There’s something extraordinary going on in Vietnam, and I’m not sure everyone sees it. The country blazes from the dry pages of our research printouts, its incandescence obscuring its neighbors and making our office fire alarms nervous.

Among the 105 nations we now survey, Vietnam will finish in or near the Top 20 in the world in our overall ranking, when we announce our latest results next month. It will be near the top in Asia. Our overall ranking integrates several socio-economic and technological factors.

Additionally, Vietnam will rank near the top of the world in our pure tecnology development ranking.

In contrast, Vietnam continues to lag in the traditional economic development rankings that I’ve read. The United Nations’ Human Development Index places it 121st among 187 nations, tied with Guyana and trailing even Syria and Iraq.

It fares a little better in the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitive Index, finishing in a tepid tie for 65th among 144 nations, in the neighborhood of Peru, Colombia, Slovenia, and India. Another ranking, the Asia Cloud Computing Association’s Cloud Readiness Index, places Vietnam dead last among 14 nations surveyed.

Damned Lies & Statistics
The country’s mediocre to poor rankings in these surveys and others is no doubt strongly tied to less than $2,000 in per-person income, ranking around the bottom quartile of world incomes. Compare this amount to about $2,800 in the neighboring Philippines, $5,600 in Thailand, and $7,000 in China.

Yet this statistic, as with all single statistics, doesn’t tell the whole story. Our research takes the view that relative developmnt is the key; that is, how well is a country doing given its current economic resources. How strong are its underlying IT infrastructure and overarching societal development with respect to its overall wealth? And how dynamic is its environment? How quickly is its pace of change increasing?

By these measures, Vietnam is a star. Its global buzz has diminished recently, as years of rapid development following enactment of doi moi (renovation or innovation) reform policies in 1986 led to uneven development and societal stress.

Indeed, our research also shows Vietnam running “too hot” in our Goldilocks Index of pure technology development. How long can it sustain its current pace?

(More later…)

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Gordon Haff wrote an insightful column today about “skeuomorphic virtualizaton,” in other words the notion of thinking of virtual servers as having the same look and feel of the physical machines lying underneath. The upshot is that virtualization ends up just being a form of partioning; users view virtualized instances as no different from a single physical server.

Gordon urges the end of skeuomorphism’s reign of terror (my words, not his) now that containers are (back) in the news.

So don’t simply stuff “a hodepodge,” as Gordon says, of operating systems versions along with your app and all that goes with it (web server, database, storage, comms) into a container as if it’s just another virtualized machine.

Instead, he writes that it’s time to think of “containerized operating systems, container packaging systems, container orchestration like Kubernetes, DevOps practices, microservices architectures, “cattle” (shorter term) workloads, software-defined everything, and pervasive open source as part of a new platform for cloud apps.”

Reboot Time
Old habits die hard. The relentless drive for efficiency in business focuses itself evermore on IT operations, breeding an instinct to view the new tool as simply an improved hammer and to simply try to slam things through with it more quickly. An increasing focus on DevOps, as seen from the high management level, can certainly reinforce this view.

But that would be wrong. Containers give everyone another shot at imagining their software as a number of services rather than a unified application. Further, as Gordon notes, they let you throw in an OS here, some orchestration there, a VPN there, and truly become efficient (and more future-proof) in the way you design and deploy what you’re trying to do.

The original SOA days seem far away to me, but the idea of provisioning services is still a radical one. Too often today, software-as-a-service in the cloud still means software-as-an-application from the sky. The inexorability of Moore’s Law allows people to slam things through for short-term gain rather than long-term efficiency, and this will be particularly true as containers become prized for their relative abstemious use of resources.

But an expeditious, rather than more profound, use of containers will just create tomorrow’s hodgepodge. The potential of containers to reboot the way we think of services and how they should be delivered can logically lead to re-imagining how users should experience what the services offer – and how skeuomorphic those experiences should be, of course.

