Build At the Build 2017 developer conference today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella marked a Windows milestone 500 million monthly active users and proceeded to say very little about Windows or Office.

Instead he, along with Scott Guthrie, EVP of the Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise Group, and Harry Shum, EVP of Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research group, spent most of their time on stage, in Seattle, talking about Azure cloud services, databases, and cross-platform development tools.

Arriving on stage to give his keynote address, Nadella in jest said that he thought it would be an awesome idea on such a sunny day "to bring everyone into a dark room to talk about cloud computing."

Office and Windows can wait.

Microsoft watchers may recall that its cloud-oriented businesses have been doing well enough to deserve the spotlight. In conjunction with the company's fiscal second quarter earnings report in January, the Windows and Office empire revealed that Azure revenue grew 93 per cent year-on-year.

During a pre-briefing for the press on Tuesday, Microsoft communications chief Frank Shaw described "a new worldview" for the company framed by the "Intelligent Edge" and the "Intelligent Cloud."

Nadella described this newborn weltanschauung as "a massive shift that is going to play out in the years to come."

He mused about a software-based personal assistant to illustrate his point. "Your personal digital assistant, by definition, will be available on all your devices," he said, to make the case that the centralized computing model, client and server, has become outmoded. Data and devices are dispersed.

In other words, all the data coming off connected devices requires both local and cloud computing resources. The revolution will not be centralized.

That could easily be taken as reheated Cisco frothing about the explosive growth of the Internet of Things and bringing processing smarts to the edge of the network. But Microsoft actually introduced a new service that fit its avowed vision.

Microsoft's bipolar worldview the Intelligent Edge and the Intelligent Cloud manifests itself in a novel "planet scale" database called Azure Cosmos DB. It's a distributed, multi-model database, based on the work of Microsoft Researcher Leslie Lamport, that promises to make data available locally, across Microsoft's 34 regions, while also maintaining a specified level of consistency across various instances of the data.

An Intelligent Meeting demonstration, featuring Cortana, showed how AI has the potential to exchange and coordinate data across multiple services. But "potential" requires developer work it will take coding to create the Cortana Skills necessary to connect the dots and manage the sort of cross-application communication that knowledge workers accomplish today through application switching, copying, and pasting.

Conveniently, the Cortana Skills Kit is now in public preview, allowing developers to extend the capabilities of Microsoft's assistant software to devices like Harman Kardon's Invoke speaker.

Beyond code, it will take data associated with people and devices in an organization to make those connections. That's something Microsoft with its Azure Active Directory, its Graph, and LinkedIn has in abundance.

A demonstration of real-time image recognition to oversee a construction worksite showed how a capability like image recognition might be useful to corporate customers. Cameras spotted unauthorized people and located requested equipment on-site. It looked like something companies might actually find useful.

Artificial intelligence as a general term sounds like naive science fiction. But as employed by Microsoft, it refers to machine learning frameworks, natural language processing, computer vision, image recognition or the like.

"We believe AI is about amplifying human ingenuity," said Shum.

Microsoft's concern is convincing developers and corporate clients to build and adopt AI-driven applications using Microsoft cloud computing resources, rather than taking their business to AWS or Google Cloud Platform.

One way Microsoft hopes to achieve that is by offering cloud computing outside the cloud, on endpoints like IoT devices. The company previewed a service called Azure IoT Edge to run containerized functions locally. It's a way of reducing latency and increasing responsiveness, which matters for customers like Sandvik.

The Swedish industrial automation biz has been testing Azure IoT Edge to anticipate equipment failure in its workplace machines, in order to shut them down before components break, causing damage and delays.

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Microsoft is on the edge: Windows, Office? Naah. Let's talk about cloud, AI - The Register

By Bob Brown, News Editor, Network World | May 10, 2017 2:20 PM PT

Your Alpha Doggs editor is Bob Brown, Network World Online Executive Editor, News.

When I saw that the creators of the Andrew File System (AFS) had been named recipients of the $35K ACM Software System Award, I said to myself "That's cool, I remember AFS from the days of companies like Sun Microsystems... just please don't ask me to explain what the heck it is."

Don't ask my colleagues either. A quick walking-around-the-office survey of a half dozen of them turned up mostly blank stares at the mention of the Andrew File System, a technology developed in the early 1980s and named after Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon. But as the Association for Computing Machinery's award would indicate, AFS is indeed worth knowing about as a foundational technology that paved the way for widely used cloud computing techniques and applications.

