If software is indeed "eating the world," as famed venture capitalist and prognosticator on pretty much everything Marc Andreessen once opined, then it goes without saying that the pipes that have the unenviable task of carrying that software become ever more critical. The more important the internet, the more the underlying network of undifferentiated "dumb pipes" becomes important. This has led to the rise of myriad vendors that all help to ensure those "dumb pipes" keep working. A case in point is Veriflow, a company that is bringing a new approach to network breach and outage detection via mathematical network verification.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If software is indeed "eating the world," as famed venture capitalist and prognosticator on pretty much everything Marc Andreessen once opined, then it goes without saying that the pipes that have the unenviable task of carrying that software become ever more critical. The more important the internet, the more the underlying network of undifferentiated "dumb pipes" becomes important. This has led to the rise of myriad vendors that all help to ensure those "dumb pipes" keep working. A case in point is Veriflow, a company that is bringing a new approach to network breach and outage detection via mathematical network verification.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Interesting news from Formation Data Systems, an enterprise storage vendor, around the launch of a new technology that should help IT departments eke out greater efficiencies from their existing storage assets. The new feature allows enterprises to recapture unused storage in their virtualized server environments.Fetchingly called Virtual Storage Recapture (VSR) this technology allows Formation customers to extend their FormationOne deployments beyond standard software-defined storage implementations to be able to utilize storage capacity that is “stranded” within most virtual servers and hypervisor clusters. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Healthcare is now the most frequently attacked industry, beating out financial services, retail and other industries, according to a new report by TrapX. As a result, healthcare organizations are having trouble keeping pace with the number and sophistication of attacks they have to deal with.The report, entitled MEDJACK 2, details the sheer scale of attacks that hospitals and other medical establishments suffer on a regular basis. It is a follow-up to a similar report TrapX released last year.+ Also on Network World: Healthcare needs more IT security pros – stat +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Healthcare is now the most frequently attacked industry, beating out financial services, retail and other industries, according to a new report by TrapX. As a result, healthcare organizations are having trouble keeping pace with the number and sophistication of attacks they have to deal with.The report, entitled MEDJACK 2, details the sheer scale of attacks that hospitals and other medical establishments suffer on a regular basis. It is a follow-up to a similar report TrapX released last year.+ Also on Network World: Healthcare needs more IT security pros – stat +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There has been an interesting change in the enterprise storage world as the increasingly affordable and high-performance world of solid state drives has gradually but inexorably increased penetration into an area formerly the domain of spinning disk drives.Of course, the value proposition for solid state drives is obvious: the fact that almost everyone is toting a mobile device that has its entire storage made up of flash has increased the awareness of the approach. That and the rapidly improving economics of actually delivering flash storage into enterprise customers has meant that vendors such as Solidfire and Pure Storage have managed to grow rapidly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There has been an interesting change in the enterprise storage world as the increasingly affordable and high-performance world of solid state drives has gradually but inexorably increased penetration into an area formerly the domain of spinning disk drives.Of course, the value proposition for solid state drives is obvious: the fact that almost everyone is toting a mobile device that has its entire storage made up of flash has increased the awareness of the approach. That and the rapidly improving economics of actually delivering flash storage into enterprise customers has meant that vendors such as Solidfire and Pure Storage have managed to grow rapidly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Docker initiative has been an amazing thing to watch.Over only a few short years, Docker has taken a pre-existing technology (the concept of Linux containers) and built a massive ecosystem around it. In the process, Docker (the company, as distinct from the open source project) has built itself an incredible valuation that it needs to try and live up to.+ Also on Network World: How Docker can transform your development teams +But that valuation, and attempt to justify it, are somewhat countered by the fact that Docker also relies on an ecosystem of vendors that all try to justify their existence. Thus the challenge remains: what should Docker (the company) do for itself, and what should it leave for third-party vendors to resolve?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I have a particular interest in the manufacturing of physical goods. For close to 25 years, I have been involved with a boutique, New Zealand-based manufacturer of backpacks and workwear. Cactus Equipment has been designing and making its own products for years.As opposed to the regular model of spec'ing a product from Far Eastern design and manufacturing houses, Cactus designs in house and then manufacturers in its own New Zealand factory, as well as a number of outsourced but still New Zealand-based facilities. So, the realities of trying to get a product designed and prototyped is something I'm well aware of. The design and sourcing combined with the difficulty in accessing resources makes product engineering a difficult task.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I'm a big fan of Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack vendor. It is one company that has no problem at all being contentious. Where other vendors tend to think deeply about the impacts of what they say and process their messages through multiple levels of communication staffers, Mirantis has an "ask forgiveness, not permission" approach. This must cause serious headaches for its long-suffering press staff, but it certainly provides serious fodder for the commentators out there.Looking back over the years, Mirantis has been the source of many high-profile cloud stories. Of course, high-profile is a relative term, and it is, admittedly, a small number of people who watch the space that Mirantis plays in.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Algolia offers a hosted search platform. That means if you're a developer wanting to offer search within your applications and websites, you just integrate Algolia's search engine and it does it all for you—allowing you to focus on what is important: your app. Since its inception in 2012, Algolia has gained over 1,500 customers.Algolia API returns search results quickly and offers a search-as-you-type experience for end users. A perfect example of farming out parts of an application to third parties, Algolia follows in the footsteps of communication platforms such as Twilio and email platforms such as Sendgrid. To deliver both economics and speed, Algolia built itself a distributed, cloud-based, search network. It leverages 12 individual data centers globally to deliver a claimed 50ms response time for search within the top markets globally.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
