Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

December 12, 2013

AT&T's predictions for the enterprise in 2014
M2M technology is a label that describes the connection of devices and machines through a networks to a control center which allows the exchange of information -- and then for actions to be performed without human intervention. M2M systems -- based on the idea of the "Internet of Things" -- can include sensor relays, RFID and Wi-Fi connections. Machines developed with M2M are ideally able to interpret data transferred through a network and make decisions automatically in real time.

Technology in restaurants: Fast-casual sector represents growing market
Much has changed, however, as the restaurant sector pursues new directions in IT. Technology in restaurants now includes sophisticated POS devices, mobile applications, thin clients and cloud computing. For VARs, it's a little more involved than selling a glorified cash register. As a consequence, channel partners must offer more than basic POS automation. Resellers are responding with a wider range of technology systems, as well as consulting and professional services.

Inter-thread communications in Java at the speed of light
The Akka framework is great for inter-process communications when actors cross process boundaries between different JVM instances on the same machine or on machines distributed across a network. However it may be excessive to use Akka typed actors for smaller projects, where you need only inter-thread communication but you still want to stick with the typed actor approach.

Banks shouldn't rely on mobile SMS passcodes, security firm says
"Do not rely on SMS-based authentication," the report said. "It has been thoroughly compromised." Nearly all mobile malware is written for the open-source Android OS, which allows users to install any application, the report said. iOS mobile malware is rare since Apple forbids downloading applications that haven't been vetted by the company.

Big data demands nonstop experimentation
In business, the applications of statistical models are practical, but the need to vet the underlying causative factors remains. If you're unsure whether the historical correlations you've built into your statistical models will continue in the future, you treat that low confidence as a risk factor. For example, if you have low confidence in your predictive models of demand and response rates in a given customer segment, you're probably not going to wager millions of dollars on a new product launch that targets that segment.

2014 Trend Predictions for the Mobile Web
There will be renewed demand for all kinds of connected devices, with nomophobia becoming even more prevalent. We can expect to see greater demand for highly customized experiences that prioritize exact user context. As one of the biggest challenges facing brands in 2014, this one movement itself will fundamentally shake-up how organizations need to interact with their customers. Brands no longer belong just to a company.

Top 10 smartphones of 2013: There's One that's best
Thus, I must rank the HTC One my top smartphone of the year and until about a month ago it was the best smartphone I have ever used. The hardware is fantastic, HTC has done a great job updating the OS to the latest and greatest while also updating its Sense UI, you can pick it up in various colors, and it can be found for a good deal (as low as $50 with contract) with rumors of a successor launching in early 2014.

Confirmed: Cloud infrastructure pricing is absurd
As O’Grady points out in a list of caveats, this is very big picture because his analysis doesn’t include special offers, reserved instances or special packages. For a deeper examination of pricing, companies can pull out the 451 Research report, but it’s not for the weak of heart. It’s an incredibly detailed analysis of the different kinds of pricing models and which are used by each of the 53 vendors that analysts examined. However, it doesn’t actually reveal which vendors offer the best prices for any given service. Instead it classifies the different pricing methods and shows which vendors use which ones.

Amazon WorkSpaces: A threat to DaaS providers in the VDI market?
Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is a new opportunity for Amazon, but it's also a new challenge because the provider is not used to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workloads, said Mark Margevicius, research vice president of virtualization for Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Research Inc. While WorkSpaces will appeal to companies that want to experiment with VDI without making a significant investment or to those that want to spin up a quick desktop for a contractor, DaaS providers still have value-added management services that will help them keep their competitive edge.

DevOps @ large investment bank
The solution is to somehow redefine the software delivery process in order to enable it to support these two requirements – fast and stable – simultaneously. But how exactly should we redefine it? Let us have a look at this question from the point of view of the three layers that make up the software delivery process: the process itself, the tooling to support it and the culture

Quote for the day:

“You can't connect with something you're not passionate about.” – Gemma Arterton

December 11, 2013

Telecom CIOs Seek Innovative Solutions
“From an IT perspective, the emerging challenge is to meet the changing expectations of the Indian consumers. Customers today do not go by just what is given to them. Customers have a wide range of options and if we don't provide them with what they want then they will surely move on and Mobile Number Portability (MNP) has made this even easier. At the same time MNP can be used as an opportunity as well to attract new customers with superior capabilities, offers and service. For IT, the focus is on providing cheaper services and maintaining a proper speed of delivery pipeline.

