Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

April 20, 2013

How PPM can improve strategy deployment

Put simply, PPM involves managing the process of translating the strategy and objectives into the right projects and then focusing the execution of these projects on the delivery of overall strategic objectives. When implemented correctly, PPM helps managers to prioritize effort on those projects that have the greatest impact on achieving strategic objectives.

How a CIO Can Save an Incompetent CEO
When a bad CEO goes down, the CIO often goes down with him. The way to save yourself, and your company, is to invest in the analytics technology that gives the CEO the data necessary to make smart business decisions. It doesn't hurt that it also shows why the CIO is more valuable to the CEO than other C-level executives.

What IBM's x86 exit may mean for rivals
The only unexpected part of an IBM divesture is the timing. The company sold its PC business to Lenovo, it has also exited the hard disk drive and printer manufacturing business. "IBM has never been shy about divesting businesses," said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT. And as with the PC, printer and disk drives, the low-end x86 server market "is heading further and further into commodity territory."

Citrix pitches cloud-based webcasts with GoToWebcast
To simplify administration, GoToWebcast has a five-step wizard that walks users through setting up their event. Users are first asked to schedule the event, including deciding audience size and if the web cast should be available on-demand or live with an archive. Users are then asked to select registration alternatives, multimedia options, choose what content to upload and finally decide on security and email settings.

Intel to Buy Mashery
Eric Knipp, managing VP of application platform strategies at Gartner Research, says that, from the vendor perspective, a partnership between Intel and Mashery that began late last year showed strong, complementary benefit. In the bigger picture, the deal suggests Intel “didn’t need much time to understand” the beneficial connections between SOA governance and API management.

Will OpenStack Become A Private And Hybrid Cloud Enabler For Channel?
"OpenStack is a little bit like a modern operating system," said John Engates, CTO of San Antonio, Texas-based Rackspace Hosting. "It is more complex than a simple operating system, so customers often need help with the installation and deployment. So that's an opportunity for channel partners. Environments include private clouds, service providers, colocation and customer premises." Engates compares the OpenStack ecosystem with the mobile phone market, which provides rich opportunities for software developers to build solutions that meet specific customer needs.

Deployment in the Age of Consumerization

In the case of out-of-the-box SaaS applications, an enterprise might never even touch the application at all after initial deployment. All new versions, upgrades, patches, and updates are deployed by the vendor. ... A business customer might have the SaaS vendor add a “skin” to the application with the company’s branding. In terms of updates, many organizations and consumers also want the option to reject or accept new features. This

Dell: Data complexity forces need for agnostic tool chain approach

The dichotomy means that organizations, both large and small, not only need to manage all of their internal data to provide intelligence about their businesses, they need to manage the growing reams of increasingly external big data that enables them to discover new customers and drive new revenue. The latest BriefingsDirect software how-to discussion then focuses on bringing far higher levels of automation and precision to the task of solving such varied data complexity.

All I need to innovate is…
All you need for innovation is a carefully defined “cookbook” of tools and processes that the product teams can understand, follow and implement successfully. Along with, of course, the engaged commitment of the senior team, which they have promised. The fact is that it takes a lot of people, culture, processes, leadership, commitment and resources to innovate. The sooner you start your mantra “All I need to innovate is…” the better off you’ll be.

Where you place the “a” matters: Are you just a leader or a just leader?
Justice comes from the Old French justitia, meaning righteousness and equity as well as the Latin justus, meaning upright. So how can we apply this virtue in a practical, applicable way as leaders? There are three ways I can think of, and I bet if you try, you can think of more. I’ll address two: fair versus equal and I versus you. The third, the triple bottom line/corporate social responsibility, is better known and discussed, so we will leave that for later.

Quote for the day:

"Big goals get big results. No goals get no results or somebody else's results.." -- Mark Victor Hansen

April 19, 2013

CISPA permits police to do warrantless database searches
CISPA is controversial because it overrules all existing federal and state laws by saying "notwithstanding any other provision of law," including privacy policies and wiretap laws, companies may share cybersecurity-related information "with any other entity, including the federal government." It would not, however, require them to do so.

Xamarin Announces Mobile Cloud Testing Service
In a pre-release briefing, Friedman noted that Xamarin Test Cloud not only simplifies the testing process, but also makes it more robust. He explained that Xamarin Test Cloud uses object-based UI testing, which provides a stronger method for defining proper UI behavior than methods used by other UI testing tools (such as testing based on image recognition or gesture recording). Object-based testing also allows for "cross-platform test cases that adapt automatically as the UI changes," according to the Xamarin Test Cloud press release, which allows "tests [to] continue working even if changes are made to the app UI."