No one argues against the contention that enterprises and, more importantly, their stakeholders (both internal and external) are increasingly demanding access to core systems on a remote/mobile basis. Still, there is much debate about the best way to actually deliver that mobile access.Several schools of thought exist. First, we have the revolutionaries who suggest that existing applications are fundamentally flawed, inflexible and large, meaning they're unable to deliver what enterprise customers need. Proponents of this perspective say enterprises should pretty much take an entirely new look at how they work from a technology paradigm. These organizations take a Netflix-like approach to the problem space, deciding to re-architect from the ground up to meet their needs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
News this morning from storage vendor Scality that the company is announcing the general availability of its S3 Server Software. The offering is an open source version of Scality's S3 API and allows developers to code to Amazon Web Services' S3 storage API on a local machine.Packaged as a Docker container (what else!) the idea is that developers can local build applications that thereafter can be deployed on premises, on AWS or some combination of the above.RING storage capabilities
Scality has grown to scale (pun intended) by offering storage solutions that now store some 800 billion objects. Scality's RING storage supports any file and object application, sited on any hardware and with no capacity constraints. Given its standard API approaches, RING enables storage to be completed across public or private services and can be deployed on any standard x86 hardware, without the need to re-architect as infrastructure changes occur.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The world, or at least the world of technology, is fixated on buzzwords. Call it laziness, or call it simply a great way for companies to build context for their customers and prospects. Either way, buzzwords aren't going anywhere soon. And right now, "artificial intelligence" is the buzzword en vogue. I get dozens of PR pitches a day that promise to apply AI to dog walking, laundry services and enterprise resource planning.Today's example comes courtesy of Wix, a website development platform. Wix's cloud-based web development platform allows users to create HTML5 websites and mobile sites using online drag and drop tools. So, what place does AI have in Wix's industry? According to Wix, AI is going to help its users eliminate the most significant challenges they face when building websites: time, design and content creation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Now, this is interesting.Ping Identity is a well-known identity vendor. Basically, Ping handles authentication, single sign-on (SSO) and other identity-related functions that large organizations have. The company competes with vendors such as OneLogin and Okta. So, what is it doing investing in a formerly stealthy blockchain vendor?It seems Ping sees blockchain as a potential disruptor for identity session management. It's so excited about it that it is spending some of its hard-earned cash to invest in Swrlds, a new platform that is creating the "hashgraph," a distributed consensus platform. Swrlds sees itself as solving some of the limitations that are inherent in blockchain. Swrlds contends that it delivers the three legs of the consensus stool: fairness, distributed trust and resilience to Denial of Service attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Now, this is interesting.Ping Identity is a well-known identity vendor. Basically, Ping handles authentication, single sign-on (SSO) and other identity-related functions that large organizations have. The company competes with vendors such as OneLogin and Okta. So, what is it doing investing in a formerly stealthy blockchain vendor?It seems Ping sees blockchain as a potential disruptor for identity session management. It's so excited about it that it is spending some of its hard-earned cash to invest in Swirlds, a new platform that is creating the "hashgraph," a distributed consensus platform. Swirlds sees itself as solving some of the limitations that are inherent in blockchain. Swirlds contends that it delivers the three legs of the consensus stool: fairness, distributed trust and resilience to Denial of Service attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At the recent OpenStack summit in Austin, Texas, infrastructure company CoreOS demonstrated Stackanetes, a new initiative it dreamed up that is designed to make it easier for organizations to utilize applications sitting on top of Kubernetes.Kubernetes is, of course, the open source container management initiative that was borne out of the internal systems that Google uses to manage its own infrastructure.Stackanetes came from CoreOS's focus on delivering what it calls GIFEE (Google's Infrastructure for Everyone). The idea is that currently only massive organizations like Google have the ability to run these highly efficient platforms. CoreOS wants to democratize that ability.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
News today from DigitalOcean, the little engine that could of the cloud world. Despite being a relative unknown, at least compared to the big three of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, DigitalOcean has managed to grow incredibly fast in its short life.The company, which is headquartered in New York City, has a massive 700,000 customers globally, customers who are attracted to its super-simple offering. DigitalOcean offers the simplest of products, in contrast to the other cloud vendors that give customers a plethora of different options.While that simplicity may be a problem if and when DigitalOcean wants to go up market, for the moment it is scooping up hundreds of thousands of grassroots developers in its main market of the U.S. and Europe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ecommerce vendors are increasingly under pressure to deliver the most relevant products to site visitors. As choices available to consumers increase, so too does the requirement to filter the myriad of options and offer the most relevant products in response to a consumer's search. It is for this reason that ecommerce search tools from companies such as SLI Systems are increasingly important.Another player in the space is stealth Israeli company Twiggle. Twiggle combines the buzzwords du jour—machine learning, artificial intelligence and natural language processing—and delivers them within the context of ecommerce search.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Salesforce and Oracle have an interesting relationship. Even more interesting is the relationship between the companies' two founders, Marc Benioff and Larry Ellison, respectively.Benioff is, after all, a former Oracle alum and a protege of Ellison. And the two have an interesting history—sharing many perspectives (not to mention a penchant for kicking back in their respective Hawaiian bolt-holes). Indeed, the on-again, off-again war of words between the two has been excellent fodder for the peanut gallery. Who will forget the time Benioff's invitation to speak at Oracle Open World was removed?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ben Kepes