• 50% of organisations are planning to use machine learning to better understand customers in 2017.
• 48% are planning to use machine learning to gain greater competitive advantage.
• Top future applications of machine learning include automated agents/bots (42%), predictive planning (41%), sales & marketing targeting (37%), and smart assistants (37%).

These and many other insights are from a recent survey completed by MIT Technology Review Custom and Google Cloud, Machine Learning: The New Proving Ground for Competitive Advantage (PDF, no opt-in, 10 pp.). 375 qualified respondents participated in the study, representing a variety of industries, with the majority being from technology-related organisations (43%). Business services (13%) and financial services (10%) respondents are also included in the study.  Please see page 2 of the study for additional details on the methodology.

Key insights include the following:

• 50% of those adopting machine learning are seeking more extensive data analysis and insights into how they can improve their core businesses. 46% are seeking greater competitive advantage, and 45% are looking for faster data analysis and speed of insight. 44% are looking at how they can use machine learning to gain enhanced R&D capabilities leading to next-generation products.

If your organisation is currently using ML, what are you seeking to gain?

• In organisations now using machine learning, 45% have gained more extensive data analysis and insights. Just over a third (35%) have attained faster data analysis and increased the speed of insight, in addition to enhancing R&D capabilities for next-generation products. The following graphic compares the benefits organizations who have adopted machine learning have gained. One of the primary factors enabling machine learning’s full potential is service oriented frameworks that are synchronous by design, consuming data in real-time without having to move data. enosiX is quickly emerging as a leader in this area, specializing in synchronous real-time Salesforce and SAP integration that enables companies to gain greater insights, intelligence, and deliver measurable results.

If your organisation is currently using machine learning, what have you actually gained?

• 26% of organisations adopting machine learning are committing more than 15% of their budgets to initiatives in this area. 79% of all organisations interviewed are investing in machine learning initiatives today. The following graphic shows the distribution of IT budgets allocated to machine learning during the study’s timeframe of late 2016 and 2017 planning.

What part of your IT budget for 2017 is earmarked for machine learning? 

• Half of the organisations (50%) planning to use machine learning to better understand customers in 2017. 48% are adopting machine learning to gain a greater competitive advantage, and 45% are looking to gain more extensive data analysis and data insights. The following graphic compares the benefits organisations adopting machine learning are seeking now.

If your organisation is planning to use machine learning, what benefits are you seeking?

• Natural language processing (NLP) (49%), text classification and mining(47%), emotion/behaviour analysis (47%) and image recognition, classification, and tagging (43%) are the top four projects where machine learning is in use today.  Additional projects now underway include recommendations (42%), personalisation (41%), data security (40%), risk analysis (41%), online search (41%) and localisation and mapping (39%). Top future uses of machine learning include automated agents/bots (42%), predictive planning (41%), sales & marketing targeting (37%), and smart assistants (37%).

• 60% of respondents have already implemented a machine learning strategy and committed to ongoing investment in initiatives. 18% have planned to implement a machine learning strategy in the next 12 to 24 months. Of the 60% of respondent companies who have implemented machine learning initiatives, 33% are in the early stages of their strategies, testing use cases. 28% consider their machine learning strategies as mature with between one and five use cases or initiatives ongoing today.

Oracle has announced its public cloud services have achieved various security and compliance certifications, including ISO 27001, HIPAA, SOC1 and SOC2, in what the company describes as ‘continued momentum’ for its products.

The Redwood giant’s platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) has received Service Organisation Control (SOC) attestations across a variety of key services, while its Fusion software as a service (SaaS) is HIPAA-accredited and the ISO 27001 was awarded for ‘the proper management and security of assets such as financial information, intellectual property, employee details or information entrusted to an organisation by third parties’.

The move puts Oracle alongside its various industry competitors; for example, Microsoft’s SOC1 and SOC2 information can be found here – copies of the report are only available to customers who have signed an NDA – while ISO 27001 can be found here. The Oracle accreditations were administered by Schellman & Co.

“Oracle is continuously investing time and resources to meet our customers’ strict requirements across highly regulated industries,” said Erika Voss, Oracle global senior director for public cloud compliance, risk and privacy in a statement. “These new certifications not only validate the reliability and security features of the Oracle Cloud; they effectively make Oracle’s solutions available to thousands of new customers in the healthcare and public sector industries.”

