IT professionals continue to debate the benefits of standardization versus the benefits of innovation, and the potential of standards inhibiting engineer and software developer ability to develop creative solutions to business opportunities and challenges. At the Open Group Conference in San Diego last week (3~5 February) the topic of standards and innovation popped up not only in presentations, but also in sidebar conversations surrounding the conference venue.

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Can call centers hang up the phones for good? Intuitive Solutions did. WebRTC enabled this contact center provider to eliminate antiquated telephony and desktop phone infrastructure with a pure web-based solution, allowing them to expand beyond brick-and-mortar confines to a home-based agent model. It also ensured scalability and better service for customers, including MUY! Companies, one of the country’s largest franchise restaurant companies with 232 Pizza Hut locations. This is one example of WebRTC adoption today, but the potential is limitless when powered by IoT.

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The Internet of Everything (IoE) brings together people, process, data and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before – transforming information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. IoE creates new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented opportunities to improve business and government operations, decision making and mission support capabilities.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Gary Hall, Chief Technology Officer, Federal Defense at Cisco Systems, will break down the core capabilities of IoT in multiple settings and expand upon IoE for both technical and non-technical audiences.

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DevOps is the hottest moving target when it comes to software development methodologies. Many people fear that this fast-paced, barrier-breaking movement will leave information security best practices in the dust. Analysts provide recommendations to security professionals using bingo-laden terms like “moving security to the left” or “get a seat at the table.” What we need are real-world examples and tactics for security practitioners to be part of DevOps.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Andrew Storms, a DevOps and Information Security professional, discussed how DevOps done right with the inclusion of Information Security, produces products and processes with the potential to be even more secure.

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Operational Hadoop and the Lambda Architecture for Streaming Data
Apache Hadoop is emerging as a distributed platform for handling large and fast incoming streams of data. Predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization, and Internet-of-Things analysis are examples where Hadoop provides the scalable storage, processing, and analytics platform to gain meaningful insights from granular data that is typically only valuable from a large-scale, aggregate view. One architecture useful for capturing and analyzing streaming data is the Lambda Architecture, representing a model of how to analyze real-time and historical data together.

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The annual holiday shopping season, which starts on Thanksgiving weekend and runs through the end of December, is undoubtedly the most crucial time of the year for many eCommerce websites, with sales from this period having a dramatic effect on the year-end bottom line.
Web performance – or, the overall speed and availability of a website or mobile site – is an issue year-round, but it takes on increased importance during the holidays. Ironically, it is at this time of year that networks and infrastructure come under the most strain from traffic and are more vulnerable than ever to performance degradations. Yet busy, hurried holiday shoppers expect better performance than ever, and the stakes for lost conversions are frighteningly high. When customers encounter long load times, they’re likely to abandon their current shopping destination and move on to a competitor’s site that is performing better, sending potential revenue out the door. What’s worse, studies have shown that if a site freezes or crashes, is too slow, or involves an overly complicated checkout process, 75 percent of shoppers will no longer buy from that site.

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Hang around any IT department (or the AppDynamics offices) and you likely won’t finish a cup of coffee before somebody brings up the cost of downtime or the ascent of DevOps. And that’s a good thing, because these are two topics that are central to the value that IT brings to enterprises today and how that value will increase in the future.
IDC recently published research on these two topics in its report, “DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified,” by IDC Vice President Stephen Elliot. (See the full report.) AppDynamics was happy to cooperate with the study, along with a select group of other enterprise software companies. The survey was conducted among a cross-section of IT personnel in Fortune 1000 companies.

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NaviSite, Inc. has received the Global and Americas VMware Partner Network Award in the Service Provider Partner of the Year category. The award was presented at VMware Partner Exchange 2015, VMware’s annual partner event, held in San Francisco.
“I am pleased to recognize this select group of partners who distinguished themselves at the global level in 2014,” said Dave O’Callaghan, senior vice president, Global Channels and Alliances, VMware. “VMware is dedicated to educating and equipping our partners with the resources they need to thrive, while providing more agile delivery of IT services – to organizations of all sizes. We congratulate NaviSite on winning a Global VMware Partner Network Award and look forward to our continued mutual success in 2015.”

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Contrary to what your mother may have told you, going in circles is sometimes a good thing. When it comes to our economy, it is actually a great thing.
Throughout history, society has built itself up by transforming raw materials into finished, usable products. This manufacturing process has always been linear in that:
Materials (sand, iron, gold, etc.) are evaluated for purpose and taken from nature.
Modified and refined as necessary, these materials are combined and recombined into the services and products we use every day, until…
Their usefulness to society wanes and the everyday products and services are disposed of in a heap of useless trash.

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