Unity vs. MEF: Picking the Right Dependency Injection Manager
Out of the box, MEF provides the most functionality, but has an implementation that I still think of as "quirky." And, prior to the .NET Framework 4.5, you must add attributes to a class to have it work with MEF -- you can't use MEF with Plain-Old CLR Objects (POCOs). Unity, on the other hand, works in a more obvious and natural way, making it easier to integrate into your application -- and Unity does work with POCOs.

Avoid the most common mobile development strategy mistakes
"The most common mistake architects are making is that they aren't thinking in a broad enough context. They are just thinking in terms of 'should I build a mobile application' or 'should I build a native app.' There are a lot more issues to think about," said Anne Thomas Manes (@atmanes), a VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner. ..."There's all of these different dimensions that go into this architectural model, so you have to make sure you've come up with the right set of questions to help you determine what is the right architecture," Manes said.

Mobile a top priority for Yahoo in 2013, Mayer says
How Yahoo will accomplish that goal is not immediately clear -- it has yet to announce any specific mobile apps or services it has in the pipeline -- but it was an objective oft-repeated during the company's first-quarter earnings call. But if the "how" is not clear, the "why" is more evident. Mobile is top of mind for all Internet firms, Google and Facebook included, and mobile will be crucial to Yahoo's efforts to increase user engagement and expand advertising revenue.

Schnucks supermarket chain struggled to find breach that exposed 2.4M cards
Increasingly, attackers have been resorting to techniques like hiding stolen data inside legitimate files and encrypting data to evade detection. "They cloak their malware or hide it within seemingly innocuous files so that it's very difficult to detect," she said. Existing forensics tools are not good enough at finding these attacks within hours, or even days, she said. "And the network and enterprise security tools are not smart enough to detect the hacking ... when it occurs.

BI architect has new options to meet growing data, analytics demands
"At one time, the options for analyzing data were limited to the products of a few big players and a handful of best-of-breed startups. Now there are a lot of options out there," said Joe Caserta, president of Caserta Concepts LLC, a New-York-based data warehouse consulting and training company. Caserta is also co-author -- with BI and data warehousing consultant Ralph Kimball -- of The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit.

IT supply-chain security standard aims to prevent counterfeits, tampering
It seeks to lay out best practices in design, sourcing, building, fulfillment and other facets of supply chain distribution, including for integrators. It addresses the huge concern that fake or tampered electronics, hardware and software is being sold, a concern that has been voiced specifically by the U.S. government and the Department of Defense in particular.

High-density cloud databases: NuoDB + Moonshot
Enter project Moonshot, HP's new server initiative that focuses on high-density concentration of servers, each with very low-energy consumption. HP announced availability of its Moonshot offering, based on Intel S1260Atom processors, on April 8. With that product, a single 4.3U system contains 45 discrete physical servers.

KeyBox makes controlling your servers easier
Technically speaking, the KeyBox web pages and forms that you see in your browser are generated by the Jetty Open Source Web server (alternative home page here). All sensitive data are stored into an SQLite3 database, which is a single file called keybox.db. Jetty comes with the Java project management tool called Maven. A nice little introduction to creating web services with Jetty and Maven is here. Luckily, you don’t really need to study all this stuff to use KeyBox.

Quote for the day:

"Opportunity always involves some risk. You can?t steal second base & keep your foot on first!" -- Joseph Heller

April 18, 2013

Don't Be the Office Tech Dinosaur
"The speed of change makes you uncomfortable on a regular basis," he says. "That's so difficult for people who are paying mortgages, buying cars, trying to give their kids the things they had, to get them through school. You want to feel confident in the last 15 years of your career that after 25 or 30 years of effort, it's just going to work," he says. "But it isn't so. And I don't think you ever get over the fear of not knowing."

Big-data science requires SDN, Internet2 chief says
"The genomics community finds very little in our current-generation Internet that is capable of supporting the needs they have," Lambert said. SDN will let developers invent new networking methods suited to the needs of different applications, he said. nInternet2 is operating a live, production pilot for SDN as well as a high-speed backbone to give academic users plenty of bandwidth for new applications.

Frequent Releases – Confessions of a Project Manager
Could it be that this goal puts excessive time pressure on the team, forcing us to rush through our testing processes and improperly validate a release before it has to go out of the door? Would a three-monthly release cycle have meant that this bug was spotted? Well, I really don’t think so. In fact, I think our release frequency means that we are more likely to spot bugs and better able to recover from them quickly.

The situational CIO
You might change your skills and focus, you might help change your company’s strengths and focus, or you might fill in the gaps. You might also realize that there is no fit—or that there is not likely to be one—and accept that it’s time to move to another company where there’s a more natural fit. This paper explores what being strategic should mean and provides a framework for how the CIO can be more strategic in serving the business while handling other responsibilities the position demands. We call this the situational CIO.

