellard

Hybrid cloud is the ideal IT model for the majority of organisations – yet comparatively few have it in place today.

That was the key finding from a new report by hyperconverged infrastructure firm Nutanix. The study, the firm’s first Enterprise Cloud Index, polled 2,300 respondents and found that while enterprises plan to up their hybrid cloud usage, less than one in five (18%) said they were on the road to hybrid today.

The research found there needs to be more done than just a simple rollout. Public cloud is not a cure-all, with more than one in three (35%) respondents admitted to overspending their public cloud budgets. Key to getting initiatives right included matching applications to the right cloud environment; with visibility an interesting part of that. 88% of those polled said application mobility across any cloud would ‘solve a lot of problems.’

Yet for those who have already taken the plunge, success is tangible. 87% of respondents said hybrid cloud as an IT trend was having a positive effect on their business, with almost half (49%) saying their needs were met – higher than single public cloud users (37%). The concept is proving particularly popular in EMEA, with the report forecasting the region to overtaken both Americas and Asia Pacific in terms of adoption.

Nutanix has focused on this aspect as part of its strategy in 2018. The company acquired Netsil, a San Francisco-based app mapping, discovery and management software provider, back in March. In this instance, with multiple clouds, the rise of containers and microservices has meant many organisations lack visibility in key areas.

Plenty of M&A activity this year has been around the multi-cloud angle – Cisco buying Duo Security, Check Point Software acquiring Dome9 – but true hybrid cloud infers the need for private cloud, as well as on-premises applications and workloads that will stubbornly not fit in a cloud environment, and will take time to sunset.

“As enterprises demand stronger application mobility and interoperability, they are increasingly choosing hybrid cloud infrastructure,” said Ben Gibson, Nutanix chief marketing officer in a statement. “While the public cloud has increased IT efficiency in certain areas, hybrid cloud capabilities are the next step in providing the freedom to dynamically provision and manage applications based on business needs.

“The findings of this study reveal an important gap in the market,” Gibson added. “Organisations need IT talent to manage their hybrid cloud models, especially in the next 12 to 24 months.”

You can download the full report 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.

The latest addition to the ever-expanding collection of IT buzzwords, artificial intelligence (AI) seems to mean all things to all people. No matter which industry you turn to – from retail to finance, manufacturing to healthcare – AI is touted as a ‘game-changer’ and the answer to any number of problems. 

This hype is driving real change: worldwide spending on cognitive and AI systems is expected to increase at an annual growth rate of 50.1% through to 2021.

And one area in which the impact of AI is already being felt is across the global cloud computing market.

The rise of cloud computing has proved pivotal in helping to expand almost all markets and the label ‘cloud-native’ is now worn as badge of honour. For startups, the ability to move directly to cloud infrastructure has allowed them to leapfrog their established counterparts, many of whom have struggled in the attempt to integrate cloud into their complex legacy systems.

With a more powerful and more agile infrastructure at their finger-tips, any organisation – no matter the size, sector, or region – can take a place at the leading edge of the global industry. And this in turn has meant the democratisation of new technologies, most notably in enterprise AI where the sheer number of different sectors able to access this nascent development has meant a wide testbed that has thrown up some of the most exciting innovations in enterprise IT. 

Without cloud computing we simply wouldn’t have today’s AI capabilities, which rely on enormous reserves of premium data. The raw power offered by cloud computing is what allows organisations to collect, store, process, and analyse data in the staggering volumes now needed.

Put simply: the better the cloud, the better the AI.

Lessons learned

Amidst all the excitement its worth taking a deep breath and understanding that AI is not a silver-bullet or a panacea to any-and-all IT woes. As with any technology, AI is a tool, and one that will only work effectively when it has a clear business aim. Context is everything, and for the best results AI must be directed towards a tangible output. 

Perhaps the best way to understand the problems surrounding AI investment is through an analogy with shoe shopping. No one simply purchases a pair of shoes without understanding the context in which they will be used – in the same way that flip flops would be entirely inappropriate for a weekend of hiking, or football boots would look out of place at a black-tie dinner, so too can AI services be used in the wrong context. Finding the right AI solution requires a crystal-clear understanding of the problem you’re aiming to solve and why no solution has been in place.

This is a lesson that many businesses have already learned thanks to their dealings with cloud computing. On its introduction to the mainstream, as with many tech trends, cloud computing was the ‘must-have’ technology, though many businesses were less than clear on why this was the case. As strange as it seems now – in a time when cloud computing is the default option – many early cloud deployments failed. Swept up in the hyperbole, organisations leapt head-first into the cloud without assessing why they were doing it or defining what a successful implementation looked like for their business. 

Driving demand

It’s also worth noting that just as the rise of cloud computing has allowed the AI sector to flourish, investment in AI is now driving the cloud industry forward. As AI becomes more sophisticated it needs ever more powerful platforms to sit on. The cloud industry has been enthusiastic in its response, with cloud investment helping to propel the industry to new levels.

What’s more, as cloud becomes more powerful, access to AI is democratised as the infrastructure (and skillsets) needed to implement these services are more affordable and accessible.

