Whilst still a fancy name and not much else in some cases, the idea of "smart cities" is slowly taking hold around the globe - promoted mainly by tech and lighting giants. The main, yet overlooked vital ingredient of Smart Cities is "Internet of Things" (IoT).

Of course, IoT is a great deal more than just smart cities - cars, homes (heating, lighting, CCTV) , and businesses (take manufacturing as a key example) are all becoming "connected", and there is no shortage of companies new and old, dipping their toes into IoT.

The big players, including the likes of Google, Apple, and Microsoft are all actively taking steps to ensure that their IoT technology is one of the first into everyone's cars, homes and businesses.

So what makes a City Smart?

Just think for a moment about the Sci-Fi films of the noughties such as minority report and the like. Motorways, lighting systems, road junctions, public transport, trams and airports, all inter-connected using sensors to provide real time and up-to-date information to measure and calculate the most efficient means of traveling. Imagine local authorities being able to provide it's residents with real-time air quality data, in conjunction with public transportation options, to help mitigate the environmental impact of the world's drivers and even to adjust road toll charges based on the quality of air for example.

Moving the world's commuters efficiently is only the tip of the smart city iceberg though. Smart Buildings are also part of this "smart city world". Cisco as an example, are working with a number of US based authorities to build affordable housing developments with automated solutions that alert emergency and service providers to almost everything from relatively minor problems such as water leaks to potentially life-threatening situations such as fires, intruder alerts and the like.

Connected Cities means Big Opportunities

Gartner expects there to be over 1.1 billion connected "things" this year as part of the smart city's expansion. That's a big number but is tiny in number in comparison to what's expected to be connected by 2016 and beyond. Gartner predicts that by 2016 smart cities will account for over 1.7 billion devices, and this will likely rise to nearly 2.7 billion in 2017.

And it get's bigger - by 2020, Gartner predicts there will be nearly 10 billion connected items across the world's cities. Gartner says that "Smart cities represent a great revenue opportunity for technology and services providers (TSPs), but providers need to start to plan, engage and position their offerings now."

Cisco Seem to Be Leading in Smart Cities

Cisco seem to be standing out from the pack is their focus on smart cities. According to research analyst Gartner, the opportunities for Cisco in a smarter and more connected world are staggering. After all, they pretty much dominate the inter network and internet space from a connectivity perspective so it stands to reason that would be one, if not the leading player in the connected everything space.

Cisco has already signed agreements with a host of international cities including Hamburg, Barcelona, Santiago, Chile, and multiple cities in Denmark showing that Cisco is actively and aggressively pursuing the smart city opportunity.

Cisco have recently opened a new "IoE Innovation Center" in Australia, which takes the total count to eight globally.

Of course, Cisco will not be limiting its IoE efforts to just smart cities. Companies such as Apple and Microsoft have already inked with car manufacturers, and Google's recent $3.2 billion deal for Nest, means they are serious about getting into Smart homes. Competition in these IoT markets is fierce, and will become even worse going forward. With Smart Cities though, Cisco, though not alone, seem to be miles above the rest, and this market is still just in it's infancy!!

So, if you missed the two hours of announcements on Wednesday, here’s our recap and summary of what was announced about Windows 10.

It will be Free

Windows 10 will come as a free update for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 users for the first year. It will also be free on the mobile version for anyone running Windows Phone 8.1

Windows 10 comes with a more streamlined task bar and the ability to full screen the Start menu. Windows 10 also has an updated Action button with right hand side notifications bar, offering shortcuts to your favorite apps and settings.

When the keyboard is detached from a Windows 10 tablet, it will also ask to go into tablet mode to switch between mobile and PC settings. The new build for Windows 10 (the insider preview version at least) arrives next week.

Windows 10 is expected in the summer.

Cortana on PC as well as Phone

Microsoft teased upcoming Windows 10 features that will arrive in the next three to five months – starting with Cortana coming to PC. Cortana will be located right on the lower left corner, where notifications from her will appear.

Microsoft demoed Cortana on PC with a few quick questions about the weather, flight tracking and other location-based queries specific to the user rather than the more generic assistants offered by "the competition".  You can also dictate emails, search for apps and ask her to perform tasks like “Play my music.”

Windows 10 for Mobile

So Windows Phone is dead - it will now be Windows 10.

