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Most professionals place a premium on communication and transparency in the workplace.
More than half (52 percent) of workers who took part in a recent Society for Human Resource Management study indicated that management’s communication of the organization&8217;s goals and strategies was important to their job satisfaction. Many companies, in turn, pay a premium to facilitate communication, spending thousands transporting and accommodating an increasingly remote workforce for an annual, in-person, company-wide meeting.
The goal is to reunite the organization under common values and goals ahead of the new year. But in reality, 72 percent of employees report they don’t fully understand the strategies of the companies for which they work, according to a survey by Ustream, an IBM company.
The challenge of bringing the workforce together will only become more challenging to accomplish at scale. Based on the data, a company’s finances may be better allocated toward consistent communication of company goals than plane tickets. Streaming video can help fill the gap.
Shrinking the distance
Numerous companies are already required to institute new systems that unite their distributed employees. IDC projects that by 2020, mobile workers will account for 72 percent of the US workforce. As this shift occurs, the virtual meeting — supported by streaming video — will become the approach for companies of all sizes to shrink the distance between corporate headquarters and remote teams.
Rather than allocating thousands for face-to-face meetings, executives can use video to communicate effectively while cutting costs. According to the Ustream report, spending just $100 per employee on communication can yield a 50 to 1 return on investment. Compare that to the average expense for air travel, which ranges from $1,000 for domestic to $2,500 for international flights, compounded with additional transport to and from the site, refreshments and other expenses. What’s more, travel can drain employee productivity and create stress.
According Gallup’s State of the American Workplace report, re-engaging employees could make a dent in the $450 to $550 billion companies lose annually due to loss of productivity. Effective communication can help companies address the 58 percent of employees that report wanting better insight into the company’s next steps, according to Ustream’s survey. Another 63 percent of employees reported wishing they heard from company leadership more often.
Using data to hold meaningful meetings
Streaming video solutions can not only help organizations share important messages, but also ensure those messages resonate. In the near future, machine-learning technologies such as IBM Watson will enable management to gauge the social sentiment of attendees by analyzing their Q&A and social activity during a virtual meeting. They also will be able to conduct deep analysis of how employees engage with and share recorded video content from these events.
Companies can use these and other insights from Watson to refine how they share content with their workforces during virtual meetings. Over time, these efforts can help to ensure that no one within an organization is unaware of the company&8217;s performance and goals, or unsure of how they, as individual employees, are helping the business achieve those objectives.
Learn more about IBM Cloud Video.
The post Dare to lead with streaming video at your next annual meeting appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

27. Dezember 201627. Dezember 2016

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Tackling worldwide education challenges in the cognitive era

A seemingly intractable problem facing countries across the world is the mismatch between the education of young people and employment.
According, to the United Nations’ International Labor Organization, almost 75 million people ages 15-24 around the world, about 12.6 percent, are unemployed. High levels of youth unemployment and the shortage of critical work skills emphasize the need for solutions that can be scaled to fix the worldwide spread of this disconnect.
IBM recognizes that cloud and cognitive technology can help transform education and training for young people and ultimately help lower youth unemployment.
Kofi Appenteng, President of the Africa-America Institute (AAI) and member of the Ford Foundation Board of Trustees, recently visited IBM Austin as part of a tour with corporate partners to brainstorm how AAI can play an optimal role connecting public and private interests on a global scale to deal with the education and training challenge.
IBM partners with AAI through our corporate citizenship programs and received a Corporate Responsibility Award from the US-based international organization in 2015.
Appenteng’s visit was an opportunity to listen and to share expertise on the training of young people, as well as learn more about the work AAI does.
Some key takeaways from the discussion included:

How education and training can be used to drive improvement and advancement among young people, 11 percent of whom are non-literate.
Techniques and approaches for bringing various stakeholders together to make meaningful sustainable impacts.
The importance of infrastructure in transforming and enabling young people’s educational opportunities cannot be overemphasized.
Fostering engagement between stakeholders can positively impact education and training of young people.

