Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

December 20, 2012

Drucker and Deming = Lean Marketing
Once this is identified and organized you are well on your way in creating a great marketing system. Now, all you have do is put it into action. Granted a well-defined problem is half the work but how do you enact it and improve upon the process.

A walk through the integrated Cloud
No doubt, Cloud computing brings great benefits such as affordability, scalability and manageability for businesses, especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). And that's one truism Mumbai-based Neural Integrated Systems had in mind while choosing ERPNext, a Cloud-based enterprise resource planning solution from WebNotes Technologies for their business.

Game developers need to diversify to survive
The challenge for these game houses is--apart from creating addictive games--developing a successful monetization strategy around these games to increase revenue. "No games company can thrive without these two components," Luong pointed out.

Avnet Story: How to Integrate 100% of B2B Data Sources
Avent is a large distributor of electronic components with a diverse ecosystem of customer and suppliers. Their B2B infrastructure reflects the complexity of their environment but, despite a sophisticated and mature EDI infrastructure, they were still manually re-keying invoices and product updates from hundreds of spreadsheets and .PDFs received from partners.

Chinese e-commerce sector main target of cybercriminals
According to John Ellis, director of enterprise security at Akamai Technologies, e-commerce is the most widely targeted industry in China by cybercriminals within the country. The sector is booming and growing rapidly in China generating a lot of revenue for the country, he noted, in an interview here Thursday.

The Age of Cognitive Computing
The new technologies that IBM provides this time are directly interrelated. They are all linked to the human senses. That’s why the company indicates the next era as the “the age of cognitive computing”. The computer reaches a higher level in the DIKW hierarchy. The computer already moved from the level of data processing to the level of information processing.

Cloud environments to remain low on attacker’s radar in 2013: Verizon
Increasing popularity of Cloud among enterprises may lead those in the security biz to believe that such deployments would become favored targets for hackers and cybercriminals in the days ahead, but that’s hardly the case. Experts predict that despite its rising fame, Cloud-based environments will remain low on attacker’s radar, at least in 2013.

Windows 8 Management, Security and Licensing Changes: What IT Pros Need To Know
Simply put, Windows 8 will bring new ways for IT pros to deal with client management, security and licensing. Those changes largely reflect Microsoft's moves to address a shift toward a more mobile device-centric world that is taking shape. And while much is known about Windows 8 at this point, much also remains shrouded in mystery, even at this late date.

Private cloud computing benefits occur on a case-by-case basis
"Private cloud is hard and expensive, and at the end of the day, you still own the infrastructure and have to manage and integrate it. Yikes!" said Ellen Rubin, vice president of cloud products at Terremark, a Verizon company that offers managed hosting and cloud services.

Web designer sentenced after building torrent website
What happens if you design a website and the client puts it to potentially illegal services? According to one court, you're just as culpable. First reported by TorrentFreak, a website designer who was contracted to work on a now-dead torrent search website, StudentBay, has been found guilty of copyright infringement offences.

Quote for the day:

"Always bear in mind, that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other thing. " -- Abraham Lincoln

December 19, 2012

Shipping software at 20% completion

DeNA first puts out its games on browsers rather than applications, which allows for “tweaking and tuning” in real time, says Mr Moriyasu. A Japanese game may be only 20% completed when it is made available to gamers. Its developers believe this enables them to finesse it, so that it stays popular for longer.

Microsoft plugs Outlook.com, knocks Google after Sync death notice
Last week, Google announced it would phase out synchronization via Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), which companies like Apple and Google license from their Redmond, Wash. rival to push email to smartphones and tablets, and sync calendar entries and contacts on multiple devices.

.NET Framework 4.5 Multi-Threaded Globalization
The .NET Framework 4.5 includes a simplified way of setting the default culture and UI culture for an application domain. In .NET Framework 4 and earlier frameworks, if you wanted to set the Culture and UI Culture for an application, you’d typically set the culture settings on the current Thread.