To keep its operating system fluid across platforms, Microsoft showed off what Windows 10 will look like for devices with screens that measure 8-inches and smaller, i.e. smartphones and small tablets. Some of the new features include pushing Recent Apps to the top of the Apps list, syncing Action center with PC and most notably, Skype integration with messaging.

Microsoft showed what its Office apps will look like on Windows 10 mobile. Recent files will roam between PC, OneDrive and mobile and they’ll now include wireless printing and Miracast.
Windows 10 for mobile is scheduled for developer preview in February with released in the summer along with new flag ship phones that will be "impressive".

Universal apps across Windows 10

With both PC and phones running Windows 10 they will behave very similarly. Microsoft has refreshed its apps to make the experience universal. They include Outlook, Calendar, Photos, People and Music, which will sync all your information across devices.

Quick notes about these app features:

• Outlook will offer swipe gestures (a la Mailbox) to archive or delete emails - a totally brand new experience
• Calendar lets you pinch to zoom in and out of time intervals
• Photos app will cache images directly onto OneDrive, remove duplicates and automatically create albums based on location, time and people in the photos
• Music app will allow you to upload your music library to OneDrive like itunes does!!
  
  

Brand New Web Browsing Experience - Code Name: Spartan

Microsoft's long-awaited new browser has officially arrived with the code name "Project Spartan" with a view to challenge Google Chrome. The browser supports annotation directly on the Web pages, freezing the page for you to mark up and saving the final result to OneNote for easy sharing.
Users can also add items to a Reading List to save webpages offline to read later. It’s also got built-in support for viewing PDF files and editing inline.

Cortana will be also be integrated into Spartan as well. For example, typing “weather” into the URL bar will show the answer without you needing to enter the search query.
Other Cortana integrations include popping up relevant info on upcoming traffic for example in the URL bar or showing restaurant information and directions from your current location.

Xbox app on Windows 10 means tight eco system integration

The new Xbox app on Windows 10 now allows gamers to voice and text chat with their friends on Xbox Live from your PC. Gamers will be able to browse video game clips and share them Instagram-style. You can film your gaming by hitting Windows+G and record the live clip or save the last 30 seconds from the game DVR. You’re also able to edit them before sharing as well.

Microsoft also addressed battery life and gaming performance with DirectX 12. Microsoft claim this technology improves graphics performance and cuts battery consumption by 50 percent. Gaming studios that have adopted DirectX 12 includes Unity, Unreal Engine and Lionhead Studios.
Lastly, Microsoft will allow you to stream Xbox One games to your PC or tablet, and Windows 10 will come to Xbox as well. This feature will arrive later this year

Microsoft Surface "business" Hub

On a slightly-unrelated note to Windows 10, Microsoft showed off its Microsoft Surface Hub, a superb 4K display screen for businesses. It’s essentially a really, really big tablet (remember the original Microsoft Surface Table thing) that lets you showcase presentations, make Skype calls and write on it like a whiteboard – all powered by Windows 10. If you markup the screen during a meeting, you can also save this to OneNote and share afterward.

Google Glass VS Windows Holographic +  HoloLens

This was really cool - Microsoft introduced Windows Holographic, a new API to add a layer of augmented reality to Windows 10. Developers can now add holograms to their apps with this new technology, viewable through Microsoft’s special goggles, Microsoft HoloLens. The smart goggles can understand users’ gestures, voice and the spatial area surrounding them.

You can also create your own holograms and 3D objects, then print them via HoloStudio. In the demo, a woman built and customized a quadcopter with the augmented reality app using gestures and voice commands.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkuNBqy0_gI

 

Talk to us @Cisilion or email sales@cisilion.com for more information. We will have this in our Innovation Centre soon

www.cisilion.com

 

So as we say good bye to 2014, we thought we'd share our predictions for what will be big in the world of technology in 2015. There isn't really anything new and breath-taking here, but some of the technologies will be become more relevant in 2015 with adoption rates increasing, technologies refined and marketing getting their heads round it all and convincing businesses and the consumer that they want it.

1. Video Adoption will Grow - with the new standards in video decoding, ever falling bandwidth and broadband pricing, lower price points from vendors and the rise of video adoption across every social app in existence, video is now the "expected" means of communication. From boardroom, to meeting room, to desk and to pocket, business users everywhere are expecting high quality video communication. 
   
