The global internet of things market is estimated to value US$ 847.0 Bn in 2016 and is projected to register a CAGR of over 21% in terms of value during the forecast period 2017–2026. The report offers in-depth insights, revenue details, and other vital information regarding the global internet of things market, and the various trends, drivers, restraints, opportunities, and threats in the target market till 2026. The report includes PEST analysis, Porter’s Five Forces analysis, and opportunity map analysis for in-depth understanding of the market. The report offers insightful and detailed information regarding the various key players operating in the global internet of things market, their financials, supply chain trends, technological innovations, key developments, apart from future strategies, SWOT analysis, acquisitions & mergers, and market footprint. The global internet of things market report has been segmented on the basis of type, sales channel, application, and region.
Speaking Opportunities at @CloudEXPO NY | #CloudNative #Serverless #IoT #AI #DevOps #SmartCities #DigitalTransformation
CloudEXPO New York 2018, colocated with DXWorldEXPO New York 2018 will be held November 11-13, 2018, in New York City and will bring together Cloud Computing, FinTech and Blockchain, Digital Transformation, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps, AI, Machine Learning and WebRTC to one location.
Sipgate Team review
22 May, 2018
Price
From £14.95/month exc VAT
Small businesses that want a simple, low-cost cloud-based IP PBX will find Sipgate Team ticks plenty of boxes. The Light version starts at only £14.95 per month for three users and can be upgraded in small increments so you only pay for the features you need.
The Light version doesn’t cover calls to landlines and mobiles, which will be charged to your account as they are made – so if this is an issue consider the UK or EU call packages. The UK Call Pack bundle, for example, starts at £44.95 per month and includes all VoIP calls to UK landlines and mobiles regardless of their duration.
This latest version shows off a redesigned web portal which we found easy to use. We settled for the numbers already assigned to our account but could request local or international numbers and port over existing landlines with prices for the latter starting at £20.
To avoid unauthorized access, Sipgate posts a start code to the main account holder. We could configure our users and phones but had to wait two working days for this to arrive before we could activate our account.
Sipgate doesn’t have an import function so each user account must be created manually by entering their name and email address and assigning a phone number plus extension. On completion, they’ll receive an email with their personal web portal login details.
Hardware and software phones are also configured manually but plenty of help is at hand. We use Yealink T23G IP phones and the portal provided screenshots of their web interface showing clearly where the SIP account and proxy details are entered.
Sipgate doesn’t offer its own softphones but supports plenty of third-party products so we chose the popular Zoiper for testing. After downloading the preconfigured Windows version from Sipgate, we added the SIP ID and password as displayed in the user’s web portal.
The Zoiper iOS app is configured by tapping the QR icon at the top of its dialpad screen and scanning the code displayed in your account web page. It took a few more seconds to add our SIP credentials after which our iPad was successfully registered.
Businesses with remote offices will like the Sipgate Location feature. These link different geographical locations together within the same package, each with their own set of users, and all VoIP calls between them are free.
Place selected users in a group with a dedicated phone number and extension and when it’s called, all their phones will ring. Both groups and users can have custom greeting messages assigned but the Click2Record feature from previous versions is no longer provided so we had to record our messages separately as MP3 files and upload them as new announcements.
Group voicemail allows callers to leave a message while call forwarding and hunting rulesets redirect them to other users or phone numbers. These are quite versatile as multiple rulesets for both groups and users can apply a range of actions while schedules determine when they are active.
Call queuing and an IVR (interactive voice response) service are available in the Pro package which costs from £10 per month extra. The IVR service is basic when compared to RingCentral but does allow you to upload MP3 greeting messages that present callers with a choice of up to 10 extension numbers.
The lack of free softphones will increase per-user costs, but Sipgate’s low monthly charges and no minimum contract period can offset this extra expense. For small businesses looking to make the jump to cloud-hosted VoIP, Sipgate Team is a good choice that offers slick call handling features and easy management.
Spec 2018: Slack lets developers build and test apps inside Slack
22 May, 2018
Slack has announced a suite of new developer tools, as part of a range of platform changes designed to foster the growth of its app ecosystem.
The new features will make it much quicker and easier for developers to build and test Slack apps within Slack itself, according to the company’s developer advocacy lead, Bear Douglas.