MORE: Whirlwind tour of tech's major awards, honors and prizes

Mahadev "Satya" Satyanarayanan, a Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science professor who was part of the AFS team, answered a handful of my questions via email about the origins of this scalable and secure distributed file system, the significance of it, and where it stands today. Satyanarayanan was recognized by ACM along with John Howard, Michael Leon Kazar, Robert Nasmyth Sidebotham, David Nichols, Sherri Nichols, Alfred Spectorand Michael West, who worked as a team via the Information Technology Center partnership between Carnegie Mellon and IBM (the latter of which incidentally funded this ACM prize).

Is there any way to quantify how widespread AFS use became and which sorts of organizations used it most? Any sense of how much it continues to be used, and for what?

Over a roughly 25-year timeframe, AFS has been used by many U.S. and non-U.S. universities. Many national labs, supercomputing centers and similar institutions have also used AFS. Companies in the financial industry (e.g., Goldman Sachs) and other industries have also used AFS. A useful snapshot of AFS deployment was provided by the paper "An Empirical Study of a Wide-Area Distributed File System" that appeared in ACM Transactions on Computer Systemsin 1996. That paper states:

"Originally intended as a solution to the computing needs of the Carnegie Mellon University, AFS has expanded to unite about 1000 servers and 20,000 clients in 10 countries. We estimate that more than 100,000 users use this system worldwide. In geographic span as well as in number of users and machines, AFS is the largest distributed file system that has ever been built and put to serious use."

Figure 1 in that paper shows that AFS spanned 59 educational cells, 22 commercial cells, 11 governmental cells, and 39 cells outside the United States at the time of the snapshot. In addition to this large federated multi-organization deployment of AFS, there were many non-federated deployments of AFS within individual organizations.

What has been AFS's biggest impact on today's cloud and enterprise computing environments?

The model of storing data in the cloud and delivering parts of it via on-demand caching at the edge is something everyone takes for granted today. That model was first conceived and demonstrated by AFS, and is perhaps its biggest impact. It simplifies management complexity for operational staff, while preserving performance and scalability for end users. From the viewpoint of end users, the ability to walk up to any machine and use it as your own provides enormous flexibility and convenience. All the data that is specific to a user is delivered on demand over the network. Keeping in sync all the machines that you use becomes trivial. Users at organizations that deployed AFS found this an addictive capability. Indeed, it was this ability that inspired the founders of DropBox to start their company. They had used AFS at MIT as part of the Athena environment, and wanted to enable at wider scale this effortless ability to keep in sync all the machines used by a person. Finally, many of the architectural principles and implementation techniques of AFS have influenced many other systems over the past decades.

How did AFS come to be created in the first place?

In 1982, CMU and IBM signed a collaborative agreement to create a "distributed personal computing environment" on the CMU campus, that could later be commercialized by IBM. The actual collaboration began in January 1983. A good reference for information about these early days is the1986 CACM paper by [James H.] Morris et al entitled "Andrew: A Distributed Personal Computing Environment". The context of the agreement was as follows. In 1982, IBM had just introduced the IBM PC, which was proving to be very successful. At the same time, IBM was fully aware that enterprise-scale use of personal computing required the technical ability to share information easily, securely, and with appropriate access controls. This was possible in the timesharing systems that were still dominant in the early 1980s. How to achieve this in the dispersed and fragmented world of a PC-based enterprise was not clear in 1982. A big part of the IBM-CMU collaborative agreement was to develop a solution to this problem. More than half of the first year of the Information Technology Center (1983) was spent in brainstorming on how best to achieve this goal. Through this brainstorming process, a distributed file system emerged by about August 1983 as the best mechanism for enterprise-scale information sharing. How to implement such a distributed file system then became the focus of our efforts.

What would the AFS creators have done differently in building AFS if they had to do it over again?

I can think of at least two things: one small and one big.

The small thing is that the design and early evolution of AFS happened prior to the emergence of [network address translation (NAT)]-based firewalls in networking. These are in widespread use today in homes, small enterprises, etc. Their presence makes it difficult for a server to initiate contact with a client in order to establish a callback channel. If we had developed AFS after the widespread use of NAT-based firewalls, we would have carefully rethought how best to implement callbacks in the presence of NAT firewalls.

