WebRTC is great technology to build your own communication tools. It will be even more exciting experience it with advanced devices, such as a 360 Camera, 360 microphone, and a depth sensor camera. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Masashi Ganeko, a manager at INFOCOM Corporation, will introduce two experimental projects from his team and what they learned from them. “Shotoku Tamago” uses the robot audition software HARK to track speakers in 360 video of a remote party. “Virtual Teleport” uses a multiple Intel RealSense Depth Camera to scan 3D and build 3D models in real-time, and display as hologram in front of remote participants.

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Throughout the global economy and across all industries, companies are re-inventing themselves to become better at sensing the next big thing their customers need, and finding ways to deliver it to get ahead of the competition.

The concept of DevOps dates back nearly 10 years now. During this time, a lot has changed. As DevOps has matured, we have seen many successful implementations, lessons learnt and copious amounts of data gathered. One thing that remains unchanged to this day – DevOps is motivated by business results, without which there would be no reason to take risks. Typically, organisations are driven to improvement through one or more of the following four areas: time to market, quality in the improved user experience, efficiency or compliance. However, to achieve any of these objectives, DevOps requires changes to culture, process and tools. 

As consumers have demanded more online services, DevOps has become incremental to the digital transformation some companies have embarked on to stay competitive.  For example, during the time that Netflix evolved its business model from DVD rentals to producing its own shows and delivering a video on demand service, a lack of commercial tools to support its huge cloud infrastructure saw it turn to open-source solutions for help. It was here that the Simian Army was created, a suite of tools that stress tested Netflix’s infrastructure so that its IT team could proactively identify and resolve vulnerabilities before users were affected.

A global study from Freeform Dynamics and CA Technologies reveals the benefits and drivers for DevOps implementation, and highlights how culture, process and technology must come together to enable DevOps success. In EMEA, IT decision-makers surveyed saw a 129 per cent improvement in overall software delivery performance when practicing cloud and DevOps together. This was over an improvement of just 81 per cent when practicing DevOps alone and 67 per cent when leveraging cloud without DevOps.

Not only have organisations experienced 99 per cent better predictability of software performance, by combining DevOps with cloud-based tools, it has resulted in a 108 per cent improvement in customer experience over traditional software development and delivery models. A streamlined online customer experience is in high demand, and respondents cited a faster software delivery speed of 2.6 times – plus more than three times better cost control for the tools and services that DevOps teams actually use.

It is clear that modern development and delivery must be supported with DevOps. The following five components are essential in enabling companies to leverage new software to meet customer needs in any deployment:

Agile management: New capabilities bridge the gap between employee autonomy and company strategy with an unprecedented level of process flexibility, supporting organisational methodologies (such as Scrum and Kanban) at the team level. It helps ensure visibility, and alignment to corporate strategy and direction.

API management: Application programming interfaces (APIs) are the unsung heroes of the application economy. Many of the world’s leading applications would not exist without them. APIs are sets of defined rules that govern how one application can talk to another, providing ready-made, universal access to whatever functionality an organisation needs to deliver.

Analytics: Analytics are necessary to provide visibility into time spent at each step in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to enable faster software delivery. They also provide a holistic view of orchestration across the entire software delivery chain – integrating planning tools, agile management solutions, performance testing tools with release automation, operations and application testing solutions. Analytics solutions also correlate end-user, application and infrastructure monitoring to deliver business and operational insights necessary to improve digital experiences.

Integration of mainframe operations and automation tools: These allow organisations to leverage machine learning for operational intelligence and real-time dynamic thresholds. These solutions proactively detect performance anomalies sooner, and automate corrective action that prevents outages and slowdowns of mission essential systems. 

DevSecOps: The entire software lifecycle is incorporated with security through DevSecOps. By detecting and addressing security defects throughout the development process, companies can reduce the risk of the most common source of breaches: attacks on the application layer.

In the current environment, being built to succeed means being built to change. Innovations supporting microservices and container-based architecture are driving overall modernisation, with technologies such as machine learning and advanced analytics. Today, traditional software development proves obsolete versus cloud, DevOps, or – ideally – both combined. Together, cloud and DevOps are fuelling the modern software factory revolution.

A new piece of research from MIT’s computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory (CSAIL) has proffered a new system for data centre caching using flash memory – potentially meaning more energy efficient and economical computing.

According to the researchers, the system they created, dubbed BlueCache, is able to keep up with requests flooding the data centre by ‘pipelining’, allowing the next instructions to be fetched while the processor performs arithmetic operations.

This helps shore up the traditional flaw in flash memory when compared to RAM, in terms of speed. As slow as flash is relative to dynamic RAM (DRAM), users ‘won’t notice the difference between a request that takes .0002 seconds to process… and one that takes .0004 seconds because it involves a flash query’, as MIT puts it. Per gigabyte of memory, flash consumes approximately 5% as much energy as RAM, and costs about one tenth as much.

Despite this, even through pipelining, the researchers had to deploy some ‘clever engineering tricks’ to make flash caching able to compete with DRAM caching, with BlueCache ending up 4.2 times as fast as a default flash-based cache server. This included adding a few megabytes of DRAM to each million megabytes of flash, making the detection of cache misses more efficient.

“The viability of this type of system extends beyond caching, since many data-intensive applications use a [key value]-based software stack, which the MIT team has proven can now be eliminated,” said Vijay Balakrishnan, director of the data centre performance and ecosystem program at Samsung Semiconductor’s Memory Solutions Lab.

“By integrating programmable chips with flash and rewriting the software stack, they have demonstrated that a fully scalable, performance-enhancing storage technology, like the one described in the paper, can greatly improve upon prevailing architectures,” Balakrishnan added.

You can read the full MIT post here.

• Gartner added eight new technologies to the Hype Cycle this year including 5G, artificial general intelligence, deep learning, edge computing, serverless PaaS.
• Virtual personal assistants, personal analytics, data broker PaaS (dbrPaaS) are no longer included in the Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies.

The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2017 provides insights gained from evaluations of more than 2,000 technologies the research and advisory firms tracks. From this large base of technologies, the technologies that show the most potential for delivering a competitive advantage over the next five to 10 years are included in the Hype Cycle.

The eight technologies added to the Hype Cycle this year include 5G, artificial general intelligence, deep learning, deep reinforcement learning, digital twin, edge computing, serverless PaaS and cognitive computing. 10 technologies not included in the hype cycle for 2017 include 802.11ax, affective computing, context brokering, gesture control devices, data broker PaaS (dbrPaaS), micro data centers, natural-language question answering, personal analytics, smart data discovery and virtual personal assistants.

The three most dominant trends include artifical intelligence (AI) everywhere, transparently immersive experiences, and digital platforms. Gartner believes that key platform-enabling technologies are 5G, digital twin, edge computing, blockchain, IoT platforms, neuromorphic hardware, quantum computing, serverless PaaS and software-defined security.

Key takeaways from this year’s Hype Cycle include the following:

• Heavy R&D spending from Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Facebook is fueling a race for Deep Learning and Machine Learning patents today and will accelerate in the future – The race is on for Intellectual Property (IP) in deep learning and machine learning today. The success of Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google’s Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana and others are making this area the top priority for R&D investment by these companies today. Gartner predicts deep-learning applications and tools will be a standard component in 80% of data scientists’ tool boxes by 2018. Amazon Machine Learning is available on Amazon Web Services today, accessible here.  Apple has also launched a Machine Learning Journal. Baidu Research provides a site full of useful information on their ongoing research and development as well. Google Research is one of the most comprehensive of all, with a wealth of publications and research results.  IBM’s AI and Cognitive Computing site can be found here. The Facebook Research site provides a wealth of information on 11 core technologies their R&D team is working on right now. Many of these sites also list open positions on their R&D teams.
• 5G adoption in the coming decade will bring significant gains for security, scalability, and speed of global cellular networks – Gartner predicts that by 2020, 3% of network-based mobile communications service providers (CSPs) will launch 5G networks commercially. The Hype Cycle report mentions that from 2018 through 2022 organizations will most often utilize 5G to support IoT communications, high definition video and fixed wireless access. AT&T, NTT Docomo, Sprint USA, Telstra, T-Mobile, and Verizon have all announced plans to launch 5G services this year and next.
• Artificial general intelligence is going to become pervasive during the next decade, becoming the foundation of AI as a service – Gartner predicts that AI as a service will be the enabling core technology that leads to the convergence of ‘AI everywhere’, Transparently immersive experiences and digital platforms. The research firm is also predicting 4D printing, autonomous vehicles, brain-computer interfaces, human augmentation, quantum computing, smart dust and volumetric displays will reach mainstream adoption.

Sources:

Gartner Identifies Three Megatrends That Will Drive Digital Business Into the Next Decade

Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2017 (client access required) 

Read more: Living on the edge: The changing face of the data centre and public cloud

Floyd “Money” Mayweather made headlines last weekend for making light work of Mixed Martial Arts superstar Conor McGregor. But he also made tech headlines recently by endorsing the Hubii Network, an initial coin offering (ICO), on his Instagram and Twitter accounts.
This isn’t the first time Mayweather (who’s dubbed himself Floyd “Crypto” Mayweather) has endorsed an ICO. In late July, he promoted the ICO for the Stox project, which went on to raise more than $30 million in its token sale. (BTW: There are subtle differences between an ICO, a token sale, and a crowdsale, although the terms are often used interchangeably. Search the terms to learn more.)

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Enterprises often face challenges when integrating Salesforce and NetSuite. But, despite the fact that NetSuite offers an out-of-the-box solution to integrate with Salesforce, companies’ data flow requirements are far too complex even for a simple integration.
NetSuite is highly popular among enterprise customers for its accounting, financial and ERP toolkit. Even though it has fully functional CRM module, Salesforce is considered to be perfect blend in cloud-based CRM solution. Alternatively, some Salesforce users feel like it lacks the ERP, Accounting, Financial solution capabilities which NetSuite delivers.

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As consumers in the age of digital innovation, we benefit from an abundance of technologies, each seeking to simplify our daily lives. Be it Apple, Amazon or Google, our digital service providers are only too happy for us to take advantage of their latest cool apps or funky new tools. With so much free stuff and low cost pay as you go options, we’ve never had it so good. It’s a no brainer, win-win for both consumer and producer. Or is it?

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