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AT&T, a US-based multinational communications company, is connecting millions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Partnering with IBM, developers can deliver IoT innovation and insights on a hybrid cloud platform.
Taking the next step forward in a long-standing collaboration
AT&T and IBM have a longstanding relationship which has deepened over the past 20 years as we have leveraged each other drive value to the market. We are extending our collaboration to the Internet of Things, where we are integrating our capabilities to make it easier for developers to create end-to-end IoT solutions and gain deeper insights from data collected from connected devices.
This partnership is a first of a kind in the industry, providing one platform that scales from the device, through the network to powerful analytics to gain deep insights into IoT data.
Paving the way for new opportunities using deeper data insight
There is a strong industry and business need for developers who can create the next generation of innovative IoT solutions, so enterprises can benefit from the massive amounts of data to be generated by more than 29 billion devices IDC says will be connected by 2020.
According to the VisionMobile 2016 Internet of Things Megatrends report, nearly 10 million developers will be active in IoT by 2020, doubling from the estimated 5 million today. As businesses depend more on IoT solutions to succeed, they must invest in developers to stay competitive.
AT&T Flow Designer is now open for business
As of January 2017, AT&T Flow Designer, a graphical application development tool based on IBM Node-RED, is available on IBM Bluemix. Flow Designer, a unique, single platform for IoT DevOps, has been integrated with Watson APIs to enable developers to easily embed cognitive capabilities in their IoT solutions.
The solution integrates IBM Watson IoT cognitive capabilities and IBM Bluemix cloud technology with AT&T Flow Designer to help companies transform their businesses. The new solution will enable developers to quickly gain deeper insights from data collected by connected devices, which has the potential to reveal new market opportunities and improve productivity. These open standards-based tools allow developers to improve their skills and avoid the churn of learning new tools, protecting investments made in IoT solution development.
Using the solution, IoT developers can realize faster time to value, enhanced levels of security and simple, one-stop shopping that can increase their productivity in building innovative applications.
Creating open standards-based tools to build IoT solutions quickly
Combining the unique strengths in cognitive computing and global connectivity to create open standards-based tools on the IBM Cloud, the partnership between AT&T with IBM enables developers to quickly build and implement widely compatible IoT solutions. For example, Node-RED, an IBM-developed IoT tool now open source through the Linux Foundation, is embedded in AT&T’s Flow Designer. This allows developers to tap the Node-RED community’s hundreds of nodes to include new capabilities into their flows.
With this enhanced ability to deploy apps on the IBM Cloud, developers will have more visibility and understanding into the “things” they connect. For example, imagine an asset tracking app that has the ability to not only show the location of an asset, but to couple that with weather data, businesses would then be able to predict delays in the supply chain and reroute deliveries due to bad weather. Adding the Watson Speech API would enable operators of these assets to use the “hands-free” driving capability to monitor engine performance in real time to help avoid breakdowns.
A convenient one-stop shop for developers
The IBM and AT&T collaboration provides one-stop-shop access to the tools and capabilities needed to create end-to-end IoT solutions – inclusive of device, global connectivity, platforms, applications and analytics. Developers can rapidly compose and deploy IoT analytics applications and industry focused solutions that provide data to generate new business models and insights.
IBM brings its Watson IoT Platform and strong analytics capabilities, which partners nicely with the global connectivity (cellular and satellite) and IoT services that have made AT&T a leader in connected devices. The solution makes it easier for developers and enterprises to create innovative IoT applications and gain deeper insights from connected devices.
Multiple Watson APIs available to use
Watson APIs can be used to break down barriers to analyzing unstructured data and provide access to powerful capabilities, including advanced cognitive computing, machine learning and deep learning approaches to help better understand and engage users and tackle the massive growth of data in multiple formats.
The full list of IBM APIs available in AT&T Flow Designer is:

Cloudant
IBM Push Notifications
Watson IoT Platform
OpenWhisk
IBM Watson

Alchemy Feature Extract
Alchemy Image Analysis
Watson Language Identification
Watson Language Translation
Watson Natural Language Classifier
Watson Personality Insights
Watson Relationship Extraction
Watson Speech-to-Text
Watson Text-to-Speech
Watson Tradeoff Analytics
Watson Visual Recognition

