The explosion of connected devices / sensors is creating an ever-expanding set of new and valuable data. In parallel the emerging capability of Big Data technologies to store, access, analyze, and react to this data is producing changes in business models under the umbrella of the Internet of Things (IoT). In particular within the Insurance industry, IoT appears positioned to enable deep changes by altering relationships between insurers, distributors, and the insured.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Michael Sick, a Senior Manager and Big Data Architect within Ernst and Young's Financial Servi...Mar. 5, 2015 10:30 AM EST Reads: 2,799
Docker is an excellent platform for organizations interested in running microservices. It offers portability and consistency between development and production environments, quick provisioning times, and a simple way to isolate services.
In his session at DevOps Summit at 16th Cloud Expo, Shannon Williams, co-founder of Rancher Labs, will walk through these and other benefits of using Docker to run microservices, and provide an overview of RancherOS, a minimalist distribution of Linux designed expressly to run Docker. He will also discuss Rancher, an orchestration and service discovery platf...
The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly in the process of breaking from its heretofore relatively obscure enterprise applications (such as plant floor control and supply chain management) and going mainstream into the consumer space. More and more creative folks are interconnecting everyday products such as household items, mobile devices, appliances and cars, and unleashing new and imaginative scenarios. We are seeing a lot of excitement around applications in home automation, personal fitness, and in-car entertainment and this excitement will bleed into other areas. On the commercial side, m...
PubNub on Monday has announced that it is partnering with IBM to bring its sophisticated real-time data streaming and messaging capabilities to Bluemix, IBM’s cloud development platform.
“Today’s app and connected devices require an always-on connection, but building a secure, scalable solution from the ground up is time consuming, resource intensive, and error-prone,” said Todd Greene, CEO of PubNub. “PubNub enables web, mobile and IoT developers building apps on IBM Bluemix to quickly add scalable realtime functionality with minimal effort and cost.”
Sensor-enabled things are becoming more commonplace, precursors to a larger and more complex framework that most consider the ultimate promise of the IoT: things connecting, interacting, sharing, storing, and over time perhaps learning and predicting based on habits, behaviors, location, preferences, purchases and more.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Tom Wesselman, Director of Communications Ecosystem Architecture at Plantronics, will examine the still nascent IoT as it is coalescing, including what it is today, what it might ultimately be, the role of wearable tech, and technology gaps stil...
Every innovation or invention was originally a daydream. You like to imagine a “what-if” scenario. And with all the attention being paid to the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) you don’t have to stretch the imagination too much to see how this may impact commercial and homeowners insurance. We’re beyond the point of accepting this as a leap of faith.
The groundwork is laid. Now it’s just a matter of time.
We can thank the inventors of smart thermostats for developing a practical business application that everyone can relate to. Gone are the salad days of smart home apps, the early chalkb...
In the consumer IoT, everything is new, and the IT world of bits and bytes holds sway. But industrial and commercial realms encompass operational technology (OT) that has been around for 25 or 50 years. This grittier, pre-IP, more hands-on world has much to gain from Industrial IoT (IIoT) applications and principles. But adding sensors and wireless connectivity won’t work in environments that demand unwavering reliability and performance.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Ron Sege, CEO of Echelon, will discuss how as enterprise IT embraces other IoT-related technology trends, enterprises with i...
When it comes to the Internet of Things, hooking up will get you only so far. If you want customers to commit, you need to go beyond simply connecting products. You need to use the devices themselves to transform how you engage with every customer and how you manage the entire product lifecycle.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Sean Lorenz, Technical Product Manager for Xively at LogMeIn, will show how “product relationship management” can help you leverage your connected devices and the data they generate about customer usage and product performance to deliver extremely compelling and reliabl...
The Internet of Things (IoT) is causing data centers to become radically decentralized and atomized within a new paradigm known as “fog computing.” To support IoT applications, such as connected cars and smart grids, data centers' core functions will be decentralized out to the network's edges and endpoints (aka “fogs”). As this trend takes hold, Big Data analytics platforms will focus on high-volume log analysis (aka “logs”) and rely heavily on cognitive-computing algorithms (aka “cogs”) to make sense of it all. 
With several hundred implementations of IoT-enabled solutions in the past 12 months alone, this session will focus on experience over the art of the possible. Many can only imagine the most advanced telematics platform ever deployed, supporting millions of customers, producing tens of thousands events or GBs per trip, and hundreds of TBs per month.
With the ability to support a billion sensor events per second, over 30PB of warm data for analytics, and hundreds of PBs for an data analytics archive, in his session at @ThingsExpo, Jim Kaskade, Vice President and General Manager, Big Data & Ana...
One of the biggest impacts of the Internet of Things is and will continue to be on data; specifically data volume, management and usage. Companies are scrambling to adapt to this new and unpredictable data reality with legacy infrastructure that cannot handle the speed and volume of data.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Don DeLoach, CEO and president of Infobright, will discuss how companies need to rethink their data infrastructure to participate in the IoT, including:
Data storage: Understanding the kinds of data: structured, unstructured, big/small?
Analytics: What kinds and how responsiv...
Since 2008 and for the first time in history, more than half of humans live in urban areas, urging cities to become “smart.” Today, cities can leverage the wide availability of smartphones combined with new technologies such as Beacons or NFC to connect their urban furniture and environment to create citizen-first services that improve transportation, way-finding and information delivery.
In her session at @ThingsExpo, Laetitia Gazel-Anthoine, CEO of Connecthings, will focus on successful use cases.
The Workspace-as-a-Service (WaaS) market will grow to $6.4B by 2018. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Seth Bostock, CEO of IndependenceIT, will begin by walking the audience through the evolution of Workspace as-a-Service, where it is now vs. where it going.
To look beyond the desktop we must understand exactly what WaaS is, who the users are, and where it is going in the future. IT departments, ISVs and service providers must look to workflow and automation capabilities to adapt to growing demand and the rapidly changing workspace model.
Almost everyone sees the potential of Internet of Things but how can businesses truly unlock that potential. The key will be in the ability to discover business insight in the midst of an ocean of Big Data generated from billions of embedded devices via Systems of Discover. Businesses will also need to ensure that they can sustain that insight by leveraging the cloud for global reach, scale and elasticity.
The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to evolve the way the world does business; however, understanding how to apply it to your company can be a mystery. Most people struggle with understanding the potential business uses or tend to get caught up in the technology, resulting in solutions that fail to meet even minimum business goals.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jesse Shiah, CEO / President / Co-Founder of AgilePoint Inc., showed what is needed to leverage the IoT to transform your business. He discussed opportunities and challenges ahead for the IoT from a market and technical point of vie...
IoT is still a vague buzzword for many people. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mike Kavis, Vice President & Principal Cloud Architect at Cloud Technology Partners, discussed the business value of IoT that goes far beyond the general public's perception that IoT is all about wearables and home consumer services.
He also discussed how IoT is perceived by investors and how venture capitalist access this space.
Other topics discussed were barriers to success, what is new, what is old, and what the future may hold.
Mike Kavis is Vice President & Principal Cloud Architect at Cloud Technology Pa...
Hadoop as a Service (as offered by handful of niche vendors now) is a cloud computing solution that makes medium and large-scale data processing accessible, easy, fast and inexpensive.
In his session at Big Data Expo, Kumar Ramamurthy, Vice President and Chief Technologist, EIM & Big Data, at Virtusa, will discuss how this is achieved by eliminating the operational challenges of running Hadoop, so one can focus on business growth. The fragmented Hadoop distribution world and various PaaS solutions that provide a Hadoop flavor either make choices for customers very flexible in the name of opti...
The true value of the Internet of Things (IoT) lies not just in the data, but through the services that protect the data, perform the analysis and present findings in a usable way. With many IoT elements rooted in traditional IT components, Big Data and IoT isn’t just a play for enterprise. In fact, the IoT presents SMBs with the prospect of launching entirely new activities and exploring innovative areas. CompTIA research identifies several areas where IoT is expected to have the greatest impact. 
Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are increasing at an unprecedented rate. The threat landscape of today is drastically different than just a few years ago. Attacks are much more organized and sophisticated. They are harder to detect and even harder to anticipate. In the foreseeable future it's going to get a whole lot harder. Everything you know today will change. Keeping up with this changing landscape is already a daunting task. Your organization needs to use the latest tools, methods and expertise to guard against those threats. But will that be enough? In the foreseeable future attacks w...
A large US insurance carrier, based in the Midwest, has improved its applications’ lifecycle to make enterprise mobility a must-have business strength.
This five-part series of penetrating discussions on the latest in enterprise mobility explores advancements in applications design and deployment technologies across the full spectrum of edge devices and operating environments.
Our next innovation interview focuses on how a large US insurance carrier, based in the Midwest, has improved its applications’ lifecycle to make enterprise mobility a must-have business strength.
An anatomy of startup ventures for the Internet of Things market. Like GE describes in their white paper Pushing the Boundaries of Mind and Machine, this is basically a process of innovating through more intelligent machines to reinvent workflow models.
For a useful overview as to what constitutes an ‘IoT startup’, check out one example for some key characteristics: Hutgrip. Hutgrip is a SaaS solution that replaces VPNs with the Cloud and real time analytics, with the headline points being:
Clear description of the business benefit the new technology will bring – Smarter automation of bi...
The Internet of Things has emerged as the universally accepted term for the ‘next big thing’ wave, not replacing but building upon the Cloud Computing cycle, which itself built upon SaaS and ASPs.
There are many technology aspects to this trend, which will be covered extensively throughout this guide and ongoing series, but overall our goal is to describe the associated startup venture opportunities.
Indeed it’s not limited to startups, the IoT represents a new product innovation platform for any and all businesses, and this is the overall theme of this paper.
Mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT) have thrust many businesses into the era of the truly digital enterprise. This means opening up new channels and business opportunities. APIs are the key, enabling the digital enterprise to connect itself to myriad external apps and partners while cracking open an equally expansive range of fresh internal connections. Everything a digital enterprise touches through a Mobile or IoT device is backed by an API.
As an enterprise, you are consuming more data and services as APIs from third parties than ever before. The question, however, is “Do you know if y...
One of the neat things about microservices is the ability to segment functional actions into scalability domains. Login, browsing, and checkout are separate functional domains that can each be scaled according to demand. While one hopes that checkout is similarly in demand, it is unlikely to be as popular as browsing, after all, and the days of wasting expensive money on idle compute resources went out when the clouds descended.
In that same vein comes the ability to also create performance domains. After all, if you're scaling out a specific functional service domain you can also specify p...
It is no surprise to anyone that service providers need to find new sources of revenue and increase profitability. The digital, cloud and as-a-service revolution provides a silver lining.
As IT organizations feel the tension that comes from a combination of aging legacy B2B infrastructure, changing business mandates and rapidly evolving e-commerce requirements, they are increasingly looking at digital services and outsourcing to trusted providers. They want a trusted partner to deliver connected digital services; including mobile, cloud and M2M/IoT.
The pressure is on for businesses to thin...
When people talk about the Internet of Things (IoT) they tend to think about big data technologies like Hadoop where petabyte size datasets are store and analyzed for both known and unknown patterns. What many people don’t realize is that many IoT use cases only require small datasets.
I attended a Meetup yesterday in Mountain View, hosted by The Hive group on the subject of Lambda Architecture. Since I had never heard about this new phrase, my curiosity took me there. There was a panel discussion and panelists came from Hortonworks, Cloudera, MapR, Teradata, etc.
Lambda Architecture is a useful framework to think about designing big data applications. Nathan Marz designed this generic architecture addressing common requirements for big data based on his experience working on distributed data processing systems at Twitter. Some of the key requirements in building this archi...
Instant API is a true API-as-a-Service which makes it easy and cost-effective to build an API. Instant API has simplified all of the key areas of an API’s lifecycle, covering API creation, hosting, management, discovery, monetization, and documentation.
For example, let’s say you have information and services or data and services you want to expose through an API that can be used internally for BYOD initiatives or externally by developers or your business partners. With the API deployed, you still don’t have a mobile app. That’s where the Appery.io platform comes in. Appery.io makes it very e...
One of the most exciting parts of this week's Apple Watch launch was the example of the BMW watch app. This app allows you to see the charging status of your BMWi electric car, right from your wrist. You can also check the status of the doors of your car (important information such as if they are locked or not!). Although the star of the show was the watch app, APIs had a cameo appearance, since the information shown on the watch is fetched in real-time from APIs.
A successful recurring revenue business requires a focus on monetization across every aspect of the customer relationship, not just billing or payments. Monetization is an end-to-end process from activation through cancelation. While traditional billing systems are designed to manage one-time sales, modern systems are designed to support recurring revenue management with the functionality and integration capabilities necessary to coordinate and manage business processes and customer touch points.
Containers and microservices have become topics of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities.
Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 16th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York June 9-11 will find fresh new content in a new track called PaaS | Containers & Microservices
Containers are not being considered for the first time by the cloud community, but a current era of re-consideration has pushed them to the top of the cloud agenda. With the launch of Docker's initial release in March of 2013, interest was revved up several notches. Then late last...
We continue to see an increasing trend in cyber-attacks in line with the growth of new technologies, and enterprises have to protect themselves. It is critical for enterprises to devise their own measures to protect against cyber-attacks because any tolerance on this front is more than an IT issue but may affect the very existence and the business model of the enterprise. We have seen in a recent incident where a cyber-attack prevented a large enterprise from performing their basic business process.
Back in 2003 I wrote an article that described the forthcoming evolution of the Cloud, and with it the development towards the SIngularity. The growing use of XML Web services would see them evolve to become intelligent agents, forming the basis for this collective.
This would fit well with the vision of the ‘Internet of Things’, where lots and lots of devices of all shapes and sizes will be equipped with an IP address and some small amount of self intelligence. Cars and traffic lights that are able to interoperate to better manage themselves for example.
Connected cars will create new business models and provide opportunities for current businesses to greatly improve their service offerings.
Areas like targeted marketing, fleet management, event planning, city planning, insurance, and auto repair will benefit immensely from the data that connected cars will provide in the not too distant future.
Check out my latest post on Forbes to see how.
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