Crucially, cloud computing using AI isn’t a radical or revolutionary change. In many respects it’s an evolutionary one. For many organisations, it has been a seamless integration from existing systems, with AI investment gathering pace quickly. Over the next few years we can expect to see the industry continue to boom, with AI driving cloud computing to new heights, while the cloud industry helps bring the benefits of AI to the mainstream. Collaboratively, AI and cloud computing will become the twin-turbo drive engine to smarter businesses.

 Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their use-cases? Attend the co-located AI & Big Data Expo events with upcoming shows in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more. Co-located with the  IoT Tech Expo, Blockchain Expo and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo so you can explore the future of enterprise technology in one place.

Clare Hopping

Clare Hopping

Connor Jones

Many companies are embracing multi-cloud strategies, and it’s easy to understand why. The cloud enables greater flexibility, accessibility and overall resilience. The bigger the organization, the more likely these assets are spread across public and private clouds. But managing these resources can quickly become a challenge.

The key to simplifying this issue lies in global tagging strategies. Organizations need to be very purposeful in creating global tagging strategies that will work across all clouds. All cloud providers are not created equal when it comes to tagging and have different limitations. Therefore, it is important that a global tagging policy does not violate any of the limitations of any of the cloud providers that are currently in use or your organization will potentially use in the future.

Whether you’re starting your tagging strategy from scratch or “retrofitting” your current cloud infrastructure, here’s how your organization can tackle the challenge: Design your tagging strategy using the lowest common denominator approach. In other words, design it to accommodate the various and distinct limitations of each major cloud provider. This lowest common denominator approach will ensure that you don’t end up with a fragmented tagging strategy. Fragmentation of your strategy is a sure-fire way to reduce its usefulness and longevity.

DivvyCloud recommends the following tagging strategy design to accommodate all major cloud providers:

• Maximum Key Length (driven by GCP): 63 Characters

• Maximum Value Length (driven by GCP): 63 Characters

• Maximum # of Tags Per Resource (driven by Azure): 15 Tags

• Case Sensitive

• Keys and values can only contain lowercase letters, numeric characters, underscores, and dashes. International characters are allowed.

• Label keys must start with a lowercase letter and international characters are allowed.

• Label keys cannot be empty

• Tag names can’t contain these characters: <, >, %, &, \, ?, /

• AWS-generated tag names and values are automatically assigned the AWS: prefix, which you cannot assign. User-defined tag names have the prefix user: in the Cost Allocation Report.

• Use each key only once for each resource. If you attempt to use the same key twice on the same resource, your request will be rejected.

• You cannot tag a resource at the same time you create it. Tagging requires a separate action after the resource is created.

• You cannot backdate the application of a tag. This means that tags only start appearing on your cost allocation report after you apply them, and do not appear on earlier reports.

• Tags applied to the resource group are not inherited by the resources in that resource group.

• Tags can’t be applied to classic resources such as Cloud Services.

Keep in mind, all of the providers are regularly expanding their tagging support, but it is best to plan for today and expand later when able to.

Now, on to a few different strategies based on where your firm is today in your global tagging strategy journey.

How to create and deploy an effective tag strategy

Starting from scratch: When launching your tagging strategy as part of the provisioning process, ensure that your tags represent all the needs of your organization. This will take planning and collaboration across several departments – from finance to operations to each of the business units that use the cloud as part of their workflow – and it’s best to put in a lot of effort before deployment. If your organization doesn’t address all the tags needed at launch, it means a lot of work will be needed after deployment. In general, more tags are better than fewer tags, just as long as the tags are standardized and well-documented to eliminate input mistakes and redundancy. Once your strategy is fully fleshed out, it’s best to implement it with as much automation as possible to eliminate human error and potential gaps.

Retrofitting your existing cloud infrastructure: When dealing with a messier implementation scenario, such as adding tags to an existing cloud infrastructure, there is no easy button.  Take a phased approach. Establish your policy and begin to implement it first within the IT departments. Once you have full compliance here then move on to developers and engineers in business units or who sit outside of central IT.  Start in all cases on applying this policy to all net new resources and build this muscle memory. Establish the value of tagging with all the parties involved. Demonstrate the benefits to everyone in the organization – up and down the company hierarchy.  Once you have buy-in then begin to move through legacy environments and update tags. Do so on some type of incremental basis that limits the period and frequency of disruption to the people who will have to inform or execute this effort.

Developing and implementing a strong tagging strategy works best when your organization is starting with a clean slate. That way, tags can be implemented, standardized, and enforced as part of the provisioning process. Starting from scratch also lets administrators fine-tune the tagging process moving forward: New and updated tags can be added cleanly and seamlessly as new code bases are deployed.

Unfortunately, few organizations have the luxury of starting their efforts with a blank canvas. Instead, most tagging strategies are implemented as a “uh oh, we need to address this” measure — a necessary reaction to an increasingly complex and diverse cloud infrastructure. Perhaps the company has grown quickly or moved more critical resources to the cloud over the years. Maybe the cloud provider has made additional resources available for tagging. In other scenarios, organizations may have implemented effective tagging strategies already, but a merger or acquisition requires getting an inherited infrastructure up to speed.

With an effective tagging strategy, any organization can achieve a greater sense of clarity and structure within a multi-cloud infrastructure. Your tagging strategy can start simply and seamlessly and over time, it can mature and grow in complexity as your business evolves and scales. All you need is a solid tagging foundation, an understanding of best practices, and an inspired first step.

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.