Measuring the Business Value of Cloud Computing
“Can you help me build a business case and ROI for cloud computing?” Well, yes… and no. The issue is that cloud computing has such a massive impact on how IT is delivered that many of the metrics and KPIs that are typically used at many enterprises don’t capture it. I mean, how do you capture Agility – really?

6 Actions of Great Managers

How would you measure yourself as a manager? There are plenty of good business leaders out there, but what separates the good from the great? Every situation is different, but we have consistently seen six qualities--all of which must be juggled simultaneously--that great managers demonstrate.

Latest US research shows proliferation of hybrid clouds
In terms of hybrid cloud preferences, there were three scenarios that respondents wanted to see to improve performance: Ability to easily move an entire application from one cloud to another, on either a short or long-term basis; Ability for an application in one cloud to easily access data in another; and Ability to use or manage the resources of separate clouds as a single, combined pool of resources

Why You Should Care About Data Mining
Data mining is also the basis for so-called predictive analytics. Predictive analytics involve applying mathematical techniques to historical data to build a predictive analytic model. Such a model predicts how likely something is to be true or the likely value or order of something. A predictive analytic model is created using many of the same techniques found in data mining but focuses those techniques on making predictions about what is likely to be true in the future.

Cloud Computing SLAs: What You Should Ask
The promises of performance, storage and savings in a cloud deployment are only as strong as your service level agreement. Even as cloud users become more savvy and vendors more capable, there remain a slew of tricky issues surrounding what is expected and what is realistic. Here are seven of the most pertinent issues you should address with your cloud computing SLA and master service agreements, according to a recent discussion between Winston Bumpus of DMTF, John Pereira of Intel and ODCA, and Mark Thiele of Switch Inc

Outgoing Intel CEO knocks Windows 8, predicts $200 touch PCs this year
"There is an adoption curve," Otellini acknowledged, talking about Windows 8 and its "Modern" user interface (UI), a radical overhaul of the traditional desktop. "We didn't quite have that same kind of adoption curve in Windows 7 versus XP before it. This requires a little bit of training." Otellini, however, did say, "Once you get over that adoption curve, I don't think you go back." He also argued, as have most analysts and many Windows 8 users, that on a touch-enabled device Windows 8 is easier to use than Windows 7

Quote for the day:

"The way to success is to brand yourself not your business" -- Anonymous

April 17, 2013

Important Considerations When Building Single Page Web Apps
There are numerous points to consider before building a new app; to make matters worse, the expansive web development landscape can be intimidating at the outset. I have been in those unsettling shoes, but fortunately, the past few years have brought consensus on the tools and techniques that make the application development experience as enjoyable and productive as possible.

The Five Stages of Disruption Denial
You would hope that we were getting better at understanding and managing change. And sometimes we are. Too often however, our response is to ignore and forget change, to fake our way through it, to pretend an engagement and a mastery we do not have. And that's bad. That means we are not getting better at change, but steadily worse. We are denying disruption, instead of adapting to it.

3D Data Visualization Takes Another Step
Tables, graphs and 3D bar charts just don't cut it anymore. To really glean insights from all that data you're collecting, you need pretty pictures, maps and interactive "cinematic guided tours" that users can play with. "Now you can apply geographic and temporal data visually, analyze that data in 3D and create visual tours to share your insights with others," says this video about the new product that started out in Microsoft Research:

REST vs. SOAP: How to choose the best Web service
In a nutshell, when you're publishing a complex application program interface (API) to the outside world, SOAP will be more useful. But when something with a lower learning curve, and with lightweight and faster results and simple transactions (i.e., CRUD operations) is needed, my vote goes to REST.

10 percent IT Security will be Cloud Enabled
The services are also driving changes in the market landscape, particularly around a number of key security technology areas, such as secure email and secure Web gateways, remote vulnerability assessment, and Identity and Access Management (IAM). Gartner expects the cloud-based security services market to reach $4.2 billion by 2016.

Dell Grows Data Center Fabric With Switch, Management Tool

Dell is driving to expand its networking initiative to create a complete fabric solution that leverages the networking technology it’s acquired over the past couple of years, particularly from its acquisition in 2011 of Force10 Networks, which has become the cornerstone of its enterprise networking efforts. The company is announcing its Active Fabric networking offering, the next phase in an effort that over the past year has included rolling out converged systems.

Red Hat, Hortonworks prep OpenStack for Hadoop
Merging the worlds of big data and cloud computing, Red Hat, Hortonworks and Hadoop integrator Mirantis are jointly building a software program, called Savanna, that will make it easier to deploy Apache Hadoop on an OpenStack cloud service. The software will "allow Hadoop to take advantage of the scale-out storage architecture that OpenStack offers," said Adrian Ionel Mirantis CEO. "Enterprises will have a much easier way to deploy and use Hadoop at scale."

