What are the successful IoT innovations from emerging markets? What are the unique challenges and opportunities from these markets? How did the constraints in connectivity among others lead to groundbreaking insights?
In her session at @ThingsExpo, Carmen Feliciano, a Principal at AMDG, will answer all these questions and share how you can apply IoT best practices and frameworks from the emerging markets to your own business.

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“We view the cloud not really as a specific technology but as a way of doing business and that way of doing business is transforming the way software, infrastructure and services are being delivered to business,” explained Matthew Rosen, CEO and Director at Fusion, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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SYS-CON Events has announced today that Roger Strukhoff has been named conference chair of Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo 2016 Silicon Valley.
The 19th Cloud Expo and 6th @ThingsExpo will take place on November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
“The Internet of Things brings trillions of dollars of opportunity to developers and enterprise IT, no matter how you measure it,” stated Roger Strukhoff. “More importantly, it leverages the power of devices and the Internet to enable us all to improve the state of the world and lives of people.”

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When people aren’t talking about VMs and containers, they’re talking about serverless architecture. Serverless is about no maintenance. It means you are not worried about low-level infrastructural and operational details. An event-driven serverless platform is a great use case for IoT.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Animesh Singh, an STSM and Lead for IBM Cloud Platform and Infrastructure, will detail how to build a distributed serverless, polyglot, microservices framework using open source technologies.

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(c)iStock.com/-MG-

Organisations’ fears of cloud-based backup are mostly down to inexperience or ignorance of how the systems work rather than technological issues, according to new survey results released by analyst house Clutch.co.

The research, which surveyed more than 300 small to medium US businesses to measure the benefits and challenges of cloud-based backup, found that 87% of respondents said online backup was either equally or more secure than on-premises equivalents. 24% argued it was “much more” secure, with 32% opting for “somewhat” and 31% equally secure. Only 2% argued online backup was much less secure.

In terms of benefits to cloud backup, greater data security (31%) was most frequently cited, ahead of data space (21%) and simpler backup (21%), while more than a third (37%) of businesses polled said they had experienced no problems when utilising cloud backup, with downtime and bugs (36%) cited most often ahead of limited data space (22%), security issues (19%), and data recovery problems (14%).

Despite this, the research argues these factors can be improved upon. “It’s often very disconcerting if there’s any downtime with getting to the provider to get the data,” said Bob Lamendola, general manager of infrastructure services at MindShift. “It makes people very uneasy if the solution is not reliable and stable…it really casts a dark shadow and can create a barrier to adoption.”

Almost half (49%) of respondents say they back their data up on a daily basis, according to the research, compared with 34% who say weekly. Perhaps worryingly, 2% of firms polled said they back up their data annually. On a similar theme, backup services are usually tested weekly (34% of respondents) or monthly (34%). One in 10 ensure to perform a test daily, while 3% admit they have never done it.

Clutch argues a mix of frequent monitoring and annual, or semi-annual, testing by fully simulating a data leak and checking if the data can be fully restored. “[You should] simulate the ‘loss’ of a critical file, folder, database, or system, and document the exact steps and amount of time it takes to recover this data completely,” said Mark Anderson, of Anderson Technologies. “Go through every step necessary to get the data back on a system in-house and completely usable again.”

The concept of companies fearing change, rather than technology, is one which has been covered extensively in this publication. Matthew Finnie, CTO of Interoute, argued as much when speaking to CloudTech last month. “It’s all transitionary,” he said. “From our experience, the speed of [cloud] transformation has got nothing to do with technology…[but] many times the fear and loathing of the IT department.”

You can read the full Clutch report here.

(c)iStock.com/Tuomas Kujansuu

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has said it will continue its plans to build a data centre in the UK despite the referendum vote to leave the European Union last month.

The news was disclosed by AWS UK&I managing director Gavin Jackson at the AWS Summit in London earlier today. The UK data centre region, first announced in November last year, is part of AWS’ expansion plans which also include new bases in Montreal, Ohio, and Ningxia in China.

AWS’ confirmation that the UK data centre will be built – scheduled to arrive either at the end of this year or the beginning of next – arrives after Gartner issued a bleak warning over IT spending after the UK voted to Brexit. In a note, the analyst house argues that “with the UK’s exit, there will likely be an erosion in business confidence and price increases which will impact UK, Western Europe and worldwide IT spending.”

If that wasn’t bad enough, IDC adopted a similarly cautious tone in a forecast released earlier this week, arguing the UK faces a ‘challenging transition’ in terms of how organisations will spend their IT budget. Neither analyst firms’ figures took Brexit into account, however IDC warned that the following quarter could see a downturn for the UK.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, AWS has also announced greater support for EU-based ISVs through the AWS Marketplace, meaning ISVs that have legal entities in EU countries can register, list, and sell their products through AWS. The full list of vendors that have already signed up is available on the AWS blog, including Germany-based in-memory database provider EXASOL. “Companies of all sizes can now take advantage of EXASOL’s performance-beating in-memory analytic database on the world’s most significant cloud platform,” said Dr. Jens Graupmann, EXASOL VP product management.

“This is of great benefit to organisations that want to get started with data analytics fast but cannot invest upfront in analytic infrastructures, and it will be interesting to see what new data-driven businesses are created as a result,” he added.

Internet of @ThingsExpo, taking place November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, is co-located with the 19th International Cloud Expo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world and ThingsExpo Silicon Valley Call for Papers is now open.

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Apixio Inc. has raised $19.3 million in Series D venture capital funding led by SSM Partners with participation from First Analysis, Bain Capital Ventures and Apixio’s largest angel investor. Apixio will dedicate the proceeds toward advancing and scaling products powered by its cognitive computing platform, further enabling insights for optimal patient care.
The Series D funding comes as Apixio experiences strong momentum and increasing demand for its HCC Profiler solution, which mines unstructured medical records, for an accurate view of a patient’s chronic conditions so payers and providers can deliver better care. Apixio’s cognitive computing platform has analyzed data from more than six million patients, achieving 210 percent year-over-year growth in patients analyzed.

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“Avere Systems is a hybrid cloud solution provider. We have customers that want to use cloud storage and we have customers that want to take advantage of cloud compute,” explained Rebecca Thompson, VP of Marketing at Avere Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

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Internet of @ThingsExpo has announced today that Chris Matthieu has been named tech chair of Internet of @ThingsExpo 2016 Silicon Valley.
The 6thInternet of @ThingsExpo will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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