Fredric Paul
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Fredric Paul
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The cloud continues to rise—and fast
Now that the big three cloud vendors—Amazon, Microsoft and Google—have released their financial results for the fourth quarter of 2016, it’s time once again to take stock of how fast the cloud is growing. The short answer remains: very, very fast. That conclusion comes in spite of some carping from analysts about the latest numbers from Amazon Web Services (AWS), but I don’t think those complaints add up to much when comes to the health of the cloud computing industry. But let’s take a closer look, and you can decide for yourself. AWS posted strong growth AWS revenue grew 47 percent in the quarter to $3.5 billion. The business earned $926 million in the quarter, up from $540 million in Q4 2015. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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My worst tech purchase ever
As you can see from my profile picture above, I’ve been around the tech industry for a while now. And while I’ve surely learned a thing or two over the years, much of that wisdom has come at a heavy price. I’ve spent years following dead-end technologies down rabbit holes, getting up to speed on promising new software that never came close to living up to its hype, and jumping on board publications that were just about to give up the ghost. But lately I took some time to think about the absolutely worst tech product I ever bought with my own hard-earned dineros. And as it turned out, it was pretty much a no-brainer to settle on the winner (or loser, I guess, depending on how you look at it) as well as two runners-up. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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More proof the cloud is winning big
One way to track the growth of cloud computing is to follow the investments in the infrastructure and equipment that make it run. That’s why IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker is so revealing.The cloud is growing faster According to the IDC report, total spending on IT infrastructure products—including server, enterprise storage and Ethernet switches—for use in cloud environments will grow a healthy 18 percent this year to top $44 billion. Meanwhile, IDC said, investment in old-school non-cloud architecture equipment will actually decline by more than 3 percent in 2017.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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More proof the cloud is winning big
One way to track the growth of cloud computing is to follow the investments in the infrastructure and equipment that make it run. That’s why IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker is so revealing.The cloud is growing faster According to the IDC report, total spending on IT infrastructure products—including server, enterprise storage and Ethernet switches—for use in cloud environments will grow a healthy 18 percent this year to top $44 billion. Meanwhile, IDC said, investment in old-school non-cloud architecture equipment will actually decline by more than 3 percent in 2017.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Amazon Alexa ‘wins’ CES, but how well does the virtual assistant really perform?
According to multiple reports, Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant dominated last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, despite the fact the company had little official presence. Spreading its wings far beyond Amazon’s own Echo, Dot and Tap devices, Alexa popped up on wide variety of new devices demo’d at the show—from refrigerators to air purifiers, baby monitors, headphones and even cars. But Alexa’s rapid spread begs the question: What is using the voice-controlled system really like? What can it actually do, and how well does it do it in real-world kitchens and bedrooms—not to mention cars? Alexa moves in! Like a lot of other people, I acquired an Alexa-powered device from Amazon—the Amazon Echo Dot—over the holiday season. I know, I’m a bit late to the party, but frankly, I was not convinced any existing voice assistant system was really ready for prime time. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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When we weren’t looking, smartwatches became niche items
It became pretty clear when the Apple Watch Series 2 focused on athletes and exercise. If even Apple knew it couldn’t make a smartwatch that appealed to everyone, what hope did all the other market contenders have? And at this year's CES, you could see this trend playing out from tech outfits to traditional watch brands to athletic wear and shoe manufacturers.When the Apple Watch 2 came out in September of 2016, it struck a fine balance in terms of new features and continuity—at least in terms of the product itself. But Apple’s positioning of the device changed dramatically. Instead of trying to be the perfect device for everyone to wear on their wrists all the time, it was now focused primarily on workouts and activity tracking. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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7 things Amazon needs to do in 2017
As you may have noticed, 2016 was a very good year for Amazon, pretty much across the board. Amazon Web Services’ cloud business soared, growing insanely fast, dwarfing its competitors and generating big profits. On the retail side, Amazon dominated the holiday season, even as it experimented with drone deliveries and other shipping innovations. Known for its online sales, Amazon finally introduced retail stores as well. And the company’s voice-powered assistant, Echo, clearly outshone Apple’s Siri and forced Google to play catchup with Google Home. As one report noted: To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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How to tell if the Trump administration is serious about tech innovation
Last week’s tech news cycle was dominated by coverage of the high-profile meeting between the incoming Trump administration and a star-studded roster of tech leaders. Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Alphabet’s (Google)’s Larry Page, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Oracle’s Sasha Catz,, IBM’s Ginny Rommety and others were summoned to Trump Tower for a heavily hyped sitdown that provided some amazing optics. (Who can forget the meme of Bezos, Page, and Sandberg looking incredibly glum at the table?) To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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12 tips on moving enterprises to the cloud: Cultural edition
When it comes to enterprises successfully transitioning to the DevOps and the cloud, the key isn’t just technological agility, but also organizational agility, also known as “culture.” At least, that was the contention of Constantin Gonzalez, principal solutions architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS), in a session at the recent Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. Titled The Enterprise Fast Lane—What Your Competition Doesn’t Want You To Know, the session paired Gonzalez with Christian Dager, chief architect for European car-market site AutoScout24, to discuss the ongoing journey from monolithic apps running .Net/Windows in on-premise data centers to microservices architectures running in JVM/Linux in the AWS cloud. You can see the video of the entire talk below[FP1] , but I wanted to highlight some of the most interesting takeaways. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The latest ransomware is pure evil genius
Ransomware is always nasty business, but the latest variant discovered by the MalwareHunterTeam takes the nastiness to a whole ‘nother level.Turning victims into criminals Apparently, the latest Popcorn Time ransomware adds a new twist to the standard M.O. of demanding payment from their victims or permanently lose access to their files. In what seems like a brilliant if seriously messed up maneuver, if victims don’t want to pay the Bitcoin ransom “the fast and easy way,” the program gives victims the option of paying up “the nasty way”—by sending the ransomware link on to others. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The latest ransomware is pure evil genius
Ransomware is always nasty business, but the latest variant discovered by the MalwareHunterTeam takes the nastiness to a whole ‘nother level.Turning victims into criminals Apparently, the latest Popcorn Time ransomware adds a new twist to the standard M.O. of demanding payment from their victims or permanently lose access to their files. In what seems like a brilliant if seriously messed up maneuver, if victims don’t want to pay the Bitcoin ransom “the fast and easy way,” the program gives victims the option of paying up “the nasty way”—by sending the ransomware link on to others. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Smartwatches aren’t dead; they’re just taking a timeout
December hasn’t been a good month for the smartwatch sector. Pebble, the remarkable Kickstarter-fueled smartwatch success story valued at $740 million as recently as last year, was sold off to Fitbit for just $40 million. IDC’s latest wearables report indicates that smartwatch sales have “tumbled.” And Gartner noted, once again, that almost a third of smartwatch purchases are not being used. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Can any cloud company keep up with Amazon?