The bigger thing has to do with the World Wide Web. The Mosaic browser emerged in the early 1990s, and Netscape Navigator a bit later. By then AFS had been in existence for many years, and was in widespread use at many places. Had we realized how valuable the browser would eventually become as a tool, we would have paid much more attention to it. For example, a browser can be used in AFS by using "file://" rather than "http://" in addresses. All of the powerful caching and consistence-maintenance machinery that is built into AFS would then have been accessible through a user-friendly tool that has eventually proved to be enormously valuable. It is possible that the browser and AFS could have had a much more symbiotic evolution, as HTTP and browsers eventually did.

Looks like maybe there are remnants of AFS alive in the open source world?

Indeed. OpenAFS continues to be an active open source project. Many institutions (including CMU) continue to use AFS for production use, and this code is now based on OpenAFS.

Also, my work on the Coda File System forked off from the November 1986 version of AFS. Coda was open-sourced in the mid-1990s. That code base continues to be alive and functional today. Buried in Coda are ideas and actual code from early AFS.

Do any of you have any spectacular plans for what theyll do with the prize money?

Nothing concrete yet. We have discussed possibly donating the funds to a charitable cause.

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You really should know what the Andrew File System is - Network World

When born-in-the-cloud distributor Pax8 first started talking to partners about what it was doing, it had nothing on its line card. Still, the concept a cloud distributor designed specifically around cloud services spoke to channel partners who were fed up with the way traditional distributors approached the cloud.

Now, the Denver, Colorado-based distributor recently crossed the 1,300 partner mark, and added 169 partners in March alone. Ryan Walsh, Pax8 SVP of Partner Solutions says the company will grow to 120 employees, from 80 employees, by year-end.

I think the message is resonating that distribution for the cloud needs to be different, and I think the channel partners are showing us that they are willing to give us a shot and see what that looks like, Walsh said.

Part of what that looks like from Walshs perspective is a more focused approach than traditional distribution, he says. Pax8 selects vendors that provide a high quality and innovative product, good margins for partners, and can enable instant provisioning, he says. Its vendors include BitTitan, Carbonite, and ProfitBricks.

If I put my reputation on this I need to know that it works and it works well, Walsh said. We dont sign somebody who says, oh yeah, I go through distribution and youll just be another one. Some of our vendors didnt have tier-2 distribution when we signed up with them.

This approach to vetting vendors has also allowed Pax8 to provide advanced integration with solutions like ConnectiWise and AutoTask, Walsh says.

Traditional distribution very good at inventory management, processing, financing, but when you look at cloud business you have to look at it from quote to cash. You cant start in the middle which is when you take the order. Youve got to be good at going all the way up to how do you market and sell it to a prospect base that is greater in number than most of our partners are used to dealing with, he said.

With cloud services, once an order is placed, there is an expectation of delivering that service,onboarding, ensuringbilling is right, and support is in place, butanywhere along this continuum you could knock an opportunity out or disappoint a customer if you dont do those well, he said.

We find that the focus on understanding what that means to handle quote to cash cloud business is a big reason folks come to us, Walsh said.

In moving from a break-fix business, partners often look to Pax8 to help them acquire customers to move from intermittent sales to high transaction and high frequency.

Were finding that our channel partners need help selling and marketing cloud business and its completely different than how you would do that with on-prem technology, he said. While a partner in the past might have used a referral method, in the future youve got to automate. Its this balance between high automation and high touch.

One of the more recent initiatives to support partners at Pax8 is its Cloud Wingman program, which the company launched in February. The program provides sales and marketing solutions, as well as a dedicated Cloud Solutions Advisor which serves as partners own personal Cloud Wingman, according to its website. Its services could eventually extend to providing white-glove service for partners who need more assistance in selecting targets and how to follow up with prospects, Walsh said.

These approaches require Pax8 to spend more time working with partners upfront, but were finding that our partners need more assistance and were big believers in teaching them to fish, Walsh said.

Read more from the original source:
Pax8 Makes Case for New Approach to Cloud Distribution - Talkin' Cloud

An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is a must for every business. The need to store and access more and more data makes it impossible to operate without proper business software. Furthermore, the desire to access this information on the go means that most companies are choosing cloud solutions.

The benefits are countless more efficient, decreasing costs, easier to maintain, just to name a few. The main problem that it poses is the increased risk of security breach the privacy of the data that we store is at stake. This data has great value for our business and if it ends up in the wrong hands it may be used against us. To that end, its worth examining common ERP system security problems and what can be done about them to keep the system protected and well maintained.

Dont let strong marketing and aggressive salespeople (or overly attractive prices) win you over. Vetting your ERP provider thoroughly is the key to understanding the functionalities and restrictions of your system.

