With the mainstreaming of IoT, connected devices, and sensors, data is being generated at a phenomenal rate, particularly at the edge of the network. IDC’s FutureScape for IoT report found that by 2019, 40% of IoT data will be stored, processed, analyzed and acted upon at the edge of the network where it is created. Why at the edge? Turns out that sensor data, in most cases, is perishable. Its value is realized within a narrow window after its creation. Further, analytics at the edge provides other benefits.

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As technology continues to improve, so too does the responsibility of infrastructure providers in ensuring an environmentally-friendly future. Nordic data centre firm DigiPlex has announced a scheme whereby waste heat from its facilities will be reused in residential apartments across Oslo.

The company signed a letter of intent with Fortum Oslo Varne, Norway’s largest district heating supplier, to see to the needs of approximately 5,000 apartments across the Norwegian capital.

DigiPlex insists, in its own words, that ‘a progressive data centre industry must do what it can to reduce its environmental footprint.’ “We are proud to reinforce our leading role in our industry regarding climate change, using renewable power and the waste heat from our data centre at Ulven to keep the citizens of Oslo warm,” said Gisle M. Eckoff, DigiPlex CEO.

“Digitisation must move towards a greener world, and our cooperation with Fortum Oslo Varme is an important step in that direction.”

This is by no means the only initiative being undertaken for a greener industry. Eyebrows may have been raised in June when Microsoft unveiled Project Natick, whereby a data centre was placed underwater, off the Orkney Islands, to provide naturally cooler temperatures. Yet while it’s worth noting it is at the experimental stage right now, some struggle to see value in the project.

Writing for this publication, Joseph Denne, founder and CEO of DADI, argued: “It’s hard to believe that this is a realistic option for the future. “Being surrounded by seawater might keep the temperature of the hardware under control without requiring the specialist cooling systems used in conventional server farms, but it also makes servicing a faulty node pretty much impossible, and a lot of energy has to go into making the thing in the first place,” wrote Denne.

“Surely it makes much more sense to maximise the potential of the devices we already have at our disposal, which would otherwise be idle for around three-quarters of their lifetime.”

Of course, much of the innovation is in the Nordic regions where naturally cooler temperatures can be fed in and taken advantage of without greater energy output. Alongside the Norwegian partnership, DigiPlex also has initiatives in place for both Sweden, with district heating provider Stockholm Exergi, and Denmark. Heatwaves aside, the temperate UK can also benefit from this, with Rackspace’s UK data centres being among those with these features built in.

Despite this, the past year has felt as though environmental efforts are being stepped up. Back in April, Google announced it had hit its 100% renewable energy targets, claiming to be the first public cloud provider to do so.

Read more: A data centre with no centre: Why the cloud of the future will live in our homes

Becoming a digital business is very challenging because it demands new thinking, a willingness to evolve and bold ideas. As market leaders continue to embrace a digital transformation agenda, they're finding that the transition requires significant changes to organisational culture and internal systems.

A recent Gartner survey found that a relatively small number of organisations have been able to successfully scale their digital business initiatives beyond the experimentation and piloting stages.

"The reality is that digital business demands different skills, working practices, organisational models and even cultures," said Marcus Blosch, research vice president at Gartner. "To change an organisation designed for a structured, process-oriented world to one that's designed for ecosystems, adaptation, learning and experimentation is hard."

Gartner has identified six barriers that CIOs must overcome to transform their organisation into a truly digital business. Savvy CEOs and line of business (LoB) leaders will expect meaningful plans to fix these known obstacles to progress.

A change-resisting culture

Digital innovation can be successful only in a culture of collaboration. People have to be able to work across boundaries and explore new ideas. In reality, most IT organisations are stuck in a culture of change-resistant silos and hierarchies.

CIOs aiming to establish a digital culture should start small: Define a digital mindset, assemble a digital innovation team, and shield it from the rest of the organisation to let the new culture develop. Connections between the digital innovation and core teams can then be used to scale new ideas and spread the culture.

Limited sharing and collaboration

The lack of willingness to share and collaborate is a challenge not only at the ecosystem level but also inside the organisation. Issues of ownership and control of processes, information and systems make people reluctant to share their knowledge.

Digital innovation with its collaborative cross-functional teams is often very different from what typical enterprise employees are used to with regards to functions and hierarchies – resistance is inevitable.

The business isn't ready

Many business leaders are caught up in the hype around digital business. But when the CIO or CDO wants to start the transformation process, it turns out that the business doesn't have the forward-thinking talent skills or resources that are needed to succeed.

"CIOs should address the digital readiness of the organisation to get an understanding of both business and IT readiness," Blosch advised. "Then, focus on the early adopters with the willingness and openness to change and leverage digital. But keep in mind that digital may just not be relevant to certain parts of the organisation."

The ongoing talent gap

Most organisations follow a traditional pattern – organised into functions such as IT, sales and supply chain and largely focused on operations. Change can be slow in this kind of legacy  business environment.