How to trick Siri into using Google Maps
All you do ask for directions like you normally would, but tack on "via transit." So, for example, to find the nearest Starbucks, you'd say, "Take me to the nearest Starbucks via transit." What happens next is that Siri pulls up a list of any installed "routing apps" -- including Google Maps

Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos
The new intellectual property policy, which takes effect on January 16, comes three months after Facebook completed its acquisition of the popular photo-sharing site. Unless Instagram users delete their accounts before the January deadline, they cannot opt out.
Update: Instagram apologizes to users: We won't sell your photos

The Year Ahead: Disposable Storage Infrastructure
Employees, including upper-level managers, love these devices so much that they won't wait for the enterprise to issue one; they'll bring their own and expect IT to support it (BYOD). These new mobile devices change the relationship between data and devices. The data is virtualized and made available via Web services from giant providers such as Amazon AWS. This is the consumer cloud. Expect a rapid demand for similar corporate data services to support a new breed of mobile applications.

Social Science Pushing Data Frontiers
Addressing the pressing need to recruit suitable university graduates for careers in data science, the Nokia mother-daughter data science team of Amy O’Connor and Danielle Dean made the case at Strata-Hadoop World 2012 for college grads with math/stats, bioengineering and social science educational backgrounds.

Five Qualities of Successful Leaders
In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, Bryant shares what he has learned from Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, Ford CEO Alan R. Mulally, Yum Brands CEO David C. Novak, Teach for America CEO Wendy Kopp, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, and other leaders.

Ovum: SDN architecture is the way to go for future networks
In a new report, researchers at Ovum have revealed that the three-tier hierarchy (access, aggregation, and core) of network architecture is going away in favour of flatter architectures, virtualized application software is replacing network appliances, and network infrastructure is becoming much more programmable.

But, You Are Infected
Before you write your plan to make next year rock, take a few minutes (or longer, if you’re serious about your goals), and decide what you need to unlearn. Over the course of your life, you’ve been infected by some beliefs that you now hold as truths. You’ve learned to take some actions based on those beliefs, and to avoid other actions—some of which would help you to produce much greater results.

How Do We Read Code?
The goal is to figure out some way of measuring what features in programming systems help programmers understand wht they are doing, and how this can be used to make systems that lead to higher quality software. Mike is currently running an experiment where he shows people several short Python programs and asks them to tell the output of the program.

Derivative-free nonlinear optimization for .NET and Java
There are several more or less time-efficient ways of solving (constrained) non-linear optimization problems, including simulated annealing, genetic algorithms and direct search methods such as the Nelder-Mead method (a good overview of mathematical optimization with several links is provided here.)

Quote for the day:

"If you're never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances." -- Julia Sorel

December 18, 2012

Chasing the Network Visibility Problem
IT organizations need a virtual tap that monitors traffic flowing over the virtual switch and forwards the information to a centralized analysis solution that presents end-to-end visibility into the application -- across both the virtual and physical network -- from the same dashboard.

Discovering Hidden Purpose and Meaning in the Work We Do
Many search for years, then eventually give up and settle into enduring work with dogged determination while keeping one eye on retirement. However, a few are lucky enough to discover their unique purpose for work — a purpose that uniquely matches their interests and personalities.

Modern Programming Languages
Each of the languages is seemingly designed to take advantage of various platform affordances or work within their constraints. And, as the history of computing has shown us repeatedly, the advent of innovative hardware often leads to a rethinking of language — especially when it comes to the entrenched options (C, C++, Fortran), which are probably not going away anytime soon but might face serious threats from the latest to crash the language party.

More data-wiping malware found in Iran
Maher Center described the new threat as a targeted attack, but said that it has a simple design and is not similar to other sophisticated targeted attacks previously seen in the region. "Despite its simplicity in design, the malware is efficient and can wipe disk partitions and user profile directories without being recognized by anti-virus software," the center said in its advisory.

Incentive-based pricing models for your next IT outsourcing contract
The strength of the gain sharing pricing approach, Martin said, is that even without a contractual obligation, the provider still has an incentive to identify these kinds of cost-reduction measures because they ultimately benefit the provider in the form of improved margins.

