Kategorie: technology

Using IBM Cloud, KLM Open mobile app gives fans real-time access

Every September, 40,000-plus fans and visitors come to the KLM Open, the oldest golf tournament on the European Tour. To keep all these visitors engaged over the four-day event, KLM Open strives each year to improve the live experience for fans by creating new features to their mobile application.
Golf has never been the kind of spectator sport that soccer or baseball are, because fans are not allowed to cheer while the golfers play (or make any noise), and, unlike stadium sports, the players do not perform in a confined viewing area. Fans must know where and when their favorite player will be on the course at any given time. They watch players when they tee off and then watch the players walk the course for three or four hours. The fans might catch the players when they arrive at the last hole, but even that is not certain because it’s hard to predict what time they will be there.
The KLM Open promoter and organizer, TIG Sports, worked with IBM Cloud Services to develop an interactive mobile app with IBM MobileFirst software hosted on IBM Cloud. The team developed the solution’s back end using the IBM Bluemix platform and IBM DevOps for Bluemix services.
Each flight, or group, of golfers carries an IBM-developed GPS tracker during the tournament. Location data is transmitted to the IBM cloud infrastructure and combined with scores and other media content using API Connect, giving fans real-time access to leaderboards, players’ locations and maps that show the user’s current location and how to get to various points of interest. Golf officials use the app on an iPad and knowing the location of the players has proven useful when there is a dispute, a rules official is needed. Location data helps the official get there sooner and keep the game moving.

The app, created in 2014, gets better and better each year. In 2015, there were three times as many downloads as the year before and it supported as many as 6,000 concurrent users. The app was even modified mid-tournament to address a fan’s suggestion and updated overnight with enhanced radio functionality. When users opened the app the next morning, they received a pop-up notification and a prompt to download the update. This MobileFirst direct update capability enables developers to bypass the review and approval cycles of app stores, which would likely take longer than the golf tournament itself. Radio broadcast integration only works with a headset so the app itself is silent.
The 2015 version of the app was nominated for a Dutch Computable Award in the Cloud category. This years’ version of the app has been created following the IBM renowned Design Thinking process and is designed using the best in class IBM iX user interface design guidelines.
Because golf courses are huge and busy and the 2016 tournament will be at a different course than in previous years, finding people will be important. “Find my Friend” is a way for fans to meet up with each other, and will include an option for navigation so they’ll even know how to get where they need to go. Additionally, the new version of the app will include the ability for fans to be alerted when their favorite player is going to tee off giving the fan ample time to get to the hole and actually watch.
Also new in 2016 is gamification at Hole 14, an experience which will be modeled after the Waste Management Phoenix Open’s 16th Hole. This is one location where neither the fans nor the app must remain silent, and in fact, clapping and shouting are allowed and interaction is expected. The app will be able to sense when a user’s mobile device is near the 14th hole and sounds are permitted. There will be a “Closest to the Pin” contest between spectators, seated on three sets of bleachers. They will use the app to predict which golfer will tee the ball closest to the flag. The Watson Internet of Things platform on Bluemix will be used to collect and analyze the data from the thousands of smartphones’ and visitors placing bets. The KLM Open tournament will provide prizes for those spectators who have the highest scores or streaks (best of three) in predicting the contest. Watson Analytics is used to analyze five years of historical players’ data to help predict the winner.
The KLM Open mobile app has indeed transformed the event for fans from a standing-around-waiting occasion to a more interactive, engaging experience — like soccer or baseball — which is attractive especially to younger fans.
Learn more about IBM Cloud solutions.

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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Can a secure private cloud excel in an on-premises VMware environment?

IT departments have a lot on their plates.
A typical IT department managing workloads and systems is measured by key performance indicators (KPIs) including security, addressing service failures, restoring systems quickly, minimizing the mean time to repair, helping improve staff efficiency by being proactive and not reactive, aiming for a faster deployment of services, minimizing migration costs to newer platforms, supporting service-level agreements and efficiently planning for capacity changes.
In enterprises that run VMware, IT staffs are trained to support the KPIs for on-premises production as well as development and test workloads. However, as businesses are looking to cut costs, many choose hybrid cloud with a dedicated, off-premises private cloud. While the enterprise goal is to reduce capital expenditures (CAPEX), the current ecosystem of cloud provider solutions requires migration efforts, because the source and target cloud architectures are often not based in VMware.
IBM has worked with thousands of clients. We’ve found that workload integration and migration issues are exacerbated by mergers, acquisitions, divestures, unexpected service interruptions, changes in IT productivity, the need for IT agility and when lines of business launch new innovation initiatives.
Enterprises need a cloud offering that:

Leverages the current IT department skillset, tools, processes, VM templates and scripts used on-premises, and offers an option to self-manage.
Allows root access to systems and hypervisor for system administrators to have full control over the environment And only need to open tickets on failure.
Facilitates data centers across the globe with private, high-speed connections and resources providing the highest performance.
Has secure and dedicated off-premises private cloud resources supporting VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) architectures.
Meets compliance standards such as SOC1-2-3 reports, ISO 270001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, CSA STAR, PCI, HIPPA, Intel Trusted Execution Technology and EU clauses.
Is based on VMware SDDC architecture completely configured on-demand and ready to use.
Can scale quickly, up or down, and allows existing VMware workloads to be lifted and shifted with minimal effort, alleviating the cost of migration.
Allows live migration of workloads from and on-premises environment to and off-premises, dedicated private cloud that delivers mission-critical services on-demand.
Supports software-defined networking solutions based on VMware NSX, providing virtually unlimited networking flexibility in defining new VLANs, assigning IP addresses, and establishing network services such as load balancing, firewalls and routers.
Supports backup and disaster scenarios, as well as the ability to set up development, test, training or lab capacity.
Supports VSAN shared storage, providing highly available, high performance, single-tenant storage which grows automatically as additional capacity nodes are added.
Offers additional VMware components procured on a simple, per-CPU per-month basis with no long term contracts (Site Recovery Manager, VMware Integrated OpenStack, etc.).

What is the solution that address these requirements?
While there are offerings that support VMware based solutions, enterprises should consider the global presence of data centers and high speed private network connectivity across the globe and consistent delivery.
Learn more about VMware on IBM Cloud.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

GUEST BLOG: Forrester’s Total Economic Impact Study of Red Hat CloudForms

The Red Hat Management portfolio has seen significant upgrades, including the latest release of Red Hat CloudForms 4.1, and has delivered efficiency and costs savings to worldwide customers. This is confirmed by analysts research and testimonials from customers like Cox Automotive, who saved almost 10 years of time and almost $5 million in soft savings. Moreover, because CloudForms supports a wide variety of platforms, including three of the largest public clouds – Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, CloudForms is well-suited for enterprises seeking to manage various stages of virtualization and cloud deployments, as well as containers. The following blog, written by Forrester Consulting, provides an example of the economic impact CloudForms could have on your business.
Author’s note: The following blog details a recent Total Economic Impact (TEI) study conducted by Forrester Consulting centered around Red Hat CloudForms. The results of that study can be viewed here.

GUEST BLOG: Forrester’s Total Economic Impact Study of Red Hat CloudForms
By: Forrester Consulting
Red Hat commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study to examine the value that Red Hat CloudForms customers could achieve by deploying Red Hat CloudForms. We spoke with a large US software company about the benefits, costs, risks, and flexibility of Red Hat CloudForms and cloud management platforms. This company has roughly $4B in annual revenue, 7,500 staff, and sells its software to both businesses and consumers.
Prior to Red Hat CloudForms, this customer had developed and maintained an internal, “homegrown” solution. 45 people from different teams regularly worked on this solution to both “keep the lights on” and make incremental improvements. However, with growing and more frequent requests from the business and staff turnover challenges, the company found it difficult to continue using its homegrown solution.
The company then embarked on a selection process to evaluate different vendor technologies that could replace the internal solution. After researching 10 vendors and narrowing down to 6 for technical assessments and conceptual discussions, the customer offered a 2-week POC opportunity to 2 vendors. The POC would consist of proving out the vendor’s performance and capability in completing the company’s 140 use-case test. While the alternative vendor was unable to complete all the use cases given an extended 6 week timeline, Red Hat was able to complete more than 140 use cases in 1.5 weeks.
Readers should also consider running similar tests that relate a conceptual POC to scenarios that are more realistic and frequent to your environments. Some example use cases that the company mentioned were:

Due to the company’s heavy security constraints, apply different provisioning restrictions to different groups and adjust them uniquely and under a single tenant.
Integrate with Active Directory (AD) to have the same message groups.
Apply single sign-on (SSO).

After setting deployment goals, the company began to introduce Red Hat CloudForms into its environment. The two main benefits that the company experienced were unified service management efficiency and unified service delivery efficiency.
Unified service management efficiency focuses on the reduction in labor and effort to develop, maintain, and upgrade the internally built solution. The company was able to reduce 45 allocated resources to 10 resources in the first year of deploying Red Hat CloudForms. This 10-person team was reduced to 8 in Year 2 and 7 by Year 3. This allowed the customer to reallocate resources to other business enabling and future-thinking custom projects. This can be interpreted as either an approximately 80% efficiency improvement or that the previous state was 4.5x less efficient.
Unified service delivery efficiency centers on the reduction in labor and effort to provision and answer business user requests during the organization’s three-month peak season. In past peak seasons, a group of 100 internal resources from different departments and 30 contractors would be co-located for three months to answer all business unit requests. After the first year of deploying Red Hat CloudForms, the customer was able to provision 50% quicker with the same volume of staff.
By the second year, the customer was able to provision 91.7% quicker and did not need any of the 30 contractors anymore. After accounting for initial and recurring costs, risk-adjusting for realistic and conservative estimates, and the future value and scalability of Red Hat CloudForms, we found that the interviewed company experienced a 97% ROI, $ 5.95M net present value, and 6.8 month payback period over a three-year model. In addition to reallocating 35-38 resources to more value-add activities, the company avoided $900K-$1.8M in peak-season contractor costs by engaging a more efficient platform.
For more information on the full June 2016 case study, The Forrester Total Economic Impact of Red Hat CloudForms, please reach out to your Red Hat representative.
Quelle: CloudForms