Wearable technology was dominant at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) , and MWC was no exception to this trend. New versions of favorites, such as the Samsung Gear (three new products were released: the Gear 2, the Gear 2 Neo and the Gear Fit), shared the limelight with new wearables like Pebble Time Steel (the new premium version of the company’s previously released smartwatch) and the LG Watch Urbane.
The most dramatic difference at MWC was an emphasis on presenting wearables as fashion accessories and moving away from the original clunky technology associated with the industry. Along with more pleasing aesthetics, software updates and more capabilities also target early adopters.

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In recent years, we’ve watched mobile, cloud technologies and Internet of Things (IoT) enable increased connectivity for every network and every industry, ranging from connected cars to commercial vehicles and fleet management to smart cities to data centers. At MWC, it was clear that professionals in these areas are continuing to make strides in their fields. Below are a few of the major developments we noticed and look forward to hearing more as 2015 progresses.

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DevOps is a hot topic. It seems that everyone is talking about it. Some have built business models around DevOps-related tools and themes. There are conferences and trade shows dedicated to DevOps-strategies and techniques. Some people have even made their careers around talking about it. In light of all of that, I find it chuckle-worthy that very few people actually know what DevOps is (just follow #devops on Twitter for proof.) I am not going to be one of many trying to create a buzzword-infested definition of DevOps to suit my particular agenda. Instead, I’d like to talk about what DevOps is not.
So, without further ado, DevOps …

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The WebRTC Summit 2014 New York, to be held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York, NY, announces that its Call for Papers is open. Topics include all aspects of improving IT delivery by eliminating waste through automated business models leveraging cloud technologies. WebRTC Summit is co-located with 16th International Cloud Expo, @ThingsExpo, Big Data Expo, and DevOps Summit.

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One of the most difficult things to do today is to identify a legitimate user. Part of the problem is that the definition of a legitimate users depends greatly on the application. Your public facing website, for example, may loosely define legitimate as “can open a TCP connection and send HTTP request” while a business facing ERP or CRM system requires valid credentials and group membership as well as device or even network restrictions.

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The list of ‘new paradigm’ technologies that now surrounds us appears to be at an all time high. From cloud computing and Big Data analytics to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and the Internet of Things (IoT), today we have to deal with what the industry likes to call ‘paradigm shifts’ at every level of IT.
This is disruption; of course, we understand that – change is almost always disruptive.

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There’s a lot of focus on the performance of mobile communications given the incredible rate at which mobile is outpacing legacy PC (did you ever think we’d see the day when we called it that?) usage. There’s been tons of research on the topic ranging from the business impact (you really can lose millions of dollars per second of delay) to the technical mechanics of how mobile communications is impacted by traditional factors like bandwidth and RTT. Spoiler: RTT is more of a factor than is bandwidth in improving mobile app performance.

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Security is one the more prominent of the application service categories, likely due to its high profile impact. After all, if security fails, we all hear about it. The entire Internet. Forever.

So when one conducts a survey on the state of application delivery (which is implemented using application services) you kinda have to include security.

Which of course, we did.

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We’ve seen entire industries disrupted by the Internet including newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias, libraries, travel agents, music, taxis, hotels, the Yellow Pages and more. All of these industries were predicated on controlling proprietary information flows. When the Internet brought the marginal cost of communication and information transfer to $0, the old business models failed and new ones emerged that took advantage of a fundamentally new way to communicate.

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Containers and microservices have become topics of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities.

Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 16th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York June 9-11 will find fresh new content in a new track called PaaS | Containers & Microservices

Containers are not being considered for the first time by the cloud community, but a current era of re-consideration has pushed them to the top of the cloud agenda. With the launch of Docker’s initial release in March of 2013, interest was revved up several notches. Then late last year, CoreOS shook up the community with its Rocket containers announcement.

Part of Rocket’s strategy is apparently to return to the notion of a container as, well, a container, in the face of Docker expanding its container strategy upward into the overall PaaS realm. Meanwhile, Red Hat has its own view of containers.

Along with that, there are viewpoints that perhaps containers haven’t been used well up to this point. Red Hat’s Gordon Haff, for example, a regular Cloud Expo speaker, recently wrote that developers and their customers need to re-think the concept of services themselves, and how they should be deployed discretely and loosely. Rather than just stuff an OS into a container, for example, developers and deployers should consider a spectrum of microservices and what they can do.

Cloud Expo is still accepting submissions for this new track, so please visit www.cloudcomputingexpo.com for the latest information.

As always, Cloud Expo is staying right on top of what’s going on in this fast-evolving world. We look forward to seeing you in New York.

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