Is There Hope for Small Firms, the Have-Nots in the World of Big Data?
If it’s true, as Andrew McAfee writes, that “data-dominated firms are going to take market share, customers, and profits away from those who are still relying too heavily on their human experts,” then we can expect to see a very different business landscape some years down the road. It will be a landscape with many fewer of the small, artisan businesses that have been so important to societies for millennia.

JetBlue launches inflight Wi-Fi, promising a home broadband experience in the sky
What’s a decent connection? Perry said speed tests on FlyFi’s trial flights produced connections as fast as 20 Mbps to the device, though as with any shared wireless network, speeds are subject to fluctuations. JetBlue isn’t promising any baseline speed, however. Instead, Perry said, the airline is claiming that passengers will get a true broadband experience. They will be able to browse the web with ease, stream music, and even watch standard definition video with no interruption, he said.

Compliance in the Cloud: PaaS and the CISO
As GigaOM notes in the report Private PaaS: The next generation platform for enterprises, “the drivers behind using private PaaS extend the benefits of PaaS to environments that provide the right amount of security, compliance, and control over core business processes and data.” In fact, according to the GigaOM report: The top two drivers for enterprises that have deployed or are considering private PaaS are compliance related:

One in four cloud providers will be gone by 2015
The research firm is predicting a major consolidation in cloud services and estimates that about 25% of the top 100 IT service providers in the infrastructure space won't be around by 2015. "One in four vendors will be gone for whatever reason -- acquisition, bankruptcy," said William Maurer, a Gartner analyst. Most of the time, the changes will come through acquisition. "There is real risk," said Maurer to a packed room for his presentation at the Gartner Data Center Conference.

SDN Market to Reach $3.1 Billion by 2017: Infonetics
"The important question that everyone wants answered is, 'What's the real market for SDN?'" Cliff Grossner, directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics, said in a statement. "It's still early days, but our research over the last two years confirms that SDN controllers and Ethernet switches in use for SDN will play a role in enterprise and data center networks." Grossner said larger enterprises and cloud service providers will be the first to bring wide-scale SDN deployments into their data centers.

Will Juniper's Metafabric Architecture Simplify Data Center Management?
As businesses have to adapt quickly to the tight market competition, the IT team is somewhere feeling restricted. Another key issue that CIOs complain about is interoperability. Nobody likes to be locked down. Single-site data centres have also been replaced with a more complex data centre landscape that includes multiple, distributed data centre sites as well as services in the cloud. Managing multiple, geographically dispersed data centres, has been a problem which Juniper is trying to solve through its MetaFabric architecture

Cyber Security Watch List for 2014: Seven Trends
In addition to policy, provider organizations can expect to face added pressure from technological changes, among them, cloud storage, the burgeoning use of personal devices in the workplace, the changing nature of “insider” threats, and additional focus from the corporate boards, which are increasingly taking a more proactive look at their organizations’ preparedness and mitigation strategies.

10 Ways to Be a Great Leader
So, how does a leader bring out the best in others? It starts with having Emotional Intelligence. More than just “people skills,” Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is a powerful awareness about ourselves and others. It gives us the ability to choose new ways of handling difficult situations and to break free of old habits of thinking and acting that don’t produce the results we want. When Emotional Intelligence is high, the tremendous amount of team energy that is wasted on things such as miscommunication, misunderstandings, ego trips, unresolved tension, and conflict is freed up and can be redirected toward productive, effective endeavors.

Q&A: Adapting data governance strategies to the digital age
Information governance is defined by rules. Information governance involves, as does any governance, applying rules and behavior and indicating form of conduct. Therefore, information governance is the rules-based management of digital information to create wealth for the company. For years we focused on records management as improving compliance or reducing litigation costs, but what information governance can do differently is connect to the primary objective of the companies existence: to create new wealth.