«Right now if, for example, you want to try out Slack’s API, you have to go create an app token, you have to get the keys you need, you maybe have to spin up a project, spin up a web server, in order just to ping calls to our API,» she told Cloud Pro. «Now, what you’ll be able to do is install an app inside Slack and then directly from Slack test out our API.»
Reference documents are also easier to access. Developers can now search them via a Slack command, and they can then be read within the Slack client, or the longer-form version can be accessed by clicking out to Slack’s website.
The changes were announced as part of Spec 2018, the company’s inaugural annual conference for developers, customers and partners.
Alongside these developer tools, the company is also launching some new features designed to make Slack apps more visible for everyday users. The most prominent is App Actions – a framework for adding third-party app integrations to the three-dot menu that currently houses functions including pinning messages to channels and marking them as unread.
The feature will launch with pre-made integrations for five services, including Asana, Bitbucket, HubSpot, Zendesk and Jira. As an example, the feature will allow users to convert a Slack message from a colleague directly into an Asana task.
Power users of Slack will likely be aware that these kinds of integrations already exist, in the form of Slack commands. These already allow users to interact with third-party services in a number of ways, such as adding tasks to project management tools, sharing files from cloud storage platforms, and more.
In fact, Douglas told Cloud Pro that the new App Actions don’t actually add any new functionality that wasn’t already offered by Slack commands, but emphasised that they provide a much more intuitive and user-friendly way to access these capabilities, pointing out that while developers and techies are inherently familiar with using slash-based commands thanks to tools like IRC, most line-of-business users are much more used to contextual menu systems.
«It’s not something that should be undersold, because at the moment, a lot of users … may not be aware of the integrations that are already installed on their team, and so some of the work that we’ve done over the past year and a half or so has been on making integrations more discoverable.»
One App Action that may prove very useful is the ability to view the JSON for specific elements within Slack.
«If you see something beautiful inside Slack,» Douglas said, «and you wonder ‘how can I do that?’, there will be an Action in that overflow menu that lets you inspect the JSON for that message. So if you want to copy something beautiful you saw, or just break it down, you can do that automatically without leaving Slack.»
Making apps more attractive is something that the company is emphasising, and it will soon launch a new toolkit for modifying the UI of Slack Apps, which it is dubbing ‘Block Kit’.
Slack is aiming to build on its initial success as an enterprise collaboration platform, pursuing a partnership-based strategy in which the platform integrates as deeply as possible with the numerous SaaS-based tools that businesses rely on. The strategy is similar to the tactic Facebook has taken with its Workplace platform, which also announced a slew of new integrations earlier in the year.
«They’re absolutely integral. They’re what makes Slack more useful than just a messaging service, and it’s something that we try to make clear to our [third-party] developers: that they are key to our success,» Douglas told Cloud Pro.
«It’s really about lowering the barriers and making it easy to build Slack apps. So we’re building our tooling offering all the time, and we’re trying to be as responsive as possible.»
Cloud hyperscaler capex spend goes into overdrive in Q1, argues Synergy
If you want to challenge the leading cloud infrastructure providers, you are going to need some seriously deep pockets. According to the latest figures from analyst firm Synergy Research, hyperscaler cloud capex spending hit a record $27 billion (£20.1bn) in the most recent quarter.
The top five spenders in the industry remain Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon, with Alibaba, IBM, JD.com, NTT, and Tencent comprising the top 10.
Google kicked off the quarter by announcing various infrastructure expansion plans, including five new data centre regions and three subsea cables. Two of these regions – in the Netherlands and Montreal – are already open for business, with further plans to expand in Switzerland announced by Google earlier this month. Microsoft’s expansion plans for Azure this quarter include Australia and New Zealand, as well as Europe and the Middle East.
The big five spent on average more than $13 billion per quarter last year – but combined spending for Q1 of this year has seen that figure rise to more than $20bn.
It’s all about speculating to accumulate. The hyperscalers’ most recent financial results, published last month, saw strong growth all round. According to Synergy figures, Amazon continues to retain more than 30% of the market, ahead of Microsoft, IBM, Google and Alibaba.
Other trends come into play here. Earlier this month, Amazon Web Services announced that Verizon was choosing the Seattle firm as its preferred cloud provider, putting to bed once and for all the operator’s cloudy ambitions, which first blossomed with the acquisition of Terremark in 2011, before the service was sold off to IBM last year.