Digital business innovation requires an organisation to adopt a different approach. People, processes and technology blend to create new business models and associated services.

Employees need new skills focused on innovation, change and creativity along with the new technologies themselves – such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Current practices don't support the talent

Having the right talent is essential, and having the right practices lets the talent work effectively. Highly structured and slow traditional processes don't work for digital business. There are no tried and tested models to implement, but every organisation has to find the practices that are best suited to their needs.

"Some organisations may shift to a product management-based approach for digital innovations because it allows for multiple iterations. Operational innovations can follow the usual approaches until the digital business team is skilled and experienced enough to extend its reach and share the learned practices with the organisation," Blosch explained.

Change isn't easy

It's often technically challenging and expensive to make digital business work. Developing platforms, changing the organisational structure, creating an ecosystem of partners – all of this effort requires an investment in time, resources and money.

Over the long term, enterprises should build the organisational capabilities that make embracing change simpler and faster. To do that, they should develop a 'platform-based strategy' that supports continuous change and design principles and then innovate on top of that platform, allowing new services to draw from the platform and its core services.

Enterprises that want to take advantage of the Digital Economy are faced with the challenge of addressing the demands of multi speed IT and omni channel enablement. They are often burdened with applications that are complex, brittle monoliths. This is usually coupled with the need to remediate an existing services layer that is not well constructed with inadequate governance and management.

These enterprises need to face tremendous disruption as they get re-defined and re-invented to meet the demands of the Digital Economy. The use of a microservices approach exposed through APIs can be the solution these enterprises need to enable them to meet the increased business demands to quickly add new functionality.

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The DevOps dream promises faster software releases while fostering collaborating and improving quality and customer experience. Docker provides the key capabilities to empower DevOps initiatives. This talk will demonstrate practical tips for using Atlassian tools like Trello, Bitbucket Pipelines and Hipchat to achieve continuous delivery of Docker based containerized applications. We will also look at how ChatOps enables conversation driven collaboration and automation for self provisioning cloud and container infrastructure.

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Machine learning, cloud-native and containers are going to be key growth drivers of the future enterprise software stack – but it could be the end of the road for software as a service (SaaS).

That’s the verdict from an extensive new report by venture capital fund Work-Bench. The full 121-slide analysis (Scribd), titled ‘The Enterprise Almanac: 2018 Edition’, aims to dissect a ‘once in a decade tectonic shift of infrastructure’, focusing on the new wave of services that will power the cloud from the end of this decade onwards.

“Our primary aim is to help founders see the forest from the trees,” wrote Michael Yamnitsky, report author and VC at Work-Bench. “For Fortune 1000 executives and other players in the ecosystem, it will help cut through the noise and marketing hype to see what really matters. It’s wishful thinking, but we also hope new talent gets excited about enterprise.”

If this analysis is anything go by, there will be plenty to get excited about in the coming years.

Machine learning

Large technology companies are winning at AI, Work-Bench asserts. And why not? This publication has devoted plenty of column inches in recent months to how among the hyperscalers are using artificial intelligence and machine learning as a differentiator – indeed, Google Cloud this week launched pre-packaged AI services to try and stay one step ahead of the competition.

It’s not so much of a differentiator if everyone’s getting in on the act, though. And this is where others are struggling. “Despite hopeful promise, startups racing to democratise AI are finding themselves stuck between open source and a cloud place,” the report notes.

It’s a data-driven world, of course – but the disconnect between the ever-increasing amounts of data being crunched and the data scientists available to crunch it is clear. And this is where the Googles, Facebooks, Microsofts and Amazons of this world are again at an advantage – by hoovering up most of the AI talent.

Those who are making strides outside of the behemoths, however, are startups focusing on automated machine learning (AutoML). The key, instead of beating Amazon and Google at their own games with SageMaker, TensorFlow et al, is to focus their products and messaging on BI analysts (above). Companies such as Tableau have got data visualisation nailed – but about getting reports in natural language, or ascribing even greater insights? To illustrate this perfectly, Tableau acquired Empirical Systems, an MIT-originated AI startup, in June for this very reason.

“Expect all modern BI vendors to release an AutoML product or buy a startup by [the] end of next year,” Work-Bench concludes.

Cloud-native

Writing for this publication earlier this week, Jimmy Chang, director of products at Workspot, discussed the frustrations of terms such as ‘cloud-native’ and ‘cloud-enabled’ being interchangeable. Being in the virtual desktop business, Chang uses an example from his own industry: only two of the VDI players in the market have genuinely cloud-native products.

It’s important therefore to determine what’s what without the risk of cloud washing. For Work-Bench, it begets an exploration of cloud infrastructure and software from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform – a subject which is always good to analyse at the end of each quarter, as regular CloudTech readers will testify.

The Work-Bench analysis certainly makes sense from here. AWS is entrenched as #1, Microsoft at #2 for now, and Google at #3, in spite of the latter two’s continued momentum. ‘Killer products… but where’s the enterprise love?’, the report asks of Google.