Writing for this publication last year, Frank Krieger, director of compliance at cloud hosting provider iland, explained the benefits of ISO 27001. “The business benefits of ISO 27001 certification are many,” Krieger wrote. “ISO 27001 is an effective way to reduce the risk of your organisation suffering a data breach, satisfies audit requirements and establishes trust both internally and externally that security controls are properly managed, providing customers with greater confidence in doing business with you.”

Oracle’s efforts to become the leader in public cloud, after a slow initial start, have been well documented. The company announced total cloud revenues, including IaaS, at $1.2bn in its most recent quarter, with CTO Larry Ellison telling analysts that its next-generation data centres have capabilities which potentially dwarf Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to figures from Synergy Research, the four leading players in the cloud IaaS market – AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google – remain entrenched, although singling out Oracle for its high growth rate.

You can check the full list here.

“Why didn’t testing catch this” must become “How did this make it to testing?” Traditional quality teams are the crutch and excuse keeping organizations from making the necessary investment in people, process, and technology to accelerate test automation. Just like societies that did not build waterways because the labor to keep carrying the water was so cheap, we have created disincentives to automate.
In her session at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, Anne Hungate, President of Daring Systems, will discuss how to break the cycle of manual testing as de-facto – empowering development and quality to lead with automation. Be prepared to learn about the changes in reporting, behaviors, and communication necessary to make automation the first choice.

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Software-defined is a concept that refers to the ability to control some or all of the functions of a system using software. The concept is sometimes incorrectly characterized as a buzzword or marketing jargon, when in fact it has a clear meaning that needs to be understood by organizations looking to keep pace with change.
When technologies become software-defined, there are major systemic benefits for organizations that use them, including lower costs, higher quality products and services, and less risk.

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The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a tool that organizations have used for many years to measure strategic, operational and financial performance. The concept behind the BSC is simple: a company and/or business unit prioritizes a set of 15 to 20 financial and non-financial metrics across four quadrants linked to the company’s market and operations strategy in order to measure and manage performance. While the BSC is a good organizing framework and remains relevant today, it needs a major shift to be effective in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) world where traditional BSC measures don’t adequately gauge and predict performance.

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In his session at @ThingsExpo, Eric Lachapelle, CEO of the Professional Evaluation and Certification Board (PECB), will provide an overview of various initiatives to certifiy the security of connected devices and future trends in ensuring public trust of IoT. Eric Lachapelle is the Chief Executive Officer of the Professional Evaluation and Certification Board (PECB), an international certification body. His role is to help companies and individuals to achieve professional, accredited and worldwide recognized certification against various international standards. He also has extensive experience as a trainer and an educator in the fields of Information Security, Risk Management and IT. Throughout his career, he has worked in North America, Latin America and Asia with individuals and various companies of all sizes.

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Software as a service (SaaS), one of the earliest and most successful cloud services, has reached mainstream status. According to Cisco, by 2019 more than four-fifths (83 percent) of all data center traffic will be based in the cloud, up from 65 percent today. The majority of this traffic will be applications.
Businesses of all sizes are adopting a variety of SaaS-based services – everything from collaboration tools to mission-critical commerce-oriented applications. The rise in SaaS usage has many positive benefits, but one drawback is that as demand grows, SaaS providers are having a harder time ensuring a high-performing (fast, reliable) end-user experience – at the same time performance expectations are growing higher than ever.

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Everyone wants their device of choice right there next to them 24/7. To an employer, however, that smart device is nothing more than a dagger posed to rip apart every shred of corporate security. This reality of modern business was highlighted by the Information Security Community on LinkedIn through their 2016 Spotlight Report on “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD).

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In large enterprises, environment provisioning and server provisioning account for a significant portion of the operations team’s time. This often leaves users frustrated while they wait for these services. For instance, server provisioning can take several days and sometimes even weeks.
At the same time, digital transformation means the need for server and environment provisioning is constantly growing. Organizations are adopting agile methodologies and software teams are increasing the speed of their development processes, thus requiring more and more servers and environments to be provisioned for their development and testing.

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