“This helps to explain why so many IT service providers and telcos have stopped trying to compete with the leading cloud providers,” John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy, explained. “Companies striving for leadership in this market need to consistently find billions of dollars per quarter to cover data centre investments, which is clearly beyond all but a very small number of companies.”
Concern over cloud storage security remains says Spiceworks – but good news for OneDrive
One in four respondents to a survey from IT community Spiceworks say they remain unconvinced by cloud storage security – with Microsoft OneDrive holding firm as the most popular service.
The study, which polled more than 500 respondents from organisations across North America and Europe, found more than half (51%) are currently using OneDrive, compared with 34% for both Google Drive and Dropbox, going down to 13% and 6% for Apple iCloud Drive and Box respectively.
When broken down by company size, OneDrive dominates further. 59% of large businesses are currently using OneDrive, compared with 29% for Google Drive and 25% for Dropbox. For small businesses, these figures come out at 47%, 39%, and 34% respectively.
Yet as security – not surprisingly – remains the most dominant factor, a fair proportion of respondents voiced concern around the security of the most popular cloud storage tools. 97% of those polled cited security as either ‘important’ or ‘extremely important’ in the buying process, ahead of reliability (96%), cost (93%), ease of use (93%) and vendor reputation (89%). However, 25% said their data in the cloud was either ‘not at all’ or ‘somewhat’ secure.
This lack of confidence can be seen in the way organisations want to keep an element of control, according to Spiceworks analyst Peter Tsai. More than half (57%) of those polled only allow employees to use cloud storage or file sharing services, compared with only 19% who are happy for their employees to do what they like. “IT departments clearly want a degree of control over data,” Tsai wrote in a blog post explaining the findings.
That said, instances of shadow IT are decreasing: according to figures from 2016, 78% of IT pros said employees were using Dropbox without company approval. The latest figures put this now at 54% – still the most ‘popular’, ahead of Google Drive (43%), Apple iCloud Drive (27%) and OneDrive (25%).
One trend Tsai has particularly seen over the past two years is around the struggles standalone providers are facing. Two years ago Dropbox was the most popular service; today, it has been usurped by OneDrive, while Google Drive has also toppled Dropbox.
Yet it is not Microsoft and Google against the rest – the battle is well and truly joined between the two behemoths as well. Earlier this month, Google launched Google One, a premium tier cloud storage offering with two goals; to simplify Drive and, perhaps more importantly, to undercut Microsoft. Google is offering 2TB of storage for $9.99 per month – a price that gets only 1TB from Microsoft, Dropbox et al.
Microsoft however, with Office 365 integration, still holds the aces, according to Tsai. “As organisations want to do more with less, it makes financial sense for companies to go with OneDrive if they’re already paying for Office 365,” he wrote.
“Going forward, with this bundling trend also extending to G Suite, it will be difficult for standalone cloud storage services to compete on price,” Tsai added. “Instead, they will have to innovate continuously on features and serve niche markets that aren’t satisfied with cloud storage offerings bundled with popular productivity suites from tech giants Microsoft and Google.”
Presentation Disaster: The Five Most Embarrassing Situations During Presentations and How to Avoid Them
At this very moment, some 1.25 million presentations are being held worldwide. Unfortunately, listeners rate almost 90% of all lectures as bad, boring, or time-consuming. This is partly due to the content but also problems with the technology create disturbances—the sound is not running, the WLAN connection is on strike, or the adapter is missing. […]
The post Presentation Disaster: The Five Most Embarrassing Situations During Presentations and How to Avoid Them appeared first on Parallels Blog.
Amazon launch Marketplace Appstore
22 May, 2018
Amazon is launching a new app store for professional sellers with tools specifically created to help manage pricing, inventory, advertising and a range of other features.
The Marketplace Appstore will feature apps made using the Amazon Market Web Service (Amazon MWS) that have been developed by third-parties and given a seal of approval by Amazon.
The new app store will be available in North America through Amazon’s Seller Central hub and will be deployed slowly to ensure a smooth rollout.
As reported by Cnet, the new app store will operate behind the scenes and offer a way for more sellers to grown on Amazon and provide greater retail opportunities.
For developers, the new app store could potentially put their tools in front of an audience of over one million US small and medium-sized businesses that sell on Amazon.
«Many developers have innovated and created applications that complement our tools and integrate with our service,» Amazon said in a statement.