The Role of Analytic Databases in Modern BI Architectures
In the year ahead we will see how vendors (and their customers) will choose to adopt the integration of multiple data stores for BI and how modern BI architectures will evolve over the next several years in companies leveraging Hadoop. Likewise, the ongoing balance of semantics as part of the modern BI architecture – with in-database federation, data virtualization and BI services layers – will continue to be increasingly important for BI development methodologies.

Insurers Need CDOs to Maintain a Modern Enterprise
Converting data to information, and then to actionable analytics and modeling, is the next competitive frontier in the insurance industry. The CDO could drive this conversion by creating an ‘Information Strategic Plan’ that would clearly articulate the ultimate vision for information usage in the organization. He or she would translate that vision into action steps.

SSD prices continue to plunge
Dynamite Data said it has monitored the price, rebate and stock status of more than 600 individual SSDs at hundreds of e-commerce merchants over the past three years. In August, it noted in a blog post that SSDs had finally broken the "magic" $1-per-gigabyte price point, proclaiming it "the new normal."

How much money will top tech firms make from mobility next year?
The study suggests that over 2013, Google will generated approximately $4 billion in mobile advertising revenue. Google's mobile ad revenue is predicted to jump 84 percent in 2013 from a predicted figure of $2.2 billion this year, and reach $6.33 billion in 2014, mainly through the tech firm's search and advert business.

IBM: Computers Will See, Hear, Taste, Smell and Touch in 5 Years
The five senses are really all part of one grand concept: cognitive computing, which involves machines experiencing the world more like a human would. For example, a cognizant computer wouldn't see a painting as merely a set of data points describing color, pigment and brush stroke; rather, it would truly see the object holistically as a painting, and be able to know what that means.

Data Decisions: You Can’t Be Held Responsible (Or Can You?)
In other words, what happens when a strategy goes awry, a product flops or investors lose money? Can data analysts be held accountable? Data mining newsletter KDNuggets asked its readers the question: Should data scientists/data minters be responsible for their predictions? Its results are here.

Quote for the day:

"Vision is a picture of the future that produces passion." -- Bill Hybels

December 17, 2012

10 skills for developers to focus on in 2013
Software development had a few years of relative calm. But now the rollercoaster is back on track and it’s picking up speed, as HTML5 gains a foothold and Windows 8 threatens to significantly change the Windows development landscape. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, you should consider learning at least a few of these 10 software development skills.

Public Cloud Services Will Gain New Momentum in 2013
Over the 2012–2016 forecast reporting period, IDC believes that public IT cloud services will enjoy a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26.4 percent, that's five times the traditional IT industry, as more business leaders accelerate their shift to the cloud services model for IT applications.

Last chapter for e-readers?
Analysts are sounding a proverbial death knell for e-readers, which have declined 36% in 2012 as buyers turned instead to multi-use tablets. Both IHS Suppli and IDC recently issued dire warnings, if not obituaries, for e-readers. IHS said Monday that e-readers will see a 36% drop in shipments to retailers in 2012 over last year, and another 27% contraction in 2013.

Financial Platform Hits 500,000 Transactions Per Second
The platform uses ”in memory” matching atop of GigaSpaces’ XAP solution, running the application in a pure data and compute GigaSpaces grid with no database attached. The tests were conducted with Intel Xeon Processor E7 family, at Intel’s Computing lab in Reading, United Kingdom

Is the cloud the right place for your data warehouse?
Forward-looking businesses that have already embraced Amazon's cloud may move more quickly to the cloud for services like data warehousing, whereas larger enterprises that have been slow to jump into the public cloud may test the service on a use-case basis to see if it's the right fit for them.

SaaS integration costly and challenging
Sabharinath Bala, research manager of enterprise applications at IDC Asia-Pacific, said companies increasingly prefer a hybrid IT environment which combines existing on-premise software withSaaS applications. To facilitate integration, these SaaS vendors would offer a number of connectors or adaptors in their software to traditional applications, he noted.