   
2. Continued Adoption of Cloud and Hybrid Cloud. Businesses will continue to move IT services to third-party cloud service providers. Security will continue to be a cause for concern, especially as the media’s breach article frenzy continues. Even so, the ability to integrate with existing on-premise and newer cloud services will rise to be two very practical concerns for enterprise cloud adoption. From an IT management point of view, businesses will need to continue to seek out people with the ability to manage suppliers and service delivery. Large enterprises were never going to move everything from their data center to the cloud.  The hybrid cloud, defined by global analyst firm Gartner as “a combination of private, public, and community cloud services,” will continue to rise in popularity during 2015 as businesses look to get the best from both private and public cloud.
   Nonetheless, IT will continue to head further into the cloud in 2015.
   
   
3. Bring Your Own Everything. This is where IT finally wake up to see that Shadow IT, BYOD, or BYO-anything is not being driven by consumer IT and cloud service providers but actually bythe fact that most businesses corporate IT are not able to meet user expectations across usability, cost, service, and agility. The 10 years or so of the "Consumerisation of IT" talk, with a focus on consumer gadgets, has just been a red herring – hiding the true root cause of customer discontent with existing IT supply. IT  will need to change; and change quickly.
   
   
4. The increased focus on costs will drive a focus on assets. IT asset management has long been a poor relation to corporate IT service management activities and investment. In some ways, the lack of business scrutiny as to why IT costs so much, has allowed corporate IT organizations to be lackadaisical in their asset management. But those days have gone, or are quickly coming to an end, with 2015 finally seeing corporate IT organizations looking to physical and software assets as ways of reducing and optimizing costs.
   
   
5. The need to manage more complex IT supplier environments. This need will continue to grow as enterprises exit outsourcing deals that have failed to deliver against expectations of service improvement, cost savings, and innovation. In 2015 the need for service integration capabilities, often called service integration and management (SIAM) or multisourcing services integration (MSI), will come forth - this will happen not only for larger organisations replacing previously outsourced scenarios with multiple suppliers but also smaller ones needing to manage a portfolio of third-party, often cloud service, providers.
   
   
6. Continued mobile pervasiveness. Continued improvements in anytime, anywhere, any device access to data and services will continue to drive the need for better mobile apps and experiences, and the use of personal devices for work purposes. Not only will this dictate the need for better service and app design and delivery, and more intelligent approaches to BYOD, but also the need to consider the security implications of mobility such as data segregation issues – with personal and business data and applications isolated from each other on the same device.
   
   
7. Wearables and the quantified worker. The Apple iWatch launches, Microsoft  finally get stock of it's "Band" device and no doubt we will start to see  greater potential business use cases focus on wearable computing. While employees might like the idea of a new gadget giving them access to alerts and short messages related to email, social media, schedules, travel plans, or the weather, the ability of wearables to provide location and productivity-related information about the employee might not be so appealing. 2015 will provide an exciting technology opportunity, but one that will need the corporate IT organization and its business partners to fully understand the human implications of new technology.
   
   
8. Big Data. The real Big Data issue for 2015 will be the availability of Big Data people and their Big Data skillsets rather than Big Data technology itself. Not only from a tail-end analytics and insight perspective, companies will also need the people and skills for building the new data architectures required to handle unstructured data and real-time input, and other changes required as the increased focus on large data sets continues to disrupt business and IT operations.
   
   
9. The Internet of Everything (IoE). Most of us are probably bored to death of hearing about how the IoT will change IT forever. It seems as though it has been a long time coming – from IP address management through service/fault management to Big Data analytics. Then there is the security of a whole new breed of network-connected end points. 2015 will see IT having to look beyond the traditional IT capabilities, such as availability and capacity management, to work closer with business colleagues on how these now-connected devices do, can, and will tie in to business operations and business models.
   
   
10. Software-defined everything. So, SDN -  where the control plane is abstracted from the hardware and all that jazz, will continue to mature; and software-defined storage is gaining interest. But this is about more than quickly moving from the old to the new state data center. Of course, that legacy data center might not want to change so quickly. It’s about increasing your agility, minimising vendor lock-in, and improving your ability to serve the customers and consumers of your IT services.