Quote for the day:

"It is not the strongest of the species ... nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one ... most adaptable to change." -- C Darwin

December 10, 2013

To Execution profile or to Memory Profile? That is the question.
Profilers work by either sampling top of stack or instrumenting the code with probes, or a combination of both. These techniques are very good at finding computations that happen frequently or take a long time. As my group experienced, the information gathered by execution profilers often correlates well with the source of the memory inefficiency. However it points to an execution problem which can sometimes be confusing.

Despite cloud computing security risks, infosec pros know their role
"If all of us by default have this level of trust in the cloud, why are we so uncomfortable when the business units come to us and say, 'I'm going to put this data out in the cloud'?" asked LaRosa. As he sees it, even though society has already come to trust the cloud tacitly, security pros still "push back" against enterprise cloud computing initiatives. "The problem isn't with the cloud," LaRosa added, it's with security practitioners' ability to evolve and accept it.

Other browser makers follow Google's lead, revoke rogue certificates
Google revoked the certificates for users of its Chrome browser on Saturday after a four-day investigation. Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera Software followed suit on Monday. In a security advisory, Microsoft said it had released an update to most versions of Windows -- including Windows Phone 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 -- that revoked the pertinent certificates. Unlike other browser makers, Microsoft records trusted digital certificates in Windows, not in its Internet Explorer (IE) browser.

Report: Risk of an Uncertain Security Strategy
In spite of high-profile data breaches and the potential business impact of cyber attacks and data loss, small and midsize organizations are still not making cyber security a priority. Sophos and the Ponemon Institute recently released a report, Risk of an Uncertain Security Strategy, that highlights the need to make security a key priority.

Enterprise mobile management demands rethinking of work, play and productivity
To share his insights on how to better prepare for a mobile-enablement future that quickly complements other IT imperatives such as cloud, big data, and even more efficient data centers, we’re joined by Tom Kendra, Vice President and General Manager, Systems Management at Dell Software. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Tomorrow's Data Center Will Be Mobile, Flexible, Highly Efficient and Secure
"This year, we're seeing organizations really start to examine how 'software-defined' everything impacts the data center," Cappuccio says. "Software-defined networking, software defined storage, that's all part of the conversation; how to move away from the physical and into the conceptual, but is there a way to take that concept and apply that to data centers as a whole."

Building Innovative Organizations with Lean Thinking
Since Peter Drucker first introduced the concept of "innovative organization”, it has become a buzzword amongst corporate managers. Particularly in IT, companies strive to create innovative teams. But whilst there has been a lot of theoretical discussion on how to build innovative organizations, there have been few practical experiments and analysis. Innovative organizations are like the moon: beautiful to look at, but seemingly impossible to grasp.

Do two-factor authentication vulnerabilities outweigh the benefits?
Most two-factor authentication technologies used with online services generate a one-time password (OTP) when users logs in with their username and password. A user receives the OTP via an SMS on their registered mobile device and enters it on the website to complete the login procedure. While two-factor authentication is a definite improvement on plain password authentication, it is not infallible.

Information Governance: Why It's Becoming a Boardroom Imperative
The rapid growth of data across the enterprise has resulted in increasing risk, liability and cost to organizations. At the same time, there is a significant opportunity to tap into this data to deliver increased productivity and greater strategic insight. In this slide show, with input from a Hewlett-Packard Autonomy study, eWEEK looks at the key reasons information governance is fast becoming a boardroom imperative.

Meg Whitman: Moonshot servers will solve datacenter power and cost crisis
"If the cloud were an independent county, it would rate number five in energy use. China is number one, the US is number two, Russia is number three, India is number four and the cloud is number five, and Japan is sixth," she said. Datacentres consume about two percent of the world's electricity, Whitman told the conference audience. "By the end of the decade datacentre demand will rise to over three percent unless we find a more efficient technology. This is not sustainable. We have to make better use of the electricity that we've got," she said.

Quote for the day:

"Education is more than a luxury; it is a responsibility that society owes to itself." -- Robin Cook

December 09, 2013

Orchestrated offline VM Patching using Service Management Automation
So the goal is to ensure images stored in the Virtual Machine Manager library are updated as soon as Microsoft Security Updates become available on Patch Tuesday. In this post I’ll present you a way to achieve that goal, while leveraging the entire CLOUD OS stack including Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and Windows Azure Pack. The solution itself is provided by a SMA (Service Management Automation) Runbook. If you have not looked into SMA I highly recommend you to do so.

