The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new hot buzzword and like most buzzwords, its purpose and definition are grossly misunderstood. When some people hear the term IoT they immediately associate it with a refrigerator reminding us to order milk or our Fitbit wearable device tweeting how we just “crushed a 4.1 mile run”. Neither of those use cases are very compelling to most of us which makes it hard to fathom how experts can predict that by 2020 there will be greater than a one trillion dollar market that vendors will be trying to claim a piece of.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the “Internet of Things,” where all kinds of devices – everything from clothing to appliances to vehicles — will be interconnected via the cloud. Sounds enticing, but really not much of a stretch from what’s already happening now via smartphone apps connecting us with the physical world. Let’s look at a typical recent Saturday for a twenty-something New Yorker who I’ll call Fred. It’s 2:30 pm. Fred is in an unfamiliar area of Brooklyn finishing a great brunch that he’d found due to a deal he’d picked up on Groupon. He checks Facebook and sees that his friend Joe has posted about going to today’s Mets game at Citi Field. It’s a 4pm game, followed by a Huey Lewis & the News concert. Fred likes those old bands, but can’t quite place Huey Lewis. So he checks the group out on Spotify – hey, that song “Power of Love” is pretty good. He adds it to his music collection and decides it’s a good day for a ballgame

One would think that small businesses have things easy because fewer employees means a smaller and easier team to manage. In fact, there are a lot of challenges that are unique to small businesses, and one of the big ones if "growing pains." It's difficult for a business owner to lock themselves into contracts, whether it's a lease on an office building or a contract with an internet provider, because it's sometimes impossible to predict how quickly the business will grow and whether these existing arrangements can sustain a larger team. At least, that was true until the cloud came along. Small business owners that have unexpected success will more than likely have to withstand some stressful aspects of business growth, but cloud-based phone systems at least take away some of the stress and allow you to focus on the more exciting aspects.

Application delivery is always evolving. Initially, applications were delivered out of a physical data center, either dedicated raised floor at the corporate headquarters or from some leased space rented from one of the web hosting vendors during the late 1990’s to early 2000’s or some combination of both. Soon global organizations and ecommerce sites alike, started to distribute their applications and deploy them at multiple physical data centers to address geo-location, redundancy and disaster recovery challenges. This was an expensive endeavor back then even without adding the networking, bandwidth and leased line costs.

Cisco has been ridding itself of consumer products for some time, which is why it was surprising to see Cisco at the International Consumer Electronics Show this year. According to CEO John Chambers, however, the new IoE (Internet of Everything) plan at Cisco is set to change the trajectory of everyone on Earth, in both the consumer and the professional arenas. Bigger than anything that’s come before. Now, don’t get the wrong idea: Cisco isn’t going to sell IoE to consumers directly. But Internet of Everything will impact our daily lives in ways we can’t yet possibly imagine. From improved efficiency in the industrial arena to personalized retail encounters to the ability to control an entire building’s infrastructure with one simply smartphone app, IoE means big.

So you won your first Government Contract… Congratulations! Among the new issues you will need to consider, your accounting systems, both practices and technology, will need to pass muster with Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) auditors. This will require a combination of internal processes and controls. Your accounting system will need to properly delineate direct and indirect costs, must properly pool indirect costs, and must properly handle unallowable costs.

I love receiving gifts in the form of new insights! It doesn't matter if others received the same gift years ago and I am just getting it now. If it is new to me, I get excited. It is like waking up in the morning and discovering a new room in your house. I read an article by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times this weekend titled, "And Now for a Bit of Good News." The subject of the article was the new "sharing economy," think Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, etc. In the article, Friedman calls Airbnb a "Trust Platform." To me, this weekend, this term was a gift. He is so right. I have used Airbnb many times when traveling with my family, and to date have been very pleased with our experiences. Often the transactions are sizeable as I am reserving a home in a desirable location for a week. I am engaging in a transaction of some size with a person I don't know, in a home I have never visited, most often in a foreign country using different currency, involving different laws and customs. Why did I risk it? I trusted the platform.

I like this word re-imagination from Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends presentation. We are seeing so many aspects of our life being transformed by the internet. Take for example, ordering a cab to go somewhere. Either we phone for a yellow cab here in California or if you are in New York city, then you stand and wave for an incoming yellow cab to stop. The new game-changer is Uber. All you do is touch your smartphone screen for UberX or Black car and you get an instant message about the car coming in less than 5 minutes time with the driver and car info. It is cheaper and you pay by card (pre-registered in your Uber account). This is re-imagining the transport sector. Uber, a San Francisco company is worth about $17B and is operating in 70 cities around the world. Quite a disruptive force!

We live in interesting times for sure. Who would have thought ten years ago that IBM and Apple would become partners? Here is the announcement as reported in eWeek: Apple and IBM surprised many on July 15, announcing a global partnership that will see the companies attempt to “transform enterprise mobility.” The announcement, punctuated with comments from Apple CEO Tim Cook and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, served notice of the companies’ intentions to make Apple smartphones, tablets and mobile services pre-eminent in the enterprise, replacing the BlackBerry devices and security services that long held the dominant position in that market. The partnership only confirms what Apple has been doing for years with its smartphones, tablets and even its notebook and desktop PCs, moving deeper into enterprises. The company has been touting its success in the corporate world, saying that many of the top companies in the world are now using its iPhones and iPads. In the IBM announcement, Apple’s Cook said that the company’s iPhones and iPads are now running in more than 98 percent of the Fortune 500 and 92 percent of the Global 500. Both Apple and IBM expect those figures to grow with this new pa...

A key development for the Internet of Things will be the evolution and emergence of the ‘Cloud Name System’, a directory system for Cloud applications in the same way DNS (Domain Name System) works for the web and email. Lori MacVittie wrote a while back about the need for an ‘SNS’ – a Service Name System, a DNS type directory approach but for Cloud Services so that they can be entirely loosely coupled from their IT infrastructure. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, himself described a scenario of ‘Socially Aware Cloud Storage‘ that applies this same ideal of abstraction to our personal data across all the social networks we use. This refers to a distributed (Cloud) storage service that is used to store personal user data for social networks, rather than the social sites holding it themselves.

When people talk about Big Data, the emphasis is usually on the Big. Certainly, Big Data applications are distributed largely because the size of the data on which computations are executed warrants more than a typical application can handle. But scaling the network that provides connectivity between Big Data nodes is not just about creating massive interconnects. In fact, the size of the network might be the least interesting aspect of scaling Big Data fabrics.

Do you avoid stores that have had a credit card breach? You are not alone. About 52% of people avoid merchants who have had a data breach according to a recent Lowcards survey. They surveyed over 400 random consumers to better understand the impact of identity theft on consumer behavior. 17% said they or a family member was a victim of identity theft over the last year with half the cases being credit card theft. 94% said they are more concerned or equally concerned about ID theft. They estimate that there were 13.5 million cases of credit card identity theft in the United States over the last 12 months.

Internet of Things is the current hip phrase of technology evangelists, geeks and all kinds of clairvoyants. If, according to tech blogs and websites, 2013 was the year of big data, then 2014 certainly is the year of Internet of Things. New projects, big funding rounds, the general hype and excitement are everywhere. And yet, we don’t really get the whole thing right. The general media seem more concerned with new smart thermostats design than how the concept of IoT is changing our lives. It’s time to approach this massive subject properly and start avoiding common misconceptions. The problem with Internet of Things is that everyone seems concerned only about the Things, maybe because the name, which kind of implies that.

If you've had to test one of today's composite applications, you know that "access" has become one of the most daunting barriers to SDLC acceleration. Whether we're talking about access to dev/test environments or access to dependent applications, the ability to pull all the required pieces together in order to test thoroughly is equivalent to herding feral cats. If you haven't experienced this fun firsthand, consider this: our recent research revealed that systems under test have an average of 30 dependencies, but team members have consistent access to only 6. The time available to access test environments is extremely limited (4 hour slots) and 30% of that limited time was consumed by configuration/setup tasks. Ultimately, testers had time to execute only 50% of the available test plan. Service virtualization is a revolutionary new technology that helps you break through these constraints by providing ubiquitous, global access to complete dev/test environments. Organizations leveraging service virtualization are able to conduct testing earlier, faster, more thoroughly, and more accurately—significantly reducing the risk of application failure. In case you're just starti...

Much has been published about the Open Compute Project. Initiated by Facebook, it has become an industry effort focused on standardization of many parts and components in the datacenter. Initially focused on racks, power and server design, it has also added storage and now networking to its fold. Its goal is fairly straightforward: “how can we design the most efficient compute infrastructure possible”, a direct quote from its web site. The focus of OCP has been mostly around hardware designs and specifications. If you look at the networking arm of OCP, you find several Top of Rack (ToR) ethernet switch hardware designs donated by the likes of Broadcom, Mellanox and Intel. By creating open specifications of hardware designs for fairly standard ethernet switches, the industry can standardize on these designs and economics of scale would drive down the cost to create and maintain this hardware. A noble goal and there are many opinions on both sides of this effort. Mostly referred to as “bare metal” and “commodity”, you can easily spend days reading up on many opinions. Mike Bushong yesterday discussed pricing implications for resellers in this blog post.