So that's our prediction list - its not to disimilar from others we've seen out there. What is missing do you think...any big new things you think we will see?!

Anyway, from all of us @Cisilon - Happy New Year.

Avoid Network Operations Center Finger Pointing

Did you learn anything from BlackFriday that will help ensure that on Cyber Monday you can better prepare your network operations center (NOC) for to advoid finger-pointing and blame for poor performance or denail of service.

During this holiday season, the ITsystems for any retail business is mission-critical and business and sales  performance is going to be a direct result of your application performance—and provbably the only time of the year you can really review your IT performance.

 

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1) Keep IT Simple. You don't have to be in Media, eCommerce or retail to know that solving IT problems quickly can make a huge difference in the overall performance of your organiszations IT and client / customer facing business applications. The simpler your network and application monitoring tools and alerting systems, the easier it is for you to determine where the problem is, why its occurring and what needs to be fixed!

Sounds simple right? But when you have complicated, non-shared tools for network performance management (NPM) and application performance management (APM), IT and network teams typically get hampered by any attempts to problem solve together as a cohesive team. Whilst in the the past, that did not matter as much because fixing the network usually solved most end user experience challenges. That's not the case now - i had just last week a client who'd been trying to fix some intermittent user issues for 3 weeks!!

Within today's Hybrid Enterprise and with so many components affecting application performance, it's not always the network that is at fault.... it could be an application, part of an application, a database server or your Internet pipe! Knowing and fixing quickly is key to keeping the business running smoothly!

 

2) Manage from the Top Down not Bottom Up - the critical ingredient to the success of any business is to have the customer or end-user experience of business critical applications at the top of your priority list!  With today's hybrid enterprise and with applications and services spread across so many systems with many inter-dependencies, you need a performance engineering team that can manage and work across a number of different teams. Without this joined up approach, everyone will be working in their own silo and with no accountability for the overall success of your application delivery

 

3) Ensure you have an integrated Cross-Architecture performance dash board - lmost all troubleshooting begins in the NOC. As a network operator, you get a quick view of whether you have an application problem or a site problem with a dashboards like this:

This dashboard in the NOC gets you started. Where you go from here is up to the data and must be easily shared across teams to be effective when troubleshooting and fixing and issue.The dashboard above is from Riverbed's SteelCentral.

 

4) Remember - Better Together! - With a comprehensive set of passive and active NPM and APM monitoring tools such as those from Riverbed's complete Application Performance Platform™, you have a much better chance of solving application performance issues across teams and much faster.

Another advantage of Riverbed's set of solutions is a continued commitment to "Better Together" solutions. For example, AppResponse 9.5 now integrates with SteelHead 9.0 for visibiility and troubleshooting WAN-optimized web applications on premise or by SaaS.

SteelCentral NetProfiler provides deep packet inspection (DPI) data of the specific ports, protocols, and applications running in your branch offices from another together-is-better solution by integrating with SteelHead.

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Cisilion are proud to Riverbed Premier Plus Partners and Riverbed Authorized Support Partners. Contact us for more information, to book a demo or explore a Proof of Concept.

Yesterday, we ran an event at the Duck and Waffle Restaurant (40th Floor Heron Tower) on Optimising the Digital Experience with Riverbed's Performance Management platform and in particular SteelApp.

We made a few un-due "assumptions" that all of our guests know what Load Balancing and "Application Delivery Controllers" are and how they work. We thought we would give a brief overview into each.

Acronyms and Terminology

GLBs, ADCs, Traffic Managers, Reverse Proxy's, Application Proxy's. These words/phrases were used a lot today in different contexts. We thought it was worth clarifying exactly what these “ADCs” and “Traffic Managers” actually do, and how they differ from plain and simple “Load Balancers”or DNS round-robin processes.

So – what is a “Traffic Manager?”

A Traffic Manager performs similar functions for a website (or web service), that a call flow management system does in a call centre. Think about a customer service representative in a small business for example. Their direct-dial number is published in the phone book or online and they handle in bound and out-bound customer queries, ranging from account queries, technical support questions, through to escalations and complaints.

This is where the trouble starts.