Four Lessons From the Best Bosses I Ever Had
Guide your people's passion and get out of the way: the autonomy and freedom I was given to create and do my job exponentially increased my passion, excitement and success. ... Many companies treat their employees as employees — nicely and kindly, even generously — but not as humans.

A List of Data Science and Machine Learning Resources
Every now and then Matt get asked for some help or for some pointers on a machine learning/data science topic. He use to respond with links to resources by folks that I consider to be experts in the topic area. Over time his list has gotten a little larger so he decided to put it all together in a blog post. I am sure this will be of use for many of you.

FortiGuard Labs’ 2013 Top Threat Predictions
Fortinet, a high-performance network security player revealed FortiGuard Labs’ 2013 threat predictions, highlighting six threats to watch out for next year.

ReactiveUI 4.2 is Released!
In ReactiveUI 4.2, View Bindings automatically support conversions between types. This feature is analagous to the IValueConverter class in XAML bindings.These converters are registered using Service Location (RxApp.Register), and custom ones can be easily registered as well. In WPF, theTypeConverter framework is used to convert between many common types.

Quote for the day:

"The man who does things makes many mistakes, but he never makes the biggest mistake of all - doing nothing." -- Ben Franklin

December 16, 2012

Problems – An Opportunity for Radical Innovation
Rowan Gibson writes in his blog ... I see this same ‘problem as opportunity’ attitude when I talk to Indian companies of every stripe. When I asked one CEO recently about the impact of the weak Dollar on his business, his reply was stunningly upbeat. “Oh,” he said with a grin, “that really works in our favor. It’s going to make it much easier for us to expand in the U.S. market. Now we can buy up American companies at bargain basement prices”.

Why IBM and Intel Are Chasing the $100B Opportunity in Nanophotonics
The idea behind Nanophotonics (or Silicon Photonics) is actually quite simple: take the world’s fastest communication technology (light), and build it directly into semiconductor chips using well-known and massively scalable production processes.

Effective vs Ineffective Security Governance
Comparing and contrasting a set of behaviors and actions is useful to further illustrate effective versus ineffective security governance. Sometimes the absence of a quality, value, or cultural norm is a more revealing indicator than its presence.

Google Shuts Down Shopping Service for China
"Shopping in China was not providing businesses with the level of impact we had hoped, so we will be sunsetting it in order to focus on the products that do," the company said in a statement. Google will instead devote more resources to its advertising services for apps and search, and connecting Chinese suppliers with overseas customers with tools including its Global Market Finder.

Welcome to the Converged Future of Cloud
Disruption comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes, you can't even see it. Regardless, a cool name doesn't hurt a disruptive force, and can actually enhance its impact. Such is the case with the mCloud Helix, a wild-sounding mechanism that offers a bold promise: private cloud in a box. Granted, the cloud is all about servers, so in-and-of-itself, this offer isn't terribly novel. But when you peek under the covers, coolness does appear.

The Rewards of Ignoring Data
Can you make smarter decisions by ignoring data? It certainly runs counter to our mission, and sounds a little like an Orwellean dystopia. But as we’re going to see, ignoring some of your data some of the time can be a very useful thing to do.

DotNetNuke 7 with Active Directory and SharePoint Lists
DotNetNuke 7 provides support for active directory authentication and includes a SharePoint connector which enables fast and secure publishing of SharePoint documents to websites, intranets and extranets. In an exclusive interview to InfoQ, Richard Dumas, Senior Director of Product Marketing, DotNetNuke Corp shares his views about the features included with the recent release.

Entity Framework 6: Alpha2 Now Available
The Entity Framework team recently announced the 2nd alpha release of EF6. The alpha 2 package is available for download from NuGet. Since this is a pre-release package make sure to select “Include Prereleases” in the NuGet package manager, or execute the following from the package manager console to install it:

So What If You Have Big Data? Without Data-Driven Processes And Products, It’s Useless
You don’t win gold medals just for having data. The real winners are those like Amazon and Netflix that find ways to leverage their data better than the competition. Without a game plan to turn your data into revenue, you may as well scrap your badass Hadoop cluster and the petabytes of data it contains.

