January 06, 2015

Flexibility in the Cloud: Customer-Defined Computing
What we wanted to do was give something that was analogous to the idea of a virtual data center. Customers could come, benefit from public cloud and its benefits, such as elasticity, the ability to manage equipment in all different geographies of the world from your own location, transparency of cost, those kind of things. But at the same time, keep the things that you like about your private environment: being able to control it, configure it and do so very accurately. That was the genesis of the idea and vision behind CloudSigma. It was to bring this sort of virtual data center approach to the public cloud.


Software-Defined Storage: What's Fact or Fallacy?
The problem is that SANs have traditionally been tightly bound to their own hardware: redundant controllers, shelves of drives and whatever features (such as replication or deduplication) the vendor could pack in. Upgrades can be expensive — or impossible — and when new capabilities are needed, the options to add them might not be available at all. With SDS, storage vendors offer an additional management layer on top of the storage architecture, which provides a set of upgradeable services and makes use of whatever SANs are available, not necessarily ones that run on the same platform or are made by the same manufacturer.


Samsung at CES 2015: Internet-of-Things is not science fiction, but 'science fact'
"It's not science fiction anymore. It's science fact," Yoon insisted. Yoon theorized consumer devices now have what it takes to make science fiction dreams real through the marriage of sensors and wireless connectivity, but also one more important ingredient: purpose. Part of the common rhetoric uttered at CES and even before the show by other Silicon Valley leaders have stressed that connected devices are really about people and solving problems. "We have to show consumers what's in it for them and what IoT can achieve," Yoon asserted, continuing that IoT also has the potential to "transform our economy, society, and how we live our lives."


BitYota Introduces Breakthrough Data Warehouse Technology
Availability of compute and storage groups manageable by end users. Building on BitYota’s unique capability to separate and elastically grow/shrink compute and storage nodes within a cluster, this feature collects BitYota instances running on these nodes into discrete storage or compute groups that can be assigned to individual users or business roles. This eliminates resource contention between long and short running jobs and enables better allocation of resources to improve performance and ability to meet service-level agreements (SLAs).


Is Agile Harder for Agencies?
Successful relationships require trust and honesty, and we shouldn’t be afraid of discussing this aspect of project management. If you do move away from a fixed scope of work, then the other two items (costs and timings) can be fixed – more or less. If you can get your clients to buy into this from a standing start then you are doing well. In fact you probably deserve a promotion. For most of us this is a continual discussion. Anyway, as soon as you’ve made headway on the argument that it makes little or no sense to try and fix the scope of a digital project, you usually run into a related concern, which we’ll look at next.


Benefits of Continuous Integration
This tip is not intended to go into any details about a particular CI tool or technology or to give instructions on setting up and configuring a CI server, but is instead intended to rationalise why a development team should consider spending the time and effort of implementing CI. After all, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and it takes time and effort to introduce CI. You need to select an appropriate tool that fits your existing technology ecosystem, and then you need to set up and configure it for use within your current development environment. All of this takes time and effort that could be utilized elsewhere.


CIO interview: Federico Florez Gutierrez, Ferrovial
Gutierrez says the CIO has to wear multiple hats today as technology changes promise businesses more than just operational efficiency. “I have three roles: as the CIO, I am in charge of IT for the company; as Innovation Officer I coordinate the business innovation function applying our open innovation methodology, and as chairman of the Purchasing Committee I lead the purchasing function for common families within the group,” he says. Gutierrez thinks IT is complex at Ferrovial owing to the variety of businesses in the group. For example, the IT team has to manage local applications and vertical applications and it centrally manages the communications, IT purchasing and IT security, for the entire group.


2015 is make or break for Microsoft
The problem child for Microsoft is mobile. Windows Phone was released in late November 2010, and more than four years later, after billions of dollars spent, including the purchase of Nokia’s phone and tablet business for more than $7 billion, Windows Phone will have only a 2.7% worldwide market share by the end of 2014, according to IDC. And that share is heading in the wrong direction, being down from a 3.3% worldwide market share in 2013. Windows tablets have fared only slightly better, with an expected 4.6% market share by year’s end.


Thick data closes the gaps in big data analytics
"Individual interaction rules can be interpreted in a deterministic way only up to a certain extent, due to the ultimate unpredictability of human reactions. It is the so-called bounded rationality, which makes two individuals react possibly not the same, even if they face the same conditions. In opinion formation problems this issue is of paramount importance, for the volatility of human behaviors can play a major role in causing extreme events with massive impact...." This is exactly the problem confronting many big data and analytics efforts as they probe into the dynamic of customer behaviors and develop predictability models for when particular customers are most likely to purchase, and what they are most likely to purchase.


Ronica Roth on Vision, Visibility and Business Agility
when you start getting into that alignment and that cadence and getting all of those teams doing mid-range planning together, then now you are beginning to look at something that looks a little like the Scaled Agile framework or some form of it; it doesn’t have to, but the pictures I have in my slides, the pictures that I’ve had for a long time and I look at the big picture of SAFe, ... but be performant and the things that getting the way of that I think are, so we could blow up our silos to do some pilot teams but are we really ready to blow up our silos for a hundred people, are we really ready to break out of a project mentality where we are assigning resources to projects and instead get into a product mentality where we were flowing work through teams



Quote for the day:

“Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.” -- Peter F. Drucker

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