Box moves telephony, Web conferencing to the cloud

You would be forgiven for assuming that a native cloud company -- a company whose raison d'etre is selling cloud applications and platforms -- wouldn't have a lick of on-premises software. But the reality is that for companies founded as recently as 10 to 15 years ago, SaaS analogs for every core computing operation did not exist. For that reason, migrating to SaaS solutions is still very much the mission for Box CIO Paul Chapman. Box CIO Paul Chapman.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to build a strong employee referral culture

A strong referral culture not only helps streamline the recruiting and hiring process, but also delivers benefits such as increased engagement, collaboration and job satisfaction -- not to mention improving retention and loyalty. The recent Active Job Seeker Dilemma survey from Future Workplace, a research firm and workforce management consultancy, and Beyond.com, a career and hiring marketplace, polled 4,347 U.S. job seekers and 129 HR professionals and found that 71 percent of those surveyed say referrals from existing employees were the source of their best hires. Culture club What makes a great employee want to refer their friends, family and former colleagues? Culture, benefits, flexibility and a sense of mission and purpose, says Dan Schawbel, partner and research director at Future Workplace. "Culture is your most important competitive advantage. As long as you're paying people fairly, of course, then they are going to look for factors aside from that as positives or negatives -- they want meaningful work, solid benefits, flexibility, and those are the things they'll talk about with friends, former colleagues, family," Schawbel says. If you already have those things, you're well on your way to building a referral culture. [ Related story: 4 Continue reading

27% off 3 Squares TIM3 MACHIN3 Rice and Multi Cooker – Deal Alert

The 3 Squares TIM3 MACHIN3 Rice Cooker, Slow Cooker, Yogurt Maker & Food Steamer will make a lot more time for you while making great meals for your family. The TIM3 MACHIN3 cooks rice up to 45% faster than competing rice cookers. With Fuzzy Logic 2.0 and a 20% thicker cooking pot ensure that quickly cooked rice comes out delicious - with no burning. This unit is currently rated 4.5 out of 5 stars (read reviews) and is currently selling for $50.99 on Amazon .To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HPC Flows Into Hyperscale With Dell Triton

Dell recently unveiled its datacenter liquid cooling technology under the codename of Triton. Dell’s Extreme Scale Infrastructure team originally designed and developed Triton as a proof of concept for eBay, leveraging Dell’s existing rack-scale infrastructure.

In addition to liquid-cooled cold plates that directly contact the CPUs, Triton is also designed with embedded liquid to air heat exchangers to cool the airborne heat of a large number of tightly packed and hot processor nodes using 80% of the cooling capacity of the heat exchangers. That leaves 20% of Triton’s cooling capacity as “overhead”. The overhead cooling capacity is then used to …

HPC Flows Into Hyperscale With Dell Triton was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: Deloitte goes cognitive, partners with IPSoft

Cloud computing delivers many benefits for end user organizations, but for consulting firms, whose bread and butter is long (some would say torturous) technology implementation projects, the cloud tends to be somewhat toxic to traditional revenue streams.Seeing this impending hole, the big consulting firms have to find new ways to replace existing revenue streams. As a result, we've seen the formation of digital transformation units within the large consulting firms.Another trend is to jump into emergent technologies. We have a good example of this today from Deloitte, which is announcing a partnership with IPSoft.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Deloitte goes cognitive, partners with IPSoft

Cloud computing delivers many benefits for end user organizations, but for consulting firms, whose bread and butter is long (some would say torturous) technology implementation projects, the cloud tends to be somewhat toxic to traditional revenue streams.Seeing this impending hole, the big consulting firms have to find new ways to replace existing revenue streams. As a result, we've seen the formation of digital transformation units within the large consulting firms.Another trend is to jump into emergent technologies. We have a good example of this today from Deloitte, which is announcing a partnership with IPSoft.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microservices Gone Wild – Tech Dive Part 1

I’ve heard a lot of noise about microservices in the last couple of years, perhaps most notably when I attended ONUG in Spring 2015 and Adrian Cockcroft from Battery Ventures (previously from Netflix) was pushing the idea of building applications using container-based microservices very convincingly. In this short series of posts, I’ll look at what microservices are, why you might want them (particularly in containers) and — because it would be no fun if this was all just theory — I’ll run through a demonstration where I take a simple monolithic application and successfully break it out into containerized microservices. I’ll share the code I use because I just know you’ll enjoy playing along at home.

Monolithic Applications

In order to consider the benefits of microservices it’s important first to get some context by looking at what is arguably the polar opposite, the monolithic application. I should preface this by saying that defining what constitutes a monolithic application can be a rather nuanced task, depending on the perspective from which one looks. For my purposes though, a monolithic application is typically one where the entire application is delivered in a single release. Even if the application is logically deployed across Continue reading

HP’s Elite X3 smartphone with Windows 10 will ship this month for $699

Not many are using smartphones with Microsoft's Windows 10 Mobile, but HP's flagship Elite X3 -- which ships this month -- could boost the OS's sagging fortunes. The premium smartphone will be priced starting at US$699 in the U.S. It feels more like a phablet, but HP believes it could also be a PC in a pinch with its top-line mobile processor, OS and innovative accessories. HP first announced the Elite X3 at the Mobile World Congress trade show in February. It has a 5.96-inch AMOLED screen that can display images at a 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution, matching top smartphones like Samsung's Galaxy S7 and LG's G5. The rugged screen has Gorilla Glass 4 technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NSF and GR on Nexus 5000

NSF and GR are two features in Layer 3 network elements (NEs) that allows two adjacent elements to work together when one of them undergoes a control plane switchover or control plane restart.

The benefit is that when a control plane switchover/restart occurs, the impact to network traffic is kept to a minimum and in most cases, to zero.

NSF

• Non-Stop Forwarding
• When a control plane protocol such as BGP, OSPF, or EIGRP restarts and neighbors/adjacencies are reset, NSF will allow the data plane to hold onto the routes that were learned via that control plane protocol and continue to forward traffic while the neighbors/adjacencies are re-established.
• Control plane restarts occur when you have a router or switch with dual route processors or supervisor engines and there is a switchover from the active to the hot standby. When the newly active RP/sup takes over, it has to re-establish neighbors/adjacencies because that information is not part of the synchronization that occurs between the two RPs/sups.
• NSF keeps traffic moving — without the need to reroute — while the switchover is happening.
• NSF happens locally, all within the network element where the switchover is happening.

GR

• Graceful Restart
• GR is the procedure Continue reading

Facebook details its 2016 open source accomplishments

Facebook added 54 new projects to its open-source initiative during the last six months. The company is on a mission to open source its code for software and hardware to encourage ongoing development from outside companies and engineers. "We build tools that enable engineers to work more easily across platforms, automate testing to catch problems sooner, and help improve the overall performance of our products," wrote Christine Abernathy, a developer advocate with Facebook's open source team, in a blog post. "We know from experience that collaborating with the open source community surfaces new ideas and solutions to the challenges that we face." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Salesforce.com’s Wave Analytics helps publisher track leads

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) is leaning heavily on data to identify sales opportunities and track the status of existing accounts, both crucial activities as the textbook publisher’s business increasingly shifts from ink and paper to learning software. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt CTO Brook Colangelo. HMH CTO Brook Colangelo says the company has bet on analytics software as part of a sweeping transformation at the 184-year-old publisher designed to give sales staff more easily accessible data about leads from any mobile device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft disavows 1B-or-bust goal for Windows 10

Microsoft today acknowledged that it would not make its self-imposed goal of putting Windows 10 on 1 billion devices by mid-2018. "We're pleased with our progress to date, but due to the focusing of our phone hardware business, it will take longer than FY18 for us to reach our goal of 1 billion monthly active devices," a Microsoft spokesman said in an emailed statement. "In the year ahead, we are excited about usage growth coming from commercial deployments and new devices - and increasing customer delight with Windows." Microsoft's fiscal year 2018 -- the "FY18" mentioned in the firm's statement -- ends June 1, 2018. Ed Bott of ZDNet first reported on Microsoft's admission.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

If Microsoft can’t install Windows 10 on your PC, it’ll give you a new one

As July 29 gets closer and the free Windows 10 upgrade offer reaches its final days, Microsoft is pulling out all the stops in order to convince users to upgrade. It’s even willing to give you a new laptop. As spotted by Neowin, Microsoft retail stores are offering to install Windows 10 on any compatible machine for free. If the store’s technicians don’t complete the upgrade by the end of that business day, they’ll give you a free 15-inch Dell Inspiron notebook.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The H-1B positions of Clinton and Trump

With the political conventions set for the next two weeks, now is the time to offer a summary of where Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton stand on tech's top issue, immigration. Silicon Valley fears Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president. A letter released Thursday and signed by about 150 technologists, inventors and entrepreneurs, said Trump would be a disaster for innovation. Much of their criticism was directed at his proposed immigration policies. Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, is far more aligned with Silicon Valley on immigration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T likes ‘white-box’ networks and hopes you will, too

AT&T’s march toward standard “white-box” network gear will come to enterprises this week with the introduction of a standard x86 server that can take the place of four specialized network devices. AT&T is aggressively pursuing SDN and NFV (network functions virtualization), a pair of technologies that are expected to change the face of networking over the next several years. The carrier is on track to have nearly one-third of its own infrastructure virtualized this year. More important for enterprises, it’s offering customers a way to do the same thing at their own locations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T likes ‘white-box’ networks and hopes you will, too

AT&T’s march toward standard “white-box” network gear will come to enterprises this week with the introduction of a standard x86 server that can take the place of four specialized network devices. AT&T is aggressively pursuing SDN and NFV (network functions virtualization), a pair of technologies that are expected to change the face of networking over the next several years. The carrier is on track to have nearly one-third of its own infrastructure virtualized this year. More important for enterprises, it’s offering customers a way to do the same thing at their own locations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T likes ‘white-box’ networks and hopes you will, too

AT&T’s march toward standard “white-box” network gear will come to enterprises this week with the introduction of a standard x86 server that can take the place of four specialized network devices. AT&T is aggressively pursuing SDN and NFV (network functions virtualization), a pair of technologies that are expected to change the face of networking over the next several years. The carrier is on track to have nearly one-third of its own infrastructure virtualized this year. More important for enterprises, it’s offering customers a way to do the same thing at their own locations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Essential Azure automation tricks for Windows admins

Any organization making use of the cloud will want to leverage the power of infrastructure automation. This holds true whether you’re tapping Amazon Web Serices, Microsoft Azure, or any other cloud service. Automating repetitively executed tasks will save considerable labor and reduce human error.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Hardware Acceleration Teams Up with Software

New networking approaches such as SDN and NFV will require a balance between hardware and software.

Tech leaders challenged daily to sort through a crush of new security apps

A tech leader's day can be unpredictable, but Ginny Davis, CIO at entertainment services company Technicolor, can rely on one thing: She's guaranteed to get an email from a new security provider urging her to check out its latest and greatest technology. Davis says she values "the evolution in the fight against hackers" and considers the many new options a positive trend, "but it's mind-numbing how quickly [the security landscape] is changing." Bob Lamendola, general manager of infrastructure services at IT services provider Mindshift, agrees. "The number of security-related products and services coming at you is almost frightening. The [security] marketplace is evolving at a frantic rate, making a complex situation even more complex to navigate."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)