Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

August 14, 2014

Systems Disparity: The Implications of Data Proliferations on Business Decisions
A typical too-big-too-fail organization will have between 1,500 and 2,000 applications. These applications have proliferated for various reasons, ... they can run on a variety of hardware platforms and technologies (each with its own unique operating system). The applications in question are designed according to a variety of paradigms and methodologies and are developed using a vast range of tools. These tools, which are generally aligned to a technology platform, encompass, among other things, programming languages, database-management systems, and user-interface builders. And it is in the context of this variety and the resulting heterogeneous environment that the term disparate is coined.

How to Expedite Continuous Testing
The prescription for continuous testing is deceptively simple: Automated unit tests, version control and a continuous integration server. We wanted to first get past the buzzwords and talk about how to actually do it, by getting started with Ruby and GitHub. Today, we'll install Jenkins and CircleCI, hook them to our GitHub repository and get continuous automated build/inspect going, step by step. Along the way we'll talk about some common setup problems; you may want to read the whole article first, then try to follow the step-by-step instructions.

Partnership Enables Smaller Companies to Leverage Advanced BI Solutions
“Robust BI and analytics solutions are tools that organizations of all types and sizes must actively use to achieve success in today’s business environment,” said Gerald Cohen, president and CEO of Information Builders. “All companies, regardless of size, should have access to the BI tools they need to understand and make positive use of the information generated by their organizations. Information Builders is thrilled to be partnering with Arrow to extend the power of BI to a greater pool of potential users and ensure that more companies have the tools needed to make informed decisions, improve business processes, and boost revenue.”

Create real-time graphs with these five free web-based apps
Creating graphs is easy -- grab your favorite spreadsheet program, enter some data, and use the chart wizard. What's more difficult is creating those graphs to be published on the web based on dynamic data. Plenty of options are available to graph hard-entered data, but few are capable of dynamic generation. In this edition of Five Apps, we take a look at five free web-based tools for creating different types of graphs from dynamic data. Each of these apps offers a vast number of options and lots of customizability, more so than I could possibly demonstrate here. So take a look at each webpage and browse through the examples provided to see the power of each of these tools.

Cyberspace 2025: Overview
Our research forecasts that by 2025, two billion new Internet users will come online, for a total of 4.7 billion people online. Nearly 75 percent of these Internet users will hail from emerging economies. During the same period, social and demographic trends, such as the growing need for a highly-skilled workforce and increases in aging populations, will create new layers of challenge for policymakers already grappling with societal dependence on the Internet.

BYOD and the challenges of managing VDI and VDA
Apart from the difficulties resulting from integrating these new devices into a corporate IT infrastructure, there are a number of specific software asset management (SAM) related issues to consider which have important licensing implications. For example: Who owns the software on the device that is brought in? What applications are they using? Are there apps in use that are free for personal use but need to be paid-for when used in a corporate environment? How will the software on these devices be consumed?

Managers Can Motivate Employees with One Word
David Rock, founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, has identified relatedness — feelings of trust, connection, and belonging—as one of the five primary categories of social pleasures and pains (along with status, certainty, autonomy, and fairness). Rock’s research shows that the performance and engagement of employees who experience relatedness threats or failures will almost certainly suffer. And in other research, the feeling of working together has indeed been shown to predict greater motivation, particularly intrinsic motivation, that magical elixir of interest, enjoyment, and engagement that brings with it the very best performance.

Reconceptualizing the Board and its Metrics
The focus on features has lead to a faulty evaluation metric for corporate governance. Indeed, counting features is the most common scale used when comparing boards. When The Globe and Mail, for example, publishes its rankings of Canadian boards, it scores companies by looking at the number of features of governance. If Company A can check off more boxes than Company B, then the conclusion is made that Company A has a better board than Company B. The verification of a board’s features, however, does very little when it comes to understanding and evaluating actual board behavior.

The automated threat mitigation tool helping to beat Big Data security blues
Hexadite aims to bring that automation to corporate IT environments — and Barak believes the system is robust enough to allow administrators to rely on that automation to protect their environments. Hexadite comes with a pre-defined library of alerts and behaviours that look at all actionable information from the network and endpoints to gain a holistic view of what’s really happening. The system's analysis is built on algorithms that took years to develop, Barak said, that takes into consideration the minutiae of detail in a system, evaluating files, network connections, internet traffic, processes, and anything else going on — looking for the anomalies that can mean that a system has been compromised.

Balancing Quality and Velocity in Agile
Agile software development teams have to assure that the products that they develop have sufficient quality. Management often also expect that they increase their velocity to be able to deliver more functionality faster to their customer. Several authors explored the relationship between quality and velocity and suggested ways to improve both quality and velocity. Bob Galen wrote about the importance of software quality in respect to becoming faster in the blog post read my lips – agile isn’t fast:

Quote for the day:

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.” -- Winston Churchill

August 13, 2014

Similarities and Differences Between Predictive Analytics and Business Intelligence
The similarities of BI and PA are points I’ve tried to make in talks I’ve given at eMetrics and performance management conferences. After making suitable translations of terms, these two fields can understand each other well. Two sample differences in terminology are described here. First, one rarely hears the term KPI at a PA conference, but will often hear it at BI conferences. If we use google as an indicator of popularity of the term KPI, “predictive analytics” KPI' yielded a mere 103,000 hits on google, whereas “business intelligence” KPI' yielded 1,510,000 hits. In PA, one is more likely to hear these ideas described as metrics or even features or derived variables that can be used as inputs to models are as a target variable.

2014's Hottest IT Certification
With more than half of 2014 behind us, it's that time of the year where we look at IT certifications standings in real world IT. The right certifications can help earn tech workers premium pay or land the job they've been aspiring to. That's why knowing what is "hot" with employers is important when considering your professional development. Every quarter Foote Partners compiles their data in the IT Skills Demand and Pay Trends Report, and they speak with over 2600 employers to bridge the disconnect between job titles, job content and compensation. Read on to find out where the heat is in regards to IT certifications, salaries and employer needs.

How To Refactor For Dependency Injection, Part 4: Configuration Changes
In the early days of DI containers, XML configuration was the generally recognized method of configuring a container. As time went on and fluent interfaces became popular, the focus shifted away from XML configuration and more toward using code as configuration. By using code as configuration you gain all the benefits of the compiler checking your types for you, making configuration much easier. Now, in modern DI, XML configuration is seldom used, and instead techniques that involve code configuration are used.

