Google’s new Glass At Work program aims to capitalize at the enterprise’s interest in Google Glass, whether consumers are still skeptical. Tech’s Rich And Famous: Who’s Most Charitable? (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) After months of selling Glass as a way accessory and pushing back against misperceptions, without an evident shift in public perception, Google has extended its Explorer Program to businesses to be able to win acceptance for its computerized eyewear within the workplace. Glass at Work, announced Monday, formalizes a pathway toward enterprise use of Glass that many developers had already explored all alone. Google says that it has noticed how a few of its Glass Explorers have used Glass to advance business goals, and that several companies have already got begun working with enterprise software developers to create Glassware relevant to their business processes and customers. It has asked developers engaged on enterprise-oriented Glassware to get in contact. Two organizations which have embraced Glass are the oilfield services company Schlumberger... Read More »

The “connected home” is becoming a reality thanks to improved broadband networks and mobile apps. Here’s a rundown of how our homes are getting smarter. The connected house is no longer a futuristic vision — many of the barriers that blocked the realization of a smart home have eroded. Network bandwidth is widespread, connectivity is becoming more common in many traditional home products, and consumers are craving smart-home experiences. Technology, which had presented the greatest challenge to creating a connected home, isn’t anyw manageable. The broadband and residential networking connections are available in, mobile devices provide a natural fit because the handheld remote control for the house, and the choices for making local connections are manageable for vendors.  [Implementing IoT technologies inside the enterprise is a fancy task. Read How To Prepare For The net Of items] Some of the pieces to the connected home puzzle: Broadband networks provide the back-end connection. Without an always-on broadband connection from the house to the net, consumers cannot maintain awareness... Read More »

Tackling the information explosion requires bold new thinking and the abandonment of tried and tired methodologies. Scale matters. On the subject of datacenter infrastructure, scale separates technology that allows a company to thrive from technology that constantly gets within the way because it crumbles under growth. Nowhere is scale more important than in terms of storage, and specially file storage. Files within the sort of email, documents, and other unstructured information make up 80% of enterprise data, and files grow at a faster rate than all other data types combined. Cloud storage enables file synchronization at scale. The rush to virtualize everything moved every file server into the SAN while forcing file-specific platforms, like NAS, to become dumb-block devices with an emphasis on performance and price in preference to on scale. But files failed to leave. While datacenters embraced virtualization, the file footprint continued to double every two or three years. Traditional storage, data protection, and replication strategies are running out of steam against the... Read More »

On the mainframe’s 50th birthday, IBM positions it because the still young Enterprise Cloud System, able to running 6,000 Linux workloads. 8 Datacenters For Cloud’s Toughest Jobs (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) An IBM mainframe will also be subdivided to run Linux virtual machines, in something of an analogous manner that Amazon Web Services or the Rackspace cloud runs virtual machines. But unlike an AWS host, a single mainframe runs 6,000 VMs at a time. Likewise, the old mainframe Customer Information Control System, better called CICS, can process 1.1 million transactions per second. It was the predecessor to client/server architectures and connected thousands of users to a single mainframe. That number, incidentally, is more transactions than are conducted by the Google search engine per second, based on a spokesman for IBM partner GT Software in Atlanta. On the mainframe’s 50th anniversary this week, IBM buffed up and displayed it as probably the most few systems which could scale to cloud-like proportions. It could... Read More »

How can IT leaders meet the challenge when enterprise teams “go rogue” and implement new services and products without IT buy-in? There are lots of challenges keen on leading an IT organization within the era of Bring Your individual Everything (BYOE), but there also are a lot of opportunities. That message became clear on the InformationWeek Conference in Las Vegas March 31 through April 1. Executive presentations and panel session discussions here covered the whole gamut of BYOE possibilities, including Bring Your individual Device, Bring Your personal Cloud, or even Bring Your individual Infrastructure. During a panel session on April 1, IT leaders from Dish Network, Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated, and H.D. Smith shared their experiences in facing parts of the business which have “gone rogue” by circumventing IT when implementing services. Rob Dravenstott, VP of IT application development and testing with Dish Network, shared the tale of a “shadow IT” project that helped change how it operates at Dish Network. In line with Dravenstott,... Read More »