The majority of organisations continue to struggle with containerising applications and have three key strategies, the report notes. The first strategy is ‘monocloud’ – think Ryanair, GoDaddy – where companies go all-in on the provider of choice. The second is a price broker model with workloads run wherever they are cheapest – Kubernetes is seen as a key tool here for those who have gotten to grips with it – and the third is a function broker model with different clouds for different workloads. Remember the brouhaha when it was revealed long-time AWS house Netflix was running disaster recovery workloads on Google – an arrangement the company stressed had been going on for a while? It’s on its way – and makes good business sense when applicable.

The report also bows to the king of container orchestration in Kubernetes; despite struggles it has a clear market lead, with half of enterprises using containers in some capacity according to 451 Research. But Work-Bench asserts the puck is heading towards the service mesh, a configurable infrastructure layer for microservices applications offering load balancing, encryption, authentication and more. Security will be the killer use case going forward. “Service meshes are like broccoli… you know you need them but only adopt when you feel the pain of not having them,” the report says.

The decentralisation of SaaS

This is arguably the most interesting punt in the report: as software as a service (SaaS) ate infrastructure, infrastructure will go back and eat SaaS.

According to IDC’s most recent figures, software as a service spending globally was at $74.8bn, almost three times the size of infrastructure as a service ($24.9bn). By 2022, IDC predicts SaaS spending to be ahead of SaaS, IaaS and PaaS combined at $163bn.

But the biggest players could get too big for their boots (above), as the report explains. “SaaS vendors are becoming mighty and taking advantage of it – using aggressive tactics to expand dollar share within existing accounts, often by shoving excessive features and extensive contract terms down customers’ throats,” the report notes. “Customers have no choice but to succumb to these closed-ecosystem tactics.”

The reasoning goes back several years and further: as SaaS provided good economic sense when running infrastructure was expensive and configuration was difficult, the pendulum with cloud computing has swung.

The report adds that there is one solution: containers. If enterprises are struggling with them today then they will need to act fast, as in the opinion of Work-Bench it doesn’t quite fit in with SaaS customisation. “In a world where services written in different languages can easily communicate, proprietary languages that require hiring ‘experts’ will be obsolete.”

The empire strikes back

The report focuses on the return of the big traditional enterprise software players as an introduction – but it can also be seen as an overarching sentiment of the industry today.

Tellingly, two of the largest software acquisitions over the past six years were closed in the last six months. This is not so much in terms of the amount of money spent – although $7.5bn and $6.5bn respectively were shelled out for GitHub and MuleSoft by Microsoft and Salesforce respectively – but by dividing enterprise value by trailing 12 month revenue.

As venture capitalist Tomasz Tonguz points out, comparing the Microsoft/GitHub deal (24.5 EV/TTV) and Salesforce/Microsoft (21.2) with, for instance, Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn (6.8) and Cisco’s buy of Broadsoft (5.9) shows much greater value with this year’s buys.

“I expect substantially more acquisitions of the scale and at these multiples through 2018,” Tunguz wrote back in June when disclosing these figures. “The growing sizes of the software market. The desire for continuing growth. The pace of innovation within software. The increasing competition amongst incumbents. A vibrant public market that is continuing to price companies aggressively.

“It’s a great time to sell a fast growing billion-dollar company.”

You can look at the full slides here.

Main pictures credit: Work-Bench

Wasabi is the hot cloud storage company delivering low-cost, fast, and reliable cloud storage. Wasabi is 80% cheaper and 6x faster than Amazon S3, with 100% data immutability protection and no data egress fees. Created by Carbonite co-founders and cloud storage pioneers David Friend and Jeff Flowers, Wasabi is on a mission to commoditize the storage industry. Wasabi is a privately held company based in Boston, MA. Follow and connect with Wasabi on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the Wasabi blog.

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Addteq is a leader in providing business solutions to Enterprise clients. Addteq has been in the business for more than 10 years. Through the use of DevOps automation, Addteq strives on creating innovative solutions to solve business processes. Clients depend on Addteq to modernize the software delivery process by providing Atlassian solutions, create custom add-ons, conduct training, offer hosting, perform DevOps services, and provide overall support services.

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The current environment of Continuous Disruption requires companies to transform how they work and how they engineer their products. Transformations are notoriously hard to execute, yet many companies have succeeded. What can we learn from them? Can we produce a blueprint for a transformation? This presentation will cover several distinct approaches that companies take to achieve transformation. Each approach utilizes different levers and comes with its own advantages, tradeoffs, costs, risks, and outcomes.

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Steadfast specializes in flexible cloud environments, infrastructure hosting, and a full suite of reliable managed services and security. Complemented by expert consultation at all stages of design and deployment to maintenance and expansion planning, Steadfast delivers high-quality, cost-effective IT infrastructure solutions, personalized to customer needs.

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