Surfing a digital wave, or drowning?
One reason for worry is that IT bosses are conservative by habit and with good reason. Above all they must keep essential systems running—and safe. Those systems are under continual attack. If they are breached, the head of IT carries the can. More broadly, IT departments like to know who is up to what. Many of them gave up one battle long ago, by letting staff choose their own smartphones (a trend known as “bring your own device”). When the chief executive insists on an iPhone rather than a fogeyish BlackBerry, it is hard to refuse.

Don’t be held hostage by the IT expert
“We changed our IT culture significantly to one of service, and we realigned departments within our organization several years ago,” said one financial services CIO. “The process was necessary, but in reorganizing, I also knew that I was risking losing key technical contributors who didn’t want to be part of a cross-disciplinary service culture, but who instead preferred to operate in their traditional technical expertise silos.”

Microsoft Exec Hints at Separate Windows Release Trains for Consumers, Business
At a technology symposium hosted by financial services giant Credit Suisse, Tony Myerson acknowledged the operating system adoption chasm between consumers and more conservative corporations. Myerson, who formerly led the Windows Phone team, was promoted in July to head all client-based OS development, including that for smartphones, tablets, PCs and the Xbox game console.

Core wars redux: Intel to ship 15-core Ivytown chip
Intel confirmed Thursday that it will release a 15-core server chip code-named Ivytown, which will be based on the Ivy Bridge architecture. Intel until now had topped off at 12 cores with the Xeon E5 v2 chips that shipped in the third quarter of this year. The 15-core chip is destined for high-end servers. It will likely go into four- to eight-socket servers, which typically handle high-end computing for databases and enterprise resource planning systems.

The Status of Finance and Cloud
After several years of first inhibiting and prohibiting Cloud use, then a brief period of Cloud uncertainty, Finance leaders overall, and Finance as a corporate entity, have embraced Cloud as a means of enabling, increasing, and delivering the value required of Finance by enterprises in an increasingly-fast-changing business environment. As a result, Cloud has become the first choice of Finance leaders and buyers for Finance management solutions – and is increasingly encouraged by Finance leadership and policy as a first choice for broader enterprise business IT.

6 Storage & Management Predictions for 2014
IDC forecasts that the volume of digital data will grow 40 - 50 percent per year clearly indicating that Information Storage and Management will remain in vogue and a big focus area for CIOs across sectors. With new buzzwords emerging such as Software Defined Datacenters, integrated backup appliances etc. we believe that 2014, will continue to see these new trends gaining momentum. As cloud based storage, backup and disaster recovery become commonplace, managing and protecting data will also be a focus area for enterprises and SMBs.

US tech companies ask governments to reform surveillance practices
The latest move appears to be one of a number by the Internet companies to highlight that they are on the side of the user, and to bring pressure on governments, particularly of the U.S. Facebook, AOL, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo wrote in October to the chairman and members of a U.S. Committee on the Judiciary, demanding that the surveillance practices of the U.S. should be reformed to enhance privacy protections and provide "appropriate oversight and accountability mechanisms."

Enterprise software 2014: Three themes to ponder
There are very few greenfield opportunities in Enterprise Software any more. While there are a number of vibrant, high-growth SaaS companies, the vast majority of them are selling replacement products. We believe there is an enormous secular growth opportunity in automating processes at the very low end of the market. The Cloud has ushered in a new era of software where, for less than $50 a month in most instances, the smallest of small businesses can get enterprise-class software to automate core functions like Finance and Sales & Marketing.

DARPA makes games of finding software vulnerabilities
The games are designed in such a way that when users solve puzzles in order to advance to the next level of game play, they are actually generating program annotations and mathematical proofs that can identify or prove the absence of flaws in software written in either C or Java. DARPA funded the games and the portal through its Crowd Sourced Formal Verification (CSFV) program. Formal software verification typically relies on engineers reviewing code for possible errors and omissions that could be used by an attacker to compromise a system.

Quote for the day:

"Singleness of purpose is one of the chief essentials for success in life, no matter what may be one's aim." -- John D. Rockefeller

December 08, 2013

Beyond Data Mining
This article compares and contrasts the four kinds of miners: Algorithm miners explore tuning parameters in data mining algorithms; Landscape miners reveal the shape of the decision space; Decision miners comment on how best to change a project; and Discussion miners help the community debate trade-offs regarding the different decisions. Note that algorithm and landscape mining are more research-focused activities that explore the miners' internal details.

The Discipline of Digital Disruption
As an enterprise architect, I’ve been helping design businesses for over 20 years, and I can attest that companies haven’t mastered the basics of dealing with the existing daily disruptions that arise. Throwing emerging technology into the mix of disruption is one more complicating factor that many organizations simply aren’t equipped to handle. Companies want technology to disrupt to their advantage, but they don’t have the discipline to avert disaster or misdirection.

Intel CIO Kimberly Stevenson is working to deliver products faster and drive revenue
Kimberly Stevenson, a corporate vice president and CIO at Intel, has spent her professional career immersed in technology, working for some of the world's most recognized technology companies. Not surprisingly, she's a vocal champion for IT and how it will transform business and society. "I love to see all this disruption coming in all different industries, and it's all coming from IT," says Stevenson, one of four finalists for the 2013 MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award.

Vulnerability Counts, Remediation and Risk
Every year there are thousands of new vulnerabilities published. It’s important to understand that this isn’t the same as the number of vulnerabilities that exist, nor is it the same as the number of vulnerabilities you have in your environment. In fact, there are probably thousands more vulnerabilities that exist that haven’t been published. Those would fall into the category of zero-days; conditions that are not publicly known.

Trends: Seven Priorities In The Shift From CMO to Chief Digital Officer
Unfortunately the shift to digital requires a greater reliance on technology. Historically, CMOs relied on IT for help on the database or CRM system or even the website. However consumerization of technology and the cloud have now given marketers more control on their technology destiny. In fact, a recent post by fellow analyst Gavin Heaton on “CMO to CIO, It’s time we talked” highlights many of these new challenges.

A Programmer's Guide to Data Mining
"This guide follows a learn-by-doing approach. Instead of passively reading the book, I encourage you to work through the exercises and experiment with the Python code I provide. I hope you will be actively involved in trying out and programming data mining techniques. The textbook is laid out as a series of small steps that build on each other until, by the time you complete the book, you have laid the foundation for understanding data mining techniques. This book is available for download for free under a Creative Commons license"

What's Your Relationship with the Cloud?
Word on the street is the accounting profession might be ready to embrace the cloud — in a full on relationship — and vice versa. Like any meaningful relationship, there are different stages: the joy of new love, the longstanding relationship, and sometimes the dismal state of separation. Not sure where your relationship with the cloud stands? Read on

Writing Automated Tests with Jazz Automation
Jazz Automation differs from other automated testing frameworks by allowing test writers to describe how software features work in plain and understandable English. Most automated testing frameworks, such as Selenium and Cucumber, require programming in languages like Java and Ruby before tests are executed. Jazz Automation provides an abstraction layer, removing programming requirements from test writers and configurators.

Lean & Enterprise Architecture: The seven deadly wastes of Enterprise Architects
We believe EA is a powerful and often indispensible aid for organizations. However, not all EA initiatives are a great success. We see many EA practitioners struggle to keep EA on the agenda. It is then a common reflex to say: “They don’t understand us; they only want quick fixes instead of doing the right thing for the long term”. But let’s take a closer look at our own behavior as Enterprise Architects, from a Lean perspective. A truly Lean Enterprise Architect ensures that all EA activities create value. In practice, however, we see a lot of behavior that does the opposite.

VITA: Application Framework
VITA is a framework for creating .NET applications that work with databases. It is a powerful implementation of pure .NET ORM. Supports modular construction of complex applications, query and data caching. It supports data models distributed over multiple databases. Provides built-in Authorization framework. Works with MS SQL Server 2008/2012, MS SQL Compact Edition, MySQL.

Quote for the day:

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.” -- Charles Baudelaire