How to Become a Morning Person
This is not like trying to become a professional basketball player if you are only 5'6" tall. This is more like trying to change a belief system and a set of habits. You can do it if you are intentional. “Morning people” tend to make more money, be more productive, be healthier and live longer and be more happy and satisfied in their lives.

Quotes for the day:

"Very few of the great leaders ever get through their careers without failing, sometimes dramatically." -- Philip Crosby

"Leadership is a matter of having people look at you and gain confidence in how you react.If you're in control,they're in control" -- Tom Landry

December 15, 2012

Official document reveals the rules of Oracle's cloud
Customers should be mindful of other policies, such as one that allows Oracle to turn off access to accounts in the event of a dispute or account violation. "Customers may want to get clarity on the type of incidents that would result in a temporary turn-off of service," Wang said.

A decision maker's guide to organizational records management strategy
In the past, unless you were being sued or were part of some niche industry, records management strategy was often left on the back burner. ... "A lot of organizations don't do a very good job of it, if they do anything at all," said Jim Just, a partner at Imerge Consulting Inc., about the lack of respect for records management. "They just sort of let it roll along at its own impetus. They need to get control of it, and they are starting to realize it."

Computing and the Law: The America Invents Act
The twelfth in a series of articles in Computer magazine provides basic information on legal issues facing people and businesses that operate in computing-related markets discusses employment law issues faced by new companies.

SMS stealing apps uploaded to Google Play by Carberp banking malware gang
Several malicious Android apps designed to steal mobile transaction authentication numbers (mTANs) sent by banks to their customers over SMS (Short Message Service) were found on Google Play by researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab.

With JOBS Act, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance likely won't get easier
With the arrival of the JOBS Act, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance requirements are bound to change, or are they? As with many compliance questions, the answer is, “It depends.” In this tip, we'll first take a look at the general provisions of SOX as they apply to IT controls, and then, in that context, discuss the impact of the JOBS Act.

Cybersecurity firm identifies ‘credible threat’ to 30 U.S. banks
The report, scheduled to be released Thursday by McAfee Labs, warns the financial industry to be wary of software that creates fraudulent online banking transactions. Hackers could create fake bank transactions, or skim a portion of high-dollar bank transfers, the report said.

Dell software aims to automate mobile device management
The Dell KACE K3000 Mobile Management Appliance combines the new software with a rack-mounted Dell server. The K3000 appliance handles jobs such as over-the-air provisioning of iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, enforcing through user profiles a range of security and management policies, tracking hardware software inventories and managing distribution of enterprise mobile apps.

Why You Must Develop the Right Talent Channels
At an early stage company, hiring is the CEO’s job. It should not be outsourced, delegated or de-prioritized. The assumption is that the CEO has defined company culture and is hiring within that cultural norm. As Brad Feld wrote, focusing on cultural fit is a must. ... The CEO probably should be spending between 40% and 70% of their time hiring in the early stages.

The role of software-defined networks in cloud computing
Given the elasticity of views about what a software-defined network is, it's hardly surprising that SDN's specific role in the cloud is elusive. There are two software-defined networking models and two different SDN missions in cloud computing. Since networks create the cloud, managing the interplay between these two factors could be the key to cloud efficiency and success.

IT Outsourcing Hits Nine-Year Low In Q3
The U.K.-based research group pegged the total contract value of deals signed worldwide during the period at $18.9 billion, down 33% from the same time a year ago.The analyst blamed the tech services downturn on the weak global economy. Looking to the fourth quarter, "There will need to be a significant upturn in both TCV and deal volume if last year's performance is to be matched," said Thomas.

Quote for the day:

"It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time." -- Winston Churchill

December 14, 2012

Examining Some Networking-Virtualization Chimeras
The blog author has been thinking more about some of these networking-virtualization chimeras, and thought it might be interesting to talk about them, if for no other reason than to encourage the RSGs to correct me and help everyone understand a little better.