I spent last week in Las Vegas, along with 32,000 of my closest friends—or at least, with 32,000 other cloud computing devotees attending Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference. Packed to the gills, the event had the excited hum of a fast-growing industry confident it was riding the wave of technical disruption toward market dominance.But amidst all the mechanical bulls, massive EDM dance parties, TV show premieres—not to mention all of the geeky, deep-dive technical sessions that form the backbone of the show—Amazon’s two main keynote sessions made it clear that the company doesn’t merely plan to ride that wave; it figures to own it outright. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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When it comes to security, Android is the new Windows
For decades, it’s been conventional wisdom that Windows PCs are more vulnerable to attacks and malware than computers running the Mac OS. There’s been some argument over whether that was primarily due to inherent, structural security weaknesses or simply because Windows’ dominant market share makes it a bigger, juicier, more lucrative target for hackers.Whatever. There’s plenty of truth to the thought that Windows was more vulnerable than Macs, especially with earlier versions of the Microsoft operating system.But even as Windows security seems to be improving, the rise of mobile computing means the Windows/Mac security rivalry is no longer top of mind for many people. The biggest issue now concerns mobile security on iOS and Android devices, and once again Apple’s (relatively) walled garden appears to create a safer world than the more open environment of its more popular rival.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Nate Silver shares the secrets of accurate predictions
Statistician extraordinaire Nate Silver won fame for correctly predicting the outcome of the 2008 U.S. presidential election in 49 out of 50 states. And he followed that up in 2012 by nailing the winner in all 50 states.How did he do in 2016? Well, let’s just say he wasn’t as wrong as most statisticians, as he gave Clinton a little more than a 70 percent chance of winning (not far from the Trump campaign’s own predictions), while others gave her odds of up to 99 percent.So, in the wake of a continually surprising election season, what did the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight.com have to say to an audience of software and analytics professionals at New Relic’s FutureStack16 conference in San Francisco last week? Plenty, as it turns out. (Disclosure: My day job is editor-in-chief for New Relic, where I also wrote about Silver’s presentation.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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In wearables, IDC says the little things are going to be very big
There’s no denying it: Despite years of hype, wearable computing technology has yet to make a big impact on enterprise IT. But if you believe the last IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Wearables and AR/VR predictions, that’s finally about to change. And ironically, two of the smallest categories of wearables seem poised to make the biggest difference.Smartwatches and ear-worn wearables Among the 10 predictions in the report, IDC predicts smartwatches—yes, those things that strap on your wrist to monitor your fitness activities, and not much else—will find favor among enterprises in pilot programs designed to “augment or replace enterprise-use smartphones in 2017 to communicate time-sensitive data.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Facebook just had a very, very bad week
There’s a rule of thumb in journalism that says three of anything is a trend. If that’s true, then the world’s largest social network is in the middle of one very tough trend. In the last week or so, the company has been absorbing criticism on three separate fronts, from embarrassing gaffes to potentially helping sway the results of that election—in multiple ways. Facebook = election influencer? Let’s start at the top: with the election. Donald Trump’s victory surprised a lot of people, and one reason—say the Monday morning quarterbacks—is that Facebook and other social networks are how many people now get their news, which is creating bubbles where subscribers see primarily content that supports their own positions and politics. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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No, Apple and Microsoft aren’t trading places
For the past couple of weeks, the interwebs have been buzzing with talk that Microsoft and Apple have somehow switched positions in the tech world. The formerly staid folks in Redmond, so the theory goes, are now the cool technology innovators, while the once audacious corps in Cupertino has been reduced to milking existing cash cows.The idea got rolling in reaction to a provocative post by legendary entrepreneur Steve Blank, who compared Tim Cook’s regime as Apple’s designated caretaker following Steve Jobs to the long, slow decline at Microsoft under Steve Ballmer, Bill Gate’s designated replacement. And the meme took off with the dueling announcements of Microsoft’s slick new Surface Studio computer and Apple’s underwhelming update of its Macbook Pro laptop. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Do smartphone trade-ins threaten corporate security?
As the holiday season approaches (OK, it may already be here), workers in your company will likely be acquiring new smartphones. In fact, a recent survey by Blancco Technology Group says a whopping 68 percent of mobile users plan to purchase a new smartphone for the holidays. That number seems high to me, but come January, you can be pretty sure there will be a lot of shiny new iPhones, Galaxies and Pixels connecting to your corporate network. But that’s not what this post is about. No, this post is about what happens to all those no-longer-shiny BYOD smartphones that used to connect to your corporate network and work with your corporate data, but have now been replaced with something new. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Do smartphone trade-ins threaten corporate security?
As the holiday season approaches (OK, it may already be here), workers in your company will likely be acquiring new smartphones. In fact, a recent survey by Blancco Technology Group says a whopping 68 percent of mobile users plan to purchase a new smartphone for the holidays. That number seems high to me, but come January, you can be pretty sure there will be a lot of shiny new iPhones, Galaxies and Pixels connecting to your corporate network. But that’s not what this post is about. No, this post is about what happens to all those no-longer-shiny BYOD smartphones that used to connect to your corporate network and work with your corporate data, but have now been replaced with something new. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here