The visit showcased one of the many ways IBM continues to play an important role in tackling some of the world’s most daunting challenges.
As Chalapathy Neti, Director of Education Transformation at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center wrote, “The challenge of providing a quality education to all students is a global one. Two out of every three adults have not received the equivalent of a high school education.”
Talent and talent development is, in the end, the driver of innovation. Cloud and cognitive solutions provide powerful tools that can dramatically lead to improvement in education and training of young people.
Learn more about how IBM is helping spur educational advancements with Cloud Academy and Watson.
The post Tackling worldwide education challenges in the cognitive era appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

22. Dezember 201622. Dezember 2016

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Integration is at the core of effective hybrid deployment

No sizable enterprise instantaneously moves to cloud in one swoop. It is a gradual process of carefully selecting applications that will benefit most from the move.
Each application will have its own challenges, such as sensitivity to the location of data, latency of connections with other applications and suitability for target cloud platforms, along with other factors. For most enterprises, hybrid will be the norm for a long time to come.
This sets an interesting challenge for integration software. Your applications send and receive data from many other applications, often using a variety of patterns from file transfer to event driven messaging to real-time APIs. While you may be lucky enough to be able to move an entire application to the cloud, the picture will be much more complex for its related integrations.
How must the topology of your messaging infrastructure change? What will happen to your centralized enterprise service bus? Are the adapters separable? Where will you host the exposure point for your APIs?
Then there’s the question of whether you want to continue to run and manage integration software yourself. Simply moving your existing integration software to machines in the cloud does not free you up to focus on core business activities. For at least some of those integrations, you’d probably prefer to move to an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) that takes away the need to worry about the detail of the infrastructure configuration so you can simply focus on the required capacity.
For some future integrations you may want to go a step further and provide application teams and even the business itself with fully managed integration software as a service (iSaaS), such that it can create some of its own integrations directly.
This brings us to the crux of the challenges posed by hybrid integration. Migration of applications to cloud can take years, and the sequence of that migration will be a constantly changing target.
Enterprises must ensure that they can cleanly maneuver integration software across the hybrid topology, potentially changing to more managed styles of infrastructure and platforms. This requires a dramatic rethink of how software is provisioned and licensed. You should be able to deploy integrations in the most logical place at each stage in your migration to cloud. In short, you need choice with consistency to be able to move what you want, when you want without having to buy new or renegotiate contracts.
IBM is making it easier to deploy integration software across hybrid environments by introducing a new freedom license for IBM Integration Bus, IBM Integration Suite and IBM App Connect Professional. These new, hybrid entitlement licenses give you flexibility to deploy your entitlement however you want: on-premises, on the cloud or both, with just one purchase.
Read more about the challenges that hybrid integration aims to resolve through the lens of a reference architecture. Also, watch for further announcements regarding how we are addressing licensing for modern cloud focused enterprises by introducing hybrid entitlements.
The post Integration is at the core of effective hybrid deployment appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

21. Dezember 201621. Dezember 2016

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Meetups are a great way to share cloud knowledge

The meetup phenomenon is one that spans domains, industries and geographies.
Take a quick moment to browse meetup.com for a local gathering, and you’ll find topics as diverse as “knitting for beginners” and “artificial Intelligence and machine learning.” Browse meetups in other cities, and you’ll see a similarly broad range of topics, driven out of interest and an appetite to learn.
Meetup.com defines a meetup group as follows: “A Meetup group is a local community of people. Meetup groups are sustained through Meetup events, which are face-to-face gatherings that happen in real life between members and organizers.”
Often, I describe the Bluemix meetup I host in Dublin as an informal gathering that provides a platform for learning new things and sharing expertise. I like to learn from those that attend how they’re using the Bluemix platform, and, in return, I schedule Bluemix experts to deliver enlightening, insightful talks on Bluemix capabilities and services.
Given the informal nature of a meetup, the audience can be quite varied, which makes for an even more interesting gathering. Typically in Dublin, we see a mix of developers from startup organizations, enterprise application developers, students and people who are learning to code as a hobby.
I’ve found that certain topics resonate better than others. Often it’s the meetups focused on Watson or DevOps that draw the bigger crowds. For example, one of the winning teams from a local Internet of Things (IoT) hackathon presented at the last Dublin Bluemix meetup on the topic of “using AI, IoT and Watson Machine Learning.” The initial hackathon was held in The Portershed in Galway, Ireland.
The winning team that spoke at our Bluemix meetup in Dublin built a solution using Node-RED and Watson Developer Cloud services to manage hospital bed allocation. The real-world context of the solution meant the audience could readily understand the challenge, and how technology could be applied to address and surmount it. This made for a very engaging meetup.
We host this Bluemix meetup in Dublin once a month, usually on the last Tuesday or Wednesday. We’re just one of the many regular Bluemix meetups that take place worldwide.
If you’re keen to learn more, simply look for a Bluemix meetup near you on meetup.com. I can give you a head start and let you know that there are regular Bluemix meetups in Seoul, London, Toronto, Raleigh, Sao Paulo, Sydney and of course, Dublin.
If you happen to be in Ireland anytime soon, be sure to look us up.
The post Meetups are a great way to share cloud knowledge appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