Agile Software Architecture Sketches and NoUML
There seems to be a common misconception that "architecture diagrams" must only present a high-level conceptual view of the world, so it's not surprising that software developers often regard them as pointless. In the same way that software architecture should be about coding, coaching and collaboration rather than ivory towers, software architecture diagrams should be grounded in reality too.

What is probabilistic programming?
A probabilistic programming language is a high-level language that makes it easy for a developer to define probability models and then “solve” these models automatically. These languages incorporate random events as primitives and their runtime environment handles inference. Now, it is a matter of programming that enables a clean separation between modeling and inference.

Google gives users a way of breaking up with legacy browsers gently
"IT managers simply define which sites should launch from Chrome into an alternate browser, and then set this Chrome policy for all employees. And while Chrome Frame helps developers build apps for older browsers, Legacy Browser Support lets IT admins of organizations embrace the modern web," said Cyrus Mistry, Chrome for business senior product manager.

Quote for the day:

"You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you. " -- John Wooden

April 16, 2013

The Risk Management Trap: How Information Security Fails, But You Can Succeed
Everyday information security professionals are bombarded with marketing messages around risk and threat management, fostering an environment in which objectives seem clear: manage risk, manage threat, stop attacks, identify attackers. These objectives aren't wrong, but they are fundamentally misleading. In this session we'll examine the state of the information security industry in order to understand how the current climate fails to address the true needs of the business.

How to Improve Your IT Portfolio Management
Before exploring the process, it is important to define the process of IT Portfolio Management through which organizations evaluate and ultimately make decisions about existing or planned investments in IT. Improving your IT PfM process can be as simple as gathering data, determining priorities, evaluating options, making decisions and, ultimately, implementing those decisions. You receive a holistic view of available investments, score them individually against criteria deemed appropriate and determine which IT investments should be supported or not.

An Opportunity For The CIO
Not to dismiss their importance, but CIOs usually play limited roles. They quarterback their companies’ use of technology and flow of information. While this affects many of their firm’s big decisions, CIOs have little direct say on strategy. This often keeps them pigeonholed. They lack the broader experience needed for COO and CEO jobs, but are not able to gather this experience because they are not asked to do more.

Do We Still Need a BI Architecture? You Bet We Do!
It is a logical approach, and as such, how it is physically implemented varies greatly from company to company. It is a roadmap that directs an efficient and productive approach to BI by promoting reusability of data, for example. It also promotes the sharing of analytics, data and components. It promotes efficiency in the data integration and data quality processes.

Scrollable divs: rendering issues with CSS overflow auto or scroll (iOS/Android)
The problem: CSS transitions/transforms run unacceptably slow on ICS (4.0 was a disaster and even 4.0.4 with hardware acceleration enabled does not work well). This simply prevents from using libraries like iScroll or touchScroll. Since they use pure JS to manipulate div’s position by setting CSS ... they become useless if the content is bigger than a few tenths on DOM nodes and/or the device is unable to transform the content fluently.

10 things you should do to securely dispose of computers
Even in the best of times, computers are rotated out of use and we have to figure out how we should dispose of them. ... This may increase the rate at which we dispose of computer equipment — and it can increase the exposure to security threats if we aren’t careful about how we do it. Take the following list of tips for secure equipment disposal to heart.

Samsung hits high gear, rolls out densest flash chip
"The new chip is a critical product in the evolution of NAND flash, one whose timely production will enable us to increase our competitiveness in the high density memory storage market," Young-Hyun Jun, executive vice president for Samsung's memory sales & marketing, said in a statement.

Introduction to OAuth in ASP.NET MVC
Using OAuth the application can allow the user to login using his existing credentials(on another website).So user does not have to create and remember another credentials on a new web site . It has an advantage for you as a developer since you can delegate the authorization to another trusted website. These trusted websites that authorize users on other applications behalf are called Identity providers.

RIP the old world and why cloud causes inevitable change
In many of the boardrooms today, organisations are looking at new business models and brushing them aside as not a risk; 'we're doing okay', 'customers won't want that', 'it's too big a change' and the like phrases being happily bandied around. Think back, listen to the news and consider how many of today's casualties are now paying the unfortunate price for ignoring change.

Microsoft should never have supported netbooks - they signed the PC's death warrant
Perhaps, if Microsoft hadn't blinked, if it had said that Windows didn't actually scale down to a tiny little screen and a hard-to-use keyboard, if it had concentrated on making Windows a powerful premium experience that was also easy to use, the PC market wouldn't have collapsed quite the way it has. This, admittedly, would have relied on OEMs actually delivering premium hardware that wasn't compromised by crapware - or on Microsoft launching its own PCs much earlier than it did.

