The Internet of Things (IoT) is creeping into every aspect of our lives. With the advent of smart cities, smart manufacturing, precision agriculture, drones and digital energy, businesses and individuals alike have seen the influx of IoT technology. For example, a recent report from Gartner, “suggests that more than 26 billion devices will be connected to the internet by 2020, with 250,000 of them being vehicles.” So, with the billions of connected things, its only natural this week’s top news roundup would highlight how IoT is maturing and what experts see for the future ahead.
Tibco announces stream of new updates
Tibco has announced four new updates for its Spotfire, LiveView, community support and IoT offerings.
The company’s current focus is on leveraging analytics for augmented intelligence to discover new insights then productively share those insights across the enterprise in the shortest amount of time possible.
“Some in the industry would lead you to believe that computers are going to replace people. We think that’s dead wrong,” said Mark Palmer, SVP at Tibco. “Computers should serve to augment human experience and intellect. At Tibco, we focus our industry-leading visual, advanced, embedded and, streaming analytics solutions on delivering a pragmatic approach to cognitive computing, which we achieve by combining enhanced intelligence features with algorithmic automation capabilities.
“This combination encapsulates the essence of our Fast Data analytics platform – it balances human insight with intelligent technologies for superior productivity and a competitive advantage in end users’ respective markets.”
The Spotfire offering now includes self-service data preparation, management, and utilisation functionality to extend the platform’s analytics capabilities. The team highlighted the product requires no third-party coordination for data preparation, as the inline datawrangling functionality in Spotfire is built-in.
The company has also launched open source, BSD-licensed Accelerator package for Apache Spark and the IoT. The offering includes five subsystems; Connector, for edge connection to IoT and enterprise data; Digester, a stream data preparation layer; Finder, predictive model discovery template; Automator, a streaming analytics-based automation engine for Apache Spark; and Tracker, to monitor predictive models and automatically invoke model retraining.
LiveView now includes a code-free HTML5 operational-intelligence dashboard development platform for use with the Live Datamart. Finally, the team have introduced a new developer community space for sharing end-user-driven technical expertise, insights, and Wiki articles.
Salesforce reveals secret recipe for digital transformation
Speaking at the London edition of Salesforce’s world tour, EVP of Customer Success & Growth Simon Short outlined the case for digital transformation, and also the factors which underpin a successful transformation project itself.
Short’s view on digital transformation is there are very few companies who achieve the goal of becoming digitally orientated. This is done to three reasons. Firstly, the aggressive expansion of technology is so vast some organizations are drowning in information overload. Another is the cultural side of digital transformation, there simply aren’t enough companies embracing the necessity of cultural change. And finally, despite implementing various technologies and advanced platforms, some companies still operate in silos. Until these digital silos are connected on one overarching platform, the digital transformation journey is not complete.
The invention of chess is a good anecdote to demonstrate the progression of technology. The inventor, Ibn Khallikan, approached the Indian king with the game and his reward was to be rice, more specifically one grain for the first square on the chess board, two for the second, four for the third, and doubling there on until the end of the 64 squares. Although at first it would not appear to be a great amount, the geometric progression of the amount of rice far exceeded the king’s resources. Short believes the same theory can be applied to the growth of technology in the business world.
“If you apply the same doubling theory and Moore’s law to the growth and importance of technology, we get have way through the chess board in 2002,” said Short. “Since then we’ve seen an explosion of technology within the business world. As we continue to move forward, it’s a real challenge for those with existing technology to make the change and get ahead of the trend. No one really knows what the power of technology is and where it will go. This is the conundrum for businesses throughout the world.”
One of the main challenges here is focused around legacy technologies, businesses cannot rid themselves of the cumbersome platforms quickly enough to capitalize on the potential on emerging technologies. But at the same time, Short highlighted the companies who focus on technology implementation and do not embrace the cultural change required will not be successful in the digital transformation journey.
According to Short, digital transformation is so much more than simply implementing technology. Ensuring you employees embrace the digital change, as well as connecting the individual silos (for example the eCommerce platform to the customer call centre and also the logistics/delivery team), are more important aspects of the project than the technology itself. Without the digital culture and the connected model, the customer simply sees a business which is broken even if the technology is revolutionary. “Silos and culture are the two things which can kill any transformation project,” said Short.
But what is the secret to a successful digital transformation project? And what have the successful ‘Digital Masters’ done which other companies haven’t?
For Short, the project has to be led by the CEO and has to be phased in. The various different components of the project (business change, strategy, technology implementation, employee digital engagement etc.) have to be implemented hand-in-hand. If one area progresses faster than the rest, the project will stutter. And most importantly, there has to be a governance and accountability role, an area which most companies overlook, to ensure all components of the project are heading in the same direction and progressing at the same speed. In general, there are six lessons from Short’s and Salesforce’s perspective:
- Change has to be led from the CEO and not delegated down. The business unit and IT cannot get into a shouting match, pointed fingers at each other, the CEO needs to take control and pull the business along with him
- Physical and digital experience needs to be co-ordinated. The customer experiences the brand in the physical world as well as the digital despite the growth of the internet and technology; the physical and digital experience for the customer needs to be co-ordinated to be successful
- Outside-in thinking. Many companies make the mistake of telling their customers about how they are changing the brand, as opposed to understanding what the customer journey is and adapting the digital experience to enhance this.
- Understanding it’s okay to fail. This is one of the more challenging facets according to Short, as accountable businesses don’t like to fail. But the belief every PoC will be an extraordinary success is somewhat wishful thinking. Short highlighted being okay with failure is the only way to move on and achieve success.
- Data driven insights. The amount of data available to businesses is unprecedented and growing faster every day. Decisions should be based on the data available which has been derived directly from the customer. It removes uncertainty (as much as possible in any case) and provides justification.
- A single platform to connect the business units. Without a single platform to connect all business units, digital transformation cannot be achieved, as digital transformation should focus on the connected journey. The aim should be the seamlessly interact with the customer on all their touchpoints.
Digital transformation is a key objective for the majority of businesses around the world, and rightly so. According to MIT research which Short quoted on stage, digitally transformed businesses are 26% more profitable than what would be perceived as the norm, but too many companies are focusing on the technology as opposed to the customer. Until the ideas of culture, technology and silo connections are addressed on a level playing field, digital transformation cannot be achieved.
How to enable the ISV community with cloud computing
(c)iStock.com/roberthyrons
Access to computing resources has been democratised through access to low cost cloud platforms. Network access is now high-speed, low-cost and almost ubiquitous. Together, this means that cloud provides a perfect platform for the development and scalable delivery of applications. And the ISV community has a significant opportunity to take advantage.
Delivering value for customers
The SaaS model creates new opportunities for both ISVs and their customers. Consumption-based charging models enable both low cost-of-entry and low cost-of-software, so clients can experiment with applications that optimise business processes, drive higher efficiency, productivity and growth.
Such cloud-based models allow ISVs to focus on their core goals of developing and delivering applications; and improving their customer experience. Tasks like capacity management, infrastructure budget management and platform availability can all be offloaded to a cloud partner; and importantly, the costs of such operations can be married to usage and revenue for the ISV.
Other tasks can potentially be offloaded, too – ISVs working with a Managed Service Provider can also offload tasks such as patching, replication, redundancy and security. With the right partner, an ISV can deliver agility to the DevOps cycle and then rely on the service provider to implement change control, security or compliance enhancements, business continuity and to deliver a robust availability and performance SLA for the production applications.
Enabling customisation
ISVs can take a pragmatic approach in a move to SaaS, establishing whether it’s a good fit for their client base, their financial model and their software offering. However, they might have use cases that are better suited to a partner that can deliver hybrid solutions.
Applications delivered to end-users in heavily regulated industries may not be suited to multi-tenanted platforms, but may still sit well on discrete, dedicated infrastructure with appropriate security and compliance controls. Those cloud platforms where resources are rented by the hour may not necessarily offer the best value to applications with predictable workloads; or those where the end-user signs fixed-term contracts.
The combination of opportunities presented by IaaS and SaaS models has expanded the options available to ISVs for software development and delivery; and in turn provided a greater number of options and better-value solutions for end-users.
The cloud is reducing barriers to entry for new software businesses and allowing existing ISVs to be more agile, responsive to customers and innovative. Both the customers of these solutions and the ISVs themselves stand to gain considerable benefits by taking advantage of cloud infrastructure and managed services as long as due diligence is undertaken in this transition.
Choosing a cloud provider
Developers are now leveraging Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and other cloud platforms to spin up cloud instances and to tear them down when they’re done, without any manual intervention, and all from one portal. However, there are a variety of service providers that offer an equal variety of cloud services. Software businesses need to consider their specific needs carefully when selecting a provider.
Key considerations should include:
- Uptime commitment from the service provider, particularly how this relates to the critical needs of the relevant application
- Whether a transparent billing mechanism is built in with the cloud offering
- API functionality to allow your software to drive the infrastructure
- Tools or native platform capabilities that allow rapid cloning and deployment of whole environments, enabling faster and more reliable DevOps cycles
- Whether that partner can deliver a robust, managed service wrap that enhances the user experience and delivers security to client data
The challenges ahead
Despite the opportunities it offers, the cloud is not a panacea for ISVs and challenges still remain in the delivery of secure, reliable software solutions to end-users. However, by partnering with a Managed Service Provider that can offer agile development platforms and robust delivery services, many software developers will be able to reap the benefits of increased focus on core business areas, improved user experience and faster, more agile DevOps cycles.