Update: Apple's iPhone found to infringe Sony, Nokia patents
The jury found that the iPhone 3G, 3GS and 4 directly infringed claims in U.S. patent 6,070,068, which was issued to Sony and covers a method for controlling the connecting state of a call, U.S. patent 6,253,075, issued to Nokia and which covers call rejection, and U.S. patent 6,427,078, also issued to Nokia and which covers a data processing device.

Generating .NET POCO Classes for SQL Query Results
Note that the code generated from Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tools such as Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL’s SQLMetal, NHibernate and SubSonic generate code for the schema objects contained with the database--not the results of queries. Regenerating the code due to a database schema change can overwrite your customizations if you're not careful. Managing a custom POCO class can be a better option.

What You Need to Know about Open Source BI
Do companies understand all the factors involved and what they’re really getting when they select an open source business intelligence platform? Analyst Lyndsay Wise, author of the new book “Using Open Source Platforms for Business Intelligence: Avoid Pitfalls and Maximize ROI,” believes that people get caught up in the advantages of open source over proprietary software, often without evaluating whether the platform will fully meet their needs.

Q&A: The True Cost of the Cloud
Another recent "Ah ha!" for many CIOs is the cloud service invoice. Some are surprised at how many services are spun up and left running and surprised at the resulting high cost. Many are beginning to realize cloud resources left on are significantly more expensive than managing resources themselves -- even if they are calculating people costs.

Rejection Breeds Creativity
New research from Johns Hopkins University suggests that having our ideas rejected tends to boost our creativity output. Sharon Kim and her colleagues found that when most of us experience rejection, it can actually enhance our creativity, depending on how we respond to it.

Nine Ways Successful People Defeat Stress
This is life in the modern workplace. It is more or less impossible to be any kind of professional these days and not experience frequent bouts of intense stress. The difference between those who are successful and those who aren't is not whether or not you suffer from stress, but how you deal with it when you do.

The Man Looking to Turn Samsung into a Silicon Valley Trendsetter
Leading this effort is Young Sohn, who started at Samsung in August as president and chief strategy officer. He has spent a long career leading several successful Silicon Valley semiconductor and storage companies after founding Intel’s PC chipset business and running its joint venture with Samsung in the 1980s. MIT Technology Review business editor Jessica Leber sat down with Sohn in his office in Menlo Park, California, to talk about his new mandate.

China investigating Amazon's e-book business
A Sohu IT report Friday said the General Administration of Press and Publication of China (GAPP) has launched an investigation looking into Amazon and its Chinese partner, Chineseall.com, and whether they have violated regulations in selling digital publications.

Enterprise tech biz leaders debate where the market is headed in 2013
With the end of 2012 just around the corner, plenty of trend predictions are trickling out left and right as everyone wants to predict the future. The enterprise technology world is no exception, and a group of CEOs of some of the fastest-growing businesses in this segment gathered for a roundtable discussion on Thursday morning to discuss the near future of computing.

Quote for the day:

"The secret of happiness is to count your blessings while others are adding up their troubles." -- William Penn

December 13, 2012

Future of Data Management
According to a recent Enterprise Management Associates end user research survey on Big Data, the future of data management platforms is with multi-structured data sets and flexible data schemas spread across multiple platforms.

Implementing IT Balanced Scorecard
The Balanced Scorecard as it has evolved over a period of time is being looked at not just as a performance measurement tool, but as a strategic planning and management system. This is because, the Balanced Scorecards can be cascaded down smaller business units including IT and aggregated upwards to the higher-level.

Working as a Software Developer
Henrik Warne gives his views on the main differences between professional software development and programming for a university course as part of his talk for the engineering students. Henrik talks about challenges with large-scale software development, several development practices used to cope with these challenges, ways to become a better programmer, and some fun facts from work.

Google has 'no plans' to build apps for Windows 8, Windows Phone 8
Speaking to V3, Google Apps product management director Clay Bavor said the firm has, "no plans to build out Windows 8 apps." Google already has a search application for the Windows 8 platform -- which it released just before the Windows 8 launch in October -- but will retain its focus on the iOS and Android platforms

Oracle Rolls Out New Database Security Package
The offering, Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall, provides both network traffic sniffing for security threats and audit data analysis. It also adds the ability to audit OSes, directories and other sources, beyond Oracle's database and third-party database systems, according to the company.