Quotes for the day:

"People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing - that's why we recommend it daily." -- Zig Ziglar

"Opportunities multiply as they are seized." -- Sun Tzu

April 15, 2013

Internet of Things, once bitten, twice shy?
As you can see, the examples of Bruce Kasanoff are quit concrete. Think about what will happen, when we place sensors and wired-up objects in our bodies, in our houses, in our companies, in our cities and in our whole society. We will be able to measure every single part of society and business insights which will create competitor advantage on both short and long term.

Open standards critical for successful cloud strategy: Red Hat
For enterprises that have yet to take the cloud leap, the CEOs are increasingly putting pressure on CIOs to fast track their cloud journey as hype for the technology reaches fever pitch. But CIOs themselves are confronted by issues, such as how to adopt cloud in a manner that is not just relocating the company's IT infrastructure, and how to ensure IT security, according to McCabe.

Cloud-based security services market to reach USD 4.2 billion by 2016: Gartner
"Demand remains high from buyers looking to cloud-based security services to address a lack of staff or skills, reduce costs, or comply with security regulations quickly," said Eric Ahlm, research director at Gartner. "This shift in buying behavior from the more traditional on-premises equipment toward cloud-based delivery models offers good opportunities for technology and service providers with cloud delivery capabilities, but those without such capabilities need to act quickly to adapt to this competitive threat."

The Difference Between Finishers and 70-Percenters
There’s a class of professionals in the world one of my former bosses labeled as “70-Percenters.” They’re the people who are great at making noise, and even getting things started, but they don’t know how to close. They’re not finishers. Are you a Finisher or a 70-Percenter? Are you cultivating Finishers on your team?

14 cloud outages in 7 months, who is next?
Since January this year we have seen over 10 outages, wherein cloud providers were forced to eat their own words (read as claims) with regards to 99.999 per cent uptime and availability. The year, cloud outages began with online service provider Zoho's outage, which lasted for several hours on January 21, and affected about 5 million customers.

BYOL: Bring your own liabilities
In order to ensure that any savings are not outweighed by ongoing operational costs, organisations need to carefully consider how they intend to apportion liability between themselves and their employees in a number of important areas. For example, who will take responsibility for lost or stolen devices, and who will be responsible for malware or virus attacks associated with an employee’s device? There is no fixed answers to these questions under the law, and these are precisely the type of tricky operational issues that should be addressed in the policy.

How Will Google Glass Change Internet Marketing?
How might Google capitalize on Google Glass beyond the first wave of sales? It's a tricky question for several reasons. Google Glass is unlike anything that Google has done before. Come to think of it, it's unlike anything that anyone has ever done. Humankind is treading into an area of vague outcomes. There is so much potential for Google Glass that it's hard to get our head around all the possibilities.

The Worst Leadership Tragedy
Take yourself and a notebook to lunch once a month and askyourself probing questions: What is the message of repetitive frustrations? Frustrations are gifts that reveal development opportunities; What new connection should I develop? Dr. Henry Cloud, author of, “Boundaries for Leaders,” said, “We develop in the context of relationship.”; Is life’s trajectory upward or downward? ...

Interview with Michael Azoff from Ovum about How To Create the Agile Enterprise
The concept of the agile enterprise arises from practices that embrace common principles and values, such as putting uppermost the delivery of value to the customer and high-quality products. The ultimate goal is business agility, where the mainstream business processes have adopted agile ways of working and where IT use is optimized, from “run the business” to innovation, and from tactical requirements to long-term strategic requirements affecting the future of the business.

Finding Business Value in Information Management
There are many technologies entering our landscape that people need to be aware of in order to capitalize on the data available to organizations. William McKnight states that people need to challenge themselves to think beyond the traditional approaches and consider the new ways to bring value to their companies.

Quote for the day:

"One needs to be slow to form conviction, but once formed, they must be defended against the heaviest odds." -- Mohandas Gandhi

April 14, 2013

Critics Question Wording of Internet Freedom Bill
"This bill will have many unintended consequences on domestic telecom policy," she said. "The bill is about rehashing the debates of the past.A The bill is also about prejudicing the debates of the future, specifically concerning the transition to IP-based voice services."