Microservices and the First Law of Distributed Objects
So in essence, there is no contradiction between my views on distributed objects and advocates of microservices. Despite this essential non-conflict, there is another question that is now begging to be asked. Microservices imply small distributed units that communicate over remote connections much more than a monolith would do. Doesn't that contravene the spirit of the first law even if it satisfies the letter of it?While I do accept that there are valid reasons to do for a distributed design for many systems, I do think distribution is a complexity booster. A coarser-grained API is more awkward than a fine-grained one.

Internet Touches Half Million Routes: Outages Possible Next Week
This situation is more of an annoyance than a real Internet-wide threat. Most routers in use today at midsize to large service providers, and certainly all of the routers that operate the core infrastructure of the Internet, have plenty of room to deal with the Internet’s current span, because they were provisioned that way by sensible network operators. Affected boxes cause local connectivity problems for the network service providers who still run them, so they will be identified quickly and upgraded as we pass the threshold. Their instability in turn causes some minor additional load on adjacent routers.

Delivering a Customer-Focused Government Through Smarter IT
The Digital Service will work to find solutions to management challenges that can prevent progress in IT delivery. To do this, we will build a team of more than just a group of tech experts – Digital Service hires will have talent and expertise in a variety of disciplines, including procurement, human resources, and finance. The Digital Service team will take private and public-sector best practices and help scale them across agencies – always with a focus on the customer experience in mind. We will pilot the Digital Service with existing funds in 2014, and would scale in 2015 as outlined in the President's FY 2015 Budget.

PaaS shoot-out: Cloud Foundry vs. OpenShift
For deployment of application source code, OpenShift uses Git, but it also allows you to deploy binary packages. Cloud Foundry only takes your binaries (.WAR files for now, with other formats to be supported later), then automatically combines them with buildpacks of languages and frameworks (such as Java and Tomcat) and services such as databases. The buildpack format was developed by Heroku and contributed to the open source community, spawning many community buildpacks, most of which work on Cloud Foundry.

Dell bundles backup software, eyes further development
“We have a new approach to data protection that is driving down the costs,” said Michael Grant, head of software product marketing at Dell. The release is a precursor to Dell delving more deeply into the market of storage software, not just as a vendor but as a developer of new technologies. “We’re making a pretty big investment in data protection,” Grant said. The new Backup and Disaster Recovery Suite contains popular Dell backup programs, AppAssure, NetVault Backup and vRanger. Dell acquired each of these programs through company acquisitions in 2012. Each application performs a slightly different function, Grant explained.

400 Gbit Ethernet: The Next Leap
According to the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Bandwidth Assessment Ad hoc, industry bandwidth requirements are continuing to grow at an exponential pace. At such a rapid speed, networks will need to support terabit-per-second capacities by 2015 and 10 Tbit/s capacities by 2020. ... In May 2013, recognizing this growth and foreseeing the need for a new Ethernet speed rate, the IEEE 802.3 working group formed the IEEE 802.3 400 Gbit/s Ethernet (400 GbE) Study Group. When the working group last addressed the need for a new Ethernet speed rate, two rates were created: 40 GbE, which was intended to provide a medium path for servers, and 100 GbE, which was targeted at network aggregation applications.

Large Scale Event Tracking with RabbitMQ
On the one hand, they provide game designers and game balancers with a valuable tool for their work. The event data helps them answer questions such as whether players regularly quit the game at a specific quest, or how a new feature that has been implemented is performing. The insights gained are used to improve the gameplay and user experience. On the other hand they are a powerful tool for marketing specialists. Specific events make it possible to identify which marketing channel a new player is gained through, and thus allow a constructive adaptation of marketing strategies and channels. Finally, they can be used by the developer, for example to measure and improve performance of loading times or to identify and adapt to the mobile devices used.

Quote for the day:

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" -- Philip K. Dick

August 12, 2014

Redefining System Architecture with Data at the Core
System architecture in today’s cloud era should be defined by the data it contains rather than the hardware that stores and makes it available. Software-defined data platforms are drastically and rapidly changing the IT model. By abstracting the underlying hardware, and allowing data management and access to be defined workload by workload, data characteristics are now defining the infrastructure used, rather than vice versa. IT investment, therefore, needs to be better matched against the value of data to the business, while allowing increased flexibility and responsiveness.

Sentencing, by the Numbers
While well intentioned, this approach is misguided. The United States inarguably has a mass-incarceration crisis, but it is poor people and minorities who bear its brunt. Punishment profiling will exacerbate these disparities — including racial disparities — because the risk assessments include many race-correlated variables. Profiling sends the toxic message that the state considers certain groups of people dangerous based on their identity. It also confirms the widespread impression that the criminal justice system is rigged against the poor. It is naïve to assume judges will use the scores only to reduce sentences. Judges, especially elected ones, will face pressure to harshly sentence those labeled “high risk.”

Forget 'Things' – It's The Internet Of Business Models
Success in the Internet of Things will come to those who look beyond the disruptive technology. Indeed, as former Intel CEO Andy Groves perfectly put it: "Disruptive technologies is a misnomer. What it is, is trivial technology that screws up your business model." That's a great observation, especially with the Internet of Things where falling prices are making the technology more readily available -- so if you're looking to make money out of manufacturing home sensors, maybe think again because you'll be up against stiff competition, even from someone with some electronic smarts and $35 to spend on a Raspberry Pi.

'Biochip' aims to quicken disease diagnosis, cut medical test costs
The Hydra-1K -- which is a silicon chip -- can be used at doctor's offices or points of care, where a disease can be instantly analyzed to determine treatment, said Arjang Hassibi, founder and CEO of startup InSilixa, during a presentation at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, California. The chip -- which Hassibi also called a reader -- heats up a culture or sample, and can identify unique molecular structures like DNA sequences, to help identify possible strains of a disease, which can help determine medication, or whether a patient needs to be isolated. Right now the chip can test cultures or samples only for specific diseases and mutations.

A Glimpse Behind the Cloud: Tour the EMC Durham Data Center
Our virtual tour of the Durham Data Center gives you a high level understanding of how our data center works and a glimpse of EMC Cloud computing using Vblock architecture. It features purpose-built Vblocks which run our SAP-based, enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and Exchange environment, as well as 100 percent tapeless backup environments built on our Data Domain and Avamar technologies. With tens of thousands of VMs in our data center, our sales staff can tap in to Durham to demonstrate products and services in a real-life lab setting.

Agile Practices and Social Nudges in the Workplace
A special kind of nudge is the “Social Nudge”, which results from the interaction with other people. According to Thaler and Sunstein: “Social influences come in two basic categories. The first involves information. If many people do something or think something, their actions and their thoughts convey information about what might be best for you to do or think. The second involves peer pressure. If you care about what other people think about you, then you might go along with the crowd to avoid their wrath or curry their favor.”

Intel watches ARM as low-powered computing thrives
“You get more peak performance per thread on Intel than on ARM-based chips," said Novakovic. “ARM-based architecture is more suited for mobile devices and connected devices such as the refrigerators and the washing machines." But Intel thought that if it built extremely high-end high-compute power processors first, it can scale it down to suit the mobile devices needs. “But ARM proved that strategy completely wrong by starting ground up,” said Novakovic. “There is a growing market for low-power CPU architecture and that’s where ARM is winning and that will be Intel’s biggest threat,” said technology blogger Scott Wasson.

Ontologies versus Data Models
The common definition of an ontology is: a specification of a conceptualization. I find this is a very difficult definition to apply practically. To me an ontology is a view of the concepts, relations and rules for a particular area of business information, irrespective of how that information may be stored as data. ... Using ontologies to drive clarity in business discussions is beneficial. We can clearly see that Figures 1 and 2 are not data models, and so data models cannot be used in this example. However, ontologies also play a vital role in conjunction with data models. As noted above, data models are sometimes held to represent business reality, as well as provide a design for a data store. Yet, a data model of any kind has to be a generalization across many different business views.

Virtual Meetings on the Rise, but Value Is Still Debatable
Meetings are increasing because, in general, workplaces are encouraging collaboration–between individual, teams, divisions and locations, Craig Daniel, vice president of collaboration products at LogMeIn, told eWEEK, noting there has been a dramatic increase of tablets and smartphones replacing PCs as the virtual meeting tool of choice. ... "Nobody will admit to liking meetings, but most people will acknowledge that they serve a purpose," Daniel said. "Many meetings are a waste of time, but every now and then, with the right attendees and the right tools, we come away from one saying, ‘That was a good meeting’."

Project Inception - How to Use a Single Meeting to Achieve Alignment
Inception attendees should include the core team doing the work and the sponsoring stakeholders or their designates. Typically this will include business, product, development and perhaps other teams like operations and support. It may also include representatives from upstream or downstream teams that are producers or consumers of this teams work. Practically the effectiveness of the meeting starts to diminish when the number of people is over 10 people because there is a lot of group participation and having 20 people all contribute effectively is difficult.

Quote for the day:

"There is no right way to do a wrong thing." -- Harold S. Kushner

August 11, 2014

When Robots Take All the Work, What’ll Be Left for Us to Do?
Humans will continue to be useful workers, the argument goes, because of things like empathy, creativity, judgment, and critical thinking. Consider the all-too-common experience of calling customer service reps whose employers force them to follow a script—a kind of pseudo-automation. When made to follow a decision tree the way a computer would, all four of those qualities are sucked out of the interaction—no opportunity to exercise creativity, empathy, judgment, or critical thinking—and the service provided tends to stink. “Detecting complaints is an AI problem. Sending the complaints to the correct customer service entity is an AI problem,” said one unnamed Pew respondent described as a university professor and researcher. “But customer service itself is a human problem.”

We cannot do modern science unless it's open
No one will write code for a competitor but many will write to interoperate with a collaborator. We got to know each other, and in 2005 most of us met at the American Chemical Society (ACS) under the blue obelisk in San Diego. I suggested we form a close, informal community under the label Blue Obelisk and that we adopt the mantra: open data, open standards, open source (ODOSOS). We have a mailing list and at intervals I buy Blue Obelisks as awards for publicly valuable contributions. There's a communal agreement to interoperate but no downwards control. It just happens in its own way and at its own speed. We reviewed 5 years on and had 20 groups authoring the paper, which is a remarkable achievement for a very conservative discipline (chemistry) where established companies are more valued than innovation.

When Payment Processing Becomes A Commodity
A catalyst for a commoditization of payment processing is the introduction of cryptocurrencies and new payment protocols like bitcoin and Ripple, which renders clearing obsolete and dramatically lowers the transaction cost for merchants. As a comparison, the transaction cost for payments through Visa/Mastercard/PayPal is ranging between 3-5 percent depending on the transaction size. The transaction cost for bitcoin on the other side is as low as 1 percent with continuing efforts to reduce transaction fees from the bitcoin community. To accelerate the development Bitpay recently announced removed the transaction fees on the starter plan, offering free unlimited payment processing to merchants accepting BitCoin.

New devices run on Wi-Fi signals alone
To find out exactly how the Wi-Fi backscatter devices work, Crave contacted Bryce Kellogg, a doctoral student in electrical engineering and co-author on the research, which will be published at the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communication's annual conference this month in Chicago. He explained that the gadgets function by either reflecting or not reflecting the Wi-Fi signal running between say, a router and a laptop. That interruption in the signal can be then be read by software on the laptop much in the same way binary code is interpreted.

When Data Joins The Dark Side
"Sometimes data goes dark because we're simply too busy to deal with it, so we push it to the side and ignore it," Colgan said. "Maybe we don't have the right tools to address the scale or speed, or to shine a light on the data." Alternatively, data can go dark when it's trapped in a repository -- a legacy archive, for instance -- that renders it difficult to access or analyze. "We have a lot of customers interested in migrating off legacy archives," said Colgan. "They're doing so for a couple of reasons: One, a number of archives are at end of life, and (customers) want to go to a more modern platform; two, they want to migrate to the cloud."

Enterprise Security: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
Each year there are more than 50 million cyber attacks in the UK alone and this number is rising. It’s fast becoming evident that old security technologies are diminishing in effectiveness and holes are opening up in corporate security networks. In the paragraphs below I explore the good, the bad and the ugly to dispel some of the common myths around the enterprise security armoury. ... It’s become commonplace for employees to access corporate email via a mobile device. Often this is not a standard work-issue device and IT managers are challenged with managing multiple devices all with different operation systems.

The Latest Strategy in the Fight Against Offensive Social Media Content
Possibilities include using natural language filters to pick out tweets that are likely to be offensive and then quarantining the authors. Another is a peer review model in which people rate the offensiveness of tweets and those responsible for the content deemed most offensive are quarantined. But these approaches raise all kinds of practical questions: where should the cut-off lie between people who should be quarantined versus those who should not; how long should individuals be quarantined for and so on. And what of users simply reregister under another name?

15 Technologies Changing How Developers Work
A long time ago, developers wrote assembly code that ran fast and light. On good days, they had enough money in their budget to hire someone to toggle all those switches on the front of the machine to input their code. On bad days, they flipped the switches themselves. Life was simple: The software loaded data from memory, did some arithmetic, and sent it back. That was all. ... The work involved in telling computers what to do is markedly different than it was even five years ago, and it's quite possible that any Rip Van Winkle-like developer who slept through the past 10 years would be unable to function in the today's computing world. Everything seems to be changing faster than ever.

