Executive Editor of LWN.net Jon Corbet will moderate the Linux kernel developer panel with Greg Kroah-Hartman, Will Deacon, Sebastian Hasselbarth, and Peter Zijlstra at 2:30 p.m. GMT on Tuesday, Oct. 22.
IBM: API and “Cloud-First” Approach Key to Business Success in the App Economy
We live in a new generation that is always asking “Is there an app for that?” said Mac Devine, CTO of IBM Cloud Services in his Tuesday morning keynote at LinuxCon and CloudOpen Europe in Edinburgh. Consumers want easy access to data and information and they want it right now.
To survive in this new mobile economy businesses must be able to deploy applications and data when and wherever they want, he said. Next-generation cloud platforms provide the infrastructure for this service, but the true key to success is making that platform available to others as an API for spontaneous innovation. Through the API, businesses can use and expose their data to engage customers in strategic ways.
“A cloud service is only as good as its API,” Devine said. “If you’re going to do something innovative but it’s invisible to the open ecosystem, it’s not going to do anybody any good.”
This requires a different way of thinking than the traditional enterprise IT approach, however, in which managers determine the architecture and products are developed over several months and perfected before they are released. A “cloud-first” approach is faster and it empowers developers to determine the direction the technology takes, he said.
It also gives customers access to the service much earlier in the development process. Putting a service out quickly, within a few weeks, with limited investment allows for early feedback on a product and more rapid innovation. But it can also fail miserably.
“Cloud-first” business challenges
Adapting to this new way of doing business is a challenge. At IBM it required a complete change in the DNA of the business, Devine said, a process he called “gene therapy.”
IBM’s acquisition of SoftLayer eased the transition because the company was built from the ground-up with that cloud-first approach in mind, he said. Their infrastructure is flexible, with the ability to provide bare metal servers as well as virtual machines.
Before the hard work of setting up the processes and architectures to provide an API and cloud services, developers must first convince business managers that cloud-first is the right approach.
“It’s hard for people to give up control — to open up your technology and let people do with it what they want,” agreed Steve Chambers, CTO of Canopy Cloud, during the panel discussion following Devine’s talk.
To lay the groundwork with IT managers, Rich Miller, a big data and cloud consultant on the panel, recommended addressing the real or perceived lack of security that managers fear when it comes to opening up a company’s data. You must safely manage the jurisdictions of where data can and cannot live, he said.
“If you present it safely, you can allow each department to build their own services without endangering the whole,” Miller said.
And finally, instead of opening up all of a company’s data and services, choose the ones that you are best able to support and make the most strategic sense, Devine said. Even offering 60 percent of your services is a good goal, he said. This makes it more manageable.
“Just do it in a way that fails quickly and recovers quickly,” he said. “Plan for adaptability.”
Starting an Open Hardware Company and Building in the Open
For nearly as long as the three of us have known each other, we have talked about the things we would make when we had our own company. The seriousness of that statement grew and waned over time. But early this year, a friend who was just getting into working with the Arduino microcontroller platform built an 8-bit binary counter and an idea was born: Why not make a bigger counter? Why not make it a clock? This idea became the start of Maniacal Labs, a company that we plan to run by following the ideals of open source software and hardware.
Read more at OpenSource.com
HTC Reportedly Working on Android Smartwatch for Next Year
HTC is planning a smartwatch for the second half of 2014, according to an anonymously sourced report from Bloomberg News. The product is said to have a camera and run Android, but other details such as pricing and functionality are yet to be ironed out. Companies such as Sony and Samsung have already produced smartwatches running Android, and Apple is rumored to be working on a similar product.
Earlier this week CEO Peter Chou and chairwoman Cher Wang alluded to HTC’s intentions to enter the wearable technology market, calling it a “critical segment” for the company. “It’s still too early,†said Chou of current efforts in the space. “It has to meet a need, otherwise if it’s just a gimmick or concept, it’s not for…
Read more at The Verge