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Software Defined Networking: Trend or technology movement?

Posted on September 27, 2015 by Lindsay Posted in Tech Leave a comment

Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO.O) said Thursday it would form a joint-venture with Chinese server maker Inspur to sell networking and cloud computing products in China, where the Silicon Valley firm faces political pressure and declining sales.

Cisco and Inspur said they would invest $100 million in the project, although they offered few other details.

The partnership is one of a growing number of tie-ups between Chinese and U.S. technology firms announced during or ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States this week.

Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) said on Thursday it would partner with Baidu Inc (BIDU.O) and Chinese state-owned private investment firm Tsinghua Unigroup on cloud technology, while Dell Inc announced last week it would invest $125 billion over five years in China.

Earlier this year, IBM (IBM.N) pledged to help develop China’s advanced chip industry with a “Made with China” strategy, while chipmakers Intel Corp (INTC.O) and Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O) are developing chips with smaller Chinese companies.

Similar to its dealings with the foreign auto industry in decades past, Chinese officials have made clear to foreign technology firms that market access depends on their sharing technology and cooperating with Chinese industry.

Like many of its peers, Cisco’s market share has retreated in recent quarters in China, where its products have been labeled a cybersecurity threat by state media and government-affiliated experts.

U.S. business lobbies have said the Chinese allegations amount to protectionism, while China has pointed to the experience of Cisco’s Shenzhen-based rival Huawei Technologies Co Ltd [HWT.UL], which faced similar accusations from Capitol Hill when it sought to enter the United States.

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How emerging technology is changing K-12 classrooms

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Lindsay Posted in Tech Leave a comment

While students in K-12 classrooms are building robots in their makerspaces, IT professionals are building the infrastructure needed to keep up with the latest technologies in the 21st century classroom.

Though implementing one-to-one initiatives such as having a laptop for every student continues to be a primary focus for many school systems across the country, those who have already a 1:1 program are discovering new ways to shape student learning. Impressive technology trends are transforming traditional classrooms for students at every grade level.

Robotics, makerspaces and wearables will be a few of the trends that join the ranks alongside teachers and students in the fall. “Research shows that this group of kids learns very differently from past generations,” says GB Cazes, vice president at Cyber Innovation Center recognized, Cazes says.

“The use of cyber as a way to provide a context for the content is rapidly growing. We are putting them on a cyber-highway and providing them with on and off ramps,” says Cazes, who added that this is especially true in science and math. One exciting new tool, the Boe Bot robot, allows students to build a robot with a microcontroller. “There are no textbooks for the Boe Bot. The Boe Bot is the textbook, so you provide teachers with all they need and the students are learning programming and coding as they build,” Cazes says.

Some schools may have the ability to provide a Boe Bot for every classroom, but for those who can’t, makerspaces – high-end craft rooms with access to 3D printers – are a trend that make technology available for students to learn and create all on their own.

Jason Valade, customer success manager at TechSmith described the makerspace as “a place where students need very little direction. It’s trying to give students space to be creative and let them explore and develop.”

Eileen Lento, Intel Education’s director of strategy and marketing says, “Microscopes and databased software,” are new technologies that will give 21st century learners more authentic educational experiences.

“There are holographic technologies, coding is becoming a valuable skillset in the world we live in. There are goggles for virtual reality and wearables for physical education classes that are more usable and kids can analyze their own data more easily,” Lento says.
Improvements have to happen at both ends

Changes need to happen at both the front end and the back end, Lento says. “We don’t want devices to be expensive typewriters.” The tools need to do more than exist, which means there needs to be matching improvements when it comes to infrastructure.

“The role of the CIO as enabler comes into play,” says Lento. “The job has grown from supporting services to enabling learning. They need to be asking, ‘How do I set up the infrastructure?’ and ‘How do I protect the students’ privacy?’”

The role of the IT professionals has become even more demanding because, “There needs to be innovations on the backend from servers to storage. All of the edge devices on the front-end need to exist within a secured fabric,” says Lento.