Mobile chips face lockdown to prevent hacks
A well-designed system can provide multiple layers to prevent malicious attacks and injection of rogue code, said Chandra, adding that the hardware, security subsystem and software on mobile hardware need to work together. Besides ARM, chip makers like Intel and AMD are working to bring more security features so mobile devices are shielded from attacks. The companies are knitting together hardware and software to work more cohesively in a system, and also establishing hypervisors, secure boot layers, and segmented areas -- much like sandboxes -- in which code could be executed without compromising a system.

The Importance of Putting People First
Undaunted, the new CEO (the founder’s son) explains that he may be new but the one thing he knows is that “Burridge’s is its staff,” and he intends to look out for their welfare. He sends the manager to make the call. A bit patrician perhaps (the series is set in the 1950s, after all), but it’s a reminder that there can be a human connection between employer and employee. It is in this light that I began to consider the recent announcement that Starbucks had forged an alliance with Arizona State University to make 40 online degree programs affordable for its employees.

Quote for the day:

"Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier." -- Charles F. Kettering

August 10, 2014

The Theory and Tragic Reality of IT Projects
It is still possible, and there are some shining gems produced this way, but most corporate software projects today involve groups of developers, often working in remote teams and with numerous personnel changes over the lifecycle of a piece of software. This type of project requires careful management, regardless of the programming language involved. Several different types of development model have evolved to cope with the challenges of creating software code that works well, is properly commented and can be updated later by people who weren't involved in writing the original program.

Cloud complexity hinders some enterprise adoption. So, what’s the answer?
The enterprise architect in me would suggest that the best solution for enterprises that are already hindered by architectural complexity without the presence of cloud computing is to get their respective “acts together” before they adopt cloud computing. However, the world does not work that way. In the real world, most enterprises would have to do a ton of work over many years to be perfectly ready to move easily to cloud-based platforms. The root issue is the ability to manage complexity, including the addition of applications (new and old) that will run on public cloud platforms. The trick is to think in terms of replacement, and not additions.

Why CIOs Must Rethink How They Measure Success
There’s only one problem: Most are measuring the wrong items. This became strikingly clear in a recent Forrester survey that asked CIOs, CFOs, and CMOs to define their top ten measurements of technological success. To say that the lists didn’t match would be an understatement. What CIOs considered the most important measurement, the percentage of projects that met or exceeded expectations, ranked fourth in the business leaders’ list. Conversely, the CMOs’ and CFOs’ most important metric, IT cost per business service, ranked fourth for the CIOs.

Artificial intelligence will not turn into a Frankenstein's monster
Yes, we do have lots of AI systems, like chess programs or automated financial transaction systems, or the software in driverless cars. And some are already smarter than most humans, like language translation systems. Some are as good as some humans, such as driverless cars or natural speech recognition systems and will soon be better than most humans. But none of this has brought about the end of civilisation (though I'm suspiciously eyeing the financial transaction systems). The reason is that these are all narrow-AI systems: very good at doing one thing.

To stop security breaches, kill the username and password
This is not a new idea. Far from it. The OpenID standard, for example, is basically the same concept, and there were others before. Meanwhile, the government has proposed its own solution, lovingly titled National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC). OpenID found a fair bit of success when it comes to straightforward authentication tasks, but it's never been a player when it comes to online retail. Recently, major online identity companies like Janrain and Facebook have withdrawn support. (Facebook has launched its own authentication service, Facebook Connect.)

How Technology Can Fix 4 Big Problems of India
It has been predicted that some of the most fundamental problems in India like healthcare, food, water, and energy, are going to worsen alarmingly over the next three decades. Sure, the country has made a lot of progress over the last few decades, particularly since the economic reforms were initiated in 1991, but apparently, that’s way too little. Things have come to such that India’s most intricate issues are now likely to become almost impossible to handle unless something is done urgently. This will cause severe disruptions to lives and businesses. Maybe technology can help?

Microsoft blocking of old ActiveX not enough
App development rules for these environments are strict and the developers must pay Microsoft for the privilege of being a developer and of testing and hosting their apps. But the problems are far from insurmountable. For one thing, I see no reason why Microsoft would need to host anyone else's code. For another, Microsoft could set terms for allowing third parties into the system. One option would be for the Windows Update servers to serve code hosted on other vendors' servers. Or Microsoft could license Windows Update server software to the third parties to run on their own servers, and their installation process could configure the Windows Update client to look for updates on those servers as well. Or Microsoft could host the third party code

.NET CLR Injection: Modify IL Code during Run-time
Modifying .NET methods' MSIL codes during run-time is very cool, it helps to implement hooking, software protection, and other amazing stuff. That's why I want it, but there is a big challenge on the road -- the MSIL code could have been complied to native code by JIT-complier before we have a chance to modify; also the .NET CLR implementation is not documented and it changes during each version, we need a reliable and stable way without dependency to the exact memory layout.

Google's big-data tool, Mesa, holds petabytes of data across multiple servers
A Mesa implementation can hold petabytes of data, update millions of rows of data per second and field trillions of queries per day, Google says. Extending Mesa across multiple data centers allows the data warehouse to keep working even if one of the data centers fails. Google built Mesa to store and analyze critical measurement data for its Internet advertising business, but the technology could be used for other, similar data warehouse jobs, the researchers said. "Mesa ingests data generated by upstream services, aggregates and persists the data internally, and serves the data via user queries," the researchers wrote in a paper describing Mesa.

Enterprise Architecture: Don't Be a Fool with a Tool

As Viswanathan explains, there are three basic approaches to applying TOGAF: “The first approach is to baseline first, because it’s good for cleaning up messes. Second, target [business outcomes] first, which is best for greenfield companies.” But for many organizations, the mess is so bad that if they spent all their time on the baseline, they’d never achieve any business outcomes at all. For those organizations, Viswanathan recommends “some baseline, then target. Take an iterative approach. Take a pain point, create that slice of EA. Back the TOGAF cycle into that.”

Quote for the day:

"Decisiveness is a characteristic of high-performing men & women. Almost any decision is better than no decision at all." -- Brian Tracy

August 09, 2014

Talking To Big Machines
In Comstock’s vision, software intelligence improves machines in two respects: it makes them both more selfish and more selfless. “Selfish machines” monitor themselves and ask for help when they need it, as when a jet engine calls for service because vibration sensors have detected early signs of wear. Human operators have typically performed this function, observing, for instance, that a combination of rising temperature and falling pressure suggests an oil leak. Not only can software monitor machines at extremely high accuracy and frequency, it can also present nuanced, abstracted conclusions to human users.