20. Dezember 201620. Dezember 2016

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Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 is here! So what’s new?

It’s that time of the year. We all look back at 2016, think about the good and bad things, and wish that Santa brings us the gifts we deserve. We, at Red Hat, are really proud to bring you a present for this holiday season: a new version of Red Hat OpenStack Platform, version 10 (press release and release notes). This is our best release ever, so we’ve named it our first Long Life release (up to 5 years support), and this blog post will show you why this will be the perfect gift for your private cloud project.

We know installing OpenStack in the past was cumbersome due to the extensive use of the command line, so in this release we’re bringing a new Graphical User Interface for the Director. This new UI is a first step in our goal to simplify OpenStack deployments, and you’ll see how much it will improve in future releases, thanks to the extensive feedback we’ve collected in these previous months of internal testing.
Another feature that has finally passed all of our tests is Distributed Virtual Routing (DVR), which is now production-quality (despite some limitations in functionality), and completely automated in Director with very simple configuration changes.

Another gift to our beloved customers, who told us they wanted a simplified management of OpenStack services, is the move of all stateless services to SystemD, greatly simplifying the Pacemaker configuration. We rely on Pacemaker only for stateful services such as databases, virtual IPs, etc. Everything else, all the other OpenStack processes, are now running as regular Systemd services.
Furthermore, OSP 10 gives you the possibility to define your own Roles thanks to Composable Services, and fully customize the OpenStack deployment architecture. You can split the Network services into its own servers, same with Swift or Ceilometer, etc. The caveat is that at the moment you cannot migrate an OSP 9 monolithical controller to a customized one in OSP 10, but that will be solved very soon.
For those who are already using Ceph as a storage backend, we offer automated upgrades from Ceph 1.3 to Ceph 2 at the same time that you upgrade OSP 9 to 10. Moreover, if you want to experiment with the new Shared Filesystem service (Manila), but you don’t have a Netapp backend (currently the only fully supported), we offer CephFS as a Tech Preview. This way, you can truly leverage Ceph as the definitive unified storage pool for all your cloud needs.
One more thing, for those early adopters who have been really patient this previous year with advanced tuning and manual NFV deployments, OSP 10 can automatically deploy an NFV infrastructure. You can deploy compute nodes with either SR-IOV enabled or OVS+DPDK. Both options come with proper resource partitioning and “tuned” profiles to help you fine-tune and get the maximum performance for your network packets. For more information, check out our new documentation about NFV: NFV product guide, NFV planning guide and NFV configuration and tuning.
In addition to all the above great features, there are many other new features in Tech Preview.

Thanks to RHEL 7.3, we provide a Conntrack backend for OVS, which will improve network performance and reduce operational complexity.
We’re also offering the option to deploy Hyper Converged Infrastructure by collocating the Ceph OSD with the compute nodes. The updated reference architecture will be published soon.
Finally, stay tuned for the option to deploy latest Open Daylight drivers for Neutron and the ODL controller via Director, something that will be released early 2017

Ready to learn more?
We provide more insights about OSP10 in our press release. You can also check out our updated Red Hat OpenStack Platform page, where you can learn more about the most common use-cases, success stories, overview of our partner offers and our own consulting and training services. Additionally, you can download a free 60-day trial.
Or visit our customer portal, where you can:

View the list of supported components and certified plug-ins
Browse the official documentation page
Check out the version 10 release notes

Quelle: RedHat Stack

20. Dezember 201620. Dezember 2016

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5 game-changers coming to cloud in 2017