The role of the IT professional has also grown to include mediator, and even educator. Procuring the funds to build the infrastructure, especially in public schools, can be a formidable obstacle, and Valade recommends a multi-tiered approach. It’s important to consider where the desire for technology and devices falls in line with the greater priorities of a school’s mission.

Moving too fast might slow things down
Knowing how to effectively communicate the value of investing in technology will help a school system develop a comprehensive plan for continued success. Schools need to think about if they want to delay tech improvements for a year or two, or, as Valade cautions, “get devices in hands now but end up with a poor experience.”

Even if finding funding for technology isn’t an issue, the physical structure of the school can create complications. Many schools were built in the 1940s–1970s, and they were not designed to run new Cat 5 cables.

From the students to parents, school boards, teachers, administrations and IT professionals, there are a lot of players to consider, and a lot of stakeholders who want to see the success that educational technologies are promising.

It’s important not to be driven by ego in the race to bring more technology into the classroom. While all of these tools and gadgets are intended to meet today’s students where they are and prepare them for the work force, rushing in too quickly can backfire.

“Technology is leaping and bounding itself so fast. How do you keep up? How do you plan for replacement costs?,” Cazes says, It’s the nature of the beast to get excited, so it’s easy to raise more for the initial investment, but how do you get support for strategically sustaining and replacing the technology?”

Investing in technology is not a single line item in a budget. IT professionals need to communicate with school boards and the community to change the mindsets of people who remember the classroom as one thing and are challenged by conceiving the ways in which technology is reshaping schools.

Lento agrees that schools need to “start at a focus of improved student outcomes. What does student success look like? Most parents are still in the space of, ‘I went to K-12 and this is what it looked like, and it worked.’”

Consider the integration of technology not as a race but a journey. “Through the journey, the leadership team needs to evaluate what they said student success will look like, how they said they would measure it, and then look at the data they are using to measure it,” Lento says.

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5 Big Data Technology Predictions for 2015

Posted on January 3, 2015 by Lindsay Posted in Tech Leave a comment

Big data technologies have evolved at a torrid pace that shows every sign of continuing in 2015. MapR CEO and co-founder John Schroeder predicts five major developments will dominate big data technology in the new year.

In just a few short years, big data technologies have gone from the realm of hype to one of the core disruptors of the new digital age. 2014 saw big data initiatives inside the enterprise increasingly move from test to production. In 2015, big data will push further into the enterprise with even more use cases — specifically real-time use cases — says John Schroeder, CEO and co-founder of Hadoop distribution specialist MapR.

“This is the year that organizations move big data deployments beyond initial batch implementations and into real time,” Schroeder says. “This will be driven by the realization of the huge strides that existing industry leaders and soon-to-be new leaders have already made by incorporating new big data platforms into their analytics with “in-flight” data to impact business as it happens.”

Schroeder says five major developments will dominate 2015.

1. Data Agility Emerges as a Top Focus
Data agility has been one of the big drivers behind the development of big data technologies, as the processes around legacy databases and data warehouses have proven too slow and inflexible for many business needs. In 2015, Schroeder says data agility will become even more central as organization shift their focus from simply capturing and managing data to actively using it.

“Legacy databases and date warehouses are so expensive that DBA resources are required to flatten summarize and fully structure the data,” he says. “Upfront DBA costs delay access to new data sources and the rigid structure is very difficult to alter over time. The net result is that legacy databases are not agile enough to meet the needs of most organizations today.”

“Initial big data projects focused on the storage of target data sources,” he adds. “Rather than focus on how much data is being managed, organizations will move their focus to measuring data agility. How does the ability to process and analyze data impact operations? How quickly can they adjust and respond to changes in customer preferences, market conditions, competitive actions and the status of operations? These questions will direct the investment and scope of big data projects in 2015.”

2. Organizations Move from Data Lakes to Processing Data Platforms
In some ways, 2014 was the year of the data lake (or data hub), an object-based storage repository that stores raw data in its native format — whether structured, unstructured or semi-structured — until it’s ready for use. Data lakes have a strong value proposition in that they represent a scalable infrastructure that’s economically attractive (with a reduced per-terabyte cost) and extremely agile.

Schroeder says that the data lake will continue to evolve in 2015 with the capability to bring multiple compute and execution engines to the data lake to process the data in-place. That’s not only more efficient, it creates a single point of governance and a single point of security.

“In 2015, data lakes will evolve as organizations move from batch to real-time processing and integrate file-based, Hadoop and database engines into their large-scale processing platforms,” he says. “In other words, it’s not about large-scale storage in a data lake to support bigger queries and reports; the big trend in 2015 will be around the continuous access and processing of events and data in real time to gain constant awareness and take immediate action.”

3. Self-Service Big Data Goes Mainstream
Advances in big data tools and services means that 2015 will be the year that IT can ease away from being a bottleneck to the access of data by business users and data scientists, Schroeder says.

“In 2015, IT will embrace self-service big data to allow business users self-service to big data,” he says. “Self-service empowers developers, data scientists and data analysts to conduct data exploration directly.”

Previously, IT would be required to establish centralized data structures,” he adds. “This is a time-consuming and expensive step. Hadoop has made the enterprise comfortable with structure-on-read for some use cases. Advanced organizations will move to data bindings on execution and away from a central structure to fulfill ongoing requirements. This self-service speeds organizations in their ability to leverage new data sources and respond to opportunities and threats.”

4. Hadoop Vendor Consolidation: New Business Models Evolve
In early 2013, Intel made a splash with the introduction of its own Hadoop distribution, saying that it would differentiate itself by taking a ground-up approach in which Hadoop was baked directly into its silicon. But just a year later, Intel ditched its distribution and threw its weight behind Hadoop distribution vendor Cloudera instead.

At the time, Intel noted that customers were sitting on the sidelines to see how the Hadoop market would shake out. The number of Hadoop options were muddying the waters. Schroeder believes Hadoop vendor consolidation will continue in 2015 as the also-rans discontinue their distributions and focus elsewhere in the stack.

“We’re now 20 years into open source software (OSS) adoption that has provided tremendous value to the market,” Schroeder says. “Technologies mature in phases. The technology lifecycle begins with innovation and the creation of highly differentiated products and ends when products are eventually commoditized. [Edgar F.] Codd created the relational database concept in 1969 with innovation leading to the Oracle IPO in 1986 and commoditization beginning with the first MySQL release in 1995. So historically, database platform technology maturity took 26 years of innovation prior to seeing any commoditization.”

“Hadoop is early in the technology maturity lifecycle with only 10 years passing since the seminal MapReduce white papers were published by Google,” he adds. “Hadoop adoption globally and at scale is far beyond any other data platform just 10 years after initial concept. Hadoop is in the innovation phase, so vendors mistakenly adopting “Red Hat for Hadoop” strategies are already exiting the market, most notably Intel and soon EMC Pivotal.”

Schroeder believes 2015 will see the evolution of a new, more nuanced model of OSS that combines deep innovation with community development.

“The open source community is paramount for establishing standards and consensus,” he says. “Competition is the accelerant transforming Hadoop from what started as a batch analytics processor to a full-featured data platform.”

5. Enterprise Architects Separate the Big Hype from Big Data
2015 will see enterprise architects take center stage as their improving understanding of the Hadoop technology stack leads to a better defined and more sophisticated statement of requirements for big data applications, including elements like high availability and business continuity.

“As organizations move quickly beyond experimentation to serious adoption in the data center, enterprise architects move front and center into the big data adoption path,” Schroeder says. “IT leaders will be vital in determining the underlying architectures required to meet SLAs, deliver high availability, business continuity and meet mission-critical needs. In 2014 the booming ecosystem around Hadoop was celebrated with a proliferation of applications, tools and components. In 2015 the market will concentrate on the differences across platforms and the architecture required to integrate Hadoop into the data center and deliver business results.

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