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Category Archives for "Network World SDN"

Customers have a love/hate relationship with IT outsourcing providers

HPE Outsourcing once again garnered the highest Net Promoter (NPS) score among IT service providers according to a 2016 analysis of NPS scores among corporate technology vendors recently published by the Temkin Group. However, its merger with CSC could shakes its customer experience standing.A company’s NPS is considered a measure of customer loyalty and has been proven by some to be a leading indicator of corporate growth. Customers are asked to rank the likelihood they would recommend a brand to a friend or colleague on a scale of 1-10. Those who answer 9 or 10 are considered promoters: loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others the company, thereby fueling growth. Respondents who answer 7 or 8 are considered passive customers: satisfied, but unenthusiastic and vulnerable to competitive offerings. Those who answer between 0 and 6 are detractors: unhappy customers who can damage a brand and impede growth with their negative word of mouth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Matching IT priorities with IT realities

Fall is back-to-school time, though for those of us who aren’t going back to school, it’s a really good time to reassess 2016 priorities and budgets to see what projects can get done by the end of the year. It’s good to take stock to see what’s been accomplished this year, and see what priorities should take precedence before the new year (and a new budget) approaches.At the beginning of 2016, some CIO priorities for the year included standardization, integration, faster service delivery, more innovation and better IT and business alignment. No problem, right? Right—unless you’re actually working, day to day, to keep networks and apps up and running for users. That makes it a lot harder to achieve those lofty goals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Financial sector expands use of blockchain databases

Banks and financial markets are adopting blockchain distributed database software for their payments and lending services at a pace faster than once expected, according to a survey of 400 such businesses globally.Blockchain software is the basis of bitcoin, first developed in 2009, and acts as an automatic public ledger for transactions, primarily financial transactions.The survey, conducted by a research division of IBM, found that 15% of the banks and 14% of financial market institutions intend to implement full-scale, commercial blockchain-based services in 2017.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 ways to get more out of meetings

The modern workforce is growing resentful of meetings. In fact, a recent survey from Atlassian found that, on average, employees attend 62 meetings per month and at least half of those meetings are considered "time wasted." Of the respondents, 91 percent admitted they daydreamed during meetings, 39 percent owned up to falling asleep during a meeting and 45 percent said they felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of meetings they needed to attend.In fact, a whopping 96 percent said they often miss meetings all together, whether due to workload or overlapping meetings. And when employees do make it to meetings, 73 percent said they often did unrelated work during it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Elon Musk’s next great adventure: Colonizing Mars

You cannot say that Elon Musk doesn’t dream big. Today he outlined what would be his biggest aspiration ever – colonizing Mars.If you watched Musk, who is SpaceX Founder, CEO, and Lead Designer deliver the details today on his Mars colonizing mission to the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico you may have been struck by the matter-of-fact way he delivered the details of what even he calls a very complex and dangerous mission.“I think the first trips to Mars are going to be really, very dangerous. The risk of fatality will be high. There is just no way around it," he said. "It would basically be, 'Are you prepared to die?' Then if that's ok, then you are a candidate for going."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The power of lazy programming

Whoever said working hard is a virtue never met a programmer. Yes, ditch diggers who work hard generate longer ditches than those who daydream, and farmers who lean into the plough plant more food than those who stare off into the sky. But programming isn’t the same. There is no linear relationship between sweat on the brow and satisfied users.Sometimes it helps if programmers pull all-nighters, but more often than not it’s better for programmers to be smart -- and lazy. Coders who ignore those “work hard, stay humble” inspirational wall signs often produce remarkable results, all because they are trying to avoid having to work too hard. The true geniuses find ways to do the absolute minimum by offloading their chores to the computer. After all, getting the computer to do the work is the real job of computer programmers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HackerOne CEO: ‘We’re building the world’s biggest security talent agency’

Marten Mickos, a veteran executive with companies from MySQL to Sun, Nokia and HP, was not particularly excited about his meeting to explore a leadership role with HackerOne, a fledgling security company. Security is hard, it’s unpleasant, it doesn’t work very well. But he perked up fast after learning about HackerOne’s crowdsourced model of finding and fixing security flaws – a model in which HackerOne plays a key matchmaking role between companies and ethical hackers in a rapidly growing marketplace of skills and needs. Those are still conducted through your platform, those private bounty programs?With increasing urbanization in the world, increasing internet access, good STEM education in many countries in the world, there is no practical limit to how many hackers we can find. We get them from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia, all the Russian-speaking countries, Western Europe, the U.S.A., Chile, Argentina. It’s fantastic to see them because you suddenly realize that there are all these mostly young people who have a burning desire to make the world safer and, of course, make some money at the same time. They have such great intent and instincts about this. I don’t think we’ll run out of hackers Continue reading

