Launched this June at the Javits Center in New York City with over 6,000 delegate attendance, the largest IoT event in the world, 2nd international Internet of @ThingsExpo will take place November 4-6, 2014, at the Santa Clara ConventionCenter in Santa Clara, California with estimated 7,000 plus attendance over three days. @ThingsExpo is co-located with 15th international Cloud Expo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading IoT industry players in the world. In 2014, more than 200 companies will be present at the @ThingsExpo show floor, including global players, and hottest new technology pioneers.

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We’ve all been there. It might be an email address you neglected to put in your contacts book. It’s on the tip of your tongue but you just can’t remember it. It might be a photo, or even an important email from the boss you swore you’d put in the right folder.

Docurated, a New York and Boston based firm, feels your pain. The firm’s product lifts, shifts and sorts through a company’s content repository, using machine learning to automatically tag the most relevant, effective and important content.

“That’s really a story that’s relevant to a lot of people,” Alex Gorbansky, CEO of Docurated, tells CloudTech. “Whether you work in sales or marketing in a large organisation, you are looking and flipping through so much content it impossible for you to find that information you need – and that’s where we help customers.”

Gorbansky says his view of the company’s position in life is as “a connectivity layer between knowledge workers and their contents.” It’s knowledge and information that’s the key. Here’s the irony: as cloud storage becomes ever cheaper, to the point of no cost at all, it’s the information that you’re actually being charged for.

At least, that’s how Docurated sees it. With clients including Netflix and The Weather Channel, and in a world where data threatens to overwhelm everyone in the team, others are seeing it that way too.

“We’re seeing a world where there’s much more heterogeneity on where content is stored,” Gorbansky explains. “People have information on Box, they have information on Google Drive, SharePoint, Dropbox, all over the place.

“The cost of information retrieval from a human productivity perspective is going through the roof,” he adds. “And that creates an enormous challenge for organisations.”

There are other options available to companies with different fingers in different pies. Some storage vendors offer capability to merge all their storage accounts into one big cloud, for instance. Yet the biggest partner for Docurated is Box, announcing integration back in June. As Box’s search functionality is limited to 10,000 characters, Docurated can go through the entire subset.

Docurated uses a variety of what it calls ‘signals’ to assess what content is relevant or not. As Gorbansky puts it: “When people are looking for content they’re specifically not looking for a document. They’re looking for something within the document, maybe even within the page, and we bring all of that to the forefront.”

These signals are inspired in part by how Google sorts its SEO rankings. “What was really brilliant about Google Pagerank is the way that they looked at the web, they realised that the more links a site had pointing to it, the more relevant that page was,” Gorbansky explains. “We’re getting the same thing with documents, but of course documents don’t have links, so you have other signals.”

The signals include how often a slide has been used – say, to decide which bio page is best – how recently a slide has been modified, as well as analytics. “You can call it data science,” Gorbansky concedes. “We apply data science to all this content to figure out which is the most interesting and the most relevant.”

Documents can be broken up incrementally, from individual slides, to individual text blocks and charts within that slide. Users can adopt a clipboard – a workspace where they can fit all their useful data. And to complete the cycle, the user can then save as a PowerPoint file, or PDF – effectively creating a new piece of content.

Yes, it’s adding to the noise, but it’s making that noise clearer and more tuneful. “Imagine trying to do this with today’s workflow, and today’s environment,” Gorbansky adds. “It’s virtually impossible.”

Docurated was in attendance at BoxWorks last week, with Gorbansky speaking at a panel session. Given the two companies work closely together, Gorbansky is in a perfect position to comment on Aaron Levie’s strategy, from the on-again off-again IPO drama to nixing cloud storage costs – and he defended the Box CEO.

“I think a lot of companies go through ups and downs,” Gorbansky explains, adding that the same happened with a previous startup of his but the company ‘persevered, and truly understood its true north.’ “The same will happen with Box,” he adds.

“One thing I will tell you is you can listen to all the stuff in the media, which has become negative recently, but if you actually talk to customers and leading CIOs, because we have many of those in common, they’re all enthusiastically investing in Box, despite all these things.

“I think that’s really what matters,” he adds.

Numerex has been reported as an “IoT company to watch,” and that seems to be a reasonable statement. The company does its work in the cloud, of course, delivering its IoT DNA to devices, networks, and application tools for M2M customers. We had a few questions for Numerex’s Chief Innovation & Technology Officer Jeffrey O. Smith, and here’s what he told us:

IoT Journal: Numerex has been around for about 20 years, with a background in telemetry, as I understand it. How has that migrated to what’s known as M2M today?

Jeffrey O. Smith: I have referred to a Maslow’s hierarchy of telemetry needs as a tongue-in-cheek way of helping people understand the evolution the M2M market isgoing through. “Just get me the data, stupid” is the first layer, and the hierarchy’s top layer is optimization.

Supply chain is a good example of that evolution. Initial supply chain deployments were Œdots on a map most of our deployments lately are in optimizing things like dwell time in the supply chain utilizing location data with higher level data analytics and visualization.

IoT Journal: How much data will M2M be producing within a few years, and how should
IT managers plan for it?

Jeffrey: Most M2M applications do not create that much data, except for possibly fleet management, which has location reports continuously. But who really needs to know the address of a delivery van or other fleet asset with 15 seconds resolution from six months ago?

By contrast, I have said that control and BSS/OSS data and metadata will far outweigh the data from a device. Part of the reason for this is that devices which generate large amounts of data will have local
intelligence.

For example, cavitation detection in large pumps generate a tremendous amount of real-time vibration, pressure, etc. data. But that data is usually analyzed using high-level frequency analysis locally and
only one bit of info is needed to transmit—are we in cavitation or not? You will be able to drill down to the device to get at a particular moments raw data, but it should not be transmitted and analyzed in the
cloud if it can be done on the edge.

A second example is video. In this case, it can be filtered locally—motion detection and capture—or
transmitted through out of wireless-band medium, ie a land line.

IoT Journal: I wanted to say next that massive dataflows are of no value without monitoring, analysis,
collaborative tools, and a strategy, and you’ve pointed out that the non-local dataflows may not even be that massive. In any case, how does Numerex address these issues with its customers?

Jeffrey: Numerex has had an approach to “big data for real-time streaming” of data for several years. We have PhD¹s with specialization in this area.

Most of our initial success has been in internal projects to determine areas for cost savings and determining anomalistic behavior of network elements and devices. We use some pretty-leading edge technologies to do machine learning and real-time classification on streaming data (in terabytes) and use the cloud for processing this data in real-time.

We have only recently been commercializing these capabilities. The most interesting opportunity is what we have down lately in deep packet content analysis of live streams in coordination with network and billing data.

IoT Journal: What similarities and what differences do you find in M2M challenges
within the large vertical markets that you serve?

Jeffrey: Differences are usually in how the data is presented or the action that is taken. The similarities of challenges are in devices—which our new NX platform through licensing and off-the-shelf solutions can solve—by eliminating or reducing certification, for example.

Other similarities that we leverage are services like LBS. Indoor location is needed across verticals and the integration of those capabilities like advanced Kalman filtering to disparate tea-time data to infer good indoor location is helpful in most domains.

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Racemi announced an update to its DynaCenter cloud migration software that synchronizes changed data between source and target to minimize data latency prior to migration cut over. This new delta-data synchronization feature is especially useful for migrating large enterprise applications such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Business Process Management (BPM), and other enterprise applications, which are often performed by system integrators.

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Amazon, Google and Facebook are household names in part because of their mastery of Big Data. But what about organizations without billions of dollars to spend on Big Data tools – how can they extract value from their data? In his session at 6th Big Data Expo®, Ion Stoica, CEO and co-founder of Databricks, will discuss how the zero management cost and scalability of the cloud is addressing the challenges and pain points that data engineers face when working with Big Data. He will share how the growing demand for cloud-based Big Data workloads and frameworks is shaping the future of Big Data analysis.

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Dell announced the opening of the Dell Internet of Things (IoT) Lab to partner with customers to help them explore, test and deploy IoT solutions that help drive business outcomes and accelerate time to market. The Dell IoT Lab is located in the Dell Silicon Valley Solution Center in Santa Clara, Calif. and demonstrates Dell’s expanding IoT solutions and service capabilities.

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Continuous delivery provider CloudBees has shifted its company focus, dropping the platform as a service (PaaS) of its offering to focus exclusively on open source software Jenkins.

CEO Sacha Labourey told CloudTech it was a ‘hard’ and ‘emotional’ decision to move for CloudBees, which was founded in 2010.

“We realised at the beginning of this year that Jenkins Enterprise was growing very fast, beyond our expectations, and we knew that something was going on, but it took us a bit of time to really make the conscious decision that what we had to do was strictly focus on Jenkins,” Labourey said.

“The company had a lot of strong PaaS DNA and so, to take the conscious decision to move away from that was obviously a hard decision, and even I could say an emotional decision to make.

“As soon as we decided to do that, we spent a couple of months looking at what we should do about those [PaaS] customers, what would be the best way to treat them, and as soon as we were ready we decided to move forward and do the roll-out,” he added.

With that in mind, CloudBees is retiring its PaaS Run@Cloud service – a “big shift that the company’s taking”, as Labourey put it.

 “In the last year or two we’ve seen tremendous growth towards continuous delivery,” Labourey added. “The big difference here is it’s not just about developers, but Jenkins is becoming this hub where everybody can meet – developers, DevOps, IT, they all meet around the table to set out a unified pipeline that goes from code to transaction.”

Earlier this year Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the creator of the Jenkins server, became chief technical officer at CloudBees, indicating a sign of things to come.

CloudBees has also announced a partnership with Pivotal Network to collaborate in developing enterprise-grade continuous integration. Labourey, who said the two companies were in talks for “quite a long time”, notes the strategy shift to Jenkins was also key in securing this move.

“They really liked our Jenkins portfolio and offering, and what we could bring to the table, but it always kind of hard to have discussions when in your back pocket you have a PaaS and they have a PaaS – [it] led to complicated discussions,” Labourey said.

“As soon as we decided to move on, and to solely focus on Jenkins, discussions with Pivotal became extremely simple, and it was obvious for both parties that there was a clear interest in bringing each other’s value to the table,” he added.

Labourey also confirmed the current work delivering PaaS onto Verizon’s cloud, as CloudTech reported back in February, will be discontinued, although adding the two companies are still keen on working with each other.

You know the cloud has taken over when even the most reticent of industries – legal, financial – shift to the cloud, and even discuss Europe-wide private clouds specifically for their industry.

It seemed for a long time that the traditional reasons for moving to the cloud – i.e. reduced cost, increased flexibility – were the key drivers behind the shift towards cloud-delivered software, but some professions are seeing wider benefits. Let’s look at the example of Human Resources – another of those industries initially reluctant to move to the cloud, but one which has now embraced it.

The HR Cloud

It’s easy to see why Human Resources professionals were initially reluctant to move to the cloud – personal data (lots of it) – accessible through a username and password. Many were stuck in the era of paper and pen (coloured-coded paper, too, as I remember it).

Cost and flexibility, therefore, may have been drivers for a move to the cloud, yet were hardly compelling to those stuck in the ‘HR past’.

It’s a legal thing

Across both payroll and HR, legislation is forever changing. One government will enact legislation every 6 months, and the next government may repeal or enhance that legislation. In the past, those with HR or payroll software would have had to update their software manually – through CDs delivered by post – in order to stay compliant with the new legislation.

Failure to comply would mean potential fines from HMRC, or could mean overpayments or underpayments to employees, the latter of course resulting in disgruntlement and in many cases, departure to a more trustworthy employer.

Keeping up with legislation, therefore, was part and parcel of HR. It was, of course, a nightmare for those running the software.

This all changed with cloud-delivered HR software. The updates are just rolled out online, usually overnight, in time for the next pay run, meaning that the business could a) ensure that employees were paid the right amount and b) the company avoided fines.

It’s an engagement thing

I often go back to my days of colour-coded paper for holiday forms as an example, but it’s a good one (and it wasn’t so long ago). Forms would be lost, or worse, rejected because of the wrong colour paper. You were, of course, not informed of that rejection until the day before your holiday was due to start.

We tend to look back on the ‘paper’ days in a bad light, they weren’t all that bad, but they were prone to error. And that error would lead to serious disgruntlement. 

Marks & Spencer had similar problems in that each store had its own HR person, with their own HR rules. It was hard to manage hundreds of stores around the country when there was no centralised HR policy being applied. A HR system built to centralise these rules and regulations actually ended up solving another problem – engagement.

Getting holidays signed off quickly may sound like a small thing, but the culmination of small things being done correctly makes a big difference. Being able to apply for leave online, at home, and have it signed off within a guaranteed timeframe does a world of wonder for employee engagement.

And therefore, you might think, for sales of elasticated knickers.

The takeaway

We’ve (finally) reached a stage where the cloud is considered more or less default. On-premise has its place in some instances, but with CRM and the like shifting to near 100% cloud by 2020 (or 85%, according to some recent research), we’re nearly there.

To accelerate this, we need to take the HR angle and look at not just the cost savings and the flexibility, but the actual ROI and day-to-day business improvement. For HR, this was about avoiding fines, increasing compliance and boosting employee engagement. The cloud has done what on-premise (or paper) could not – it has actually made HR better. 

We can’t keep trotting out the same arguments about cost & flexibility, but we can start looking at tangible improvements. Who knows, we might actually be able to improve the cloud systems we’ve already got in place?

Josh Garza, the CEO of GAW Miners, first made a name for himself by building one of the top online retail stores for cryptocurrency mining equipment. Garza has pivoted that operation into the cloud by launching what he has dubbed hashlets. These hashlets are designed to create Bitcoins using a combination of ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) and cloud data center technology.

CloudWedge first reported on organizations wanting to use cloud to mint Bitcoins back in March 2014. The write up chronicled CloudHashing.com’s method of selling cloud contracts that “Reserves a certain amount of computational power for your own Bitcoin mining endeavours.” Garza and GAW Miners look to gain a piece of this market share by shifting his company from the online retail world. Instead of selling Bitcoin mining hardware, GAW Miners has pivoted into selling cloud mining contracts. According to Garza, the move was met with unprecedented success.

Garza tells DCKnowledge, “I saw that shipping hardware to people wasn’t going to last forever, so I worked on a plan to migrate our business to a cloud model.” Garza continues by mentioning that his eCommerce provider was knocked offline by the enormous amount of interest in cloud bitcoin mining contracts. In fact, Garza said, “We had to slow down because we were running out of data center capacity.”

Garza’s candid comments continue as he talks about how he got into the Bitcoin industry. “I got into mining as a hobby, as a lot of people do. I ran into some unsavory companies and lost money on a couple of deals. I just wanted to create an alternative so people could do business with confidence. And it kind of exploded.”

Garza recently shelled out over $1 million for the domain name BTC.com and GAW recently bought out ZenMiner for $8 million in order to expand his this growing Bitcoin cloud mining endeavors. At current rates, Garza’s hashlet products are expected to give Bitcoin speculators a return on their investment within 2 months.

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