Amazon Web Services launches X1 instances on EC2 for SAP users
(c)iStock.com/Prykhodov
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has officially launched X1 instances for its EC2 cloud, which claim to have the most memory available in any SAP-certified cloud instance available today.
The instances have 2 terabytes of memory each and are, according to Amazon, a good fit for programmes such as the SAP HANA in-memory database, big data processing engines such as Apache Spark and Presto, as well as other high performance computing workloads. The memory available in X1 is eight times more than in any other instance on EC2.
“Amazon EC2 provides the most comprehensive selection of instances, offering customers, by far, the deepest compute functionality to support any workload,” said Matt Garman, Amazon EC2 VP in a statement. “XI instances change the game for SAP workloads in the cloud. Now, for the first time, customers can run their most memory-intensive applications at scale with the elasticity, flexibility, and reliability of the AWS Cloud, rather than having to battle the complexity, cost, and lack of agility of colo or on-premises solutions.”
This is not the first time AWS has waxed lyrical over SAP this week; earlier the cloud giant issued a release which noted a significant increase of customers running SAP applications on the AWS cloud. No specifics on numbers were given, but customers include GE Oil & Gas, Kellogg’s, and Zappos.com.
AWS as we know it turned 10 years old back in March, and still continues to be seen as the darling of the industry with a significant – almost unsurpassable – lead in infrastructure as a service and, in the words of Ian Moyse, Cloud Industry Forum and Eurocloud board member, taken companies such as Microsoft with it more quickly than expected.
X1 instances are available upon request to AWS customers in selected US, EU, and Asia Pacific regions, with the service being rolled out to more regions in the coming months.
CRN’s “Power 100: The Most Influential Women of the Channel 2016”, Why Smart IT Leaders Connect with Maria Dinallo and Parallels
CRN’s “Power 100: The Most Influential Women of the Channel 2016”, Why Smart IT Leaders Connect with Maria Dinallo and Parallels Maria Dinallo, Parallels’ Senior Director of Channel Sales has been honored in CRN’s “Power 100: The Most Influential Women of the Channel 2016”. CRN Power 100 honorees were selected on the basis of their […]
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Industrialized IIoT | @ThingsExpo #IoT #IIoT #M2M #API #InternetOfThings
As machines are increasingly connected to the internet, it’s becoming easier to discover the numerous ways Industrial IoT (IIoT) is helping to shape the business world. This is exactly why we have decided to take a closer look at this pervasive movement and to examine the desire to connect more things!
Now if you need a refresher on IIoT and how it is changing the world, take a moment and listen to Greg Gorbach with ARC Advisory Group. Gorbach believes, “IIoT will significantly change the world. You won’t participate with conventional thinking and an incremental approach.”
IoT Will Change IT | @ThingsExpo #IoT #IIoT #M2M #DigitalTransformation
The Internet of Things has the potential to completely change how we live and work. It’s already causing an evolution in the workplace – especially where IT is involved.
By 2020, there will be over 38 billion connected devices. In the interest of convenience and efficiency, we’re shoving embedded computers into pretty much every single product and appliance we use, from fridges and blenders to thermostats and security systems. Wi-Fi connected device are no longer an oddity or for use simply by the elite; they’re a regularity in both our personal and professional lives.
[session] Container Security Compliance for Financial Services By @CloudRaxak | @CloudExpo #Cloud
Many banks and financial institutions are experimenting with containers in development environments, but when will they move into production? Containers are seen as the key to achieving the ultimate in information technology flexibility and agility. Containers work on both public and private clouds, and make it easy to build and deploy applications.
The challenge for regulated industries is the cost and complexity of container security compliance. VM security compliance is already challenging, and containers increase the problem exponentially. Simplifying and automating security compliance will be critical to achieving the high ROI expected from containers.
[session] Cross-Channel Marketing in a Cloud-Driven Digital World By @Adobe | @CloudExpo #Cloud
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Bruce Swann, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adobe, will discuss how the Adobe Marketing Cloud can help marketers embrace opportunities for personalized, relevant and real-time customer engagement across offline (direct mail, point of sale, call center) and digital (email, website, SMS, mobile apps, social networks, connected objects).
Bruce Swann has more than 15 years of experience working with digital marketing disciplines like web analytics, social media, mobile marketing and email marketing, as well as marketing and CRM technologies, including marketing automation, predictive analytics and marketing resource management. At Adobe, he is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Campaign, focused on marketing and product strategy for cross-channel campaign management.