A Framework for Cloud Strategy and Planning
A model based approach or a framework based approach to come up with the cloud strategy could help maximize value creation out of cloud adoption. With their expertise on the standards and frameworks and on the internal business capabilities, the Enterprise Architects are in the best position to take this mantle. Though there are various standards and frameworks that can be used to strategize and plan the Cloud Adoption, Mike Walker in his article suggests a simple three step framework for Cloud Strategy and Planning

A Unified Environment For Big Data Analytics
Big data is adding a burden on users, and for those who were starting to enjoy the freedom from worrying about the underlying systems, this isn’t a welcome development. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. The market’s momentum is building towards merging big data systems and toolsets into a single, unified analytics platform that enables users to access any amount data of any type for any analysis at any time

Leveraging Technology for Disaster Risk Management
The Tokyo event highlighted technologies Japan leveraged in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, for instance: A real-time traffic map was generated and made available to the public (including via Google) using data gathered from moving vehicles; Observation data from flood sensors was distributed to car navigation systems and smartphones; and GPS data from mobile phones was used to reproduce and analyze the flow of people at the time of the earthquake.

Startup Aims SDN Technology at Cisco WANs
Glue's gluware software runs in the cloud and provides a cloud-based service for turning up remote sites and teleworkers worldwide. It is designed to lower the cost of private WAN networking by automating those operations and handling ongoing maintenance, monitoring, life-cycle management and feature extension.

RBI penalizes JPMorgan for risk norms violation
“On a careful examination of the bank’s written reply and the documents available on record, the Reserve Bank found that the violations were conclusively established and a penalty of Rs5 lakh was thus imposed,” an RBI release said. The Indian central bank had issued a show-cause notice to the US lender first and imposed a penalty as it was not satisfied with the explanation. A JP Morgan spokeswoman said the bank had “noted the central bank’s concern and had taken remedial action.”

Lawsuit could put kink in Microsoft's push for cloud security

According to a statement by StrikeForce, PhoneFactor's authentication technology infringes a patent issued to StrikeForce in 2011 for "several key technologies underlying a multichannel security system for granting and denying access to a host computer in response to a demand from an access-seeking individual and computer." Although StrikeForce's lawsuit is aimed at Microsoft, other companies may also find themselves in the crosshairs of patent litigation.

Bahrain is poised to benefit from ICT trends says expert
Microsoft Middle East and Africa vice-president Charbel Fakhoury said the kingdom has agility by virtue of its small size, which can be a decisive advantage in bringing about transformational change. "Bahrain can use technology to surpass big transcending geographical limitations to become a key regional powerhouse. "For Microsoft, Bahrain has been a key market for more than 20 years and the challenge is how to take the country into the new area of cloud, big data, social computing and mobility, creating new economic opportunities along the way," he said.

Innovation through PoS
A new age PoS solution can facilitate rich MIS on: Central aggregation of credit card transactions--transactions from all PoS terminals are all stored / archived in a central server; Facility to upload bank Payment Advice file; Automatic bank reconciliation and transaction dispute management; Financial closures; and Proactive alerts for better operational efficiency

Mobile apps: Devising software requirement specifications
In the mobile space, retention metrics are an important measure of the combined utility and user experience. Retention metrics typically show how much time users spend with an app, relative to the time elapsed since they first installed it. The key for B2C mobile apps is creating a great user experience around functionality, while also providing value to company behind the app.

Quote for the day:

"Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great" -- Mark Twain

April 13, 2013

The Hidden Biases in Big Data

Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations. Hidden biases in both the collection and analysis stages present considerable risks, and are as important to the big-data equation as the numbers themselves.

BMC's MyIT May Be the Future of IT Services
The ideal defensive move for IT departments is to treat consumer technology as the competition that it is and step up to the challenge. It isn't that IT can't win the battle by providing more reliable and more secure services; it's that often IT isn't even in the fight. However, BMC Software's recent MyIT initiative is designed to address this problem directly by providing a personal UI that's tailored to a user's role and is accessible on mobile devices as well as the traditional desktop.

Flexible Search using Stored Procedures: varying the WHERE clause at run-time
The technique uses a single stored procedure with a single WHERE clause containing all search terms and uses nullable parameters and boolean logic to decide exactly which combination of search terms is executed.

Google Submits Antitrust Remedies to EU
According to reports, the proposed remedies submitted Thursday are similar to a settlement Google struck with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, and involve Google sharing more information through its advertising APIs (application programming interfaces) and agreeing not to scrape Web content from rivals.

Nasdaq Cloud Gets Rated as Regulation-Ready
The R3 service, the consulting firms said, meets the electronic records storage, retrieval and management requirements of: Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 17a-4(f), which regulates exchange members, brokers or dealers; Commodity Futures Trading Commission Regulation 17 C.F.R. §1.31(b)-(c), which regulates commodity futures trading. Cohasset said FinQloud adequately preserves records in “a non-erasable, non-rewriteable format” and with “ a highly secure deletion process.”