Redefine App and Data Delivery for the Modern Workforce
The modern workforce is one that spans devices, countries, time zones and schedules. Delivering apps and data to them can be a serious challenge, and moreover, a serious drain on your resources.So join Holger Daube for this session as he shows you how to: Move your enterprise from device-level management to dynamic delivery of apps and data; Create highly automated, self-service systems to securely deliver data and applications across all devices; and Build a well-managed foundation that enables end user services (e.g., BYOD, VDI, app store) within an ITaaS framework

Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem
As an enterprise start-up, Meraki has been impeded by its distance from the web scene. It simply does not have the same recognition as a consumer company whose products users (and potential recruits) interact with every day. “You say, ‘I work at Pinterest,’ and people know what that is — they use Pinterest,” Biswas said. “You tell them you work at Meraki, and they’re a little more reserved. They’re like, ‘What’s that?’ Once we explained our culture and our approach, we were able to hire great talent, but it’s always a challenge.” Since the acquisition, Biswas, who is 32, has fought to retain the spirit of the vanguard, but his struggle reveals an implicit fear — that young engineers might be willing to work at Meraki but not at Cisco

Keeping IT Relevant isn't about the Title of the CIO
There are ramifications for the entire IT organization when pursuing a staffing model that includes technical and business savvy folks being embedded within each of the functions. There is the risk of further stratification of IT between the "innovators" and the "operations teams". There is the risk of having a distributed team performing poorly or not communicating without greater leadership focus. The fact is, there isn't an easy way to slice this artichoke and someone's ego or job function is likely to get poked. However, if you have the courage to make the necessary changes and make the tough calls on staffing models based on people and opportunity not silos or turf, you can make it work.

The cultural gaps between enterprise mobility and business intelligence
"When the project is coming from the BI team, these are the guys who have been doing BI and publishing dashboards around the company," Alsbury said. "The first thing typically they are looking at is we have these ten reports or these thirty five reports now we want to enable people to access them on their phone so can you make our reports that look this way look the same way on a phone? That's the first break down right there." Alsbury adds that some organizations perceive is as a transcription or transposition project where we are taking the same thing they look at here on their desktop and put the same thing on their phone.

Peer Pressure! Business Pushing the Cloud on Enterprise IT
"The cloud is getting so much attention and chat time that all of a sudden there is an urgency," said Jeff Kagan, an independent analyst. "Tomorrow the cloud will be tested and trusted. However, today it's still the wild, wild West. IT executives know this but they get pressure from their chief executives to jump into the cloud because it's becoming the new code word for success. And no one wants to be last." Brad Shimmin, an analyst with Current Analysis, said IT shops are under considerable pressure to improve overall operational efficiency and even to drive business opportunities through the nimbleness that comes along with being a leaner organization.

Taking A Wait-And-See Approach With Disruptive Innovations
While the word has taken on many meanings (as Lepore’s article notes), Christensen’s original definition includes two characteristics that show up in sequence. At first, the technology performs worse than alternatives on performance criteria that mainstream customers care about. At this point, we can only say that it is potentially disruptive. Only if its performance later improves can we say that a technology is actually disruptive. That’s why startups with potentially disruptive technologies start out competing instead of cooperating. Incumbents can’t tell whether their technology is any good, so they decline to license it.

Five Smart Cybersecurity Moves From Top Security CEOs
The complexity of security threats to individuals has also increased, but no individual cybersecurity issue will receive the headlines that a corporate breach would, so one can be lulled into a false sense of security. I sought the counsel of four CEOs of major information security companies to ask them what steps they take personally to secure their information and their computing devices. They offered the following five recommendations.

The future of TV is social
Now there’s a whole generation of cord-cutters, something my colleague Janko has written about extensively, and I have one daughter firmly in that camp: when she and her boyfriend got an apartment together, they chose to get high-speed internet and either download everything they want to watch or stream it via an Android set-top box. But my two youngest daughters — one teenager, one in her 20s — are even further down the curve: like the kids surveyed by Variety, names like PewDiePie and Smosh are more relevant to them than than most Hollywood actors.

Why Do We Need Self-Organising Teams?
Organisations have no longer been able to choose whether they want to respond to these demands or not. Change has become mandatory. Trying to hold onto the status quo is like trying to keep the leaves on trees in autumn. For an organisation to be successful, it must adequately deal with the risks and use the opportunities every change brings along. In other words, the organisation must keep up with, or ideally be ever so slightly ahead of, the current market demands. How inconvenient then that this market behaves unpredictably. That which is ‘top’ today can be a ‘flop’ tomorrow; yesterday’s success factor can become a burden overnight.

Quote for the day:

"Simplicity and complexity need each other." -- John Maeda

August 08, 2014

Sysinternals new Sysmon tool looks for intruder traces
Sysinternals is a set of Windows utility programs first released in 1996, long before Russinovich joined Microsoft. Almost all were written by Russinovich and his then-partner Bruce Cogswell. Sysmon, written by Russinovich and Thomas Garnier, also of Microsoft, is the 73rd tool in the set, and has been used internally at Microsoft for some time. The point of Sysmon is to monitor for three specific system events which are often used by malicious processes and which can be difficult to separate from the flood of events in a normal Windows system. Sysmon runs as a service using the Local System account and loads very early in the boot process in order to give the best chance of finding the origin of any problems.

8 Reasons Big Data Projects Fail
Big data is all the rage, and many organizations are hell bent on putting their data to use. Despite the big data hype, however, 92% of organizations are still stuck in neutral, either planning to get started "some day" or avoiding big data projects altogether. For those that do kick off big data projects, most fail, and frequently for the same reasons. ... Because so many organizations are flying blind with their data, they stumble in predictable ways (including thinking that a data scientist will magically solve all their problems, but more on that below). Gartner's Svetlana Sicular has catalogued eight common causes of big data project failures, including:

Continuous Improvement Of Your Compliance Program, Part II
While many companies will look at continuous monitoring as a software solution that can assist in managing risk, provide reporting metrics and, thereby, insights across an organization, it should be viewed more holistically. You will need to take many disparate systems, usually across a wide international geographic area, which may seem like an overwhelming process. Justin Offen, explained this in his article, entitled “Mission Impossible? Six steps to continuous monitoring”, where he detailed a six-point program to ensure that your “CM solution doesn’t become part of the problem” rather than a solution.

Technology and marketing disconnect hinders customer analytics success
“What tends to happen and what we have seen in recent years, is that there’s a fundamental disconnect in the way business leaders think about data, and how technology leaders think about it,” she told CMO in an interview before the event. “We see lots of lost opportunities. There has been a focus on big data projects and platforms and solutions by technology teams, or vendors are wooing marketing leaders, but they’re not so good at solving business problems. Business and technology are not working together towards a common purpose, which is using that data for customer engagement.”

