“The Visual Organization” author Phil Simon discusses data visualization tools and their power to modify business conversations. Big data may be big chaos. But finding clarity — and business opportunities — in that chaos hasn’t ever been more important. Presenting data clearly and visually is now as important as finding it. Enter data visualization tools that create heat maps, data relationship trees, and geospatial overlays. They offer visual how you can explain a sales trend to the CEO in a couple of minutes. They turn data right into a conversation. This is the timely subject of Too Big To disregard author Phil Simon’s upcoming book, The Visual Organization: Data Visualization, Big Data, and the hunt for Better Decisions (Wiley, 2014), due out next month. Simon sat down with InformationWeek to debate the right way to become more of a “visual organization,” the perils of being a big data laggard, and more. IW: Phil, you emphasize in your book, The Visual Organization, that data visibleization is... Read More »

DevOps pushes two differing cultures together — developers and operations — nevertheless it gives IT a fighting chance at maintaining with the business. A recent survey means that companies practicing DevOps deploy code 30 times more frequently than others. i am not surprised. Formerly few years, we have seen at Rackspace a surge renowned from customers who like to deploy massive amounts of code — weekly, daily, even hourly. Most of them do it using a DevOps approach, a technique we now have embraced as a corporation.   When we started offering a DevOps support service late last year, we did it with the conviction born of our own company’s experience. Using DevOps at Rackspace in an average year, we push code into production greater than 2,500 times, launch about 20 new cloud products, and run greater than 15,000 automated tests. In the pre-cloud world, that might never had been possible. In actual fact, there wasn’t much incentive to work at such speed and scale.... Read More »

Upstart supplier opens sixth datacenter, plans for brand new UK facility and more developer tools. Top 10 Cloud Fiascos (Click image for larger view.) Developer-friendly DigitalOcean is expanding into Asia with a brand new cloud datacenter opening in Singapore Tuesday. This can serve developers in Australia, India, Southeast Asia, and Japan, in accordance with founder Mitch Wainer. DigitalOcean will stir up 150 servers in a brand new Equinix facility in Singapore to get its Asia/Pacific region going. Wainer said those five racks could be only a start if DigitalOcean follows the pattern of rapidly adding more developer accounts, because it has in North America and Europe. It has an option with Equinix for extra space inside the same site. At the beginning of 2013, DigitalOcean had 2,000 users and was just beginning to gain a flood of Ruby developers that might boost its server count from 100 to 7,000 by July. As of last week, it had 163,000 active accounts and was expanding on the... Read More »

Agile, DevOps, and cloud form a nearly-holy triumvirate with a standard theme: Software rules. As software has grown in importance, overshadowing the once-riveting details of chips and hardware, a brand new language has crept into computing’s vernacular. Where when we talked in silicon yields and gigahertz speeds, we now speak of scrums and sprints, DevOps and Continuous Delivery, and most of all, workload deployments to the elastic cloud’s infrastructure. The genie within the bottle is not any longer the secrets within the hardware; it is the invisible functions of the software. Even the terminology of software has changed. Prior to now, we’d have declared new development had nothing to do with maintenance of the datacenter’s legacy systems. Development was novel and exciting, something apart. Nor did development methodologies have anything to do with production deployments. And definitely an enterprise software project could proceed and feature nothing to do with the cloud. But nearly everyone now knows these old verities are less prone to be true.... Read More »

Startup’s API Services Exchange aims to simplify interactions a few of the Internet of factors’ billions of connected devices, applications, and systems. CES 2014: Cisco’s Internet of Everything Vision (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) The term “Internet of Things” has become as popular as “big data,” perhaps more so. It now extends beyond its original scope — radio-frequency identification tagging of objects within the physical world — to incorporate a broader view of machine-to-machine interaction. Here’s how the University of Cambridge’s Auto-ID Lab, considered one of seven global research centers studying automatic identification of supply chain objects, describes how enterprises may benefit from the IoT: Put a tag — a microchip with an antenna — on a can of Coke or a car axle, and suddenly a working laptop or computer can “see” it. Put tags on every can of Coke and each car axle, and suddenly the area changes. Not more inventory counts. Not more lost or misdirected shipments. Not more guessing... Read More »