Kategorie: technology

How two companies reinvented themselves with SAP S/4HANA and managed IBM Cloud

SAP data and applications are mission-critical assets that impact operations across an entire enterprise. With that in mind, leaders count on SAP architects and developers to discover new ways to derive value from their enterprise resource planning (ERP) environments as they migrate to S/4HANA.
At the SAP TechEd conference later this month, I’ll share in-depth examples of companies that have transformed business processes by deploying HANA with cloud managed services.
Here’s a short preview:
Footwear company reinvents its entire IT environment in less than two years
After some business changes, a footwear company had only two years to stand up an entirely new IT infrastructure before it could no longer use the platform of its former parent company. To achieve that goal, the company implemented the SAP Fashion Management solution to handle all of its manufacturing, wholesale and retail operations. The solution runs on an SAP HANA database deployed on managed IBM Cloud.
The managed cloud deployment hosts the SAP and non-SAP applications that compose the company’s complete enterprise landscape. Service-level agreements help ensure high application availability and disaster recovery while enabling the company to be agile enough to change as needed, whether that means scaling for capacity or rapid provisioning of IT resources for new initiatives.
Within a few weeks, the company was running its entire SAP system without any in-house technical support. With IBM managing the day-to-day maintenance of the private cloud infrastructure, the company could focus on designing and selling quality footwear.
Construction services company builds a better infrastructure
A construction services company wanted to improve its decision making in business operations. The key to unlocking this insight lay in analyzing data from sales, logistics and finance. That information was stored in multiple, independent systems which made cross-analysis slow, inefficient and prone to errors.
IBM worked with this company to create a new, more integrated IT environment, using SAP S/4HANA to consolidate finance, sales and logistics data into a single repository. The solution is deployed using IBM Cloud for SAP Applications, which frees the IT team from the burden of managing and maintaining a physical infrastructure.
With a unified way to manage inventory and financial data, the company can access enterprise information 50 percent faster and has reduced response times by 42 percent, driving faster service delivery and improved customer satisfaction scores. It has also reduced operational costs by around 15 percent while enjoying the benefits of a security-rich and highly accessible cloud environment.
Come to SAP TechEd in Las Vegas 25 – 29 September to learn how IBM helped build and implement these S/4HANA solutions. Be sure to register for speaking session CPL156 and visit IBM at booth 708. Visit the SAP TechEd website to register.
To learn more about how the right managed cloud services provider can maximize the value of your SAP deployment, read this analyst report from Frost & Sullivan.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Fun with Watson: Object recognition

Back in the old BBS days, users posted how-to guides called “fun-withs.”
Fun-withs were a sort of off-label user manuals. They weren’t really official uses, but they were uses all the same. To bring back some of the old fun-with spirit, I wanted to share a few off-label guides for how to use Watson. This one teaches Watson how to recognize an object of a user’s choice.
It’s easy to start training Watson on object recognition, and the best part is that no code is necessary to get started. You almost don’t even need this guide. All a user really needs is a large collection of images. I used pineapples because I had stumbled upon a huge cache of easily licensable photographs of pineapples (don’t ask me why).
What you’ll need
Put together a zip file of at least 50 low-resolution pictures of your chosen object. The total file size can’t be more than 5 megabytes, so that’s no more than 100 kilobytes per photo. On the plus side, you can have up to three zip files for a total of 15 megabytes. Sometimes less is more, but in this case, more is more. Let’s say my zip file is called “pineapples.zip.”
Next, assemble another zip file containing at least fifty pictures that are not pictures of your chosen object. If you think your object could be mistaken for another object that looks similar, put pictures of that in this zip file (for example, succulents can sometimes look like pineapples). This can help train Watson to really learn what your object is. We’ll call that file “not-pineapples.zip.”
Keep in mind that training an AI is all about the quality of the data set. You’re going to want good, clear photographs of your object in various poses and positions. If there are different ‘phases’ of your object, such as growth, color or maturity, you’ll want to include photos of those different phases.
Also, not all images will be complete images of your object, so it’s important to include a few “cut” images that feature a half or a part of a pineapple. In real life, Watson may encounter photos where only part of an object is featured, so it’s valuable to teach it to recognize the object in those cases as well. Half of a pineapple should still be as recognizable as a pineapple.
Simple next steps
Once you have your images together, go to this page and upload your files. Then name your class to describe your image (in my case “pineapple”). After that, click “Train your classifier.”