How SaaS solutions help CFOs get IT right
With the widespread acceptance of SaaS, it’s easier to evaluate technology based on what your business needs rather than getting bogged down in details about functional alignment with existing technology. And this rings true for many types of business solutions, including finance. Leading CFOs have realized they are uniquely positioned to consider potential TCO, ROI and use-case factors to determine how well solutions fit with the overall business strategy, even if they are non-technical. At the same time, CFOs are increasingly embracing cloud computing. 72 percent of CFOs believe that “disruptive” technologies such as cloud, social and mobile will change the way they structure and run finance.

Car Security Is Likely to Worsen, Researchers Say
Because of the proliferation of wireless access in vehicles, especially Bluetooth and cellular connectivity, remote execution is increasingly possible. The feasibility of sending commands to the electronic control units that manage different vehicle functions depends on the design of the car. Car companies need to design their systems to detect exploitation attempts and prevent security from being compromised, Miller said: “You want to make each of these three steps harder for the attacker.” But with car manufacturers competing on features, the addition of in-car applications from navigation to streaming music could leave more vehicles vulnerable, Miller added. “In-car apps and desktop-like features pose huge upcoming threats,” he said.

5 Priorities For Chief Data Officers
How can CDOs ensure their own relevance and success? Finch said the key is making sure that data projects are for the sake of business objectives, not for the sake of data. For example, too many companies take the approach of putting a big data lake in place just hoping somebody will find a use for it. There should be a clear business objective, such as reducing data warehousing costs by a targeted amount, comparing same-store sales to weather patterns to improve merchandising, or streaming real-time information into the lake and finding more fraudsters.

Seven data science lessons from McGraw-Hill Education analytics guru
Practice, practice, practice, Essa said, citing Ezra Pound's classic guide to writing poetry, ABC of Reading. "His idea was read lots of poetry to prepare," Essa said. "So we do that with data scientists." He gives data scientists all kinds of data sets (on education and beyond) and instructs them to "do some descriptive analytics and just tell me what questions you can answer." In some cases, data scientists work individually; in others, they operate as part of a team. "A very important part of doing data science is interactive data exploration," he said."

Architecting a High Performance Storage System
A good data storage system is a well-balanced: each individual component is suited for its purpose and all the components fit together to achieve optimal performance. Designing such a system is not straightforward. A typical storage system consists of a variety of components, including disks, storage controllers, IO cards, storage servers, storage area network switches, and related management software. Fitting all these components together and tuning them to achieve optimal performance presents significant challenges. Experienced storage designers may employ a collection of practical rules and guidelines to design a storage
system.

Cyber Risk Strategy Must Evolve to Match Changing Threats
The bad guys are winning, primarily because they can keep one step ahead by deploying a wider array of attack methods. In a recent Deloitte survey, 75 percent of global financial institutions believed their info security program was at a maturity level 3 or higher (on a 1 to 5 scale, with 5 being best), but only 40 percent were confident that they would be protected from outside attack. That’s a scary number, but completely understandable. The cyber threat landscape is constantly evolving, and cybersecurity must transform itself to keep pace. The basis of this new approach is easy to understand. An effective cybersecurity strategy includes three legs: security, vigilance and resilience.

Quote for the day:

"Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody expects of you. Never excuse yourself." -- Henry Ward Beecher

August 07, 2014

Oracle hasn't killed Java -- but there's still time
By the time Oracle bought Sun, its troubles had leaked into Java 7, which took approximately 100 years (give or take) to be released -- and with far fewer features. Oracle started making promises about releases and tried to create a release schedule (good idea), However, it failed to fix Sun's semi-abortive attempts to open-source Java, which might have made it more responsive to the industry, or to create any new Java products that anyone wanted to buy. In fact, Oracle trimmed Sun's portfolio of immature products that no one was purchasing. It was probably a good move, but some of Oracle's offerings in those areas are rickety at best. Then Oracle continued Sun's late attempt to tick off its allies and sued Google with a position ripe with collateral damage for our entire industry. Needless to say it was sort of predictable.

What Does the Future of Work Look Like?
In the future of work, apps and operating systems will light up scenarios such that, whatever device you use, it's the functional equivalent to being on the corporate network. We saw some of this with the DirectAccess feature that Microsoft enabled in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, but this now extends in Windows 8 and beyond. No more user-initiated tunneling. No more clunky laptops trying to boot up. A user will take a computer, unsleep it within a few seconds, and use it like he or she is on the corporate campus. The takeaway for IT? Make the boundary between your network and your users as transparent as you possibly can.

5 Breakthrough DARPA Technologies Beyond GPS
"More worrisome is that adversaries can jam signals. GPS continues to be vital, but its limitations in some environments could make it an Achilles' heel if warfighters rely on it as their sole source of PNT information," DARPA says on its program website. In fact, illegal devices that jam GPS signals are becoming increasingly available. Some simple gadgets that plug into 12-volt car receptacle connectors and cost as little as $30 can render GPS systems inoperable for miles, according to GPS systems provider NovAtel. In its search for new technologies that offer an alternative to GPS, DARPA is particularly interested in systems that provide long-duration precision and accuracy in positioning and timing for global synchronization, secure communications, and cooperative effects.

I give the new Raspberry Pi B+ an A-
My two favorite B+ features are four USB ports (compared to two on the B board) and the micro SD card slot (compared to the full-sized SD card slot on the B board). Micro SD is the perfect platform for a board this small. That, and the micro SD card doesn't stick out too far from the board's boundaries. ... everything on the B+ board is more organized and better placed, although the camera serial interface (CSI) and display serial interface (DSI) didn't move very much. But the DSI is now situated very close to the edge of the board making it more convenient for cabling.

The big data architecture dilemma for CIOs
As CIOs architect for big data, they're likely to bump up against a common and longstanding IT dilemma: To build or buy? Today, big data infrastructure bottlenecks can be specific and ill-suited for the one-size-fits-all solutions that have dominated the market for years. The better fit may come from technology alternatives such as in-memory or NoSQL databases, cloud, open source or, as is the case for Facebook and Tesla, a custom build. But first, CIOs will have to parse through the ambiguity of the term "big data" itself, juxtaposing what has become a catch-all marketing phrase with the technical pain points the business faces. And in the end, they're likely to make surgical rather than sweeping technology investments.

