The 3rd International @ThingsExpo, co-located with the 16th International Cloud Expo – to be held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY – announces that it is now accepting Keynote Proposals.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the most profound change in personal and enterprise IT since the creation of the Worldwide Web more than 20 years ago.
All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices – computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors – connected to the Internet by 2020. This number will continue to grow at a rapid pace for the next several decades.

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One of the biggest challenges when developing connected devices is identifying user value and delivering it through successful user experiences.
In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Mike Kuniavsky, Principal Scientist, Innovation Services at PARC, described an IoT-specific approach to user experience design that combines approaches from interaction design, industrial design and service design to create experiences that go beyond simple connected gadgets to create lasting, multi-device experiences grounded in people’s real needs and desires.

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Software Defined Application Services (SDAS) are going hybrid. .

Organizations are turning to cloud not just as an option for applications but also for the network and application services that deliver applications to anyone, anywhere at any time. And not just "in" the cloud marketplace, available for immediate provisioning and deployment, but as part of the cloud itself; as a service.

One of the questions we asked of respondents in our survey this summer focused on the preferred deployment model across the breadth of application services. Security, I'm sure unsurprisingly, wound up with a significant number of services which organizations prefer to consume "as a service". Of those security services, the top three were SPAM filtering, DDoS protection and anti-fraud services.

The distinction between "cloud" as in marketplace and "cloud" as in a service is necessary for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that adoption of both can force organizations to deliver services across multiple architectures (with a variety of different management systems) if they want to preserve seamless application experiences for users.

For example, you might be able to subscribe to a DNS as a service (and many small and even medium businesses do), but it's management interface – whether API or service portal – are disconnected from everything else. Organizations might also choose to deploy apps in AWS or VMware vCloud Air and then choose to deploy application services to enhance security and improve performance from their respective marketplaces. But those, too, are likely to end up operationally disjoint from other, similar, services that may be delivered as a service or on-premise.

That disjointed operational state is double plus ungood. It inhibits visibility into the overall state of the business (applications) and the services upon which those applications rely. It can impede deployment, too, by introducing stops and starts in processes that might otherwise be orchestrated to improve time to market, because the tools and techniques used to provision and manage these other services are not well integrated with the rest of the IT toolbox.

That's why we continue to expand the ability of F5 Synthesis to deliver SDAS and have introduced yet another option for organizations seeking to ensure the security, performance and availability of applications across a growing portfolio of environments, architectures and business models.

F5 Synthesis: As a Service

F5's vision for application delivery is to enable organizations to take advantage of cloud and support a hybrid data center model without sacrificing the services applications need to stay secure, fast and available. That means not only expanding customer choices with respect to cloud environments and marketplaces, but making those application services available as a service and manageable as part of comprehensive, hybrid application service model spanning cloud, as a service and on-premise environments.

That's where F5 Silverline comes into play, extending F5 Synthesis ability to deliver SDAS on-premise and in the cloud with cloud-based services delivery platform. F5 Silverline will support enterprises by eliminating traditional constraints requiring an either on-premise or in-the-cloud deployment model for application services.

With an as-a-Service option to deliver F5 SDAS, customers gain the ability to shift the deployment of applications and adjacent services closer to the users and apps that benefit from them.

As a first step, building on our acquisition of Defense.Net, we've added a new security service option with F5 Silverline DDoS Protection. This new, hybrid offering combines on-premise DDoS protection capabilities with a high-capacity, cloud-based service that enables organizations to mitigate a complete spectrum of DDoS attacks. New data centers in Frankfurt and Singapore expand the global availability of this service.

F5 Silverline DDoS Protection

F5 Silverline DDoS Protection is a cloud-based traffic scrubbing service providing real-time, automated DDoS mitigation of volumetric attacks. Organizations benefit from cloud-based DDoS protection precisely because it's in the cloud, meaning attacks are scrubbed (stopped) before they ever get near the corporate network. That's important because the growing scale and volume of these attacks can overwhelm many organization's Internet links. While such attacks target services such as DNS and applications, simply oversubscribing the target's links has the same effect: the denial of service.