Exciting use cases continue to emerge
Internet of Things use cases have a common set of fundamental requirements, such as easily onboarding any connected thing, creating a real-time communication channel with the thing, capturing data from the thing and storing it in a historical database, providing access to the collected data, and managing the things and the connectivity to them. In addition to these common elements, there are more complex use cases with extended requirements such as: providing a layer of analytics on the data in both real-time and on historical trend data, triggering events based on specific data conditions, and interacting with the thing from business apps and/or from mobile devices.
Here are two simple use case examples which use different APIs with Flow Designer and Watson IoT Platform:
Manage fleets using Watson Speech API:
Businesses share data on their vehicles in near real-time using fleet management apps. Fleet operators can track a vehicle’s location, tap into Watson Speech API for ‘hands-free’ driving and help monitor engine performance to avoid breakdowns. The IBM Watson IoT Platform gives operators more detailed analytics.
Benefit: They’re then better prepared to face unexpected challenges. Fleets can become more efficient, profitable and deliver better customer service.
Maintain tools tapping Watson Tradeoff Analytics API:
A predictive maintenance and quality solution offers near real-time analytics to increase the lifetime of business assets tapping into Watson Tradeoff Analytics API. A farming company can determine which tractors are in the best condition, if proactive maintenance is required and make better decisions about which equipment to take out of service and when. The app uses current and historical data to recommend which to use and which to repair, which helps to minimize equipment downtime.
Benefit: The farm is more productive, saves costs, and its tractors perform better.
A global solution
The IoT landscape is becoming more mobile and more divergent as devices proliferate around the world. The integration of AT&T and IBM IoT platforms provides global device connectivity, ease of development, shortens the application development life cycle and provides faster time to benefit realization. AT&T and IBM’s commitment to open standards and industry standards bodies ensure that solutions are scalable and extensible across a wide variety of device types and platforms.
Enterprises that are global with footprints in multiple regions will find the technology especially valuable due to the combined global reach of IBM and AT&T. AT&T is connecting more IoT devices than any other provider in North America, with a global network that reaches over 200 countries and territories. IBM is an established leader in the IoT, with more than 4,000 IoT client engagements in 170 countries, 1,400 partners in its growing ecosystem and more than 750 IoT patents.
Get started with AT&T Flow Designer on IBM Bluemix
Unlock the power of the Internet of Things by prototyping, building and hosting IoT applications with AT&T’s Flow Designer on Bluemix. AT&T Flow Designer is a robust web-based development environment where data driven applications can be designed and deployed with ease. Flow makes it easy to prototype IoT and machie-to-machine (M2M) solutions. Flow nodes are Open Source and available via GitHub. The solution is available to the vast network of the AT&T and IBM developer communities.
Learn more about AT&T Flow Designer, IBM Watson IoT Platform and IoT tools from AT&T.
A version of this article originally appeared on the IBM IoT blog.
The post Enabling faster prototyping of IoT solutions appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

12. April 201712. April 2017

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Decentralized integration: The innovation enabler

Integration has always been hard work. It requires dealing with the complexity of the diverse landscape of applications and the nuances of how these apps expose their information and services. As we move forward, the diversity of things that need to be integrated is rising exponentially. SaaS applications, APIs from internal and external sources, new big data environments—all of these systems are growing aggressively and putting pressure on integration teams.
This expansion, coupled with the need for business to move faster, changes the way we need to look at integration patterns. And increasingly, these forces move integration beyond the control of central IT.
The challenge for integration today: how we enable the innovators across the organization to use integration capabilities to meet their requirements yet retain an IT landscape we can manage. Let’s talk about the two key audiences involved.
Developers and power users
Modern application developers rapidly prototype creative ideas to reach new markets for the business. They need access to data from multiple sources within and beyond the company in real-time. These developers expose data as APIs so that their applications bring a compelling user experience.
The risk is that developers will write reams of new code to connect data and applications. And so will the next application development team. And the next. Anyone who has tried to unpick the decades-old problems of point-to-point integration will recognize where this is going.
Business power users drive innovation by using new capabilities from modern SaaS applications. These business power users access multiple SaaS applications daily and regularly introduce new ways to use those systems.
Business teams need to be able to make separate systems feel more connected, without having to constantly copy information from one source to another. They may find isolated tools to perform those integrations, perhaps provided independently by each of the SaaS vendors they use. The complexities will pile up. Before long, it could become impossible to unpick all the weird and wonderful ways those applications have been connected.
Neither of these groups have time to work through waterfall enterprise planning to engage with an IT team to perform those integrations. They need to be empowered to do it themselves. But they need to be empowered to do it in a way that others can understand and manage going into the future.
Decentralized integration
The answer is decentralized integration. You want to enabling modern application developers as well as business power users to help themselves wherever possible.
How do you help drive self-service integration that won’t break the business? Fundamentally, both groups need two sets of capabilities.
Better runtimes. You need lightweight, simple-to-use, cloud-ready integration runtimes. Modern developers can easily incorporate them into their solutions without needing highly-specialized skills or centralized installations from another team. You need integration runtimes tuned to the needs of microservices architecture. This blog post on the latest enhancements in IBM Integration Bus dives deeper into lightweight runtimes.
Simple SaaS integrations. Look for managed integration software that simply connects common SaaS applications, but helps users define more complex connections as they go. Capabilities like these are part of the growing software segments called integration platform as a service (iPaaS), and integration software as a service (iSaaS). Either may help non-integration specialists to create powerful integrations directly.
IBM has chosen to take a unique approach by coupling both iPaaS and iSaaS into a fluid experience so the simple things stay simple. Users who need a bit more complexity can go further. Interested? Explore more about IBM App Connect here.
Connect your teams, too
Finally, both groups of users need to be able to collaborate on solutions with one another. Neither should work in a silo. Your application developers should be able to make an integration available to any business user. Just one example in action: IBM offers a model for tight collaboration by allowing the integrations in IBM Integration Bus to be introduced as simple triggers and actions within IBM App Connect.
In summary, IBM Cloud Integration caters to multiple user groups by providing capabilities that can be used independently by teams. At the same time, it helps user groups converge on common techniques and patterns of integration. It also builds cohesion and collaboration across teams. Finally it offers IT the opportunity to analyze and manage the landscape in a unified way to help deliver business innovation faster.
To learn more about IBM Cloud Integration please visit our site at https://www.ibm.com/integration.
The post Decentralized integration: The innovation enabler appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

12. April 201712. April 2017

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A whirlwind tour of open cloud trends in China with UMCloud

The post A whirlwind tour of open cloud trends in China with UMCloud appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
Recently I had the pleasure of making my first visit to China to visit Mirantis’ partner, UMCloud. Along with Greg Elkinbard, Mirantis’ senior technical director for NFV technologies, we visited Beijing, Suzhou (a gem of a city I was not familiar with before), and Shanghai.
Over the course of the week we visited with several large firms that have or are planning some significant OpenStack deployments. Several trends caught my attention.

Open platforms resonate in this market. The phrases “pure play” and “no vendor lock-in” are tangible considerations for many of the firms we spoke with. These firms want an open platform that lets them work with many partners and adapt to changing conditions. Many deployments will include multiple options for SDN or other components as a way to future-proof the deployment. This trend is reflected in the strong participation in communities like OpenStack, OPNFV, and ONAP by Chinese firms.

These clouds are big. We talked to several firms who are planning or already running clouds of several hundred or even a few thousand nodes. These operators have made big clouds work after significant investment, and now they’re looking to standardize and improve the operational aspects.

These clouds are broad. The big clouds are not dedicated to a single vertical such as service providers or media providers. While these are represented, we also heard from firms that are running big clouds for general IT workloads. There’s also significant interest in Big Data and IoT workloads.

OpenStack has a healthy ecosystem in China. The strong demand for OpenStack has spurred a healthy crop of OpenStack-focused companies.

Finally, many thanks to our colleagues at UMCloud for all of their hospitality. Until next time!
The post A whirlwind tour of open cloud trends in China with UMCloud appeared first on Mirantis | Pure Play Open Cloud.
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11. April 201711. April 2017

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4 characteristics that set blockchain apart

I speak to lots of customers who are using or thinking of using blockchain.
Depending on who you speak to, blockchain is either a new power poised to change the way we do business or the latest IT hype.
I believe blockchain has characteristics which mark it as something transformative, perhaps even more transformative than the web.
At its core, blockchain is just a database, one that is particularly good at dealing with transactions about assets, whether they’re financial assets, physical assets such as cars, or something more abstract like customer data.
But blockchain has four key characteristics which make it different:

It is designed to be distributed and synchronized across networks, which makes it ideal for multi-organizational business networks such as supply chains or financial consortia. It also encourages organizations to come out from behind their firewalls and share data.

You can’t just do whatever you want to the data. The types of transactions one can carry out are agreed between participants in advance and stored in the blockchain as “smart contracts,” which helps give confidence that everyone is playing by the rules.

Before one can execute a transaction, there must be agreement between all relevant parties that the transaction is valid. For example, if you&8217;re registering the sale of a cow, that cow must belong to you or you won&8217;t get agreement. This process is known as “consensus” and it helps keep inaccurate or potentially fraudulent transactions out of the database.

