Hot on the heels of its recent acquisition of application performance management company AppDynamics, Cisco announced today that its newest subsidiary will be launching a new developer toolkit as part of its Spring 2017 release. The toolkit is aimed at helping application development teams within enterprises better manage their application development lifecycles.

The goal of the AppDynamics' Developer Toolkit is to accelerate the process of building and launching Web and mobile apps for corporations, according to Cisco. The toolkit includes tools to build, test, analyze, and improve on a companys application products. The toolkit is generally available starting today.

Support for Mobile App Developers

"Today, the application is the business, creating immense pressure on organizations to deliver new experiences that 'wow' customers," said Bhaskar Sunkara, chief technical officer and head of product at AppDynamics. "With our new Developer Toolkit, companies can give their application teams the context of how their code impacts the business and deliver innovation like a digital leader."

Included in the capabilities of the new toolkit is support for new languages and development tools, such as Go (or GoLang) and Xamarin, a C#-based platform used by developers to build native user interfaces for apps on the iOS, Android, and Windows environments. The toolkit also includes new extensions to help development teams integrate and test their apps before and after launch.

AppDynamics' spring release also includes updates to its Enterprise iQ and Business iQ products, both of which are designed to help app developers monitor and improve the experiences their customers have with their apps. The Business iQ update, for example, will include a Unique Crash Tool to analyze crash reports and correlate them with business metrics such as customer conversion rates or revenue. A new Android Studio plugin, meanwhile, should help developers reduce errors when delivering apps for mobile operating systems.

Tracking User Experiences

Business iQ is also being upgraded with new tools to allow developers to track the way their users interact with their applications, including information on events such as scrolling through a screen, tapping a button or link, or using other gestures to interact with a mobile app.

Cisco's goal for the new tools is to help enterprises better meet increasing customer expectations for positive user experiences by making it easier for development operations to overcome the difficulties inherent in coordinating work between multiple divisions within an organization by providing a single tool that everyone involved in the development process can use.

The spring release comes only weeks after Cisco acquired AppDynamics for $3.7 billion on March 23. The subsidiary is now a business unit within Ciscos IoT and Applications division. AppDynamics, which primarily focuses on managing the performance and availability of applications deployed across cloud computing and data center environments, should help Ciscos strategy of bulking up its cloud services offerings.

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CLOUD COMPUTING Cisco Announces New Developer Tools from AppDynamics - CIO Today

By Ernest Sampera is Chief Marketing Officer for vXchnge.

In a time when we all expect instant access to our personal and professional networks, its never been more important to have the right technology and strategies in place for supporting todays advanced users, applications, and data. From business applications like ERPs and Salesforce to the ability to post to Facebook with zero lag time, decreased latency is becoming a must-have as business users and consumers demand new levels of efficiency and speed.

To remain competitive and meet the growing demand for more responsive services, IT departments are leveraging edge computing. Edge computing enables companies to put the right data in the right place at the right time, supporting fast and secure access. The result is an improved client experience and, oftentimes, a valuable strategic advantage.

The transition to edge computing is being driven by three rapidly evolving, and often overlapping, dynamics: the growth of IoT, the pace of technology-empowered business, and evolving user expectations.

IoT usage is poised to explode, with over 50 billion things projected to be connected to the Internet by 2020. In fact, the IoT is the most commonly cited reason for a move to an edge computing architecture, as more than80 percent of IT teams want their data centers to be more available and reliable to keep pace with IoT demands. Edge computing enables faster real-time analysis and lower costs for managing, analyzing and storing IoT data.

Today, almost every company in every industry sector needs near-instant data to be successful. Restaurant chains need to know where their food product is coming from, when it expires, and when it will arrive on their doorstep. A mistake in the supply chain could have consequences that range from losing a loyal customer to a food safety crisis that results in food-borne illness. Retail stores need to know what customers bought yesterday, how much they spent, and what they are looking to buy next. In the financial sector, milliseconds can make a dramatic difference for high-frequency trading algorithms. And, in healthcare, real-time patient information can be the difference between life and death. These scenarios require speed and scale to support latency-sensitive, machine-to-machine data.

When it comes to consumers, expectations are high, and brands must be prepared. Edge computing allows businesses with a geographically dispersed customer base to deliver the exceptional availability consumers demand, while also enabling data to be shared across the globe instantly. It also enables businesses with remote or branch offices to replicate cloud services locally, improving performance and productivity.

According to a recent BI Intelligence report, the manufacturing, utility, energy and transportation industries are expected to adopt edge computing first, followed by smart cities, agriculture, healthcare and retail.

Seventy-nine percent of IT teams feel that having customers closer to their content is the most important benefit of a data center. Utilizing an edge data center in markets close to customers means companies can provide better service, with less physical distance and minimal latency.

When choosing an edge data center provider, organizations should look for providers committed to standards such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, or SAE 16 Type II, depending on their particular industry. A data center that is certified can provide peace of mind to companies and their customers that their sensitive data, and ultimately their brand, is protected.

The decision to implement an edge computing architecture is typically driven by the need for location optimization, security, and most of all, speed.

The importance of speed to every business operation cannot be overstated. Its no longer a competitive advantage; its a necessity. Todays data management systems require the most immediate information to support in the moment decisions that can have an impact of millions of dollars to the bottom line. By bringing processing to the edge of the network, businesses reduce latency by prioritizing processing and lightening the load on the primary network, supporting better, faster decision-making.

Location optimization reduces data processing from minutes and hours to milliseconds and microseconds and as close to real time as you can currently get. Less physical distance translates to minimal latency and greater reliability. Allowing customers in Nashville to receive the same speed and level of service as those in New York is one example of what edge computing can enable.

While cloud computing wont be slowing down anytime soon, edge computing is finding its place in IT architectures. Cloud computing and edge computing provide significant, yet different, benefits, and smart IT strategists will be sure take full advantage of both.

Opinions expressed in the article above do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Data Center Knowledge and Penton.

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Cloud Computing Moves to the Edge - Data Center Knowledge

An overwhelming 90% of organisations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities by 2020, according to the latest prognostication from analyst firm Gartner.

The forecast, which appears in a new report titled Predicts 2017: Infrastructure Services Become Hybrid Infrastructure Services, notes the duel forces of cloud and industrialised services growth and the decline of traditional data centre outsourcing as the primary factors.

Gartner argues that last year, traditional worldwide data centre outsourcing, alongside infrastructure utility services (IUS), represented 49% of the global data centre services market, priced at $154 billion. By 2020, the numbers will swell to $228bn, but the charge towards cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and hosting will see the traditional base fall to 35%. Observant readers will note that the size of the market will increase - $75.46bn last year compared with $79.8bn in 2020 but like on-prem versus cloud-based enterprise collaboration, it is an inexorable shift.

As the demand for agility and flexibility grows, organisations will shift toward more industrialised, less tailored options, said DD Mishra, research director at Gartner in a statement. Organisations that adopt hybrid infrastructure will optimise costs and increase efficiency. However, it increases the complexity of selecting the right toolset to deliver end-to-end services in a multi-sourced environment.

Maarten van Montfoort, VP north-west Europe at IT provider Comparex, makes a similar argument, noting the importance of avoiding a one-size-fits-all migration. Many companys existing infrastructure are currently designed for business as usual operations with a combination of dated licensing models not designed for cloud and a lack of application compatibility, he said.

Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all model, and each organisations journey will be different, added van Montfoort. For example: can legacy, business-critical applications not built with cloud in mind be re-architected for the cloud, or do they need to stay on premise? Should the organisation be seeking out a new SaaS product to fit their needs? And does the organisation have the specific skills in-house that it will need to do this?

These are all important considerations if organisations are to maximise the ROI of hybrid cloud.

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Nine in 10 firms will adopt hybrid infrastructure management by 2020, says Gartner - Cloud Tech

The cloud and cloud computing have become incredible buzzwords. It seems most people are floating around the idea, as the term ambiguously suggests, but dont seem to have a grasp on how the cloud functions.

Believed to be invented by American psychologist and computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider in the 1960s, cloud computing was created to connect data for people between locations and times. Now, this technology has vastly grown and made publicly available by industry leaders Amazon AMZN and Microsoft MSFT.

What is the Cloud?