Scrubbing traffic external to those links, "in the cloud", provides ample reduction in traffic and effectively prevents services from becoming overwhelmed in the first place.

F5 Silverline DDoS protection offers three subscription models:

• Always On
  This offering is a first line of defense, continuously evaluating traffic to identify and eliminate bad traffic
• Always Available
  A first line of defense available on demand, this subscription enables organizations to turn on the service "on demand". This allows organizations to primarily rely on on-premise DDoS protection services but immediately react in the event of an attack.
• Ready Defense
  This is a "stand by", secondary protection option for organizations who are planning ahead and desire extra protection, just in case.

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Working with Big Data is challenging, especially when decision makers depend on market insights and intelligence from your data but don’t have quick access to it or find it unusable.
In their session at 6th Big Data Expo, Ian Khan, Global Strategic Positioning & Brand Manager at Solgenia; Zel Bianco, President, CEO and Co-Founder of Interactive Edge of Solgenia; and Ermanno Bonifazi, CEO & Founder at Solgenia, discussed how a revolutionary cloud-based BI along with mobile analytics is already changing the way organizations rely on data for decisions that affect operations as well as strategy. Also learn how combined predictive analytics, data modelling, mobile, and cloud BI are fast changing the key decision-making mechanisms in the enterprise.

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Picture credit: iStockPhoto

87% of enterprises believe big data analytics will redefine the competitive landscape of their industries within the next three years. 89% believe that companies that do not adopt a Big Data analytics strategy in the next year risk losing market share and momentum.

These and other key findings are from a Accenture and General Electric study published this month on how the combination of Big Data analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) are redefining the competitive landscape of entire industries. Accenture and GE define the Industrial Internet as the use of sensor, software, machine-to-machine learning and other technologies to gather and analyze data from physical objects or other large data streams, and then use those analyses to manage operations and in some cases to offer new, valued-added services.

Big data analytics now seen as essential for competitive growth

The Industrial Internet is projected to be worth $500bn in worldwide spending by 2020, taking into account hardware, software and services sales according to Wikibon and previously published research from General Electric. This finding and others can be found on the home page of the Accenture and GE study here: How the Industrial Internet is Changing the Competitive Landscape of Industries.

The study also shows that many enterprises are investing the majority of their time in analysis (36%) and just 13% are using Big Data analytics to predict outcomes, and only 16% using their analytics applications to optimize processes and strategies. Moving beyond analysis to predictive analytics and optimization is the upside potential the majority of the C-level respondents see as essential to staying competitive in their industries in the future.

A summary of results and the methodology used are downloadable in PDF form (free, no opt in) from this link: Industrial Internet Insights Report For 2015.

Key take-aways from the study include the following:

• 73% of companies are already investing more than 20% of their overall technology budget on big data analytics, and just over two in ten are investing more than 30%. 76% of executives expect spending levels to increase. The following graphic illustrates these results:

• Big data analytics has quickly become the highest priority for aviation (61%), wind (45%) and manufacturing (42%) companies.  The following graphic provides insights into the relative level of importance of big data analytics relative to other priorities in the enterprises interviewed in the study:

• 74% of enterprises say that their main competitors are already using big data analytics to successfully differentiate their competitive strengths with clients, the media, and investors. 93% of enterprises are seeing new competitors in their market using big data analytics as a key differentiation strategy.  The single greatest risk enterprises see from not implementing a big data strategy is that competitors will gain market share at their expense.  Please see the following graphic for a comparison of the risks of not implementing big data strategy.

• 65% of enterprises are focused on monitoring assets to identify operating issues for more proactive maintenance. 58% report having capabilities such as connecting equipment to collect operating data and analyzing the data to produce insights. The following graphic provides an overview of Big Data monitoring survey results:

• Increasing profitability (60%), gaining a competitive advantage (57%) and improving environmental safety and emissions compliance (55%) are the three highest industry priorities according to the survey. The following table provides an analysis of the top business priorities by industry for the next three years with the shaded areas indicating the highest-ranked priorities by industry:

• The top three challenges enterprises face in implementing big data initiatives include the following: system barriers between departments prevent collection and correlation of data for maximum impact (36%); security concerns are impacting enterprises’ ability to implement a wide-scale big data initiative (35%); and  consolidation of disparate data and being able to use the resulting data store (29%), third. The following graphic provides an overview of the top three challenges organizations face in implementing big data initiatives:

In a perfect world, Application Performance Management (APM) has all the right elements in place, providing value to the business and IT by giving us the metrics we need and showing us the health of our applications. It alerts us to anomalies when slowdowns occur, and shows us trends on performance. But there are other elements in play that can make the operations a little smoother and our days a little brighter.

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Picture credit: iStockPhoto

Cloud computing has been named as one of 12 disruptive technologies which will change the relationship between the CIO and the boardroom, according to a report by Advanced 365.

The evolving role of the CIO, and the C-suite in general, has long been a feature of modern business. Opinions differ, whether it’s a wag who proclaims CIO to mean ‘career is over’, or whether it’s a report which advocates more fluency and fluidity between executives.

The Advanced 365 paper takes a look at the different types of CIO today and how it fits in to various businesses:

• CIO as manager: A CIO who delivers today, may not be as much of an ideas person but manages the business for commercial success
• CIO as leader: Engaging in and delivering change throughout the organisation, planning for tomorrow and designing new positions within the company
• CIO as entrepreneur: Dreams about the future, seeks out change and innovates against those changes to improve commercially

The conclusion with these three categories is that each boardroom needs a manager, a leader, and an entrepreneur in its deck. Not every executive will possess all these skills – Steve Jobs, for instance, one could argue is all three – but it’s about deciding which of these is best for your company’s CIO. Managers first ask ‘what?’, leaders first ask ‘how?’, and entrepreneurs first ask ‘why?’.

Boards are expecting more tech-savvy reports from their staff. A Spencer Stuart study saw that one in five boards look for directors with technology expertise. The National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) said more than a quarter (27%) of boardrooms are unhappy with the quality of technology information they receive from below.

If we’re to accept cloud as an inexorable trend in the future – and we should, if research on enterprise cloud adoption is anything to go by – then cloud supports the ‘CIO as manager’ typology, the report argues. This is due to reducing IT costs, increasing IT agility and automating processes.

“In short, it represents a more efficient and cost effective way to run IT, which has long been the goal of the CIO as manager,” the report notes, however adding: “It could however also enable the construction of new cloud based business models and ecosystems, which ensures relevance to the CIO as leader, and especially, the CIO as entrepreneur.

“In this sense, the basic users of cloud computing is radical in impact from more advanced uses, and demands a different CIO.”

The report also notes the discrepancy between CIOs and boards, arguing the two must work more closely together if they are to gain competitive advantage from emerging technologies. Equally, CIOs need to maintain a close relationship with other C-level executives, enabling them “to better understand the operating model of the company, and be better placed to contribute tellingly to its evolution.”

The 12 disruptive technologies included in the report are cloud computing, mobile internet, automation of knowledge, Internet of Things, advanced robotics, autonomous vehicles, next generation genomics, energy storage, 3D printing, advanced materials, advanced oil and gas exploration and renewable energy. You can read the full report here.

I had the opportunity to present on Nov 5th at DevOps Summit by SYS-CON Events in Santa Clara, CA. Here are my slides.
The world is Hybrid. Organizations adopting DevOps are building Delivery Pipelines leveraging environments that are complex – spread across hybrid cloud and physical environments. Adopting DevOps hence required Application Delivery Automation that can deploy applications across these Hybrid Environments.

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Last week as I was writing Amazon Declares War on VMware, VMware was preparing to announce the acquisition of a pro services team to aid in cloud migration (see coverage in CRN): VMware Acquires Professional Services Firm To Boost Cloud Migration, DevOps Expertise. You can get my thoughts on Amazon’s frontal assault on VMware and […]

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