IDG Contributor Network: Cloud, SaaS and SD-WAN drive new licensing technology

In 5 software licensing challenges in the next generation network , I noted the important role that licensing models would have in the transition to the software defined network.  But there’s a deeper linkage between the growing demand for SaaS applications, cloud technology evolution and new software-defined Wide Area Network solutions.  What does that linkage mean for the licensing technologies that will drive monetization for the new software defined network?Let’s start with the Q3 Forrester Wave report “Recurring Customer And Billing Management,” which speaks broadly to the accelerating trend of consumers and businesses using Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings via the cloud versus traditional on-premises software.  The author states that as this takes place, software vendors invariably migrate to subscription, or usage-based monetization models.  The report goes on to reference a Forrester 2017 SaaS adoption report that finds “in 2017, we expect software-as-a-service (SaaS) spend in particular to be more than 1.5 times that of license software.”To read this article in full, please click here

Unlocking the Internet for Education: Policymakers Hold the Key

Education is the basis for individual empowerment, employability, and gender equity. Unfortunately, it is not available to everyone.

In 2015, the international community agreed to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which commits countries to addressing these challenges. Such commitments require innovative approaches that go beyond simply building more educational institutions. At the Internet Society we believe the Internet is a key piece of that puzzle, which is why we are pleased to release a new paper, “Internet Access and education: Key considerations for policy makers”, to help navigate some of the opportunities and challenges.

The Internet has great potential to not only expand access to, but also improve the quality of education. It opens doorways to a wealth of information, knowledge, and educational resources to students and teachers. It also promotes opportunities for learning beyond the classroom – a critical feature to promote the lifelong learning that the future demands. A skilled workforce that utilizes ICTs effectively is a key factor in the global digital economy and for harnessing its natural resources for sustainable growth. Education is where it starts.

This Internet Society briefing describes ways in which policymakers can unlock that potential through an enabling framework Continue reading

The Supreme Court Wanders into the Patent Troll Fight

The Supreme Court Wanders into the Patent Troll Fight

Next Monday, the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Oil States Energy Services, LLC vs. Greene’s Energy Group, LLC, which is a case to determine whether the Inter Partes Review (IPR) administrative process at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) used to determine the validity of patents is constitutional.

The constitutionality of the IPR process is one of the biggest legal issues facing innovative technology companies, as the availability of this process has greatly reduced the anticipated costs, and thereby lessened the threat, of patent troll litigation. As we discuss in this blog post, it is ironic that the outcome of a case that is of such great importance to the technology community today may hinge on what courts in Britain were and were not doing more than 200 years ago.

The Supreme Court Wanders into the Patent Troll FightThomas Rowlandson [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

As we have discussed in prior blog posts, the stakes are high: if the Supreme Court finds IPR unconstitutional, then the entire system of administrative review by the USPTO — including IPR and ex parte processes — will be shuttered. This would be a mistake, as administrative recourse at the USPTO is one of the few ways Continue reading

IoT needs to be secured by the network

Everyone who has a stake in the internet of things, from device manufacturers to network service providers to implementers to customers themselves, makes important contributions to the security or lack thereof in enterprise IoT, attendees at Security of Things World were told.“The key to all [IoT devices] is that they are networked,” Jamison Utter, senior business development manager at Palo Alto Networks told a group at the conference. “It’s not just a single thing sitting on the counter like my toaster, it participates with the network because it provides value back to business.”“I think the media focuses a lot on consumer, because people reading their articles and watching the news … think about it, but they’re not thinking about the impact of the factory that built that consumer device, that has 10,000 or 20,000 robots and sensors that are all IoT and made this happen.”To read this article in full, please click here

IoT needs to be secured by the network

Everyone who has a stake in the internet of things, from device manufacturers to network service providers to implementers to customers themselves, makes important contributions to the security or lack thereof in enterprise IoT, attendees at Security of Things World were told.“The key to all [IoT devices] is that they are networked,” Jamison Utter, senior business development manager at Palo Alto Networks told a group at the conference. “It’s not just a single thing sitting on the counter like my toaster, it participates with the network because it provides value back to business.”“I think the media focuses a lot on consumer, because people reading their articles and watching the news … think about it, but they’re not thinking about the impact of the factory that built that consumer device, that has 10,000 or 20,000 robots and sensors that are all IoT and made this happen.”To read this article in full, please click here

Nutanix: We don’t need a traditional channel program | Channelnomics

Interesting piece on Nutanix and resellers: Nutanix’s senior director of EMEA channels Jan Ursi has defended against a claim the firm has no clear channel strategy, suggesting that the hyperconverged vendor does not rely on conventional methods, such as reward programs, in order to foster partner relationships. Some thoughts Building a reseller channel is expensive […]

Edge Computing: 5 Viable Telco Business Models

Edge Computing: 5 Viable Telco Business Models Download the HPE MEC Research Report, . Telecommunications (telco) providers are excited about Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) because it promises to make compute and storage capabilities available to customers at the edge of communications networks. Workloads and applications will be closer to customers, potentially enhancing experiences and enabling new services and offers. MEC is being... Read more →

Today, Eufy Genie Speaker With Alexa is Just $19.99 – Deal Alert

This Alexa-enabled smart speaker from Eufy is discounted 43% today on Amazon as part of their "Black Friday Week" event (see all of today's active deals here). Stream music from Spotify, Pandora, SiriusXM and others. Control smart home devices. Ask for weather, sports score, news and more. Eufy Genie currently averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon where Its typical list price has been reduced 43% to just $19.99. See it on Amazon here.To read this article in full, please click here

Multi-arch All The Things

[This post was written by Phil Estes and Michael Friis.]

True multi-platform workload portability has long been the holy grail of enterprise computing. All kinds of virtualization strategies have been used over the years to approximate this dream to varying levels of acceptable performance or usability. On the one hand, virtual machines and hardware virtualization are flexible enough that you can mix and match operating systems (and even CPU architectures) on the same host—but they come with a lot of overhead. However, language-based virtual runtimes don’t have packaging formats that encapsulate all system-level app dependencies, and that makes them unsuitable for general-purpose deployment and configuration management.

Docker came along as a unique type of virtualization that only virtualizes the operating system for container processes. Docker uses existing Linux kernel features to offer isolation characteristics that are similar to what is available with virtual machines. The analogy of a “standard shipping container,” combined with these isolation primitives, caught developer interest immediately. With this new shipping metaphor came speed and agility that blew the doors off virtual machine size and speed constraints that impacted developer workflow, not to mention developer happiness! The containerization craze has grown like wildfire since then, but Continue reading

Key Software Firms Reengineer Their Code With OpenACC

Academic centers and government agencies often design and write their own applications, but some of them and the vast majority of enterprise customers with HPC applications usually depend on third parties for their software. They also depend upon those software developers to continually enhance and scale those applications, and that means adding support for GPU accelerators. Two important ones, Gaussian and ANSYS, depend not only on GPUs, but the OpenACC programming model, to extend across more cores and therefore do more work faster.

Let’s start with Gaussian.

The way that chemicals react can be the difference between a product success

Key Software Firms Reengineer Their Code With OpenACC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.