Shop around and get at least three serious offers from reputable providers. Also, dont be afraid to ask the providers youre considering for references within your specific line of work. Furthermore, it is a good idea to ask directly the vendors why they consider their product safe or better in security aspect than the completion. You may not understand their answer but if you write everything down it is easy to investigate and even question the next provider over the answer of the previous one and so on. At least, you will be able to sense how comfortable they are discussing this topic.

It isnt uncommon that people think that once they have implemented their ERP system they are set for life. Technology is constantly improving to keep up with the ever-changing market and to meet new standards and requests.

If you dont follow the technological developments, falling behind will be a given. Evaluate your need for a new ERP system and act accordingly. Check if the software will be updated regularly and if this is included in the pricing. Most cloud solutions do this and it is rapidly becoming an industry standard but that doesnt mean you can count on it by default.

People tend to get hyped about the cyber part of cyber security but they often dont realize that actually, the weakest link in the system are humans. Well-meaning but uneducated and uninformed staff that regularly use an ERP system and handle sensitive data are probably the biggest security liability.

Dont rush with going live with your ERP system. Give your staff enough time to get comfortable with it.

Also, rather than spending a lot on extreme cyber security measures, invest some time and money on educating your staff. They need to know how to handle their passwords, what to do with suspicious e-mail and hyperlinks and how to avoid giving a potential hacker what they need freely.

Regular cyber security audits are a must. Think about them as regular check-ups at your doctors if you detect something is wrong at the right time, youll have much fewer problems fixing it.

With a regular cyber security audit, you will be able to detect possible loopholes in your system but also catch security breaches relatively early. Latest research shows that, on average, a breach is being detected between six months to a year after it happens. During this period an intruder has access to sensitive information of the company. Doing a cyber-security audit twice a year is highly recommended if the company is big enough to be able to afford it.

Unfortunately, software updates take time. And when youre doing business, time is often one thing you dont have. That is why, more often than not, companies delay making regular updates of their software in general.

Keep in mind that software updates arent there to mess with you software developers are doing them to fix bugs and weak spots. This means that if you dont keep your software up to date, youre potentially making it vulnerable.

As your business grows, youll inevitably add more and more devices to your ERP system. It wont only be regular desktop computers in your office but tablets and mobile phones as well. You will also want to connect to your ERP system from anywhere, not just from your well-maintained, secure office network.

Make sure that your ERP system can keep up with this and try to always use secure networks. Dont gamble with free Wi-Fi when you are trying to manage your business remotely.

A good ERP system can be a lifesaver when youre doing business. But although it makes day to day work much easier, it does require that you take care of it properly.

If youre feeling overwhelmed, dont be afraid to seek professional help. In the end, when you consider the time, risks and effort, a professional who knows what theyre doing will probably save you more money than youll end up paying them.

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Six classic ERP system security problems and how to avoid them - Cloud Tech

IBM claims it has the fastest cloud for deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) after publishing benchmark tests which show NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU accelerators on the IBM Cloud can provide up to 2.8 times more performance than the previous generation in certain cases.

The tests, when fleshed out, will enable organisations to quickly create advanced AI applications on the cloud. Deep learning techniques are a key driver behind the increased demand for and sophistication of AI applications, the company noted. However, training a deep learning model to do a specific task is a compute-heavy process that can be time and cost-intensive.

IBM purports to be the first of the large cloud providers to offer NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs. Separate tests were carried out, first by IBM engineers and then by cloud simulation platform provider Rescale. For the IBM tests, engineers trained a deep learning model for image classification using two NVIDIA P100 cards on Bluemix bare metal, before comparing the same process to two Tesla K80 GPU cards.

The second performance benchmark, from Rescale, also picked up time reduction on deep learning training, based on its ScaleX platform, which features capabilities for deep learning software as a service (SaaS).

Innovation in AI is happening at a breakneck speed thanks to advances in cloud computing, said John Considine, IBM general manager for cloud infrastructure services in a statement. As the first major cloud provider to offer the NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU, IBM Cloud is providing enterprises with accelerated performance so they can quickly and more cost-effectively create sophisticated AI and cognitive experiences for their end users.

Another cloud vendor utilising NVIDIAs Tesla P100 GPU although not of the same scale as IBM is Tencent, who made the announcement back in March. As this publication noted at the time, virtually every major cloud player is an NVIDIA customer of some sort, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft.

You can find out more about the IBM tests here.

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IBM touts its cloud platform as quickest for AI with benchmark tests - Cloud Tech