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Modern Data Centers are very complex environments. Data center operators must have visibility into a wide range of integrated data bases, applications, and performance indicators to effectively understand and manage their operations and activities. Unfortunately, in many cases, the above systems are either done manually, have no standards, and had no automation or integration interconnecting individual back office components. This also includes many communication companies and telecommunications carriers which previously either adhered, or claimed to adhere to Bellcore data and operations standards.

In some cases, the lack of integration is due to many mergers and acquisitions of companies which have unique, or non standard back office systems. The result is difficulty in cross provisioning, billing, integrated customer management systems, and accounting – the day to day operations of a data center.

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It’s always been my philosophy that we should make it as easy as possible for our prospects to write us checks. Sounds flippant, but I believe it is sound business philosophy.
It’s been interesting to me to see how customers have wanted to buy infrastructure software, and how it has changed over the years.
Back in the ’90s and early 2000’s, most network management vendors charged for their software per interface or per port, and we did as well. Around 2004 and 2005, we started receiving requests for device-based pricing, since it was difficult for end users to know just how many interfaces they had (but they knew how many devices were in inventory). So we acquiesced, and converted to device based pricing. To do this, you need to make assumptions about the average number of ports per networking device (or interfaces per Bladeserver, etc.).

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2014 was a year of cloud security and compliance accomplishments and 2015 will certainly bring new challenges and new successes.
In 2014, we worked closely with many customers who needed to adhere to HIPAA and PCI DSS compliance requirements. We made sure all bases were covered, data was protected, and compliance was achieved.
Though PCI DSS 3.0 was officially released on November 7, 2013 and became effective on January 1, 2014, its compliance deadline took effect a year later, on January 1, 2015. This infographic explains what you need to know about PCI DSS 3.0.

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Today’s enterprise is being driven by disruptive competitive and human capital requirements to provide enterprise application access through not only desktops, but also mobile devices. To retrofit existing programs across all these devices using traditional programming methods is very costly and time consuming – often prohibitively so.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jesse Shiah, CEO, President, and Co-Founder of AgilePoint Inc., discussed how you can create applications that run on all mobile devices as well as laptops and desktops using a visual drag-and-drop application – and eForms-building techniques in 10% of the time it would take for traditional programming. Connect to all your existing in-house systems and databases as well as third-party applications like Salesforce, SAP, Office 365, etc., through easy-to-create and maintain process-centric enterprise workflow applications your team can create in days.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that ActiveState, the leading independent Cloud Foundry and Docker-based PaaS provider, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s DevOps Summit New York, which will take place June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
ActiveState believes that enterprises gain a competitive advantage when they are able to quickly create, deploy and efficiently manage software solutions that immediately create business value, but they face many challenges that prevent them from doing so. The Company is uniquely positioned to help address these challenges through our experience with enterprises, people and technology.

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“We are strong believers in the DevOps movement and our staff has been doing DevOps for large enterprise environments for a number of years. The solution that we build is intended to allow DevOps teams to do security at the speed of DevOps,» explained Justin Lundy, Founder & CTO of Evident.io, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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Disruptive macro trends in technology are impacting and dramatically changing the «art of the possible» relative to supply chain management practices through the innovative use of IoT, cloud, machine learning and Big Data to enable connected ecosystems of engagement. Enterprise informatics can now move beyond point solutions that merely monitor the past and implement integrated enterprise fabrics that enable end-to-end supply chain visibility to improve customer service delivery and optimize supplier management. Learn about enterprise architecture strategies for designing connected systems that integrate physical and digital supply chains with your enterprise systems, leveraging IoT devices, hybrid cloud and network service providers to enable innovative business models while mitigating risk, managing security and increasing capacity to meet customer changing SLA requirements.

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Orbograph is an innovative healthcare ISV that provides Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management (HRCM) solutions, online medical scheduling, PHR, and other services to hospitals and clinics.
The Leader: Ran Rothschild, Director of Operations
The Project: The company’s next generation of products launched as a cloud service.
Orbograph was seeking to benefit from the advantages of cloud computing (elasticity, flexibility, cost-effectiveness) without compromising full compliance with HIPAA, Safe Harbor, and the utmost protection for its sensitive customer and corporate data.

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