New Guidance for Healthcare Organizations to Assess Cybersecurity Preparedness
The HITRUST Cybersecurity Working Group was established to review the CSF and ensure the controls fully incorporate best practices consistent with the various risk factors related to cybersecurity for healthcare organizations. Given the increasing volume, sophistication and risks associated with cyber attacks perpetrated on healthcare organizations and increased awareness by legislators and regulators, HITRUST believes there is real value in providing additional guidance to organizations wanting to review their current level of preparedness, according to the group.

Surrounded by management consultants? Speak up.
"There are good consultants and bad consultants," Phelan says. "Good consulting is a combination of detective work, counseling, and in-depth industry knowledge." Such knowledge can really only come from experience. And the bad kind? "Bright, highly educated young kids -- and I know, because I was one -- who lack real expertise but who come in and impose a standard methodology they've been trained by their firms to use." Sound familiar?

Cloud haters: You too will be assimilated
The cloud will be a better experience than you have now, and it will be less expensive in terms of asset expenditure and total cost of ownership. But we at The Cloud Continuum are not entirely without compassion. Let's go down the list of your grievances and address your concerns. I mean, it's not like we have to, because we'll just end up owning your infrastructure anyway. But we are, if anything, attentive.

Wireless IP cameras open to hijacking over the Internet, researchers say
The vendors selling these cameras also have them configured to use their own dynamic DNS services. For example, Foscam cameras get assigned a hostname of the type [two letters and four digits].myfoscam.org. By scanning the entire *.myfoscam.org name space an attacker could identify most Foscam cameras connected to the Internet, the researchers said.

Congressional panel approves Internet freedom bill
The House Energy and Commerce Committee's communications subcommittee approved the Internet freedom bill, an attempt to discourage other countries from advocating for control of the Internet by the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union and other international agencies.

Quote for the day:

"Pull a string & it'll follow wherever you wish. Push it & it'll go nowhere at all." –-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

April 12, 2013

Want To Really Be Agile? Swarm!
The hackneyed phrase, "Good, fast, cheap -- choose two," is wrong in the agile world where collaboration is more powerful than divide and conquer. Our Agile Architect explains how to increase productivity significantly while also increasing code quality with a simple process change.

Modern Apps or Desktop? The Answer May be Spelled W-E-B
iOS and Android have proven that people still love their native apps, a lot. The real issue is that Web technologies are certain to be relevant for a long time and the native platform game, after having been stable for more than 20 years, is encountering upheaval that hasn't resolved yet. To which platform should you allocate more investment: the one that's volatile or the one that's stable? The latter would seem more sensible in the majority of cases.

Key benefits of architecting loosely coupled SOA-based solutions
The goal of every SOA architect is to develop a highly componentized, largely de-coupled system that makes application lifecycle management (ALM) easier -- from the start of the systems development lifecycle (SDLC) right through to the end. But are loosely coupled SOA-based systems always the answer? And isn't it true that, in some cases, tightly coupled systems aren't such a bad thing?

Privacy protections booted from CISPA data-sharing bill
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who proposed three unsuccessful privacy amendments, said afterward she was disappointed her colleagues did not limit the NSA and other intelligence agencies from collecting sensitive data on Americans. Her privacy amendments would have "required that companies report cyber threat information directly to civilian agencies, and maintained the long-standing tradition that the military doesn't operate on U.S. soil against American citizens," Schakowsky said.

Dell pushes the tablet envelope with the XPS 18

Rather than another slate somewhere between 5 and 10 inches, the XPS 18 is a monstrous 18-inch device. While this device is obviously not something that you’ll slip into your pocket, the XPS 18 presents a rather intriguing use case, especially in the office where most workers’ mobility consists of moving between meeting rooms rather than traipsing across continents.

Red Hat Updates JBoss Data Grid
The list of new features in this release includes cross-data center replication (XDR), which allows for replication across clusters and locations. The result, the company says, is better performance for remote users and applications. Another new feature, non-blocking state transfer (NBST), improves elasticity through a new pause-less join-and-leave protocol.

Is OpenDaylight the Next Penguin?
The OpenDaylight Project has a good technical overview, but even there it sounds more than a little like mumbo jumbo: "The business logic and algorithms reside in the applications. These applications use the controller to gather network intelligence, run algorithms to perform analytics, and then use the controller to orchestrate the new rules, if any, throughout the network."

Kaspersky discovers hacker group targeting online games
According to its blog post Thursday, Kaspersky fingered a group named "Winnti" to be responsible for breaking into the servers of at least 35 games developers and publishers since 2009. The evidence it had uncovered suggested the cybercriminals were looking to steal proprietary source codes to possible develop into pirated versions of the games, or to steal virtual currency which can be converted into real money, it said.

Four Master Data Management Mistakes to Avoid
Unfortunately, corporate data doesn’t naturally play well together. One customer may be present in five different systems. Three of those, however, may be derived from the first system, with one of them located in the cloud. Likewise, customer information may be stored in different ways. The finance system wants formal naming, akin to a Chamber of Commerce registry. The CRM system, meanwhile, caters to salespeople needing to trace contacts into specific business divisions, to prevent duplicate sales efforts.

A Practical Intro to Data Science
There are far fewer resources out there about the steps to take in order to obtain the skills necessary to practice this elusive discipline. Here we will provide a collection of freely accessible materials and content to jumpstart your understanding of the theory and tools of Data Science.

Quote for the day:

"When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts." -- Larry Ellison

April 11, 2013

USB Says New Specification to Double Transfer Speed in the Works
The new specification is an improvement over the existing USB 3.0, which can transfer data at 5Gbps. Most PCs today ship with USB 3.0 ports, while smartphones and tablets have micro-USB ports based on the older and slower 2.0 specification. Mobile devices will get faster signalling rates with micro-USB 3.0 ports in the future.

How to Become a More Decision-Centric Organization
Many organizations’ success or failure is determined by the decisions they make. Insurance companies must make good decisions about which claims to pay or what to charge for a policy. Health care organizations must decide if it is safe to discharge someone or give them a particular medication. Retailers must decide what to stock where and how to promote it to their customers. Telecommunication companies must decide if they want to retain a customer and what offer is most likely to succeed.

A Guide to SQL Server 2012
The arrival of SQL Server 2012 brings both good news and news that’s less good. On one hand, the latest version of one of Microsoft’s best-established products is full of new features, including core support for Windows Server, enhanced auditing features and enhanced PowerShell support. In this free guide from Redmond magazine, learn more about the inner workings of SQL Server 2012, which new features are the most impressive, and how to budget for and manage this new and critical product.

Intel lays out plans for the hyperscale datacentre
The reference hyperscale design will be based around current and upcoming Intel technologies. Intel has already released the sub-10w Atom Centerton S1200 targeted at the microserver market and later this year will release the 22nm Avoton SoC with integrated Ethernet and improved performance per watt over Centerton processors. Avoton samples are with customers and the first systems are expected to be available in the second half of 2013.

Self-service software broadens BI usage, reduces reliance on IT
Self-service applications offer a way to extend the scope and reach of BI deployments while also creating a more personalized and collaborative decision-making environment for information workers, added Claudia Imhoff, president and founder of Intelligent Solutions Inc., a BI and analytics consultancy in Boulder, Colo.

How to Validate the Data Model

In response to my columns on the qualifications of the data modeler and how that can help business, a reader inquired about who is responsible for validating the data model. The answer to this question depends on the type of model being validated. In this column, I will examine the responsibilities for the business data model and in a future column, I will look at the validation responsibilities for the technology data model.

Tech jobs: CIOs look safe, IT managers face chop, chief digital officer is the next big thing
Firms are planning to crank up the hiring of chief digital officers and chief data officers, but it won't necessarily be at the expense of CIOs. In fact, it is IT middle management who look more likely to lose out. Some 19 percent of business leaders expect to recruit a chief digital officer by 2014, while 17 percent foresee a chief data officer appointment, according to a study by Gartner.

More than 6 out of 10 companies approve of personal device use for work
The online survey of 502 U.S. IT and business executives was conducted in February. It also found that the most popular option, cited by 58% of the respondents, was to have a mix of corporate-owned and employee-owned devices. For 53% of those surveyed, the top reason for allowing employees to use or select their own devices was to increase productivity while employees are away from the office.

IT helpdesk must up ante in cloud, BYOD era
The result is users are now accustomed to the idea of self-service in IT and generally do not approach the IT helpdesk, at least not at the beginning until the problem escalates, he noted. Also, with increased awareness of cloud services targeted for enterprises, some business units or departments have become more confident in engaging vendors without asking for IT's help. As such, any IT helpdesk that still provides only entry level type of support with a slow response rate "has no place" in today's corporate environments, Leow stated.

Data skepticism
So, if we really want to do data science, it has to be done by incorporating skepticism. And here’s the key: data scientists have to own that skepticism. Data scientists have to be the biggest skeptics. Data scientists have to be skeptical about models, they have to be skeptical about overfitting, and they have to be skeptical about whether we’re asking the right questions. They have to be skeptical about how data is collected, whether that data is unbiased, and whether that data — even if there’s an inconceivably large amount of it — is sufficient to give you a meaningful result.

Quote for the day:

"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave." -- Calvin Coolidge