The Importance of Character and Presence
Two aspects of our work contribute to our success as change professionals: What We Do—the concepts, frameworks, processes, and techniques used when engaged with clients; Who We Are—our true nature…the substance of what we have to offer as human beings

Deep Dive: What's New in Hyper-V, Part 1
Windows Server 2012 brings so many changes to so many areas that it'll take months before we see how it all plays out in the marketplace. One thing is clear, however, with the new Hyper-V: Microsoft is taking on the competition head on. No longer content with being "good enough", they have leapfrogged VMware in several areas.

U.S. sees tech's 'center of gravity' shifting to Asia
By 2030, Asia "will have surpassed the North America and Europe combined in terms of global power, based upon GDP, population size, military spending and technological investment, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence report said. "China alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of the United States a few years before 2030," the report said.

London buses to accept contactless NFC payment
The BBC reports that the Big Smoke’s 8,500 buses will be accepting payments through near field communication (NFC) technology, so passengers can swipe a debit or credit card to pay, as well as use a charge card through a mobile NFC reader.

Dell commits to open-source software for its future clouds
The company said its upcoming public and private cloud products will be built around OpenStack, a package of software for running clouds that has received broad backing from the technology industry from companies such as HP, Cisco, IBM, Red Hat and Intel.

Quote for the day:

"You must be single minded. Drive for the one thing on which you have decided." -- General George S. Patton

December 12, 2012

The scariest software project horror stories of 2012
Though plenty of enterprise software projects go just fine, unfortunately, some still end up in ruins, leaving customers out huge sums of money, churning up lawsuits, damaging careers and destroying relationships. On the bright side, when examined these failures can reflect some important lessons for both vendors and customers to take to heart. Here's a look at some of 2012's scariest software project disasters.

Intel Open Sources Tool for Rapid Big Data App Development
Currently in beta, GraphBuilder is designed "to help data scientists in industry and academia to rapidly develop new applications that draw insights from big data," said Connie Brown in an announcement on the Intel Web site. "Developed by Intel Labs, GraphBuilder is the first scalable open source library to take large data sets and construct them into 'Graphs,' web-like structures that outline relationships among data."

Agile Expressionism 101
It would be fun to talk about the kinds of expressions you hear in an agile environment. Mark polled the folks in his company, Asynchrony Solutions, and here's what they came up with. As is the case with most things agile, many of these are not new or unique to it. So here they are in no particular order and with no chance that this is an exhaustive list.

2013 GRC Trends
Performance gains, reduced costs, improved compliance, and other benefits have shown that GRC programs, and the technologies that support them, can move a company forward and sometimes even save the day. The question is what will be the course in 2013?

Emerging Enterprise Architecture Drives 10 Trends for 2013
This Research Alert is the first of a two-part series identifying the most impactful, emergent trends we see as clear and undeniable evidence of this transformation. Each is accompanied by a Saugatuck Strategic Planning Position (SPP) that lays out specific expectations regarding its relevant impact and timing.

New Guidance to Mitigate Determined Adversaries’ Favorite Attack: Pass-the-Hash
In a large number of the targeted attacks we have seen, attackers have attempted to use a “Pass-the-Hash” (PtH) technique to get access to credentials. Today, Microsoft is publishing a comprehensive whitepaper that contains mitigations and guidance called “Mitigating Pass-the-Hash (PtH) Attacks and Other Credential Theft Techniques.”

Will cloud computing kill the storage area network?
Everything you need is provided by the modular converged infrastructure, which is now a simple building block for the data center. Traditional storage only vendors have seen the light and are now joining forces with the major network vendors to create the modular building blocks (what I call PODs) which include the storage as a part of the building block.

