Archive for December 2015

Future Ready in the API economy

December 16, 2015 0 Comments A+ a-


The world of business is software. No matter the industry vertical or business model, effective software is the key to business success.  An even more important aspect of this reality is the application programming interface (API).  If you are unfamiliar with this kind of geeky term, APIs are the glue that connects applications to each other and manages the virtual discussions between you and your customers.  APIs are also what enables business agility and flexibility of a #FutureReady business.
“Application programming interfaces (APIs) have been elevated from a development technique to a business model driver and boardroom consideration. An organization’s core assets can be reused, shared, and monetized through APIs that can extend the reach of existing services or provide new revenue streams. APIs should be managed like a product—one built on top of a potentially complex technical footprint that includes legacy and third-party systems and data.”[1] 

APIs are also at the heart of cloud computing.  These are used to provision, de-provision and scale the resources needed to run the software that drives your business. The importance of software, and by extension the APIs that drive software, is evident when you compare the top Dell Future Ready cities to the top cities for software engineering and entrepreneurship capitals.Eight of the top 10
Future Ready economies are in the top ten nationally for software engineering cities. All ten of the cities highlighted as “Capitals of Entrepreneurship” are FutureReady economies. Ten of the FutureReady economies are also cities ranked as having the most high tech jobs.


Driven by social media, mobile devices, applications, cloud and Internet of Things, the number of endpoints connecting to critical business applications is growing exponentially.  This also means that a FutureReady business faces an ever-growing number of APIs—which must be governed and managed effectively. This is why products like Dell Boomi’s multi-purpose Platform as a Service (PaaS) is critical to business success.  This particular platform can be used to:
  •  Create and publish any endpoint as an API;
  • Deploy APIs on-premises or in the cloud;
  •  Use versioning to effectively control APIs throughout the lifecycle;
  • Centrally manage and monitor web services;
  •  Enjoy economies of skill for increased developer productivity;and
  • Accelerate time to value and reduce total cost of ownership.
Being cloud-based, the Dell Boomi API Managementservice provides faster implementation and shorter time to value, as well as lower upfront costs and total cost of ownership (TCO).  This solution also delivers a centralized location to manage all of the company’s APIs, no matter how your APIs are created.
This high level overview shows that beyond a doubt, being #FutureReady means being software ready.  And software ready, by extension, means that FutureReady Enterprises must be ready to manage APIs.

[1] http://dupress.com/articles/tech-trends-2015-what-is-api-economy/
 


( This post was written as part of the Dell Insight Partners program, which provides news and analysis about the evolving world of tech. To learn more about tech news and analysis visit Tech Page One. Dell sponsored this article, but the opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent Dell’s positions or strategies. )



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Teradata: Embrace the Power of PaaS

December 11, 2015 0 Comments A+ a-




http://www.teradata.co.uk/cloud-overview/?LangType=2057&LangSelect=true









Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has always been the unappreciated sibling of the cloud computing service model trio.  Existing in the dark shadow of the most widely adopted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and foundationally powerful Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), the third service model is often misunderstood and widely ignored.

PaaS provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage web applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure.  Its unique power is associated with developing and deploying applications. Business value statements usually linked to PaaS includes:

  • Organizations can innovate faster, enabling the faster transformation of new ideas into real applications.
  • Helps to focus limited resources by eliminating much of the overhead required to deploy and manage applications
  • Saves money in the application development process by enabling economies of scale through enforcement of standardization and avoiding hidden cost of middleware misconfigurations
  • Software development quality is enhanced through the use of specialist that constantly tune, optimize, load-balance and reconfigure PaaS components
  • Reduce the risk and improve the timeliness of application updates by wielding complete control over how updates are brought into your production applications
  • Maximize application uptime through better data backup, operating system hardening and high availability deployments
  • Enable cost efficient global scalability by leveraging the insight of platform experts that have developed and deployed scaling mechanism capable of responding to the needs of many customer types and situations.
  • Enhanced security through continual security updates to individual PaaS stack components
  • Dramatically reduce overall project risk by bringing predictability to both the cost and the ramifications of introducing new applications and services.


Figure 1- Through the "Enhanced Services" layer, the Teradata PaaS advantage delivers industry and business process aligned components.
When it comes to big data analytics, Teradatadelivers these Platform-as-a-Service advantages by delivering industry andbusiness process aligned components within their PaaS. This valuable
Teradata differentiator can be delivered under a private, public or hybrid cloud deployment model. 

Understanding that PaaS by itself cannot address all your specific business needs and requirements, Teradata consultants can also address your application development and deployment needs through three convenient options:
  • Fully outsourced -  Terradata consultants work under the guidance of your business leaders to develop new applications or refactor existing application that leverage the powerful Terradata PaaS
  • Co-create - Terradata consultants act as guides and mentors to collaboratively partner with your business and IT team to develop or refactor applications as desired
  • Self-service – By coupling the inherent advantages of PaaS (standardization, cost reductions, application development agility and speed) and the Terradata platform's industry and business process aligned components, empower your development team with a self-service model and industry leading technical support.
An example of the advantage that Teradata PaaS can bring to your business is a rapidly growing US healthcare provider that needed to sustain their unpredictable growth in a rapidly expanding business. The company viewed the cloud as an opportunity to focus on its core competencies and maximize the delivery of critical healthcare services but wanted to also avoid reducing any of their healthcare focused resources. To successfully overcome this dilemma, the company adopted Teradata PaaS through the use of the managed cloud services model. 

Through this strategy, the company was relieved of most of the care and feeding of its data warehouse. They were also able to deploy both production and development systems to the Teradata Cloud, with the option to add disaster recovery systems in the future. The elasticity of cloud architecture enables the company to lease additional nodes within a few days. All this was done under a service level agreement (SLA) for operational transactions (such as three seconds to process 95 percent of certain queries) which minimizing the impact of analytic processing on its operations.
Teradata has embraced the power of PaaS.  Let them deliver that power to you through the Teradata Cloud.

 

Teradata Database on AWS


 ( This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.)



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Why cloud changes everything

December 06, 2015 0 Comments A+ a-

How is cloud computing bringing society and its ideas closer together?

This got me thinking. Last week the President of the United States started following me on Twitter. Now I realize that it’s not really President Obama on the other side of that virtual table, but the event brought to mind the Six Degree of Separation concept.

In case you don’t remember, this theory states that everyone and everything is six or fewer steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world. That random thought led me to wonder if all this social media has actually changed the theory so much that even I can be directly connected to the leader of the free world. A quick internet search revealed that the number of links between two random people have indeed reduced:


  • Facebook provies it’s 4.74 degrees of separation: Scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74. The experiment took a month and involved all of Facebook’s 721 million users.
  • Twitter shows it’s 4.67 steps: In a study of 5.2 million Twitter friendships (friend and follower relationships), Sysomos, found the most common friendship distance is five steps. (The average distance is 4.67 steps). The second most common friendship distance is four steps.
  • LinkedIn is set up on 3 degrees of separation: Although LinkedIn has yet to do a study of the magnitude of Facebook or Twitter, LinkedIn, perhaps more than any other social network, was set-up about the idea of degrees of separation. In LinkedIn case, it’s 3 degrees of separation which are:
    • You already know them
    • You know someone that knows them
    • You know someone that knows someone that knows them
In fact experiments have shown an average degree of separation of 3.43 between two random Twitter
users. Apart from the gee whiz factor of being closer to the President, this also means that using Twitter can get you that much closer to a new idea, a new opportunity or a new lease on life.

Since Twitter is enabled by cloud computing, what other things has this modern miracle caused? One plus is that cloud-enabled search algorithms have released us from the hidden biases built into the world’s relational databases. Since the 80’s data on just about everything has been managed, processed and modeled using theses relational databases which were in turn built on the assumption that humans were smart enough to know how that data would be used. These assumptions were ingrained in the database design, schema and tables. The use of structured data types was also limiting.

Today, processes built on top of unstructured data types that use technologies like map reduce have virtually eliminated the need for apriori knowledge about how data can or will be used. As shown by companies like Google and Simudyne, this has heralded a revolution in information access and process simulations. The automation that cloud computing has introduced to the acquisition of information technology resources has also changed the world’s economic model. The barrier of raising capital that has stopped many new ideas has been virtually driven out of existence. Today, the only thing between an idea and a new unicorn business is a little time and a credit card.


 This Simudyne video shows a simulation of an Iberian Fuels Value Chain. Over a two week period, engineers used operations data from 2012 to 2013 to build a concept model of this value chain. It’s based on Simudyne’s Providence platform, software that is being used to model financial flows across the whole of Britain’s banking system.

Speaking of time, it has also been altered by cloud computing. The use of parallel processing technologies pioneered by cloud-computing has shortened everything from the time it takes to find a reference document to the time it takes to map the human genome.

Dr. Matt Huentelman of the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) likens this form of high performance computer processing to a time-machine that gives him more time to do whatever is needed to help his cancer patients. In advancing health through genomic sequencing and personalized medicine, TGen uses robust, scalable high-performance computing and powerful Dell | Hadoop platform and Dell Statistica solution big data analytics tools. The increased performance provided by Dell HPC cluster, Dell PowerEdge M1000e blades, Dell PowerEdge M420 blade servers and Intel processors accelerates results, enabling researchers to expand treatments to a larger number of patients. In other industry verticals, time savings like this have been transformed to new business models and other important leading edge discoveries.

So in short, cloud computing has brought society and its ideas closer together, it has revolutionized the way we do business and it eliminates barriers caused by lack of money and lack of time. If this isn’t changing everything, what is?

To advance health through genomic sequencing and personalized medicine, the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) needs robust, scalable high-performance computing complimented with powerful big data analytics tools for its Dell | Hadoop platform. TGen optimized its infrastructure by implementing the Dell Statistica solution and scaling its existing Dell HPC cluster with Dell PowerEdge M1000e blades, Dell PowerEdge M420 blade servers and Intel processors. The increased performance accelerates results, enabling researchers to expand treatments to a larger number of patients.



This post was written as part of the Dell Insight Partners program, which provides news and analysis about the evolving world of tech. Dell sponsored this article, but the opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent Dell’s positions or strategies.





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