Michael Porter, author of the most highly regarded of all business strategy theories, Competitive Advantage, describes how there are now three distinct eras of how technology can be defined to impact upon the ability to achieve this advantage.
Michael makes two very important points. The first point is that there has previously been two eras and now there is a third – the first being when corporations started to use IT for automation purposes, described in this 1985 article, followed then by when all of this IT became interconnected via the Internet, described in this 2001 article. Then in this 2014 article Smart Connected Products he describes a third era, the Internet of Things.
Bugs. Once upon a time – and not so very long ago – that word had only one meaning: annoying little critters that crawl, sting, bite, and can generally make your life a misery.
But in today’s modern technological age, the word bug has a new meaning: flaws in software applications.
Though the word is the same, the two meanings are quite different. However, both terms represent a common theme: annoyances.
The GoDaddy customer breaches didn’t have to happen and don’t have to happen to you.
Cisco threat researchers recently reported a dramatic uptick in Angler Exploit Kit-based attacks connected to compromised GoDaddy domain registry accounts.
GoDaddy, which manages nearly a third of all global domain names used on the Internet, has issued media statements clarifying that it was not breached. It was its customers who allowed their login credentials to be stolen and used to create malicious subdomains, the company explained, accurately stating this is an industry problem for cloud-based service providers.
An explosive combination of technology trends will be where ‘microservices’ and the IoT Internet of Things intersect, a concept we can describe by comparing it with a previous theme, the ‘X Internet.’
The idea of using small self-contained application components has been popular since XML Web services began and a distributed computing future of smart fridges and kettles was imagined long back in the early Internet years.
Last month, fellow Forbes contributor Peter Cohan remarked on application intelligence vendor AppDynamics and their incredible run up to going public, probably later this year. He reported that “on February 17, AppDynamics reported that its bookings for the year ending January 2015 doubled to $150 million — adding 600 customers. The company also increased its employee base during the year from 365 to 600 people today,” according to AppDynamics CEO Jyoti Bansal.
Cohan also quoted Bansal’s comment on their Net Promoter score, a measure of how likely customers will recommend them: “AppDynamics recently increased its Net Promoter Score from 84 to 87 indicating an extraordinarily high likelihood to recommend the company; comparable enterprise software scores sit at 19.”
Such a remarkably favorable opinion on the part of its customers suggests that AppDynamics is doing something right – something that other vendors struggle to match. As AppDynamics is an Intellyx client, I had the opportunity to sit down with Bansal last week and ask him about the secrets to the company’s success.
If you’re not using the Internet of Things to engage your customers, you should be.
Earlier this week Jessica Groopman from Altimeter published a thought provoking white paper that recommends 5 consumer facing use cases for IoT. For each use case she highlights the value proposition for both the brand and the customer, describes a few key methods for engagement, and closes with some real life examples. While you can download it for free (registration is required), here’s my outline of the 5 most compelling uses cases from the report.
Pomeroy, a Global IT managed services provider, improves quality for their applications testing, development and packaged applications customization by working with a partner, TurnKey Solutions, and HP.
This next edition of the HP Discover Discussion Series highlights how Pomeroy, a Global IT managed services provider, improves quality for their applications testing, development and packaged applications customization.
By working with a partner, TurnKey Solutions, and HP, Pomeroy improves their overall process for development and thereby achieves far better IT and business outcomes.
Much of what is written about Continuous Delivery at present seems to revolve around technical challenges and technical choices: “Which is better: Puppet, Chef or Salt?”, “Should I use Jenkins, Go or XL Release?”, “How do I build a CD pipeline with containers?” etc. etc. If we’re looking at CD properly, though, this is the sideshow – an implementation detail at best. The real CD story is much bigger.
Don’t get me wrong: as a technical kind of person, I can get very enthusiastic about the tech: there are a lot of cool tools and frameworks out there and the tooling landscape is expanding rapidly. Working with evolving technology is a lot of fun, and there are plenty of challenges to be solved around supporting Continuous Delivery at scale…which is why we develop XL Release, XL Deploy and XL Test.
Right off the bat, Newman advises that we should “think of microservices as a specific approach for SOA in the same way that XP or Scrum are specific approaches for Agile Software development”. These analogies are very interesting because my expectation was that microservices is a pattern. So I might infer that microservices is a set of process techniques as opposed to an architectural approach. Yet in the book, Newman clearly includes some elements of concept model and architecture as well as process and organization.
Here at VictorOps, we are going through the process of overhauling the serialization framework that we use for inter and intra process communication. We evaluated several great options including Kryo (and its Scala companion Chill), Protobuffers, and Thrift.
In the process, we put together a little test project to help us decide which of these choices was right for us. Testing Thrift posed some challenges as the tooling, while quite mature, wasn’t quite as plug-n-play with our local development environment as we would have liked. The following instructions assume a basic knowledge of the Scala/SBT framework, Thrift, and (optionally) Intellij.