Data Scientist Shortage: Split Role In Half
One possible solution to this staffing shortage is to split big data duties in two: data management specialist and data scientist. In a phone interview with InformationWeek, Datalink technology strategist and consulting principal Steve Bulmer said this division of labor would help IT organizations prepare for the coming "tidal wave" of data. "Advanced analytic capabilities are going to be in high demand and hard to find," said Bulmer.

By 2020, there will be 5,200 GB of data for every person on Earth
During the next eight years, the amount of digital data produced will exceed 40 zettabytes, which is the equivalent of 5,200 GB of data for every man, woman and child on Earth, according to an updated Digital Universe study released today. To put it in perspective, 40 zettabytes is 40 trillion gigabytes -- estimated to be 57 times the amount of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on earth.

The critical difference between leadership and motivation

Great leaders serve to bring out the inner wisdom and free will of those they serve. Instead of inducing people to view life situations a certain way (or their way), great leaders demonstrate that there are an infinite number of ways to view any life situation.

Quote for the day:

"Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken." -- Warren Buffett

December 11, 2012

Future Cloud is safe, agile and efficient
In five years, companies will operate in a converged IT world of cloud, virtualisation and mobile computing where clouds are safe. IT organizations will have better visibility, control and compliance across their private and public clouds. To get there, Symantec extends its security, data storage and information management expertise to help companies transition to safe clouds of the future.

With Zenprise, Citrix Tightens End-User Computing Strategy
Considering Citrix has been standardizing on Xen in most of its product names, the marketing department should be thrilled with this acquisition. There's more to that acquisition than just a cool marketing twist, of course. Citrix has become, in my opinion, the very first company to have an end-to-end end-user computing solution for the enterprise.

Tech World Discovers New Species: The Cloud Architect
Inextricably tied to the internet hype machine, cloud computing is a difficult concept to pin down. The term has come to mean almost anything. But there are cases where it represents a very real change not only in how computing power is accessed, but in how data center infrastructure is built.

What Hadoop Is. What Hadoop Isn’t.
Database vendors see it as a database and challenge it on those grounds. Data integration vendors see it as an ETL tool and challenge it on those grounds. Analytics vendors see it as a replacement for their engines and challenge it through that view. In doing so, each vendor community overestimates Hadoop’s potential for displacement of their product, while simultaneously underestimating the impact that it will have on the environment and architecture they operate in.

Transforming Three Vs of Big Data into Three Ws of Business Analytics
The three Ws are the What, which refers to the data and information itself; the So What, which refers to the analysis of the data or the process of deriving implications and meaning from the data; and the Now What, which refers to the decisions made from the data and the resulting actions.

Special Report: Amazon's billion-dollar tax shield
Amazon is channeling huge amounts of money through a small Luxembourg-based unit, largely to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. and European taxes, a Reuters report suggests. There's no commercial reason for the creative-but-legal accounting, which is attracting scrutiny from U.S. officials. "The IRS shouldn't be happy about this. It sounds like they're not," says tax expert Michael McIntyre.

The Future of Big Data

By 2020, the use of Big Data will improve the understanding of ourselves and the world; Nowcasting, real-time data analytics and pattern recognition will surely get better; Big Data has the potential for significant negative impact that may be impossible to avoid -- Check out the nice infographic for more.

PerfView Tutorial 3 - Resolving Symbols(Channel 9 Video)
The PerfView tool is a free Windows performance tool developed by the Microsoft .NET Runtime Performance team for investigating both managed can unmanaged performance problems. If you are having a performance problem, especially if it is a .NET application, it is hard to overestimate the value of this tool.

The first 100 days of a new CIO: Nine steps to success
“In the first 100 days, you have to make your mark. In that period, you also need to formulate a compelling vision, because if you want to lead, as opposed to executing the visions of others, you do need to come out quickly with a story that everybody can align around.”

Keynote: The New Governance
In this keynote presentation K. Scott Morrison, CTO and Chief Architect at Layer 7 Technologies anticipates the future of SOA governance in the enterprise starting from the observation that there are major technological changes in the enterprise today.

Quote for the day:

"Don't let your ego get too close to your position, so that if your position gets shot down, your ego doesn't go with it." -- Colin Powell