Massive Russian hack has researchers scratching their heads
Some security researchers on Wednesday said it's still unclear just how serious the discovery is, and they faulted the company that uncovered the database, Hold Security, for not providing more details about what it discovered. "The only way we can know if this is a big deal is if we know what the information is and where it came from," said Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor at Sophos. "But I can't answer that because the people who disclosed this decided they want to make money off of this. There's no way for others to verify."

Run virtual machines on Windows 8.1 with Client Hyper‑V: A quick how-to
Many Windows users aren't aware of it, but a powerful virtualization tool is built into every copy of Microsoft Windows 8.x Pro and Windows 8.x Enterprise, Client Hyper-V. This is the very same Type-1 hypervisor that runs virtualized enterprise workloads and comes with Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2. The virtual machines you create on your desktop with Client Hyper-V are fully compatible with those server systems as well. If you're a software developer and need to do testing, or simply want additional operating system(s) running on your computer, such as Linux, Hyper-V can be a great feature to have enabled on your PC.

Big Data and Biometrics: Why Your Face Matters More than Ever
The face recognition software that makes those Facebook tagging suggestions possible is part of a larger discipline called biometrics that includes fingerprints, retinal scans, and gait recognition, and the field is advancing fast. Combining those capabilities with big data analytics tools allows us to understand who you are simply by looking at you—whether you’re in a photo on Facebook, a video clip, or merely walking around in the world. So, is this good or bad? The answer is probably both.

HTML5: Doomed to fail or just getting started?
Developers want easy-to-use, powerful tools, but HTML5 yields them a somewhat fragmented platform that lags native tool-chains from Apple and Google. Developers need distribution, so they launch in the Apple App Store and/or Google Play Store (never mind that they quickly get lost in the clutter of millions of other apps....). They need monetization, and the major platforms provide an understandable -- if difficult -- route to money. HTML5 offers an open alternative to these platforms, but as VisionMobile points out, "The open nature of HTML5 doesn't intrinsically help anybody do their job better." It may keep developers free, but it doesn't pay the rent.

Internet of Things: A Big Use Case for Big Data
There are three types of data that we have in our study: transactional data, something that comes out of a point of sale system; there’s human-generated data that might be Twitter, a blog or a picture; and then there’s machine-generated data, which is log files, sensors, etc. The reason that machine-generated data swapped places with human-generated data is that from a sensor perspective it’s easy for me to look at the log files that come out of my environmental control system and say “If I raise the temperature in the buildings in the summertime from 71 to 72, I can affect a dollar change and a lowering of my costs.”

Quote for the day:

“To the person who does not know where he wants to go there is no favorable wind.” -- Seneca

August 06, 2014

One Click to Disaster Recovery
Quorum says that the system is secure with all data transferred from the appliance to the disaster recovery cloud going through a 128bit advanced encryption standard (AES) session over a 256bit AES virtual private network tunnel that directly connects the Cloud to the local appliance. There is a dedicated firewall to isolate each virtual network. Moreover, with more than a nod to the retail businesses it hopes to attract, Quorum is Payment Card Industry (PCI) certified, meaning that in the event of a failure all confidential financial information, such as credit card details, is handled in a fully PCI-compliant way.

The antidote to shadow IT: Trust and transparency
Making the situation worse, most IT departments do a poor job of explaining to users what enrolling a device in an enterprise mobile management (EMM) solution means -- they don't clearly explain how they can set restrictions, monitor the device and enterprise assets on it, and wipe some or all data from the device. (Sometimes they're deliberately vague so they don't have to explain how limited those capabilities actually are.) Even when policy documents and guides are explicit about what control and access employees are giving, many users don't trust them. So it's easy to see why surveys find most users are reluctant to hand over control of a personal device to IT, or to accept a device that they're told to treat as their own under the CYOD

Optimize Your Virtual Environment with Software-Defined Storage Approach
With flash storage technology becoming more prevalent and cost-effective, a new approach to consider in virtualized environments is software-defined storage, which employs software as a means for controlling data center storage. In the coming year, current flash-based storage systems are expected to transition to a software-defined approach, producing a new landscape that will change the industry permanently. A software-defined storage tier has the flexibility to scale up or scale out easily as application and business needs dictate.

CIOs Cede Digital Transformation Ground To CMOs
Altimeter's "2014 State of Digital Transformation" report defined digital transformation as "the realignment of, or new investment in, technology and business models to more effectively engage digital customers at every touch point in the customer experience lifecycle." Some 88% of executives and digital strategists indicated that their company is undergoing a formal digital transformation effort this year, according to the report. But only one quarter said they mapped out the digital customer journey and have a clear understanding of new digital touch points.

The CIO and CMO Perspective on Big Data
CIOs can be a good check on the business value of the latest shiny big data tool and force CMOs to put the business outcome first. “Marketing is often used to take quick action and get quick results,” says Meyers of Biogen Idec. “Since much of this is still so new, and the technology is still so immature its important we focus on the handful of things that really matter and spending the time together to work through an experiment and scale it up to something that can be sustainable for the long-haul.” “CMOs and marketing organizations need to hone their focus on both the business questions they need answered, and the decisions they want to inform, with analytics,” says Suzanne Kounkel, principal and leader of Deloitte Consulting’s customer transformation practice.

Why Data Should Be a Business Asset: The 1-10-100 Rule
The 1-10-100 rule can be applied to data quality challenges at various stages in the database lifecycle, since it illustrates the importance of maintaining a high standard of data quality continually rather than occasionally. The rule applied to data is as follows: Verifying the quality a record costs the business $1. This is known as the prevention cost; Cleansing and deduplicating a record costs the business $10. This is the correction cost; and Working with a record that’s never cleansed costs $100. This is the failure cost. ... Data quality is not a problem that can be tackled once and forgotten, and tackling it soon and often is better than late or not at all.

Blackrock: measuring risk in a datacentre
In engineering risk terms, at first glance Blackrock appears to deliver fairly standard resilience. As a minimum standard Tracy says it offers "n+1" resiliency. “We generally have two independent power trains which have their own generators and UPS. Our independent emergency generator and UPS can handle half of the load out on the A and B cord. We could lose an entire generator line and still have ample cover to run the full operation,” he says. After the company bought Barclays Capital in 2010 it had 28 datacentres around the world. Then it began a migration strategy to move to a single platform. Today BlackRock has 11 datacentres and the plan is to get that down to six or eight.

Cybersecurity should be professionalized
"There were a lot of self-described doctors, but no standards," she said. "We need some kind of focal point to gather around to foster minimum, basic standards and frameworks so people have a way to navigate the cybersecurity field." Currently, it is difficult to determine the actual skills and abilities of professionals based on their education or certification credentials, she said. It is even harder to map those skills to real-world job requirements, she said. "There's nothing that prioritizes different educational programs. There are no standards across different specialties. There is no single organization that can take ownership of this field" as the AMA and the American Bar Association do, Spidalieri said.