Immutability of the data. Once you have agreed on a transaction and recorded it, it can never be changed. You can subsequently record another transaction about that asset to change its state, but you can never hide the original transaction. This gives the idea of provenance of assets, which means that for any asset you can tell where it is, where it&8217;s been and what has happened throughout its life.

Taken together, these four characteristics give organizations a high degree of trust in the data and the business network. That level of trust makes blockchain important for the next generation of business applications.
To understand why, one must understand the nature of trust. To do that, I’m going to take a short detour through 25 centuries of human economic history in my next post.
Learn more about the IBM cloud-based blockchain platform.
The post 4 characteristics that set blockchain apart appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

10. April 201710. April 2017

da Agency

Recent blog posts

I haven’t done an update in a few weeks. Here are some of the blog posts from our community in the last few weeks.

Red Hat joins the DPDK Project by Marcos Garcia – Principal Technical Marketing Manager

Today, the DPDK community announced during the Open Networking Summit that they are moving the project to the Linux Foundation, and creating a new governance structure to enable companies to engage with the project, and pool resources to promote the DPDK community. As a long-time contributor to DPDK, Red Hat is proud to be a founding Gold member of the new DPDK Project initiative under the Linux Foundation.

Read more at http://redhatstackblog.redhat.com/2017/04/06/red-hat-joins-the-dpdk-project/

What’s new in OpenStack Ocata by rbowen

OpenStack Ocata has now been out for a little over a month – https://releases.openstack.org/ – and we’re about to see the first milestone of the Pike release. Past cycles show that now’s about the time when people start looking at the new release to see if they should consider moving to it. So here’s a quick overview of what’s new in this release.

Read more at http://drbacchus.com/whats-new-in-openstack-ocata/

Steve Hardy: OpenStack TripleO in Ocata, from the OpenStack PTG in Atlanta by Rich Bowen

Steve Hardy talks about TripleO in the Ocata release, at the Openstack PTG in Atlanta.

Read more at http://rdoproject.org/blog/2017/04/steve-hardy-openstack-tripido-in-ocata-from-the-openstack-ptg-in-atlanta/

Using a standalone Nodepool service to manage cloud instances by tristanC

Nodepool is a service used by the OpenStack CI team to deploy and manage a pool of devstack images on a cloud server for use in OpenStack project testing.

Read more at http://rdoproject.org/blog/2017/03/standalone-nodepool/

Red Hat Summit 2017 – Planning your OpenStack labs by Eric D. Schabell

This year in Boston, MA you can attend the Red Hat Summit 2017, the event to get your updates on open source technologies and meet with all the experts you follow throughout the year.

Read more at http://redhatstackblog.redhat.com/2017/04/04/red-hat-summit-2017-planning-your-openstack-labs/

Stephen Finucane – OpenStack Nova – What’s new in Ocata by Rich Bowen

At the OpenStack PTG in February, Stephen Finucane speaks about what’s new in Nova in the Ocata release of OpenStack.

Read more at http://rdoproject.org/blog/2017/03/stephen-finucane-openstack-nova-whats-new-in-ocata/

Zane Bitter – OpenStack Heat, OpenStack PTG, Atlanta by Rich Bowen

At the OpenStack PTG last month, Zane Bitter speaks about his work on OpenStack Heat in the Ocata cycle, and what comes next.

Read more at http://rdoproject.org/blog/2017/03/zane-bitter-openstack-heat-openstack-ptg-atlanta/

The journey of a new OpenStack service in RDO by amoralej

When new contributors join RDO, they ask for recommendations about how to add new services and help RDO users to adopt it. This post is not a official policy document nor a detailed description about how to carry out some activities, but provides some high level recommendations to newcomers based on what I have learned and observed in the last year working in RDO.

Read more at http://rdoproject.org/blog/2017/03/the-journey-of-a-service-in-rdo/

InfraRed: Deploying and Testing Openstack just made easier! by bregman

Deploying and testing OpenStack is very easy. If you read the headline and your eyebrows raised, you are at the right place. I believe that most of us, who experienced at least one deployment of OpenStack, will agree that deploying OpenStack can be a quite frustrating experience. It doesn’t matter if you are using it for […]

Read more at http://abregman.com/2017/03/20/infrared-deploying-and-testing-openstack-just-made-easier/
Quelle: RDO

10. April 201710. April 2017

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Paygilant prevents mobile wallet fraud with IBM Cloud technology

People around the world do almost everything with their mobile devices. Paying for purchases with them is just another use case that makes sense.
That’s why the issuers — banks, financial markets, communications service providers and mobile wallet providers — as well as merchants want to be part of this trend. They’re developing and promoting their mobile wallets to the market and appealing to their channels and installed customer bases, which increases mobile wallet use. It’s just a matter of time before plastic cards will be replaced entirely by mobile wallets.
Authentication slowing things down
The promise of the mobile wallet is convenience, but what usually happens is customers are forced to authenticate almost every purchase regardless of the associated risk, so it really isn’t convenient after all.
Say someone in a coffee shop just wants to grab a coffee and go. Typically, that person is on the way to the office and it’s a hassle to be delayed with the need to authenticate using a pincode, fingerprint or some other type of authentication required by the mobile wallet provider.
In most cases, it’s not necessary and doesn’t make much sense. For example, if someone buys the same coffee at roughly the same time at the same location every day, then the likelihood of that transaction being fraudulent on any given day is close to zero. Authentication in this scenario just causes friction.
Need for increased security
Today, fraud is growing by flying under the radar because of a new trend. To avoid hassle, mobile wallet issuers now allow customers to buy up to a certain amount without any authentication. For amounts up to $100 in the US and Canada or up to €50 in Europe or up to £20 in the UK, for example, users don’t need to authenticate.
This situation poses an even bigger risk because the only thing a fraudster needs to do is steal someone’s phone, go to a merchant and buy things using that device. By the time the fraud is detected, the money is already gone. This is easily feasible, as more than half of mobile users don’t lock their phones and up to 40 percent of robberies in major cities involve cell phones.
Eliminating friction and fraud
This fraud trend is what triggered Paygilant Ltd. to develop a solution that would address how to eliminate both friction and fraud.
A portmanteau of “payment” and “vigilant,” the name Paygilant says in a word what the company does: detects fraud at the point of payment with an innovative mobile wallet solution. Paygilant was founded in 2014 to eliminate both the authentication friction that occurs when someone on the go uses a smartphone for a quick, routine purchase and the fraud that occurs when someone uses a stolen identity or device, especially with smaller purchases that are not authenticated.
Vision leading to innovation
Paygilant had a transformational vision for the mobile wallet space. To make it a reality, we needed to team with a provider that could help us design and build our solution architecture. We evaluated different options and decided to apply to the IBM Alpha Zone accelerator program, which is an intensive, 20-week program for startups to develop solutions with onsite support, mentoring and technical training. Paygilant engineers worked closely with the Alpha Zone team to create a highly scalable architecture comprising various IBM products and services.
Developing the mobile wallet solution
We developed a product based on an innovative technology which relocates the traditional fraud detection process from the back end to the mobile device. We now have a unique behavioral map of each customer, reflecting individual activities and spending habits, enabling the most accurate detection rate. The map is updated every two to three days, and it tracks customer activity from all channels, regardless of whether the transaction involves a plastic card or a mobile device.
In real time, before a transaction is even completed, we can detect on the device whether the transaction is made by the customer or whether it’s suspicious. In a majority of cases, we eliminate the need to authenticate because the detection rate is extremely high, three times higher than any traditional fraud-detection system. At a coffee shop, customers simply tap their phone, take their coffee and they’re on the way to the office. There’s no need for them to do anything else, without compromising on risk.
Only roughly 10 percent of transactions trigger authentication that requires the Paygilant solution to validate identity. If it’s the authorized user, that person will pass successfully. If it’s a fraudster, then the authentication will fail and fraud will be prevented. Paygilant’s role is to identify the suspicious activity or transaction and let the wallet provider know that there is something suspicious going on. What action to take next is up to the wallet provider.
Building on cognitive and cloud data services
Paygilant can work as a cloud-based or on-premises solution. The cloud option runs on IBM technology. The on-premises version is for financial institutions that aren’t comfortable sending data outside their own networks. The registration process includes IBM Watson Natural Language Classifier technology, which makes sure people registering are really who they say they are.
IBM Watson technology helps build a customer profile based on information from different public data sources, including social media information, and matches it against the registration details.
Delivering on the promise
Paygilant decreases both the need for authentication and the occurrence of fraud, which means savings for banks and mobile wallet providers. Typically, customers significantly reduce payment authentication with Paygilant than with other systems. Banks and mobile wallet providers can cut operating expenses for fraud detection by up to 60 percent because call center workload is reduced, as well as the cost of fraud itself.
Users don’t even realize that the Paygilant solution is backing up the mobile wallet app they’re using. It works in the background. The solution makes possible the frictionless shopping experience customers expect with mobile wallets.
Read the case study to learn more.
The post Paygilant prevents mobile wallet fraud with IBM Cloud technology appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud