In the software development industry, 2016 was truly transformative. The way software is developed, what it is being created for, and where it resides and is used all changed to a large degree last year. More development teams adopted agile and DevOps techniques, while QA “moved left” and integrated into the process, rather than being … continue reading
This month’s column is a transcript of a fascinating conversation I had with MapR executives Jim Scott, the director of enterprise strategy and architecture at Hadoop solution provider MapR, and Jack Norris, senior VP of data and applications, on the subject of microservices and scaling Big Data. SD Times: So, we know that scaling data … continue reading
Continuing on its cloud-first, mobile-first journey, Microsoft today announced that more developers will have access to the company’s Azure cloud platform. At its second Connect conference in New York City this morning, the company said it has joined the Linux Foundation to collaborate with open-source developers, and that Google has joined the .NET Foundation. Further, … continue reading
You wake up in the morning and check your watch for messages. You go into the kitchen for coffee, and as you reach for milk, you check the display on your refrigerator to find out what you might need. You get into your car and see traffic conditions as your navigation system recalculates the best … continue reading
Following up on CEO Satya Nadella’s Monday keynote at this week’s Ignite conference, Microsoft has apparently formed an artificial intelligence division to meet the vision he outlined of smarter machines to help people be more productive and make better decisions. Also announced today is an alliance between the major players in the artificial intelligence space. Amazon, … continue reading
With all the talk here at Microsoft’s Ignite conference around the cloud, office productivity and collaboration (and all that goes with that), CEO Satya Nadella took the keynote stage yesterday afternoon to discuss what he sees as the next horizon of digital transformation: artificial intelligence. This, to be sure, is not about AI for the … continue reading
Digital transformation is the cornerstone upon which Microsoft’s announcement at today’s kickoff of the company’s Ignite conference were all about. Devices already outnumber users there are for them, and Microsoft sees security, intelligence and the cloud platform as key pieces that will facilitate that transformation. “With an ever-evolving and increasingly complex cyber threat landscape, security … continue reading
Business today is software. Every company, whether it realizes it or not, is a software company. For online retailers, banks, investment firms, news organizations, insurance companies—just about every business, in fact—applications are their outward face to their clients. But applications today are complex. No longer monolithic in nature, apps today involve API calls to various … continue reading
It’s not a new idea. The use of rapid application development tools, application service providers, and drag-and-drop visual frameworks that got you 80% of the way to an application, have been tossed around for at least the past 10 to 15 years. The thinking was, if you could give line-of-business workers and other stakeholders the … continue reading
If you listen to the voices out there in our industry, organizations must release software at a breakneck pace if they want to survive in this consumerized, instant-gratification world of applications. Heaven forbid a competitor develops a new feature before you do. If that happens, you’re told, you might as well shut down your business … continue reading
“Cogito ergo sum.” — Rene Descartes, 17th century French philosopher and mathematician. To me, software processes are a kind of intelligence, and that means to me that every program is alive. This is how I really see it.” — Benjamin Shapiro, founder of Thinking Software. You’ll get the connection soon. But first… Long story short, Shapiro, … continue reading
Open-source software is being used more than ever, yet practices for sourcing the software are inefficient and vulnerabilities are pervasive, according to a report from supply-chain automation provider Sonatype. The number of open-source component download requests increased to 31 billion in 2015 from 17 billion in 2014, according to the report, which looked at supply … continue reading