As 2016 winds down, let’s reflect on some age-old annual traditions. I’m not talking about trimming the tree or grandma’s holiday eggnog. ‘Tis the season for business predictions, when analysts, columnists and your boss tease out the trends destined to impact the way we work.
There’s no shortage of opinions on where #cloud computing is headed in 2017. But I see five gargantuan cloud trends right around the corner, the game-changers that companies cannot avoid. And there’s no question: IBM Cloud uniquely addresses the challenges and opportunities they create.
Trend 1: Dude, where’s my data?
According to an IDG survey, the majority of IT infrastructures will be based entirely in the cloud in the next year and a half. That’s incredible. The efficiencies and opportunities the cloud brings are undeniable.
But take a look at the roadblocks: 43 percent of survey respondents have concerns about where data is stored, 41 percent cite data security and privacy issues.
It is critical to put businesses in control of their own data, workloads and services. You own your data. You shouldn’t have to pay to move it when your business needs change and you have to migrate across continents. You definitely shouldn’t be concerned about the security of your customers’ data sitting on the public cloud.
Trend 2: It&8217;s your business; it&8217;s your cloud
According to the same IDG survey, 21 percent are worried about vendor lock-in, which is understandable. The big public cloud providers offer one-size-fits-all cloud models that can orphan back-end systems or even require complete rewriting of critical business applications. Once you’re on their proprietary systems, it can be expensive — if not completely cost prohibitive — to move your workloads and data off their cloud.
Take a look at this ZDNET story detailing how American Airlines is migrating to the cloud and using IBM Bluemix to develop new services and business models. IBM and American are partnering to build cloud-based applications that solve specific problems unique to their business, workloads and data. It’s a cloud strategy shaped around American’s unique business model, not its public cloud provider’s.
Trend 3: The cognitive cloud changes everything
There’s huge opportunity to build cognitive capabilities into your cloud. Adding cognitive delivers machine-learning-based tools and features, smarter analytics, and new cognitive apps your customers will love. It’s the cognitive era, and it starts with your cloud strategy.
Here’s the problem. You don’t have a decade to make your cloud smarter. Your customers are ready. So are your competitors. You should be, too.
Take a look around at your options. Other cloud providers give you nameless, faceless and untested AI. IBM Watson offers proven cognitive capabilities that clients can trust and train with their data. We offer the most comprehensive and accessible cognitive capabilities for companies to build into their own apps. Check out how our partner Westfield is delivering the promise of the cognitive era through IBM Watson.
Trend 4: Cloud Internet of Things
You’ve been hearing about the promise of Internet of Things (IoT) for years. Even your toaster needs your Wi-Fi password. But in 2017, IoT is less about the billions of “things” and far more about the macro analytics they can deliver to your business. A mountain of IoT data is worthless if you can’t turn it into insights and value.
The cloud is uniquely suited to address the scale and sprawl of IoT data. As IoT data grows by orders of magnitude, you need to address storage and compute needs. Any public cloud provider can deliver storage and compute, but you also need the tools to harvest value from that growing haystack. In 2017, your IoT strategy will need cognitive capabilities, automated workflows and integration tools that tie applications and clouds together. Then you can use the insights to build new experiences for clients like BMW aims to do.
Trend 5: Hybrid cloud takes over
For most companies, the optimal cloud strategy is a hybrid approach. Not only can you harness the public cloud’s low-cost storage and app hosting, even at massive scales, but you can also use your local, private cloud to protect and use whatever data, processes, workflows and applications are important to you.
The public cloud cannot deliver the features that connect a company’s back-end systems and front-end applications. Why let your cloud provider decide how you run your IT department? You need flexibility and control across your public and private clouds.
Check out why Bernhardt Furniture Company turned to IBM to deliver new mobile applications to production in 10 weeks, boosting sales by 20 percent all while continuing to use existing back-end processes and workflows.
So how did I do? What trends do you see impacting your path to the cloud in 2017?
Weigh in with your thoughts by tweeting @IBMCloud or leave a comment below. Your feedback could become the focus of my next blog post. Happy holidays. Enjoy grandma’s eggnog. I sincerely hope you and your loved ones have a wonderful 2017.
The post 5 game-changers coming to cloud in 2017 appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud