In his General Session at 17th Cloud Expo, Bruce Swann, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Campaign, will explore the key ingredients of cross-channel marketing in a digital world.
Learn 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).
Big Data, Analytics and WebRTC | @ThingsExpo #IoT #RTC #BigData #WebRTC
WebRTC: together these advances have created a perfect storm of technologies that are disrupting and transforming classic communications models and ecosystems. In his session at WebRTC Summit, Cary Bran, VP of Innovation and New Ventures at Plantronics and PLT Labs, will provide an overview of this technological shift, including associated business and consumer communications impacts, and opportunities it may enable, complement or entirely transform.
Big Data’s Potential to Secure the IoT | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #API #BigData
The security devil is always in the details of the attack: the ones you’ve endured, the ones you prepare yourself to fend off, and the ones that, you fear, will catch you completely unaware and defenseless. The Internet of Things (IoT) is nothing if not an endless proliferation of details. It’s the vision of a world in which continuous Internet connectivity and addressability is embedded into a growing range of human artifacts, into the natural world, and even into our smartphones, appliances, and physical persons.
In the IoT vision, every new “thing” – sensor, actuator, data source, data consumer, routing intermediary, etc., is a new security-relevant detail that stirs up a wide range of collateral security issues. In other words, every new networked IoT endpoint is a new potential attack vector or launching point that the baddies can exploit. Potentially, every time you plug in a new IoT-networked device that is infected with malware or simply open to unauthorized third-party exploitation, the vulnerabilities start. Someone somewhere might exploit the new access point to gain illicit access to sensitive secrets (business, consumer, government, etc.), to damage software and data, and to wage distributed denial of service attacks.
Next-Gen VDI By @HPMnetworks | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Microservices
As interest in VDI grows among enterprises, many are finding its implementation more challenging than they anticipated. Successful desktop virtualization requires a powerful, secure, reliable infrastructure that delivers a seamless user experience. Private clouds that deliver a public cloud experience are emerging as a solution.
Open Source Cloud ‘Stackup’ at @CloudExpo Silicon Valley | #Cloud
CloudCamp, where adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas, is being held on Tuesday, November 3, from 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm at the 17th Cloud Expo, November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. CloudCamp will be led by Dave Nielsen of CloudCamp.
This CloudCamp is focused on these Open Cloud platforms and open source applications that run on top of them. This event is a way for us to learn about what is happening in the Open Cloud ecosystem. We invite you to propose talks related to any of these open source platforms and other topics related to getting solutions to run on top of open source.
Change Management Got Bigger By @DMacVittie | @CloudExpo #Cloud
While we were busy throwing parts of our organizations into the cloud, and (for those who don’t count it as cloud) SaaS, while we were moving parts of our organization over to Python, or Node, or Swift, while we were looking into Software Defined Everything, and containers started sounding like the hosting spot for a humongous jigsaw puzzle, something was growing that we should be paying more attention to.
Companies with unmonitored Dockers could be dangerously exposed – study
While container technology is sweeping the board and being installed practically everywhere, its progress will be largely unmonitored, says a study. According to the research figures, the majority of Docker adopters could be sleepwalking into chaos.
The report, The State of Containers and the Docker Ecosystem 2015, found that 93% of organisations plan to use containers, with 78% of them opting for Docker.
The primary reason for using Docker was its convenience and speed, according to the survey group, of whom a massive majority (85%) nominated ‘Fast and easy deployment’ as their most important reason for using Docker. However, this haste could lead to mistakes, because over half (54%) told researchers that performance monitoring was not the major focus of attention as they rushed to adopt container technology.
The findings of the study shocked Bernd Greifeneder, CTO at performance manager Dynatrace, which commissioned the research.
“It’s crucial to monitor not just the containers themselves, but to understand how microservices and applications within the containers perform,” said Greifeneder, who works in Dynatrace’s Ruxit division, “monitoring application performance and scalability are key factors to success with container technology.”
Half the companies planning a container deployment in the coming six months to a year will do so in production, according to Greifeneder. Without monitoring, it will be difficult to manage, he said.
While most companies (56%) seem to realise the benefits of having reliable and production-ready solutions, fewer (40%) seemed to understand the flip side of the powers of automation and the dangers inherent in using ‘extraordinarily dynamic’ technology without monitoring its progress.
Since Docker was launched in 2013, more than 800 million containers have been pulled from the public Docker Hub. While container use is skyrocketing there are barriers to success that need to be addressed, Greifeneder argued.
The report was conducted by O’Reilly Media in collaboration with Ruxit. Survey participants represent 138 companies with fewer than 500 people from a variety of sectors including in software, consulting, publishing and media, education, cloud services, hardware, retail and government.
IBM to buy The Weather Company and make it elementary to Watson
IBM has entered an agreement to buy The Weather Company’s B2B, mobile and cloud-based web properties, in a bid to extend its Internet of Things range.
The acquired assets include WSI, weather.com, Weather Underground and The Weather Company brand. The Weather Channel will not be part of the acquisition but it will license weather forecast data and analytics from IBM under a long-term contract.
IBM says the combination of technology and expertise from the two companies will be foundation for the new Watson IoT Unit and Watson IoT Cloud platform as part of its $3 billion investment strategy in this sector.
The Weather Company’s cloud data system runs the fourth most-used mobile app daily in the United States and handles 26 billion inquiries a day.
On closing the deal, IBM will acquire The Weather Company’s product and technology assets that include meteorological data science experts, precision forecasting and a cloud platform that ingests, processes, analyses and distributes petabyte sized data sets instantly. The Weather Company’s models analyse data from three billion weather forecast reference points, more than 40 million smartphones and 50,000 airplane flights per day, allowing it to offer a broad range of data-driven products and services to 5000 clients in the media, aviation, energy, insurance and government industries.
The Weather Company’s mobile and web properties serves 82 million unique monthly visitors. IBM said it plans to develop The Weather Company’s digital advertising platform and skills, commercialising weather information through data-driven advertising with additional ad-sponsored consumer and business solutions.
“The next wave of improved forecasting will come from the intersection of atmospheric science, computer science and analytics,” said Weather Company CEO David Kenny. “Upon closing of this deal, The Weather Company will continue to be able to help improve the precision of weather forecasts and deepen IBM’s Watson IoT capabilities.”
Infectious Media CTO on how DevOps is affecting ICT teams
The fourth employee of Infectious Media, Dan de Sybel started his career as an Operations Analyst for Advertising.com, where during a six year tenure, he launched the European Technology division, producing bespoke international reporting and workflow platforms, as well as numerous time saving systems and board level business intelligence.
Dan grew the EU Tech team to 12 people before moving agency side, to Media Contacts UK, part of the Havas Media Group. At Havas, Dan was responsible for key technology partnerships and spearheading the agency’s use of the Right Media exchange under its Adnetik trading division.
At Infectious Media, Dan’s Technology division yielded one of the first Big Data analysis systems to reveal and visualise the wealth of information that RTB provides to its clients. From there, the natural next step was to produce the Impression Desk Bidder to be able to action the insights gained from the data in real time and thus close the loop on the programmatic life cycle. Dan’s team continues to enhance its own systems, whilst integrating the technology of other best-in-class suppliers to provide a platform that caters to each and every one of our clients’ needs.
Ahead of his presentation at DevOps World on November 4th in London, Dan shares his insights on how he feels DevOps is affecting ICT teams, the DevOps challenges he is facing as well as what he is doing to overcome it.
What does your role involve and how are you involved with DevOps?
Infectious Media runs its own real-time bidding software that takes part in hundreds of thousands of online auctions for online advertising space every second. As CTO, it’s my job to ensure we have the right team, processes and practices in place to ensure this high frequency, low latency system remains functional 24×7 and adapts to the ever changing marketplace and standards of the online advertising industry.
DevOps practices naturally evolved at Infectious Media due to our small teams, 1 week sprint cycles and growing complexity of systems. Our heavy use of the cloud meant that we could experiment frequently with different infrastructure setups and adapt code to deliver the best possible value for the investment we were prepared to make. These conditions resulted in far closer working of the developers and the operational engineers and we have not looked back since.
How have you seen DevOps affecting IT teams’ work?
Before adopting the DevOps philosophy, we struggled to bring the real-time bidding system to fruition, never sure if problems originated in the code, in the operational configurations of infrastructure, or in the infrastructure itself. Whilst the cloud brought many benefits, never having complete control of the infrastructure stack led to many latency and performance issues that could not be easily explained. Furthermore, being unable to accurately simulate a real-world environment for testing without spending hundreds of thousands of pounds meant that we had to work out solutions for de-risking testing new code in live environments. All of these problems became much easier to deal with once we started following DevOps practices and as a result, we have a far happier and more productive technology team.
What is the biggest challenge you are facing with DevOps and how did/are you trying to overcome it?
The biggest challenge was overcoming initial inertia to switch to a model that was so far unproven and regarded as a bit of a fad. Explaining agile methodologies and the compromises it involves to senior company execs is hard enough, but as soon as you mention multiple daily release cycles necessitating fewer governance processes and testing on live, you are bound to raise more than a few eyebrows.
Thankfully, we are a progressive company and the results proved the methodology. Since we adopted DevOps, we’ve had fewer outages, safer, more streamlined deployments and, crucially, more features released in less time
Can you share a book, article, movie that you recently read/watched and inspired you – in regards to technology?
The Phoenix Project. Perhaps a bit obvious, but it’s enjoyable reading a novel that covers some of the very real problems IT professionals experience in their day-to-day roles with the very solutions that we were experimenting with at the time.
What are you hoping to achieve by attending the DevOps World?
Really my goal is to understand and help with some of the problems rolling DevOps practices out across larger companies can yield. In many respects, rolling out DevOps in small startups is somewhat easier as you have far less inertia from tried and trusted practices, comparatively less risk and far fewer people to convince that it’s a good idea. I’ll be interested to hear about other people’s experiences and hopefully be able to share some advice based on our own.
Chad Jones Shows IoT Game-Changers | @ThingsExpo @DeepInfoSci #IoT
Deep Information Sciences, the company that reimagined MySQL for the New Economy in the cloud, today announced that Chad Jones, its Chief Strategy Officer, will be a featured speaker at Internet of @ThingsExpo, taking place November 3 – 5, 2015 in Santa Clara, CA.
In his session, “How Databases Can Stop Playing Catch-Up with the IoT” on November 4 at 8:30am, Jones will share tips on how to accelerate IoT initiatives and harness truly big IoT data by applying machine learning to the database core.
Jones will also be a featured panelist on the IoT Power Panel, “The World’s Many IoTs: Which are the Most Important?” on November 3 at 5:20pm, which explores technology advancements that will have the biggest impact on the IoT industry.