Having a well-rounded brand strategy helps you identify the marketing channels you must focus on, and defines every aspect of how your business is viewed by your customers. Marketing and advertising is an integral component of every business. The US Small Business Administration recommends that businesses with do under $5 million in gross sales and whose net profit margin is in the 10-12% should spend at least 7-8% of their gross revenue in marketing and advertising. In other words, if you are doing $100,000 in annual revenue, you should be spending around $8,000 a year in advertising your b...

In the cloud era, you as an IT professional are being forced to adopt new roles and take on new responsibilities you may not feel equipped to handle. Businesses are becoming increasingly hybrid, leaving you to manage, secure, monitor, and remediate technology on-premises and in the cloud. Of course, this comes with risks because it means you must manage mission-critical layers of application services across networks, systems, and services you neither own nor control. In fact, in many cases, you may not even have visibility into all the environments you’re responsible to ensure the performance ...

There are several reasons why businesses migrate their operations to the cloud. Scalability and price are among the most important factors determining this transition. Unlike legacy systems, cloud based businesses can scale on demand. The database and applications in the cloud are not rendered simply from one server located in your headquarters, but is instead distributed across several servers across the world. Such CDNs also bring about greater control in times of uncertainty. A database hack can be easily averted by shutting down the breached server and only rendering from servers that are ...

One of the core benefits of Java is the JVM, which is an out-of-the-box memory management. Essentially, we can create objects and the Java Garbage Collector will take care of allocating and freeing up memory for us. Nevertheless, memory leaks can still occur in Java applications. In this article, we're going to describe the most common memory leaks, understand their causes, and look at a few techniques to detect/avoid them. We're also going to use the Java YourKit profiler throughout the article, to analyze the state of our memory at runtime.

"At the keynote this morning we spoke about the value proposition of Nutanix, of having a DevOps culture and a mindset, and the business outcomes of achieving agility and scale, which everybody here is trying to accomplish," noted Mark Lavi, DevOps Solution Architect at Nutanix, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @DevOpsSummit at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

We have already established the importance of APIs in today’s digital world (read about it here). With APIs playing such an important role in keeping us connected, it’s necessary to maintain the API’s performance as well as availability. There are multiple aspects to consider when monitoring APIs, from integration to performance issues, therefore a general monitoring strategy that only accounts for up-time is not ideal.

In 2016, artificial intelligence (AI) reached its climax. Research and advisory firm Tractica predicted that the annual worldwide AI revenue will grow from $643.7 million in 2016 to $38.8 billion by 2025. The revenue for enterprise AI applications will increase from $358 million in 2016 to $31.2 billion by 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 64.3%. Thus, IT and business decision makers must face up to the potentials of AI already today. For each kind of organization this leads to the question, which type of technologies or infrastructure they can leverage to operate an A...

Any significant business process that can be documented and best practices identified - will be. Any defined process that can be standardized - will be. Standardized processes that can be codified and automated (through robotic software automation), will be - if the volume justifies it. If the process is repeatable across many companies it will be offered as a shared service on a platform in a cloud.

Web services have taken the development world by storm, especially in recent years as they've become more and more widely adopted. There are naturally many reasons for this, but first, let's understand what exactly a web service is. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines "web of services" as "message-based design frequently found on the Web and in enterprise software". Basically, a web service is a method of sending a message between two devices through a network. In practical terms, this translates to an application which outputs communication in a standardized format for other client a...

All organizations that did not originate this moment have a pre-existing culture as well as legacy technology and processes that can be more or less amenable to DevOps implementation. That organizational culture is influenced by the personalities and management styles of Executive Management, the wider culture in which the organization is situated, and the personalities of key team members at all levels of the organization. This culture and entrenched interests usually throw a wrench in the works because of misaligned incentives.

I recently had the opportunity to give a 10-minute keynote at DataWorks Summit 2017. I know what most of you are thinking: Schmarzo can barely introduce himself in 10 minutes! What sort of keynote could he give in just 10 minutes? And to be honest, I too struggled with what to say. But after some brainstorming with my marketing experts (Jeff Abbott, Erin Banks, and Chris Hill), we came up with an idea: Pose 5 questions that every organization needs to consider as they prepare themselves for digital transformation. And while I didn’t have enough time in 10 minutes to answer those questions...

Because IoT devices are deployed in mission-critical environments more than ever before, it’s increasingly imperative they be truly smart. IoT sensors simply stockpiling data isn’t useful. IoT must be artificially and naturally intelligent in order to provide more value In his session at @ThingsExpo, John Crupi, Vice President and Engineering System Architect at Greenwave Systems, will discuss how IoT artificial intelligence (AI) can be carried out via edge analytics and machine learning technologies that enable things to process event data at the source, learn patterns of behavior over time...

FinTechs use the cloud to operate at the speed and scale of digital financial activity, but are often hindered by the complexity of managing security and compliance in the cloud. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Sesh Murthy, co-founder and CTO of Cloud Raxak, showed how proactive and automated cloud security enables FinTechs to leverage the cloud to achieve their business goals. Through business-driven cloud security, FinTechs can speed time-to-market, diminish risk and costs, maintain continuous compliance, and set themselves up for success.

As today's digital disruptions bounce and smash their way through conventional technologies and conventional wisdom alike, predicting their path is a multifaceted challenge. So many areas of technology advance on Moore's Law-like exponential curves that divining the future is fraught with danger. Such is the problem with artificial intelligence (AI), and its related concepts, including cognitive computing, machine learning, and deep learning.

Blockchain is a shared, secure record of exchange that establishes trust, accountability and transparency across business networks. Supported by the Linux Foundation's open source, open-standards based Hyperledger Project, Blockchain has the potential to improve regulatory compliance, reduce cost as well as advance trade. Are you curious about how Blockchain is built for business? In her session at 21st Cloud Expo, René Bostic, Technical VP of the IBM Cloud Unit in North America, will discuss the basics of Blockchain, preview the Blockchain Reference Architecture, and introduce the mechanics o...

We get it. If your company isn’t up on blockchain, your future is doomed. At least, that’s the general vibe industry leaders are putting out – scrambling to understand and utilize a framework that is more frequently associated with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. In other words, block chain is, generally, poorly understood. So, should your company stand back and let it mature, or wade into the fray and hope for the best?

If you cannot explicitly articulate how investing in a new technology, changing the approach or re-engineering the business process will help you achieve your customer-centric vision of the future in direct and measurable ways, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. At Intellyx, we spend a lot of time talking to technology vendors. In our conversations, we explore emerging new technologies that are either disrupting the way enterprise organizations work or that help enable those organizations to cope with disruption.

Increasingly, in a world of compressed times and distances, humans will be the inventors, designers and managers of digital systems and processes, rather than the operators. Operations will be measured in milliseconds, an inhumane speed where only the machines can deliver. Professor Paul Virilio, a philosopher of speed, urbanist and cultural theorist, wrote at length about the impact of speed on society. He wrote that speed compresses both time and distance. Where once it took a letter 6 months to get to the other side of the world, an email can now arrive in seconds. Today's near real-tim...

SYS-CON Events announced today that DXWorldExpo has been named “Global Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Digital Transformation is the key issue driving the global enterprise IT business. Digital Transformation is most prominent among Global 2000 enterprises and government institutions.

When shopping for a new data processing platform for IoT solutions, many development teams want to be able to test-drive options before making a choice. Yet when evaluating an IoT solution, it’s simply not feasible to do so at scale with physical devices. Building a sensor simulator is the next best choice; however, generating a realistic simulation at very high TPS with ease of configurability is a formidable challenge. When dealing with multiple application or transport protocols, you would be looking at some significant engineering investment. On-demand, serverless computing enables deve...