I’m reading a McKinsey report from May 2013 that talks about 12 disruptive technologies, including cloud computing and the Internet of Things (Iot). I’ll focus on the IoT here.

The report estimates the (Iot) Internet to be worth between $2.7 and $6.2 trillion by the year 2025.(The world’s combined GDP is about $72 trillion today.) When it comes to the IoT, the report says there could be 50 billion new devices connected to the Internet by 2025, or maybe a trillion. Give or take.

With all due respect, these numbers are nonsense, perhaps, and irrelvant, doubtlessly. It does no one any good to estimate things within a few trillion dollars or a factor of 20X.

We also have no idea what the world will look like politically more than a decade from now. Will the year 2025 harken the beginning of Hillary Clinton’s third term as President of the United States? Or perhaps the Cruz/Paul administration’s first? Will China be the world’s economic collosus, and/or perhaps the world’s largest democracy?

Over the past two decades, no one expected the fall of the Soviet Union or the Arab Spring; the dot-com meltdown came as a catastropic shock to many (and removed $7 trillion in wealth), and our favorite uncle Alan Greenspan now admits he had no idea that the Great Recession was looming. We humans are terrible at predicting the future.

But we live with the certainty that technology evolves and has great potential to improve the fate of nations and people. Technology is apolitical, agnostic, and indefatigable in the face of geo-political pettiness and conflict. We all know this. “Learning” that the cloud or IoT might add a trillion here and there, or several trillion, adds no value to any discussion.

McKinsey did its due diligence in rounding up a passel of big names (eg, Eric Schmidt, And it gives the usual, clichéd nod to Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction in touting the 12 disruptions.

Let’s Get Specific
But those of us working in the industry need to be a little more specific. The IoT encompasses an enormous range of devices, uses, and industries.

I first led discussions of it at an event in Beijing in 2011. McKinsey, to its credit, issued a nice report sans numbers in 2010. One company tweeted me yesterday that they’ve been doing IoT stuff since 2007.

OK, got it. The IoT is not a brand-new idea. But it is now gaining big traction. It is already throwing datacenter developers into a tizzy as they grapple with delivering a magnitude more processing in a short time. Industrial design is moving to the fore, not just the province of Apple anymore. Google just bought a company for $3.2 billion, a harbinger of an IoT spring.

The IoT generates Big Data, which in turn is best handled by virtualized resources and Cloud Computing, which in turn are begetting the Software-Defined Networks (SDN) and Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC). Emerging DevOps culture also fits in here, as a function of the speed required to bring ideas to fruition.

For my part, I spend a lot of my time working within a start-up that aims to deliver personal websites, photos, and video to as many people as possible, worldwide, some day. We virtualize, we use the cloud, and we will be encountering bigger datasets as we encounter mobile devices on our grid, and the telemetry that goes with them.

It’s a big development challenge, and one in which we operate in blissful ignorance of whether we’re operating within a $1.7 or $6.2 trillion opportunity.

In summary, as a writer and as Conference Chair of @thingsexpo, I have a simple question: what are you doing? Please let me know!

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The ‘platform’ tier in the middle of cloud computing’s architecture is being squeezed, folded and reshaped beyond recognition. Even with continued investment, can it survive the transformative pressures forcing down upon it from the software/application layer above, or the apparently inexorable upward movement from the infrastructure layer upon which it rests? To look at recent investments and enthusiastic headlines, it would be easy to assume that Platform as a Service (or PaaS) is on the up. RedHat recently trumpeted the launch of OpenShift Enterprise — a ‘private PaaS,’ whatever that might be. Eagerly tracked super-startup Pivotal pushed PivotalOne out to the world, strengthening the position of the Cloud Foundry PaaS offering upon which it sits. Apprenda, a PaaS that almost predates wider recognition of the term, secured an additional $16 million to continue expanding. And, more tightly integrated into Salesforce’s latest vision for world domination, Heroku continues to attract enthusiasts. And yet, the role of rich PaaS ‘solutions’ is under increasing pressure. More lightweight approaches such as Docker are attracting attention and, perhaps more importantly, the other layers of the cloud architecture are adding capabilities that look increasingly PaaS-like. The orchestration capabilities of Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk, for example, mean that many (but […]

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Appcore has released its latest product, Appcore AMP Service Manager, a hosted private cloud solution for service providers.
Based on customer demand, Appcore is releasing Appcore AMP Service Manager, allowing service providers to now sell hosted private cloud. “It is paramount for service providers to differentiate their product offering to compete in today’s environment. Our hosted private cloud solution now allows service providers to further leverage their existing network and infrastructure to provide a secure environment for their enterprise customers,” said Jeff Tegethoff, Appcore CEO.

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SoftLayer, an IBM Company, on Wednesday announced that game development studio KUULUU and online game servers provider Multiplay are using IBM SoftLayer’s cloud capabilities to power popular games such as Battlefield 4 and RECHARGE. KUULUU tapped into SoftLayer’s cloud for higher performance and scale for their newest game created with Linkin Park, the most popular band on Facebook with 55 million followers, called RECHARGE, while Multiplay utilizes SoftLayer cloud to support the mega title Battlefield 4.
The global gaming market is estimated to total $111 billion by 2015 – driven largely by the increasing popularity of cloud gaming (online, streamed and downloaded games are estimated to represent as much as $38B in revenue in 2012). By leveraging the cloud built on open standards to host and stream games, developers are able to provide users with uninterrupted, instant access to games across any devices that will provide higher performance and easily scale based. This allows games to be streamed directly from the cloud, rather than downloaded locally, freeing up storage space on user devices and making access to updates easier and more efficient.

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Infrastructure must balance between applications and the network because otherwise werewolves would cease to exist.
In science we’re taught that gravity is the law. As it relates to us living here on earth (I can’t speak for all you displaced aliens, sorry) there are two gravitational forces at work: the earth and the moon.
The earth’s gravity, of course, keeps us grounded. It’s foundational. Without it, we’re kind of up a creek (or an atmosphere, as it were) without a paddle. werewolf-4
The moon’s gravitational pull is a bit different in that’s it’s pulling in the opposite direction. It’s pulling upwards whereas the earth’s gravity pulls us downward.

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Infrastructure must balance between applications and the network because otherwise werewolves would cease to exist.
In science we’re taught that gravity is the law. As it relates to us living here on earth (I can’t speak for all you displaced aliens, sorry) there are two gravitational forces at work: the earth and the moon.
The earth’s gravity, of course, keeps us grounded. It’s foundational. Without it, we’re kind of up a creek (or an atmosphere, as it were) without a paddle. werewolf-4
The moon’s gravitational pull is a bit different in that’s it’s pulling in the opposite direction. It’s pulling upwards whereas the earth’s gravity pulls us downward.

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HCL Technologies and CSC have formed a strategic partnership to address the substantial market opportunity created by the need for enterprise clients to modernize their applications and transition to the cloud.
HCL and CSC will create a world-class application modernization delivery network to enable enterprises to shift from legacy technologies to a cloud-enabled platform. The first delivery centers will be launched in Bangalore and Chennai. These delivery centers will lower the risks and costs for clients transitioning to the cloud.
The joint application modernization offering will be enhanced with vertical specific initiatives starting with banking and financial services through the creation of a banking center of excellence. The partnership will be standardizing the delivery of modernized applications and enable them to be brokered onto any cloud environment, using platforms such as CSC’s ServiceMesh.

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Keeping up with the day-to-day HR needs of a growing workforce can significantly affect your efficiency. Paperwork, approvals, requests for information and staying compliant: all take you away from your strategic focus. A cloud-based HR system can help remove the administrative stress from your growing HR needs and allow you to concentrate on your business.

You already use the cloud

It’s amazing how many people are aware of ‘The Cloud’ but don’t know they’re using it, over 75% of businesses are in, or are looking to move to the cloud for a variety of reasons.

But first, if you’re on Facebook, Twitter, shop online or bank online you are actually more familiar to the cloud then you already know. They all use the cloud because it’s simple, it’s mobile and pretty much anyone can use it, working in real time makes your life easier …

The ‘platform’ tier in the middle of cloud computing’s architecture is being squeezed, folded and reshaped beyond recognition. Even with continued investment, can it survive the transformative pressures forcing down upon it from the software/application layer above, or the apparently inexorable upward movement from the infrastructure layer upon which it rests? To look at recent investments and enthusiastic headlines, it would be easy to assume that Platform as a Service (or PaaS) is on the up. RedHat recently trumpeted the launch of OpenShift Enterprise — a ‘private PaaS,’ whatever that might be. Eagerly tracked super-startup Pivotal pushed PivotalOne out to the world, strengthening the position of the Cloud Foundry PaaS offering upon which it sits. Apprenda, a PaaS that almost predates wider recognition of the term, secured an additional $16 million to continue expanding. And, more tightly integrated into Salesforce’s latest vision for world domination, Heroku continues to attract enthusiasts. And yet, the role of rich PaaS ‘solutions’ is under increasing pressure. More lightweight approaches such as Docker are attracting attention and, perhaps more importantly, the other layers of the cloud architecture are adding capabilities that look increasingly PaaS-like. The orchestration capabilities of Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk, for example, mean that many (but […]

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To lower IT operational costs and/or to become more agile, the business must simplify the processes to deliver and manage infrastructure and the applications running on that infrastructure. Focusing on one without the other is simply applying yet another band-aid to an already hampered environment. Delivering IT as a service requires transformative efforts across all of IT and a re-evaluation of the metrics currently used to judge success. Achieving these goals demands a new platform and approach to delivering data and applications to users.
I was recently reviewing a reference architecture for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and was confounded by the sheer complexity still required to deliver what amounts to a starting point for the higher level task of deploying software. Perhaps I set the bar too high, but if I were a CIO, any new infrastructure investment I made today would need to be part of a self-aware automatically elastic resource pool. That is, when I plug in the new hardware (e.g. server, storage, network) I’m asked a couple of basic questions about allocation and voila the hardware is automatically incorporated into one or more resource pools. Moreover, there’s software that sits on top of that pool that allocates it out to users on a metered basis. Any further time spent on operational configuration, engineering and deployment is simply wasted effort.

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