Transition tips for new leaders
A leadership transition is one of the most important yet underappreciated aspects of a new leader’s experience. It helps to frame the new leader’s role and the relationship that he develops with his team. If managed well, such transitions can make all the difference in promoting acceptance from within the ranks, and allowing the new leader the time and patience necessary to get acclimated and begin to build equity. One of the most successful transitions on record occurred in antiquity.

The Impact of Personalized BI
The biggest challenge in BI is the volume of data that is accessible. When faced with a comprehensive body of data from multiple overarching business systems, it is easy to become overwhelmed. Many leaders use BI as the foundation for reporting, pulling vast amounts of data from disparate systems to create multipage reports that are never actually analyzed. By personalizing your BI, you can streamline the reporting process and create effective, meaningful analytics that help you reach your goals.

Leading a Culture of Effective Testing
Once a team of individuals are given the responsibility to develop, test and support a system, we can either wait for them to come to the conclusion that manual verification isn't going to cut it, or we can avoid gambling and educate them. Making the leap to automated testing can take years without guidance, especially when individuals are overwhelmed with daily responsibilities. Once individuals buy into it, it will take years to become proficient. Most of this can be avoided by leveraging expertise to demonstrate the value.

Quote for the day:

"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards" -- Vernon Sanders Law

August 05, 2014

Yes, there's a tech bubble: Google Shopping Express proves it
Google has plenty of money to subsidize its service as long as it cares to, but the story quotes one observer saying “There’s no line of sight” to making the service pay for itself. This is a money loser now, and it projects to be for the foreseeable future. But at least GSX, as Google calls it, charges something for its service. The real riddle is companies like Seamless.com and WunWun, which offer free or almost free delivery from restaurants and other retailers in a number of cities. Instead of asking consumers to pay, they charge the retailers a commission and other fees that a recent BusinessWeek articlesaid made Seamless unsustainable for many restaurants.

'The Internet Of Things' Will Change Virtually Everything About How Large Companies Operate
The IoT will be a diffuse layer of devices, sensors, and computing power that overlays entire business-to-business, consumer-facing and government industries. The IoT will account for an increasingly huge number of connections: 1.9 billion devices today, and 9 billion by 2018. That year, it will be roughly equal to the number of smartphones, smart TVs, tablets, wearable computers, and PCscombined. In IoT research from BI Intelligence, we look at the transition of once-inert objects into sensor-laden intelligent devices that can communicate with the other gadgets in our lives.

Can Strategic CIOs Create a Renaissance Revolution?
Filippo Passerini, Group President-Global Business Services, and CIO at P&G is passionate about creating information democracy across the various business units. His digitize, visualize, and simulate strategy changed the business model and helped managers make well-informed business decisions. There is no doubt that there is a renaissance revolution occurring in the C-suite today and CIOs are leading the charge. Strategic CIOs change the dynamics of the business enterprise by leveraging information and technology in new and innovative ways to create customer value, improve margins, and enhance shareholder wealth...a winning outcome for any business enterprise.

How giant websites design for you (and a billion others, too)
Facebook’s “like” and “share” buttons are seen 22 billion times a day, making them some of the most-viewed design elements ever created. Margaret Gould Stewart, Facebook’s director of product design, outlines three rules for design at such a massive scale—one so big that the tiniest of tweaks can cause global outrage, but also so large that the subtlest of improvements can positively impact the lives of many.

Ugly Research: Data is easy, Deciding is hard
Tracy Allison Altman over at Ugly Research has a great new white paper – Data is easy: Deciding is hard - in which she quotes me (thanks Tracy). It’s a great paper and makes what I think is the critical point – that you don’t need a data culture but a decision culture. And I would add that you need this at every level – strategic, tactical and operational. The paper has some great advice and I would add a couple of additional thoughts: For decisions you make often – some tactical and all operational decisions for instance – build a decision model so you know how you think you are going to/should make the decision moving forward.

Using Big Data to Optimize Business Operations
Business – and life in general – is becoming data-centric. In order to uphold reliability and preserve reputation, a data center must maintain an unimpeded flow of data at a level not anticipated even just a few years ago. To do that, a data center needs to refine how it values data used in monitoring its own operations so that the flow of information generated in running the facility does not flood or overwhelm IT and management capabilities.

The Dark Age Of Enterprise Software Is Ending
We all need to realize that it’s a whole new ballgame. And just like the insular, glacial world of baseball, this new age of software is a tectonic shift in the enterprise that makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. For our enterprises to succeed in this new world, we need more than just shiny new software. We must change long-held cultural, political biases about “how we do things here.” In making critical decisions, enterprises too often rely on perceived rather than rigorously analyzed historical patterns. They let competing entities argue their positions, too often giving power to the loudest voice in the room.

Defining F5's role in software defined networks
With regards to F5 specifically, the company does have a broad set of software defined application services (SDAS) today. BIG-IQ is an architecture for managing F5 SDAS elements and can be used to provide simplified abstractions to the control or orchestration plane. This can be useful when integrating a number of heterogeneous components. This is why the F5 Synthesis partner ecosystem is so broad today and is an SDN “whose who,” including Cisco, VMware, Big Switch, Arista, Oracle, Splunk, Rackspace, and the list goes on. F5 is also one of the few vendors that’s playing both sides of the VMware/Cisco card. Clearly, the SDN wars are heading down a path where there’s a defined Cisco camp and VMware camp.

Hunting Concurrency Bugs
The bug was in the JVM, rather than my code. I've been waiting since 2010 to publish it, because a malicious coder could insert this into his code and jam up your application server. Since you cannot connect JConsole or jstack or JVisualVM to it, nor can you generate a stack trace with CTRL+Break or CTRL+\, it can be quite tricky to discover where this is coming from. As Java programmers, we often think that all bugs are in our code. But the JVM was also written by people and we all make mistakes. The only reason that there are less bugs is because more people are using the JVM than your code and so the bugs tend to get rooted out more quickly.

Early interest in LTE-connected cars is strong
It's clear GM is fully backing the idea of a connected car. While Audi actually had the 4G LTE-connected car on the market, GM will have the broadest selection of connected cars, with 30 models hitting the market this year. Chan said the goal was to further expand 4G LTE-connection in the car lines next year. Beyond the consumer, Chan said she sees an opportunity to sell its 4G LTE-connected car service to businesses that deal with vehicles, such as the trucking industry. GM has opened up its software programming to allow businesses to create apps that take advantage of a connected car.

Quote for the day:

"Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching." -- Thomas Jefferson