As this "small" company begins to become more successful, the volume of calls increases and customer service levels begin to decrease as calls are left unanswered or dealt with in-correctly. For example, the phone line may be engaged, or the customer service rep may be away from his desk, so calls get missed. In this scenario, the customer service rep is also busy dealing with all kinds of “unwanted calls” - : sales call, wrong numbers, spam calling from other company’s for example as well as personal calls.

What the company needs is a way to control how phone calls are routed to employees to ensure that their customers are services by the right people in the fastest time possible.

So what’s the solution?

In the case of the example above, many businesses implement a call centre technology. A Call Centre is a great way to solve the problem as a company can sit a number of call centre “operators” on a call management system, to balance the phone calls across the members of staff, to route particular calls to particular departments and most importantly, to give them more control - such as stopping calls from certain locations, screening out nuisance calls, and in some cases, to even respond directly to customer inquiries. Above all it’s all about improving the customer experience…

How does this work for my applications then?

In a very similar way actually.

In just the same way as the example above, businesses may have an online application (let’s call it an e-commerce website) that may be hosted with a single web server with a public IP address. As the business grows they quickly progress to building a farm of web servers which may be hosted on-premise in the cloud on in a hybrid combination of the two.

To ensure that the applications are delivered in a timely, secure and most efficient way, businesses choose to deploy “Traffic Management” in front of these web applications. These traffic management systems (often referred to as “Load Balancers” or “Proxy’s”) are application delivery controllers. Their job is to manage the delivery of the critical applications and services that the business publishes. The effectiveness of these ADCs can be measured by one simple metric – the degree of control that the application delivery controller gives you in delivery the application to the use in the fastest and most personal way.

 

Ok, I got it! So where and how do I deploy them?

Virtualization and Cloud have had a significant impact on the architecture of applications and servers running in a business – this deployment model applies equally to ADCs.

• The old architecture was monolithic - with all elements of an application deployed within a physical data center and physical ADCs in close proximity to manage the traffic. It was a static environment, with long lead times required to change or upgrade the overall application deployment.
• The new architecture is more flexible, which follows the advantages of virtualisation. With elements of an application spread across a range of IT environments (and often in different locations) we can now place an ADC around each part of the application meaning we can ensure application availability whatever the demand without buying expensive static and “future proofed” hardware meaning we can not only better control costs, but we can support an environment that is more dynamic and distributed in nature.

 

And an example of how Riverbed SteelApp does this is?

Yesterday, Steve Mavin (from Riverbed) spoke about ‘See Tickets’. See Tickets is one of the largest online ticket resellers in Europe, with over 34 million online unit sales per year.  The IT team at See Tickets was becoming increasingly aware that its website struggled to cope with huge and sudden spikes in web traffic – meaning they were missing sales! With 85 percent of ticket sales made online, and over 1 million page views per day, See Tickets is heavily reliant on the performance of its website infrastructure.

When See Tickets launches a new event, thousands of people will hit their website at the same time, and there is a real danger that the web site will collapse. SteelApp steps in to act as a shock absorber, and manages the incoming requests to protect the application, and speed up the response time.

Riverbed SteelApp was chosen for its flexibility and reporting metrics to monitor and review website traffic patterns, identify trends, and make informed business decisions. They use SteelApp to apply a series of application business policies to control the type, flow, and priority of traffic to their website. This enables See Tickets to manage traffic to the back-end servers to cope with the huge peaks of visitors coming to the site. 

In addition, SteelApp Web App Firewall is a key part of the solution, providing an additional layer of security, giving See Tickets optimum protection for their online presence. See Tickets’ customers have the reassurance that their personal and financial information is protected, as they comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Online ticket sales and similar high-volume transactions are a great example of the way in which SteelApp can make a real difference to a web application: put simply, shorter response time means they make more money, and downtime means losing money.

Anything else?

Riverbed SteelApp, is the #1 virtual application delivery controller (ADC) for scalable, secure, and elastic delivery of your enterprise, cloud, and e-commerce applications.

We'd love to hear from you to talk through your application and business performance needs. Please get in touch @Cisilion or contact me directly @rquickenden 

 

 

The Latest 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant has just been released and as usual it’s the usual leap-frogging match between Cisco and Microsoft Lync that we see every year. This year Microsoft have just beaten Cisco to the post. I won’t dwell too much on the report as I am sure by now you’d had a chance to read it. If you haven’t, you can read it here. 

If you read between the lines a little, one thing mentioned a couple of time is the growing mention (and lack of support in some cases) for WebRTC. Within the latest report, Gartner states that “Enterprise planners must also expect considerable change in technology and requirements…….Significant advances, such as WebRTC, are making it easier to integrate communications directly into business applications.”

So what is WebRTC?
WebRTC enables media rich browser-to-browser communications without the need to download “plugins” or run applets. This simplifies application creation for developers on the back end too and because its’ web-based and back-end based it means that updates can be rolled out really quickly without the need for users to download and install updated software.

WebRTC is already supported on over a billion endpoints according to Google (who are a major WebRTC developer) who expect the number of WebRTC-capable endpoints to grow to nearly 4 billion by 2016.

Phil Edholms’ who is a WebRTC expert and president at UC Strategies.com says that “The thing that is really exciting about WebRTC is that, in addition to enabling a website to allow two peer endpoints to begin a rich media session (voice, video, data, etc.) with a relatively simple set of instructions, WebRTC is the initial technology showing the change coming in the industry, the webification of communications.”

Why do I need to know about it?
It’s not just traditional Unified Communications such as Cisco Jabber and Microsoft Lync (which uses a non-standard HTML 5 variant)  that are moving to support this technology either. Specialist Web Conferencing providers technology that are enhanced by WebRTC either. The Contact Center, and customer interactions in general will see huge benefits in using WebRTC as it will enable much better interactions with people on SmartPhones and Tablets that don’t want (or cant) download special apps.

Whilst existing “leaders” are adding WebRTC support into their existing product portfolios, there are also new emerging vendors releasing UC&C products based solely around WebRT. For example in April 2013 GenBand introduced SPiDR, a specific WebRTC gateway. This sits on the network edge and provides web-centric, open APIs that allow app devs to build apps that use the rich communications services of the telecommunications network –voice, IM, video, conferencing, presence and all that other jazz.

Later this month, the online retailer http://www.toygeniusonline.com/ will go live with a new website in which shoppers can interact online with sales teams in real time. They will be able to provide real time assistance to shoppers about their products, answer any questions, and even show them videos of the products customers are interesting in. It’s like a physical shopping experience but online – all delivered using WebRTC technology. From here the virtual sales assistants can put the products customers select into virtual shopping baskets and then move shoppers to the online checkout when they are ready. They expect this to significantly help address the abandoned shopping basket and enrich the shopping experience.

It will be interesting to see this space develop further and see what next year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant looks like for the Unified Communications space.

Need to now more or see how this technology can benefit your business, visit our website or book a UC demo with us.

www.cisilion.com

Microsoft announced the appointment of Satya Nadella as the new CEO, this is the 3^rd time in 38 years that a new person takes the helm of arguably the largest software company in the globe. The background of Satya is a telling one for what this means for Microsoft, he comes from the cloud area of Microsoft and one that is rapidly growing. As we are seeing in our customer requirements the historic model of IT is shifting to a pay on demand model and one that Azure platform has excelled at. The other recent changes in Microsoft with the production of the Surface and the acquisition of Nokia all points towards one reality.

The modern workplace is changing flexible working and being productive in all areas is key. The experience of starting a piece of work at your desktop to continuing that document on your commute on your Windows mobile and then finishing off on your windows tablet is now a reality. The Office 365 suite is making this a reality with Sky Drive and Sky Drive pro (Soon to be One Drive). So I can see this move towards productivity continuing. It will be interesting to see how products like Lync which are key in the flexible work style continue to evolve since already customers are embracing the familiar windows experience in Unified Communications.

Another telling factor will be how the new Windows continues to develop and what will happen with Consumer products like X Box One under the new focus. One exciting thing coming out of Microsoft is the Windows mobile, with the decline of Blackberry and the expense of I Phones is there going to be a move to the business choice of mobile to be a Nokia? It will be interesting to see, but one thing is for certain there is going to be some big changes at Microsoft to continue the journey that was started 38 years ago, to make the business place somewhere which users can be more productive and people can have the flexibility to be productive anywhere, of course we can all hope the next Windows isn’t going to be vista repeat. 

Richard Bowes - Director of Microsoft Solutions, Cisilion.