Posts in "longform"

So what exactly should IBM do, and have done?

Now that IBM has ended its revenue losing streak, we’re ready to stick a halo on it: There is no doubt, though, that there are signs of progress at IBM, which would not comment on its financial picture before the release of the earning report. So much attention is focused on the company’s top line because revenue is the broadest measure of the headway IBM is making in a difficult transformation toward cloud computing, data handling and A.

A more pragmatic morality

The capitalist–consumerist ethic is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal. They were promised paradise, but only if they cultivated compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum.

We fear change - staff resistant to digital transformation

Introducing new technology in the workplace is making the majority of people - three in five - feel anxious while the same number have concerns over whether their job is safe when it comes to tasks being automated. And half of staff express such fears about change when businesses introduce any "digital transformation" projects, the study by Goldsmiths University and YouGov found and more than a quarter of business leaders said they meet "

IBM’s new Private Cloud Stack, it’s got the Kubernetes & Containers

This week, Big Blue rolled out its new IBM Cloud Private software platform that is designed to enable enterprises to develop on-premises private cloud environments to accelerate app development and allow for easier movement of workloads between their private clouds and public clouds – not only the IBM Cloud but also those from other vendors. Similarly, IBM is leaning on open and container-based technologies for enhanced integration and portability of workloads.

Better details on the Cisco/Google partnership around kubernetes and Istio

The cloud initiative combines Google’s de facto standard Kubernetes cluster orchestration platform for managing applications and services across hybrid infrastructure with Cisco’s networking and security expertise. It also leverages Cisco’s push into hyper-converged infrastructure. Along with extending security to application containers and other micro-services, the deal would allow users to monitor application behavior running on hybrid platforms, the partners said. The other pillar of the collaboration is Istio, another open source tool released earlier this year to help manage micro-services via what developers call a “service mesh network.

People get upset when others make more money, and they don’t

Between 1990 and 2010 the rate of economic convergence across American states slowed to less than half what it had been between 1880 and 1980. It has since fallen close to zero. Rich cities started pulling away from less well-off counterparts (see chart 1). According to the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, in the decade to 2015 productivity growth in American metropolitan areas was highest in the top 10% and the bottom 20% (where, by definition, the baseline was low).

Atlassian revenue up 47% y/y

The enterprise collaboration software vendor said it earned 12 cents a share, three cents ahead of the consensus estimate. Revenue climbed 41.7% year over year to $193.8 million, also above the $185.8 million analysts had forecasted. You know what they say: developers don’t pay for anything. Someone either needs to acquire Atlassian, it has to start acquiring companies, or if the private cloud thing becomes cemented, they need to work with the public cloud three to build out the private cloud toolchain.

Oracle’s public cloud momentum

Oracle reports its PaaS and IaaS revenue together, which makes understanding its IaaS growth difficult. FY16 to FY17 revenue increased from $0.9bn to $1.4bn, equivalent to 60% YoY growth. The company claims to have added 14,000 IaaS and PaaS customers to OCI since its inception, almost all of them existing customers of its licensed software. Oracle’s overall revenue in 2016 was $37bn, so IaaS and PaaS still represent a small slice of the pie.

Docker and kubernetes

Dave Bartoletti, an analyst with IT consultancy Forrester, said it’s clear that Kubernetes has won at the orchestration layer. “There’s too much mindshare around it,” he said in a phone interview with The Register. “There are too many developers who just want this.” Pretty much everyone has the sentiment that kubernetes has won. More details from Joseph Tsidulko at CRN: While some components of Enterprise Edition previously could be made to work with Kubernetes, the crucial control plane for managing the lifecycle of containerized applications was incompatible.

Stateless apps in one, stateful apps in the other

It happens to be the case that CF — because it’s an app platform and wants to let the user focus on their code — provides a way to convert code in to containers inside the platform without having to start messing around with Dockerfiles and the like. And this functionality even does some cool things for you like keeping your container OS automatically patched so you don’t have to build CI pipelines to monitor your base images and rebuild stuff.