«We created the Marketplace Appstore to help businesses more easily discover these applications, streamline their business operations and ultimately create a better experience for our customers.»
News of the new seller’s app store came via a press release from Seller Labs, which is a creator of cloud-based e-commerce applications and offers two tools in the Marketplace Appstore.
Ignite, which is for advertising management, such as sponsored products Ads and Feedback Genius for customer communication.
Seller Labs have also been selected as a member of Amazon Marketplace Development Council.
«The open communication with Amazon and the new Developer Council helps Seller Labs ensure it’s developing the right features for our customers and provides the best experience for the seller,» said Hank Harris, CEO of Seller Labs.
«The Marketplace Appstore is simply the beginning of bringing more effective tools to Amazon Sellers.»
25% of organisations lack confidence in cloud storage
22 May, 2018
A quarter of businesses are hesitant about signing up to cloud services because they feel they’re not secure enough, a study by Spiceworks has revealed.
Almost all (97%) of businesses think security is the biggest consideration when selecting a cloud-based file storage and sharing service, suggesting providers have a large role to play in convincing customers of the security benefits of using a cloud-based service.
Digging deeper into customer security concerns, 16% of businesses questioned by Spiceworks said they have experienced a security incident related to their cloud service within the last 12 months, including unauthorised access, stolen credentials or data theft.
What Spiceworks’ study did reveal is that businesses probably haven’t explored all security options to secure data. Although 57% restrict the services available for use by their employees and more than half have implemented user access controls, only 28% have introduced multi-factor authentication and have file sharing policy in place, while 74% don’t encrypt their data while it’s in transit. 78% don’t encrypt data at rest.
“It’s evident organizations are putting more trust into cloud storage services, but some are still hesitant despite the recent growth in adoption,” said Peter Tsai, senior technology analyst at Spiceworks. “Although cloud storage services often include features that help secure sensitive corporate information, there will always be risks involved when entrusting your data to a third party.”
Reliability (96%), cost (93%) and ease of use (93%) are also important factors decision makers look into when picking the right cloud service for their business.
Spiceworks’ study revealed the most popular cloud storage service is Microsoft’s OneDrive with 51% of organisations using it, 34% are using Google Drive and the same percentage have opted to use Dropbox.
Rackspace launches ‘Kubernetes as a service’ offering, acquires agency RelationEdge
A couple of interesting pieces of news from Rackspace; the company has launched a ‘Kubernetes as a service’ offering, as well as announcing the acquisition of digital agency RelationEdge.
The service, which will become available on Rackspace Private Cloud later this month, with planned support for public clouds later this year, is more affirmation of the rise of the container orchestration tool. At the start of this month, KubeCon and CloudNativeCon saw a truckload of announcements about Kubernetes, from certified courses to vendor support – and the latter is evidently key here.
Rackspace sees the problem thus. The application container software market will grow significantly in the coming years to almost $3 billion by 2020 – citing figures from 451 Research – meaning a gap will appear for those wishing to effectively manage Kubernetes environments on their own.
Like the company already does with public cloud providers, Rackspace wants to ease headaches organisations may have. Through the service, customers will be able to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters across private and public clouds, as well as managing ‘day 2’ operations – updates, upgrades and patching in other words – and providing enterprise-grade security.
Rackspace also says customers will save up to 50% with its Kubernetes as a service, as opposed to running the environments themselves.
“We’re making the most modern infrastructure consumable by every enterprise,” said Lee James, Rackspace CTO EMEA in a statement. “With Kubernetes as a service, we are providing the industry’s simplest Kubernetes consumption model by delivering it fully configured, tested and validated at enterprise scale with the managed cluster services customers need to effectively run their applications.
“Rackspace’s combination of operational experience and open source expertise, coupled with the security, improved economics and a fully managed Kubernetes offering available on leading public and private cloud technologies, helps companies accelerate their digital transformation,” added James.
The acquisition of RelationEdge plays more into another of Rackspace’s themes: enterprise application management. Industry watchers will recall Rackspace acquiring TriCore last year, in what was virtually incoming CEO Joe Eazor’s first announcement. RelationEdge has expertise as a Salesforce platinum consulting partner – perhaps an odd choice therefore, but Rackspace said the acquisition would ‘expand [the company’s] ability to be a preferred partner for managing a customer’s complete application portfolio through continuous transition to modern technologies, including SaaS applications.’