In basic terms, cloud computing is accessing and storing data over the Internet. To the end user, benefits of the cloud include: the ability to deliver and manage their own computer resources, scale up or scale down computing levels as needed, and only pay for the amount of computing power they use.

Synergy Research Group shows cloud vendor revenues reached $148 billion in 2016, which accounts for 25% annualized growth. Clearly, this is a vast and fast growing space. Leaders in the movement are changing the traditional notion of accessing data through hardware by introducing the idea of retrieving data through space, or the cloud.

At the end of the day, this data needs to be stored somewhere. Companies which offer cloud computing services allocate massive and secure servers to store the data being held in the cloud. Even though cloud data is not being stored in users personal hard drives, is it held somewhere and may be vulnerable to failures.

With the rate of growth this technology is flying at, it seems cloud computing will soon take over the necessities of personal hard drive space. The two popularly known leaders of the cloud computing business are known to be: Amazon with AWS (Amazon Web Service, Inc) and Microsoft with Azure.

How Fast are the Amazon and Microsoft Growing?

Amazons cloud computing service, AWS, launched in 2006. They advertise themselves to deliver large computing capabilities and capacities which cost less and take less time than a company building physical servers. As of 2016, AWS offers more than 70 services.

Year over Year (Y/Y) growth of AWS sales for Amazon were increasing until, and as of now peaked on, Q2 of 2015 at 81%. Since, AWS revenues have been seeing high growth, but not to the level it once did. In Q4 of 2016, Y/Y net sales growth for AWS was 47%.

A similar story is shown with Microsofts Azure. Y/Y revenue growth (GAAP) of their Azure business capped, to date, in Q2 of 2016 at 127% growth. Just like AWS, the later quarters show sales growth at a decreasing rate with Q4 2016 Y/Y revenue growth (GAAP) at 93%.

So Who Cares?

Two of the leaders in cloud computing platforms have not been able to increase their sales growth of their respective cloud businesses. In an industry which is infamous for how fast it is expanding into the hands of businesses and individuals, these numbers are concerning.

It looks like the maximum potential for Amazons and Microsofts sales growth for their cloud computing businesses have capped. Unless either company releases break through cloud computing technology or breaking price points, their sales growth rates look to continually decrease considering current levels.

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Amazon & Microsoft: Are These Cloud Computing Leaders in a Growth Slowdown? - Yahoo Finance

The global data landscape will total an eye-watering 163 zettabytes by 2025, up from 16 ZB last year and the equivalent of watching the entire Netflix catalogue 489 million times, according to a new missive from Seagate.

The study, Data Age 2025, was put together in conjunction with research firm IDC, and finds that within the next decade enterprises will become the primary creator of the worlds data, at 60% by 2025. Business leaders will have the opportunity to embrace new and unique business opportunities powered by this wealth of data and the insight it provides but will also need to make strategic choices on data collection, utilisation and location, the company notes.

Almost every enterprise is set to be affected by these trends, the research adds, from embedded systems and the Internet of Things (IoT), to machine learning IDC estimates the amount of the global datasphere subject to data analysis will reach 5.2 ZB in 2025 and real-time data.

Naturally, cloud also plays a vital part; consumers and businesses creating, sharing and accessing data between any device and the cloud an IoT play of course will continue to grow well beyond previous expectations, according to the report. Ciscos most recent cloud index figures argued that global cloud traffic was set to rise to more than 14 ZB per year by 2020, assisted by greater data centre virtualisation and increased migration to cloud technologies.

While we can see from this new research that the era of big data is upon us, the value of data is really not in the known but in the unknown where we are vastly underestimating the potentials today, said Steve Luczo, Seagate CEO. What is really exciting are the analytics, the new businesses, the new thinking and new ecosystems from industries like robotics and machine to machine learning, and their profound social and economic impact on our society.

The opportunity for todays enterprises and tomorrows entrepreneurs to capture the value of data is tremendous, and our global business leaders will be exploring these opportunities for decades to come, Luczo added.

One zettabyte is defined as 10 bytes to the power of 21. To put this in perspective, IDC argued back in 2006 that the combined space of all computer hard drives in the world was at an estimated 160 exabytes 10 bytes to the power of 18.

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Worldwide data creation set to top 163 ZB by 2025, argues Seagate - Cloud Tech