The Three Pillars of IoT Success

May 26, 2017 by Leave a comment

B. Shimmin

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

  • How can technology vendors guard enterprise IoT buyers against the dangers of cost and complexity?
  • They should endeavor to solve specific IoT problems through readily consumable, outcome-based IoT services.

As my compatriot Kitty Weldon pointed out in a blog post earlier this week, the success or failure of an IoT project isn’t something you stumble on a year or two after rolling out a solution. A recent Global Data Technology IoT Enterprise Survey of more than 1,000 IoT buyers showed that failure happens very early on during the investigation phase of a given deployment and more often than not centers on the cost and complexity of the project at hand. Read more of this post

Filed under Big Data

Live from LiveWorx: PTC Boosts IoT Morale and Momentum

May 25, 2017 by Leave a comment

K. Weldon

K. Weldon

Summary Bullets:

  • LiveWorx brings together a meaningful slice of the IoT ecosystem and boosts momentum for PTC’s role in empowering the market.
  • Cisco’s stats from Monday on the high percentage of IoT project failures splashed cold water on the industry, but PTC is not letting this impact momentum.

PTC’s LiveWorx, still in progress, is an annual lovefest for the IoT industry, with the additional benefit (to PTC) of boosting/cementing its already strong presence within the industrial IoT sector. The company’s ThingWorx platform competes with other IoT application enablement platforms, but is strongly differentiated. It is a purpose-built offer for manufacturing and a comprehensive platform that appeals to a growing number of PTC’s installed base which use its other offerings, including its CAD (Creo) tool and its Product Lifecycle Manufacturing and Service Management software. This year, the event was fortified by a major new release of the platform, ThingWorx 8, which adds enhanced platform capabilities and role-specific applications for engineering and manufacturing, along with new partners, more expansive educational programs, and a new collection of service offerings for customers and partners. Read more of this post

Filed under Mobilize

Genesys Jumps on the AI Bandwagon, Invites Others Along for the Ride

May 24, 2017 by Leave a comment

B. Shimmin

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

  • At its annual user conference, customer experience management player Genesys introduced Kate, a personified artificial intelligence (AI) platform tailored to augment and automate multimodal customer interactions.
  • Genesys Kate, however, is not meant to compete with AI platforms such as IBM Watson or Salesforce.com Einstein. Instead Kate seeks to blend its own capabilities with those offerings, serving as an open platform.

Personified AI platforms – suddenly every technology vendor seems to have an AI persona that’s eager to strike up a one-on-one conversation. There’s of course IBM Watson, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Salesforce.com Einstein, and Adobe Sensei, but that somewhat lengthy list doesn’t even scratch the surface of what’s available when you bring AI bots like Mitsuku, Poncho, Melody, Rose, and my personal favorite, Dr. AI. And now we have Kate, a personified AI platform introduced by customer experience manager Genesys this week during its annual user conference. Read more of this post

Filed under Big Data Tagged with ,

Cost Conundrum as Companies Quit IoT Shows Need for a New Business Model

May 22, 2017 by Leave a comment

I. Grant

Summary Bullets:

• Cost and higher priorities have led some firms to abandon their IoT plans

• IoT generates a small fraction of operators’ income

New research by GlobalData shows that the companies that give up on their IoT projects do so because they are too expensive to implement (41%), and because their priorities shift (23%). Another 21% found they are too costly to maintain.

GlobalData asked more than 1,000 users worldwide, mostly industrial firms, about their IoT investment intentions. Replies show that getting budget is less of an issue this year than last, suggesting firms are more willing to try out the technology. However, this also led to more projects being abandoned later in the project lifecycle. While most firms kill their IoT projects in the investigation phase, all firms in GlobalData’s 2016 survey pulled the plug at the latest during the pilot stage. This year, 6% abandoned their projects in each of the deployment and post-deployment phases, citing implementation and maintenance costs reasons. Read more of this post

Filed under Mobilize Tagged with

OpenStack Summit 2017: Hosted Private Cloud Demand Reflects Both the Popularity and Problems of OpenStack

May 19, 2017 by Leave a comment

C. Drake

Summary Bullets:

  • OpenStack cloud deployment continues to grow, with the main business drivers among enterprise users including the desire to avoid vendor lock-in and the potential to enhance innovation and operational efficiency.
  • Specific criticisms of OpenStack focus on the current six-month release cycle, as well as the complexity of the installation process for new releases and insufficient support for containers.

The May 2017 OpenStack Summit in Boston highlighted continued growth in the number and size of OpenStack cloud deployments, as well as evidence of increasing maturity for the technology. It also illuminated some of the ongoing challenges facing the OpenStack movement. Read more of this post

Filed under Cloud Enable

SAP Jumps on the Multi-Cloud Bandwagon as a Venue for Selling Leonardo

May 18, 2017 by Leave a comment

C. Dunlap

C. Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

  • SAP is playing catchup with PaaS rivals, integrating its middleware with public cloud providers.
  • SAP missed the opportunity to provide an SCP roadmap around emerging DevOps technologies.

SAP focused much attention during this week’s annual Sapphire Now conference on the re-release of its Leonardo IoT platform, expanded to include machine learning and big data innovations (please see: SAP Relaunches Leonardo, Blending AI, Big Data, IoT and Blockchain, May 17, 2017). Perhaps more significantly, SAP revealed that these high-value services will run on SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) with the ability to reach broader markets through multi-cloud agreements and integrations with popular public cloud partners. Read more of this post

Filed under Cloud Enable

There’s a New Informatica in Town That Wants to Unleash the Power of Your Data

May 16, 2017 by Leave a comment

B. Shimmin

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

  • At its annual user conference, Informatica quietly introduced an entirely new brand identity, which is designed to free the company from its ETL roots and target enterprise cloud data management.
  • To reach this goal, however, the company intends to do far more than merely switch up its logo and mission statement.

It is not uncommon for a technology vendor to make a break with the past by rolling out a new brand identity. Such efforts typically involve an extravagant launch party, an extensive marketing campaign, and of course, an extremely expensive logo retrofit. On average, these rebrands aren’t a good thing, at least not initially, since they’re often undertaken in response to an existing or anticipated threat. The idea is to create some cognitive dissonance among existing and potential customers, severing existing perceptions and creating new associations that are in tune with current (and hopefully future) market ideals. Read more of this post

Filed under Big Data

WannaCrypt Global Ransomware Attack Highlights a Worsening Data Hijacking Epidemic

May 15, 2017 by Leave a comment

E. Parizo

Summary Bullets:

  • WannaCry, the largest-ever ransomware attack, is likely a harbinger of what’s to come.
  • The emergence of ransomware highlights the importance of tying security to data backup and recovery.

Suddenly, the whole world knows about ransomware.

While ransomware is no secret to those in the cybersecurity industry who have seen a steadily growing number of isolated incidents, to everyone else, ransomware made its presence broadly known late last week. The largest-ever single ransomware incident, a variant of the WannaCrypt strain known (aptly) as WannaCry, caught tens of thousands of organizations in at least 150 countries by surprise, likely causing millions if not billions in damage. Read more of this post

Filed under Secure

Red Hat Summit 2017: IT Automation Takes One AWS-sized Step Closer to Business Innovation

May 10, 2017 by Leave a comment

Brad Shimmin – Research Director, Business Technology and Software

Summary Bullets:

• Red Hat’s re-energized partnership with Amazon and its continued investment in Red Hat Insights smartly emphasizes AI-driven IT automation as a way to root out the foibles of human-mediated decisions in optimizing hybrid cloud/premises environments.

• Beyond automation, however, Red Hat’s growing focus on big data points to a distinct need within the industry to bring both operational and business analytics together within a single pane of glass.

At Red Hat’s annual customer event in Boston, Massachusetts last week, the industry’s leading purveyor of all things Linux rolled out a series of announcements relating to analytics-driven IT automation and private cloud enablement – two topics that are impactful on their own but superb when combined. Read more of this post

Filed under Big Data Tagged with ,

The Competitive Impact of Cisco’s Acquisition of Viptela Is Yet to Come

May 2, 2017 by Leave a comment

M. Fratto

Summary Bullets:

  • Cisco intends to acquire Viptela for $610 million (USD), but it’s one more SD-WAN product in a sea of products.
  • The competitive impact will take a year or more to be realized, and will largely be determined based on Cisco’s integration strategy.

Cisco Systems intends to acquire Viptela for $610 million. That’s a pretty good chunk of change for a company that already has two SD-WAN products, IWAN on the ISR routers and Meraki’s SD-WAN. Until the deal closes, Cisco and Viptela will be pretty quiet about future plans, but since Viptela will be added to Cisco’s Enterprise Networking Group, it is safe to say it will augment Cisco’s networking portfolio and at least, for a while, be offered alongside IWAN. Read more of this post

Filed under Network Tagged with , , ,

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