Now you can test Watson and see if it’s learned to recognize your image. If not, you can continue training it by uploading more images of the object and things that are not the object. It will get better as you give it more data.

As promised, not one line of code was harmed in the making of this guide. It really is that easy. The best part is that so much of Watson is this accessible, there are many more potential fun-withs you can try.
You can try out the voice and tone analyzer. You can build decision trees. You can even do speech to text or text to speech, all right in your browser. Just click this one button on the Bluemix Catalog page:

Learn more about the fun you can have with Watson.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

How Dreamstime stores and manages 64 million stock images with IBM Cloud Object Storage

Today’s digital media companies are experiencing an explosion of content, resulting in massive amounts of data that must be stored and secured. For media companies working with high-resolution images, content repositories can consist of millions of photos and visuals, with hundreds of terabytes or even petabytes of data.
Stock photo company Dreamstime provides millions of high-quality images to clients in the creative market, from independent customers in the private sector to Fortune 500 companies. The Dreamstime website has 18 million registered members and receives content from more than 300,000 contributing photographers from around the world.
Petabytes of stock images
Dreamstime manages 64 million photos, illustrations, clipart images and vectors for a total of 1.5 petabytes of data. This repository is growing at a rapid clip, with photographers uploading an average of 1 million new images to the Dreamstime website every week.
All these images must be securely stored and backed up, while being available to creative clients for immediate download via the Dreamstime website or our homegrown mobile app.
The need for an affordable storage solution
To manage our content repository, we relied on replicated RAID 6 storage. However, as the data repository grew in size, we needed a more efficient and cost-effective technology to store and manage petabytes of data while making data available to our vast customer base.
Dreamstime needed a storage infrastructure that was readily available, protected against data loss and could be easily integrated with its mobile application, which manages the presentation and ordering of stock images and videos.
We also needed a storage solution that could handle and protect against surges in use, especially around peak periods such as holidays, which see a 100 percent increase in downloads.
We worked with IBM to analyze our storage and traffic requirements, ultimately selecting the IBM Cloud Object Storage regional Flex option as the best fit. The solution provides flexible, secure storage and backup while protecting against possible surges in read costs.
We were able to integrate the Dreamstime customer-facing web and mobile application with the new IBM Cloud Object Storage solution, using a sample code provided by IBM. We tested and validated that everything worked seamlessly with the IBM Cloud Object Storage free trial instance before going live.
A more efficient content repository storage solution
With IBM Cloud Object Storage, Dreamstime now has virtually limitless scalability to keep pace with our growing library of stock images. The company’s new, highly elastic solution can meet heavy customer demand, even in peak usage. Additionally, we no longer need to monitor servers for maintenance issues, eliminating a hassle for the Dreamstime IT team.
Since migrating to IBM Cloud Object Storage, Dreamstime has achieved a 40 percent decrease in overall storage and backup costs. IBM Cloud Object Storage uses SecureSlice technology, which combines encryption, erasure coding and geo-dispersal of data for greater security, flexibility and availability using only one copy of the data.  As a result, this innovative technology backs up Dreamstime’s data without duplicating it, yet still offers a high level of resilience.
The bottomline is we no longer need double or triple the storage. Since the Cloud Object Storage technology is so reliable, our Dreamstime content repository now has a dual purpose: it is an active storage repository while providing geo-dispersed disaster recovery and backup storage. This efficient solution provides significant time and cost savings for our company.
Learn more about how companies can benefit from IBM Cloud Object Storage.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Tackling digital transformation in the multicloud world

In today’s digital economy, enterprises face disruption by innovative business models and new players in the established industries. Their customers increasingly demand seamless and engaging experiences through a range of digital channels, including mobile apps, web, and IoT devices. Thanks to the immediacy of social media, many people have no patience for brands that fail to respond to them when they reach out. These market forces can create challenges for your existing business processes and applications, as well as the underlying infrastructure supporting them.
I believe these disruptions are pushing line of business leaders to demand an agile, connected and secure IT infrastructure that supports rapid innovation. Business leaders and developers alike need an agile and modern IT infrastructure that offers a choice of industry leading applications; where application development and integration can happen quickly across multiple clouds; as no organization has just one cloud.
We’re in a multicloud world. You need to operate in the multicloud environment with the agility of a start-up while meeting the security and compliance needs of a major enterprise.
In recent conversations with several CEO, CIOs, and developers a few common themes consistently emerged. They need to leverage cloud architectures to innovate quickly, with the choice of private and public clouds. They need flexible development platforms usually based on containers, access to middleware development frameworks that allow them to quickly build cloud native applications and a DevOps tool-chain that support build and deployment in a very agile manner. They need the ability to automate mission-critical business processes and decision-making in the cloud. And they need to unlock the power of their existing data using a range of integration approaches that are all secure and compliant.
So how can IBM help? Let me share examples where IBM Cloud is helping enterprises towards their digital transformation goals.
1. Agile innovation and transforming process
Bernhardt Furniture Co., a furniture manufacturer with global distribution, wanted to quickly move away from pen-and-paper sales workflows. They turned to the IBM Cloud which helped them enable a digital transformation of their customer engagement experience in 10 weeks.  Similarly, the UK National Healthcare Service (NHS) moved their organ transplant allocation process to the IBM Cloud, automating their business processes and decision-making which was designed so that NHS could more quickly maximize patient outcomes.
To drive business innovation and agility like Bernhardt and NHS, IBM offers an industry-leading application development platform of WebSphere and DevOps solutions that support the application lifecycle—on both IBM Cloud and IBM Cloud private. It offers a container based platform and microservices application development framework for cloud native  applications. IBM offers a range of options when it comes to transforming existing applications, including support for “lifting and shifting” existing applications using containers, wrapping existing application with API preserving investments and refactoring existing applications to a microservice-based architecture. In addition, IBM Cloud private, as well as a digital process automation platform can deliver business process innovation both behind your firewall or in the cloud.
2. Data and information Integration
Many businesses have embraced the API economy, helping companies unlock insights by connecting data and capabilities across internal and external development platforms. Nedbank Ltd, a South African bank serving more than four million customers, wanted to find new ways to develop and capitalize on APIs to access information and quickly bring new service innovation to market. With IBM’s support, they created an end-to-end developer, management and distribution platform for all of the bank’s APIs.
You can connect all your data and services, regardless if they reside within your firewall, on public clouds or IOT devices in a security rich environment. IBM App Connect and MQ Messaging services help you integrate and connect most data and services seamlessly across applications regardless of deployment model or location.
3. Security and management across your clouds
The India-based Yes Bank wanted to meet consumer demand for better and faster ways to pay for goods and services. To create new services that would also maintain high levels of data security, Yes Bank built a secure API ecosystem with IBM tools. They use APIs to expose specific data and services in their customized, secure ecosystem. As a result, the bank is able to create new products and services, meeting the needs of their customers more quickly.
Security-rich management and optimization solutions that provide near real-time insights down to a transaction level on these complex applications and workloads across public and private clouds using various middleware stacks and APIs is critical to delivering high quality of service. With IBM Netcool and Application Performance Management (APM) offerings supported by cognitive technology you can efficiently manage and monitor workloads across these complex environments.
4. Competitive advantage
Meritage Homes Corporation builds homes across the U.S. and was using many different on-premises and cloud applications to manage facets of their business. As the company’s technology footprint expanded, they found the cloud solution to manage increasing application complexity: consolidate all of its customer points into a single buyer portal, and create secure APIs to external sites. Strategic application integration from IBM Cloud helped give Meritage the best use of existing investments in processes and applications.
IBM offers you the choice to modernize your existing applications at your speed and timing. IBM private and public cloud solutions let you achieve your business goals on infrastructure you’ve already invested in, adding additional cloud infrastructure where you need it.
These are only a few of the many examples of how IBM has helped clients meet the changing needs of the new economy. To learn how IBM can help you navigate a multicloud world, visit us at IBM Cloud. I look forward to helping you succeed.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Innovations and momentum from IBM and VMware accelerate enterprise cloud adoption

In my previous post, I discussed the evolving enterprise cloud landscape and how the conversation in IT departments has shifted from “why cloud” to “which cloud.”
There’s no question that businesses want secure and simple access to cloud-native services such as AI, data and analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), and a serverless infrastructure. And they want to manage their data in geographically strategic locations.
That’s where the partnership between IBM and VMware comes to life. For more than 18 months, IBM and VMware have been working together to enable businesses to use a common operating environment spanning VMware-based, on-premises data centers and IBM Cloud. This not only has helped countless enterprises accelerate cloud adoption, but has also spurred the creation of new business opportunities.
We have already helped more than 1,400 enterprises transition their VMware environments to IBM Cloud, including Honeywell International, Syniverse, Vodafone and Telstra to name just a few. We have launched VMware solutions across the nearly 60 IBM data centers worldwide; enabled channel partners to create a one-stop shop for IBM Cloud for VMware solutions; prepared more than 4,000 IBM global services professionals to support VMware on IBM Cloud; and created a broad ecosystem of technology partners including F5 Networks, Fortinet, HyTrust, Intel, Veeam, Zerto and more.
Today at VMworld Europe, IBM and VMware each made announcements that further this strategic partnership and support continued adoption of IBM Cloud for VMware solutions. Highlights include:

IBM is a key design partner and one of the first partners to adopt VMware’s HCX technologies, which delivers secure and seamless interoperability and mobility between IBM Cloud and any VMware-based cloud with no downtime.
IBM is making available VMware Horizon Cloud, the next generation of virtual desktop and application cloud services, in the fourth quarter of 2017 to customers on the IBM Cloud as a fully cloud-hosted service which IBM manages end-to-end.
New, SAP-certified bare metal servers are now available in the IBM Cloud, including the first SAP-certified configurations for VMware environments and larger cloud solutions with up to 8 terabytes of memory for data-intensive SAP applications.
IBM Cloud is one of the first of a new class of partners carrying the VMware Cloud Verified trust mark, which identifies providers that fuel business growth by driving innovation, improving efficiency and lowering costs for customers as they transform application portfolios for a multi-cloud, multi-device world.
F5 Networks and Fortinet are joining the ecosystem of technology partners supporting IBM Cloud for VMware solutions with network control and visibility solutions that will be available in the IBM Cloud in the fourth quarter.

Further building on this momentum, today IBM and Dell EMC announced an expanded partnership to resell IBM Cloud for VMware solutions. Now, Dell EMC’s ecosystem of commercial and enterprise clients can seamlessly move their VMware workloads to the IBM Cloud.
Together, IBM and VMware are helping to address the key challenges facing enterprises as they journey to the cloud.
Watch the replay of David Kenny, IBM Senior Vice President for Watson and Cloud, and Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, discussing these exciting milestones and innovations onstage at VMworld Europe 2017.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Cloud-iplicity: Integration in a multicloud world

Let’s say you suddenly have the power to clone yourself. How many of you would it take to tackle all of your work on any given day? Two? Three? Four? Twelve?
If this sounds like a familiar scenario, you probably remember the movie “Multiplicity” starring Michael Keaton (and Michael Keaton and Michael Keaton) as Doug Kinney, a construction worker whose demanding job is getting in the way of his family life. While working on a construction project at a science facility he is offered what appears to be the perfect solution: clone himself.
Initially, he creates a clone (Doug Number 2) to take his place at work so he can spend more time with his family. But when that isn’t enough, he creates a second clone (Doug Number 3) to help around the house. Then the clones start creating their own clones (Doug Number 4) to help share some of the workload with less-than-stellar results. You know how when you make a copy of a copy, it’s not as sharp as the original. What started as a way to simplify, reduce his workload and accomplish things faster just made his life more complex—and not as sharp.
This very well could describe your current cloud environment. Business leaders are making technology adoption decisions with less involvement of central IT. This has led to the explosion of new endpoints like mobile, social and the Internet of Things. The resulting complexity drives the need for additional custom applications. Even though all of this has been done in the name of speed and agility, it has led to a huge increase in decentralized deployments across on-premises and multicloud environments. How many different business initiated-clouds do you even have running? One. Two. Three. Maybe twelve.
The sprawling cloud environment has necessitated a shift in the role of centralized IT teams to evolve from a controlling role to an integrating role. Because no matter where these applications are located and who owns them, they all need to work together. The name of the game in a hybrid world is interoperability.
Hybrid integration, a combination of technologies, tools and services, ensures the ability to connect any application regardless of location and architecture. But moving to a hybrid integration approach can be challenging for some organizations. So we brought in our friends at IDC to help define the top five triggers that force organizations to move to a hybrid integration approach.
Over the next few weeks, I will share key findings from the IDC report, “The Urgent Need for Hybrid Integration.” Upcoming posts will explore how organizations are responding to changing integration requirements by focusing on:

The need to integrate cloud and on-premises applications
Mobile enablement of applications and digital services
Proliferation of representational state transfer (REST) APIs and the need to manage their lifecycles
Supporting analytics-driven applications
End-user self-service integration

Your new normal is a combination of multicloud and on-premises environments that all need to connect. How successfully you can make that happen will define your success.
If you want to get a head start, download the IDC Report, “The Urgent Need for Hybrid Integration” or go to ibm.com/integration to learn more about only-from-IBM solutions for hybrid cloud integration.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud