Since Gartner’s latest research around bimodal IT was published, the buzzword has been catching some serious heat. This week, the fires quell as we learn best practices to balance bimodal IT for success. Another buzzword picking up traction this week is Agile. Whether it’s in development, testing or leadership, every corner of the enterprise is adopting Agile to not only accelerate delivery times and improve product quality, but to ensure effective management as well. Continue reading for the latest trends in Bimodal IT, Agile, tech leadership and IoT.
Keys to Successful #DigitalTransformation | @DevOpsSummit #Agile #DevOps
A lot of companies believe that they can transform the way they do business, and go so far as to include transformation in some job titles. You might be an architect, an agile coach, or otherwise responsible for setting the new standards or transitioning to a new set of tools. Let me suggest two quick tips to make your life easier.
Mobility, IoT, Artificial Intelligence | @ThingsExpo #IoT #DigitalTransformation
Developing solutions integrated with mobile applications that can anticipate your needs based upon your Code Halo data, the information that surrounds people, organizations, projects, activities and devices, and acting upon it automatically is where a large amount of productivity gains will be found in the future.
The Cloud Isn’t Cool Anymore | @CloudExpo #IoT #DigitalTransformation
If the cloud was once (ever) bleeding edge, now the cloud is sheer necessity for anyone doing anything on the Internet. It has changed the way we architect applications, build IT budgets, grow userbases, even write individual lines of code. As the Internet continues to lambdify, cloud services will become more specialized; but for now, how can you take advantage of the granularity, elasticity and pre-baked-ness of modern cloud services? And, on the flip side, as your applications expand outside blade-boxes and even beyond individual data centers, how do you design applications that treat network links like second generation buses that won’t get hung up if a service a continent away just isn’t working? And what about the applications that store sensitive data on machines whose geolocation and hardware configuration is unknown?
EMC enters native hybrid cloud market
Chad Sakac (Right), President, VCE, Converged Platform Division speaking with Jeremy Burton (Left), President of Products and Marketing at EMC World 2016
EMC has expanded its cloud portfolio with the launch of Native Hybrid Cloud, a turnkey platform for cloud-native application development and deployment.
Hybrid cloud is proving to be the next major battleground for the tech giants of the world, and cloud native is another one of the industry buzzwords which is gaining traction in all corners. EMC claim the new offering with enable deployments of cloud-native application developer platform and infrastructure services in as few as two days, using Cloud Foundry. The turnkey offering combines the Pivotal Cloud Foundry cloud-native platform with VMware’s IaaS and cloud-native offerings, into a consolidated turnkey solution.
“In the new digital economy, innovation and agility trumps all. Enterprises differentiate themselves through rapid innovation and agile services delivery,” said Chad Sakac, President of VCE and Converged Platform Division at EMC. “Trying to build, iterate and maintain these stacks built on a series of constantly moving elements are completely a waste of resources – resources that can be better applied elsewhere, because EMC is investing many hundreds of engineers to make it a turnkey platform.
“An engineered platform that integrates cloud-native IaaS with Pivotal’s cloud-native platform, EMC’s Native Hybrid Cloud overcomes the challenge in business and IT transformation to enable developers to deliver innovation through new applications, software and digital services better and faster.”
Sakac also highlighted at EMC World that the team are starting to see new trends develop in the way enterprise organizations engage with vendors. In recent years there has been a tendency for enterprise organizations to build their own cloud-native stacks, though Sakac believes trends are now leaning towards consumption of technology as a service (as opposed to building in-house), as customers realize it is cheaper and simpler to buy a turnkey solution. Should the claim prove to be true, it would certainly be good news for EMC, who are one of the first to market with such an offering.
The growth of cloud native technologies and business practises is fuelled by pressure from various aspects of the business to increase the speed of innovation, deployment and experience, responding to the competitive nature of the digital economy.
“With Pivotal Cloud Foundry tightly integrated into Native Hybrid Cloud, developers now can drastically shorten the application development and deployment lifecycle and operators can manage thousands of apps with far fewer people,” said James Watters, SVP of Products at Pivotal. “An idea for an application on Monday can be running in production by Friday. This is the cloud-native way and it’s transforming how the world builds and runs software.”
ATP teams up with Infosys to launch big data driven ranking system
The Association of Tennis Professionals, ATP, has partnered with Infosys to launch a new statistical way to measure the best performing ATP World Tour players.
The new ATP Stats Leaderboards makes use of Infosys’ data analytics capabilities to bring together recorded stats from various professionals on the tour today to rank them in three categories, Serving, Returning and Under Pressure, and even allows users to compare current players with greats from the past. The three categories can be broken down by surface, by year, by past 52 weeks or by career.
“These new statistics offer players, fans and media interesting new insights into how our athletes are rating in three key areas against their peers on the ATP World Tour,” said Chris Kermode, ATP Executive Chairman. “There is huge potential to understand our sport better through the development of new statistics, and we look forward to further advances coming soon in this area through our partnership with Infosys.”
The project uses the Infosys Information Platform, an opensource data analytics platform, and brings together the vast amount of data collected by the ATP over the years to give fans a concise rating of players on the tour today. The ranking are determined through various big data models combining several metrics including the number of double faults during a game, number of aces, the percentage of points won on an opponent’s serve and the number of successfully converted break points, to give a measure of how players are performing currently and in comparison to previous parts of the season.
“The uniqueness of our partnership with the ATP World Tour lies in being able to challenge the traditional models, and experiment and embrace technology to create a compelling experience for fans across the globe,” said U B Pravin Rao, Chief Operating Officer at Infosys. “We firmly believe that technology can amplify our ability to create this unique differentiation and we will continue to find newer avenues to elevate the fan experience.”
While this would be considered a novel concept for the game of tennis, the use of big data and advanced analytics tools is not new for the world of sports entertainment. Accenture Digital has been using its data analytics capabilities to predict the outcome of the Six Nations and the recent Rugby World Cup.
The company has been a technology partner of the Six Nations for five years now, and this year introduced an Oculus Rift beta virtual reality headset and development kit as part of the on-going marketing strategies to demonstrate its capabilities. The company claims to process more than 1.9 million rows of data during every match, and also developed parameters for 1800 algorithms to bring the data, dating back to 2006, to life. After each match, approximately 180,000 on-field actions were added to the increasing data store to refine the decision making capabilities.
[session] Hybrid Security Monitoring By @AlertLogic | @CloudExpo #Cloud
The demand for organizations to expand their infrastructure to multiple IT environments like the cloud, on-premise, mobile, bring your own device (BYOD) and the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to grow. As this hybrid infrastructure increases, the challenge to monitor the security of these systems increases in volume and complexity.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Stephen Coty, Chief Security Evangelist at Alert Logic, will show how properly configured and managed security architecture can defend against the cyber kill chain. The audience will learn about the “10 Security Best Practices” for effective security solutions and proven strategies to prevent harmful cyber activity.
IBM launches quantum computing platform for public on cloud
IBM has announced its quantum computing platform, Quantum Experience, will be available to the public through its cloud platform, who can access and run experiments on the company’s quantum processor.
The platform, which will be delivered onto any desktop and mobile device, will drive IBM’s efforts to redefine its perception in the industry. The company believe quantum computing is the future of computing and has the potential to solve certain problems that are impossible to solve on today’s supercomputers.
“Quantum computers are very different from today’s computers, not only in what they look like and are made of, but more importantly in what they can do. Quantum computing is becoming a reality and it will extend computation far beyond what is imaginable with today’s computers,” said Arvind Krishna, SVP at IBM Research. “This moment represents the birth of quantum cloud computing.
“By giving hands-on access to IBM’s experimental quantum systems, the IBM Quantum Experience will make it easier for researchers and the scientific community to accelerate innovations in the quantum field, and help discover new applications for this technology.”
IBM believes momentum driven from Moore’s law is ‘running out of steam’, quantum computing will be the next catalyst for innovation in the cloud computing era. The power available through quantum computing has the potential to take technologies such as artificial intelligence to the next level, as well as increasingly the long-term potential of IBM’s Watson.
Quantum computing is by no means a new idea, Richard Feynman proposed to build computers based on the laws of quantum mechanics in 1981, but is only now becoming a reality within the industry. A classical computer makes use of bits to process information, where each bit represents either a one or a zero. In contrast, a qubit can represent a one, a zero, or both at once, which is known as superposition. The outcome could result in a platform which can process calculations dramatically faster than classical computers.
Some corners of the industry could see IBM as one of the organizations who have been left in the pre-cloud era, though this announcement and the work done by the team to progress Watson is seemingly creating a new market for the business. As opposed to simply playing catch-up in the traditional cloud markets, IBM would appear to be looking further afield to redefine the perception of IBM.
IBM announces availability of quantum computing for testing on IBM cloud
(c)iStock.com/shylendrahoode
IBM is making available quantum computing to the public, allowing people to access and run experiments on IBM’s quantum processor.
Scientists at the company have manufactured quantum processor that can be accessed via a quantum computing platform delivered through the IBM Cloud onto any desktop or mobile device.
The cloud-enabled quantum computing platform, called IBM Quantum Experience, facilitates the running of algorithms and experiments on IBM’s quantum processor and users can work with the individual quantum bits (qubits) while going through tutorials and simulations related to the strengths of quantum computing.
The quantum processor comprises five superconducting qubits and is based at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York.
The five-qubit processor represents the latest advancement in IBM’s quantum architecture that can scale to larger quantum systems. The processor is also reportedly the foremost approach towards manufacturing a universal quantum computer.
A universal quantum computer can be programmed to perform any computing task and will be exponentially faster than classical computers for a number of important applications for science and business.
Though this kind of computer is not present today, IBM foresees the presence of medium-sized quantum processors of 50-100 qubits in the next 10 years. A 50-qubit quantum computer will surpass a TOP500 supercomputer by a long way.
MS Terminal Server and Parallels Remote Application Server- a Winning Combination!
MS Terminal Server is a server program in Windows NT 4.0 and above operating systems that delivers graphical user interface (GUI) instances of a Windows desktop to a remote client device. It has the ability to host multiple client sessions and effectively publish desktops to thin clients, Windows-based and non-Windows-based. Using MS Terminal Server, businesses […]
The post MS Terminal Server and Parallels Remote Application Server- a Winning Combination! appeared first on Parallels Blog.