Kevin Ichhpurani, executive vice president of global ecosystem and channels at GE Digital, and corporate officer of GE, told CRN during GE’s Minds and Machines conference in San Francisco last week that channel partners will have more success developing and selling applications around IoT, as opposed to grappling with the long and complex sales cycle of the GE Predix IoT platform itself. Source: GE Digital Pivots Industrial IoT Sales Focus From Platform To IoT Apps – And Looks To Partners As Sales Engine

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.

According to Telstra, in some cases, its software development time has decreased from 6-8 months to 10-12 weeks through its work with Pivotal, More on how widespread it is: Telstra has moved 100 of its internal teams to Pivotal's agile software development platform since partnering with the enterprise software company two years ago, with the telco saying this accounts for around 25 to 30 percent of its business. Under the partnership, Telstra’s teams have been trained in Pivotal Labs to build software using agile methodologies on Pivotal Cloud Foundry, with an end goal of shifting 400 teams encompassing around 4,000 to 5,000 staff members to the cloud software-development platform.

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.

"The company builds its apps in Docker containers. Apps that need to stay on the company’s premises run on an OpenStack private cloud. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are used for public cloud. Fidelity uses a combination of cloud-native management tools like CloudFormation for AWS, Heat templates for OpenStack, and Terraforms, which runs across both public and private environments. It uses Cloud Foundry as a PaaS layer that spans both public and private clouds, too.

SLOs are objectives that your business aspires to meet and intends to take action to defend; just remember, your SLOs are not your SLAs (service level agreements)! You should pick SLOs that represent the most critical aspects of the user experience. If you meet an SLO, your users and your business should be happy. Conversely, if the system does not meet the SLO, that implies there are users who are being made unhappy!

The developer of cloud-agnostic solutions has raised $74 million in total since its founding in 2012. Source: HashiCorp Secures $40 Million In A Funding Round That Will Boost Its Channel Program

Oracle’s view is simple: SaaS suites win in the long term. Source: How is the big switch to the public cloud working out… for Oracle?

"One of the problems that we've got -- it's not the problem but it's a problem -- you develop a piece of technology, we don't have the resourcing flexibility to buy it." That means the Army is forced to buy a technology available today it thinks it will need in 2025, when what it truly needs hasn’t been developed yet. “[Say] you came up with something new that I really need on the battlefield based on a threat, I have no ability to integrate that into my platform.

The economics of attention markets focuses on three features. First it focuses on time as the key dimension of competition since it is what is being bought and sold. Second, it focuses on content since it plays a central role in acquiring time, embedding advertising messages, and operating efficient attention platforms. And third it focuses on the scarcity of time and the implications of that for competition among attention platforms. Source: The Economics of Attention