Oracle denied new trial in copyright dispute with Google over Java

A federal court in California has denied Oracle another trial in its long-standing copyright infringement dispute with Google over the use of Java code in the Android operating system.A jury had cleared Google of copyright infringement in May this year, upholding the company’s stand that its use of 37 Java APIs (application programming interfaces) in its Android mobile operating system was fair use, thus denying Oracle up to US$9 billion in damages that it was seeking.A number of developers and scientists  backed Google saying that APIs, which are the specifications that let programs communicate with each other, were not copyrightable and any bid to change that would stifle innovation. The administration of President Barack Obama had in its opinion sided with Oracle and said that the APIs are copyrightable like other computer code.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bringing IoT data into public clouds is getting easier

The formidable processing power and analytical tools available in public clouds could make industrial IoT more effective and less expensive. But bringing IoT data into the cloud takes more than a network connection.On Tuesday, two companies moved to help enterprises adapt their IoT data for popular cloud services. OSIsoft introduced its PI Integrator for Microsoft Azure, and Particle announced a custom integration with Google Cloud Platform.While some large enterprises with sensitive IoT data do all their analytics in-house, public clouds offer greater scale and better security than many organizations can achieve on their own, MachNation analyst Dima Tokar said. And more advanced analytics, including better error correction, in some cases can give enterprises the same insights with fewer sensors, he said. Trading hardware for software -- especially the cloud-based kind -- typically means savings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Six senators demand more details about the Yahoo data breach

Six U.S. senators have called Yahoo's massive data breach "unacceptable," and they're demanding that the company provide more details about the incident.In a letter addressed to Yahoo's CEO, the lawmakers said they were particularly "disturbed" that the breach occurred in 2014, but that Yahoo only publicized it last week."That means millions of Americans' data may have been compromised for two years," the letter said. "This is unacceptable."The hacking incident, which Yahoo said it only learned recently, affects at least 500 million users, making it perhaps the largest known data breach in history. Account information, including email addresses, telephone numbers, and hashed passwords, may have been stolen.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Video: What’s it like to be a cloud startup

In a market dominated by vendors like Amazon, Microsoft and Google is there room for startups? Thinkstock Many entrepreneurs and investors believe so. I’ve been interested in what it takes to start up a business in the uber-competitive cloud computing market. To help explore the issue, Cloud Chronicles visited ClearSky Data in downtown Boston to chat with co-founder Ellen Rubin – a cloud industry veteran and three-time entrepreneur – to talk about what Clear Sky is and how it competes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IEEE sets new Ethernet standard that brings 5X the speed without disruptive cable changes

As expected the IEEE has ratified a new Ethernet specification -- IEEE P802.3bz – that defines 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T, boosting the current top speed of traditional Ethernet five-times without requiring the tearing out of current cabling.The Ethernet Alliance wrote that the IEEE 802.3bz Standard for Ethernet Amendment sets Media Access Control Parameters, Physical Layers and Management Parameters for 2.5G and 5Gbps Operation lets access layer bandwidth evolve incrementally beyond 1Gbps, it will help address emerging needs in a variety of settings and applications, including enterprise, wireless networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: MarkLogic: Can NoSQL databases support today’s enterprise?

Although I had a few problems with the original PR messages that invited me to meet with MarkLogic, the conversation with Gary Bloom, the company's CEO and president, was well worth the time.Summary of our conversation The following bullets are a quick summary to a complex and engaging conversation: The industry is experiencing several fundimental shifts in both the sources of data and how it is being used. The data is now coming from many types of end user focused devices, applications that combine the efforts of many systems that are housed all over the planet, neither enterprises nor end users will tolerate slow response times or failures, and older approaches that are based upon monolithic application and database design simply can't keep up. While it is true that things have changed in fundimental ways, older applications, systems and designs are not going away. They continue to support enterprise critical applications, but need help dealing with the tsunomi of data coming from everywhere. The state of the art in database architecture has shifted from a "shared nothing" design center to a "shared everything" center that can take advantage of local, virtual and cloud processing and data. Database design Continue reading

Microsoft pursues .Net development unity with .Net Standard

Microsoft is looking to provide "one library to rule them all." With .Net Standard, developers only have to master a single base library to reach multiple .Net platforms.The company on Monday shed further light on its plans for .Net Standard, which is intended to enable code-sharing between applications. .Net Standard features a set of APIs for .Net platforms to implement. It is intended as a replacement for Microsoft's Portable Class Libraries going forward, and will serve as tooling for building multi-platform .Net libraries.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 reasons CEOs should be involved in hiring decisions

Hiring is as much an art as a science. Bring the wrong talent on board, and it'll tank morale and impede performance; hire the right people, and growth will accelerate.However, finding just the right mix of skills, knowledge, experience and personality can feel like a herculean task, says Aytekin Tank, founder and CEO of online form builder JotForm, but for him, it's the most important part of his job.Tank says he involves himself in every hiring decision at JotForm. Google's CEO and cofounder Larry Page famously approves or rejects every one of the company's hires, too. Should your organization follow suit? Here are five reasons why your CEO should be involved in hiring decisions and two reasons they shouldn't.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What small business look for when considering SaaS

More and more, small and midsized businesses (SMBs) are turning to cloud-based software to help run their business. Yet many are hesitant to make the move, worrying about safety and cost. So what can Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers do to woo SMBs and allay their concerns? Here are eight suggestions on how to make your cloud offering attractive to a smaller business.1. Make sure your software is easy to use – and easy to understand. “Business owners and their employees expect [cloud-based] business apps and services to be as easy to use as their personal consumer apps,” says Ken Oestreich, director, product marketing, Cloud Services, Citrix. “Cloud services and apps need to be intuitive, so people can begin using them without training. The easier your apps and services are to use, the more people will use them, and since service revenues are based on usage, you want customers to use those services frequently and for extended periods of time.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google rolls out more low-bandwidth versions of its products

Google is rolling versions of popular products like YouTube and Chrome that are specially designed for people who do not have access to high-bandwidth internet. The products are first being introduced in India but are expected to be available in other parts of the world where low-bandwidth connections are prevalent.The company also introduced on Tuesday a set of tools, called Google Station, which aim to help partners set up public Wi-Fi hotspots. Google joined last year with Indian Railways and RailTel, a provider of telecom infrastructure, to offer Wi-Fi at 400 railway stations in India.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Sage delivers a payments API. Because APIs are the key to unlocking the future

Until very recently, the accounting software industry was evenly split among the "big three" vendors: Sage broadly owned the U.K. market, Intuit the American, and MYOB the Australasian. Bit players rounded out the other countries not covered by these big three.But in the past few years, several innovative new companies have been founded with the stated aim of disrupting these big vendors. Most notable among them is Xero, but similarly FreshBooks, Kashflow, FreeAgent and others had a crack at the problem space.+ Also on Network World: 10 free tools for API design, development and testing +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Realm broadens its mobile database offering with Object Server

Realm provides a database tailored for mobile applications. The most popular third-party database globally, Realm powers apps in use by over a billion users. Realm has focused on the mobile side of things and offers caching and synchronization services that are critical for the mobile use case.The company is broadening its offering today with the announcement of the Realm Mobile Platform, an amalgam of the existing database and a new product, Realm Object Server.Object Server deals with delivering live data synchronization between users. In practice, it uses live objects across both database and server, which update automatically in response to changes on either side. These objects are then integrated between the two ends of the chain, with data encrypted throughout the process. The use cases for this two-way synchronicity are obvious: Messaging and chat, live collaboration, two-way data syncing and offline functionality are all enabled by this.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ransomware roundup: Targeting servers, government, honoring Donald Trump and Voldemort

Security researchers have discovered more ransomware under development, namely one paying homage to Voldemort and another featuring Donald Trump, as well as one variant currently targeting servers and yet a different ransomware hitting government agencies and education institutions. Let’s start with the ransomware that has moved past development into actively locking up computers.DXXD ransomware targeting serversOn Bleeping Computer forums, there were reports of servers being hit with DXXD ransomware; after a file has been encrypted, “dxxd” is added to the end of a filename such as myimportantfile.jpgdxxd.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here