More and more brands have jumped on the IoT bandwagon. We have an excess of wearables – activity trackers, smartwatches, smart glasses and sneakers, and more that track seemingly endless datapoints. However, most consumers have no idea what “IoT” means. Creating more wearables that track data shouldn’t be the aim of brands; delivering meaningful, tangible relevance to their users should be. We’re in a period in which the IoT pendulum is still swinging. Initially, it swung toward «smart for smart’s sake,» and many brands remain in that corner. But many brands are also gradually opting for more strategic approaches. They’re taking a breath and stepping back to examine both existing and potential IoT experiences, asking themselves whether their products lend real value. Once we reach this goal, the implications for personalization are staggering. Consumers will expect devices they use and items they wear to be connected and add value to their lives. We’ll expect scales to weigh us, assess our body fat, and sync with our mobile device for personalized recommendations. Connected devices will be just another touchpoint in our increasingly digital lives. As a result, we’ll have the data, personalized touchpoints, and context to achieve great success with spot-on relevance that continues to evolve.

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Keeping pace with advancements in software delivery processes and tooling is taxing even for the most proficient organizations. Point tools, platforms, open source and the increasing adoption of private and public cloud services requires strong engineering rigor – all in the face of developer demands to use the tools of choice. As Agile has settled in as a mainstream practice, now DevOps has emerged as the next wave to improve software delivery speed and output. To make DevOps work, organizations must focus on what is most relevant to deliver value, reduce IT complexity, create more repeatable agile-based processes and leverage increasingly secure and stable, cloud-based infrastructure platforms.
In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Flint Brenton, CEO of CollabNet, outlined strategies for unifying a continuously changing, fragmented and disparate set of technologies and processes within common community architecture.

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Amazon has gradually rolled out parts of its IoT offerings in the last year, but these are just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to optimizing their back-end AWS offerings, Amazon is laying the ground work to be a major force in IoT – especially in the connected home and office.
Amazon is extending its reach by building on its dominant Cloud IoT platform, its Dash Button strategy, recently announced Replenishment Services, the Echo/Alexa voice recognition control platform, the 6-7 strategic investments of its Venture group, strategic partnerships with 50+ major consumer package goods companies and the 50-70 million current Prime customers to become a dominant force in IoT.

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Multiple agencies across the U.S. government are paying closer attention to the software they are buying. More specifically, they want to know what open source and third party components were used to build the software applications. The report notes:
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wants to know what open source components are being used in medical devices.

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How can a dinosaur adapt to the modern world? Well, if your ‘dinosaur’ happens to be a mainframe environment, then we suggest you take a good long at DevOps. The next generation of application delivery and agile methodologies are illuminating the challenges and solutions mainframe engineers face on a daily basis. As Continuous Delivery and DevOps evolve, so too should your mainframe and its processes.

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In this strange new world where more and more power is drawn from business technology, companies are effectively straddling two paths on the road to innovation and transformation into digital enterprises. The first path is the heritage trail – with “legacy” technology forming the background. Here, extant technologies are transformed by core IT teams to provide more API-driven approaches. Legacy systems can restrict companies that are transitioning into digital enterprises. To truly become a leader in the space, it’s necessary to accommodate, incorporate, and exploit the new breed of enterprise technologies — cloud, Big Data, and APIs.

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The time of year when crystal balls get a viewing and many pundits put out their annual predictions for the coming year. Rather than thinking up my own, I figured I’d regurgitate what many others are expecting to happen.
8 Predictions About How the Security Industry Will Fare in 2017 – An eWeek slideshow looking at areas like IoT, ransomware, automated attacks and the security skills shortage in the industry. Chris Preimesberger (@editingwhiz), who does a monthly #eweekchat on twitter, covers many of the worries facing organizations.

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The Internet of Things will challenge the status quo of how IT and development organizations operate. Or will it? Certainly the fog layer of IoT requires special insights about data ontology, security and transactional integrity. But the developmental challenges are the same: People, Process and Platform and how we integrate our thinking to solve complicated problems. In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Craig Sproule, CEO of Metavine, demonstrated how to move beyond today’s coding paradigm and share the must-have mindsets for removing complexity from the development process, accelerate application delivery times, and ensure that developers will become heroes (not bottlenecks) in the IoT revolution.

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Infrastructure is widely available, but who’s managing inbound/outbound traffic? Data is created, stored, and managed online – who is protecting it and how?
In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Jaeson Yoo, SVP of Business Development at Penta Security Systems Inc., discussed how to keep any and all infrastructure clean, safe, and efficient by monitoring and filtering all malicious HTTP/HTTPS traffic at the OSI Layer 7. Stop attacks and web intruders before they can enter your network.

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