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Celebrate the 20th anniversary of SD Times!

Ted Bahr & Alan Zeichick

February 23, 2000 — the debut issue of SD Times hit the stands and changed my world. Launched as a printed semi-monthly newspaper in tabloid size, SD Times grew into the world’s leading publication for software development managers.

Ted Bahr and I formed BZ Media in mid-1999. SD Times was the first of our many publications, conferences, and websites, all B2B for the technology industry. Today, SD Times flourishes as part of D2 Emerge, and we couldn’t be more proud to see our beloved SD Times continue to serve this important audience.

Let’s look back. David Rubinstein — who started out as executive editor of SD Times and is now co-owner of D2 Emerge and editor-in-chief of the magazine — put out a great 20th anniversary issue. (The other D is Dave Lyman.)

The special issue includes essays from me (page 18) and from Ted (page 12). Dave wrote a remembrance column (page 46) and art director Mara Leonardi shares some of her favorite SD Times covers and images (page 20).

Click here to read the anniversary issue or download it as a PDF.

Meanwhile, my favorite part of the special 20th anniversary issues are the old photos.

  • There’s one of Ted and Alan, doing our silly “‘I’m the B’ and ‘I’m the Z’” schtick based on Saturday Night Live’s Hans und Franz.
  • There’s one of the crazy launch crew celebrating the release of the first issue.
  • There’s one of BZ Media employees standing in the water for some unknown reason.
  • There’s a lot of alcohol being consumed. That’s what happens when your offices are next to a bar.

I love those people, and miss working with every single one of them. Thank you, Ted, Dave, Dave, Mara, Erzi, Eddie, Viena, Pat, Rebecca, Erin, Katie, Alex, Whitney, Adam, Stacy, Yvonne, Christina, Jon, Paula, David, Craig, Marilyn, Robin, LuAnn, Julie, Charlie, PJ, Lindsey, Agnes, Victoria, Catherine, Sabrina, Kathy, Jennifer, Jeff, Brenner, Doug, Dan, Lisa, Brian, Michele, Polina, Anne, Suzanne, Ryan, Jeanie, Josette, Debbie, Michelle, Nicole, Greg, Usman, Robert, Robbie, and so many others for making SD Times and BZ Media a success. Those were among the best years of my life.

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Unlock the power of “yes” to drive creativity and innovation

Duncan Wardle

Next time you hear a bad idea in the office, try saying “Yes.” That is, fight that impulse to say, “No, and here’s why your idea isn’t going to work.” That negative response shuts down creativity, says Duncan J. Wardle, former head of innovation and creativity at Disney.

Instead, try replying with a positive “Yes and …?” Ask encouraging follow-up questions—not to point out your colleague’s flawed thinking, but to help create a collaborative environment. Build a process that fosters creativity and imagination, and see where that leads.

More on the power of “Yes and.” Those words “transform the power of your idea into our idea,” Wardle explains. That transformation makes the idea bigger and accelerates its potential opportunities. It encourages collaboration, and from that collaboration, we can create new products, businesses, and processes.

Plus, by saying “Yes and,” we demonstrate to our coworkers that we honestly want to explore new ideas, not shut them down. That’s why he encourages asking questions that turn the discussion into an impromptu brainstorming session. Don’t throw up roadblocks meant to trip up your colleague. Instead, throw out your own ideas too. Be collaborative: “Here’s an idea, let’s see how to make it work.”

This is one of four techniques that Wardle offered to attendees at a packed session at Oracle OpenWorld. Read more in my short article for Forbes, “4 Techniques To Unlock Creativity, Including Saying ‘Yes’.”

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Key takeaways from RSA Conference 2018

Nine takeaways from the RSA Conference 2018 can give business leaders some perspective on how to think about the latest threats and information security trends. I attended the conference in April, along with more than 42,000 corporate security executives and practitioners, tech vendors, consultants, researchers and law enforcement experts.

In my many conversations, over way too much coffee, these nine topics below kept coming up. Consider these as real-world takeaways from the field:

1. Ransomware presents a real threat to operations

The RSA Conference took place shortly after a big ransomware event shut down some of Atlanta’s online services. The general consensus from practitioners at RSA was that such an attack could happen to any municipality, large or small, and the more that government services are interconnected, the greater the likelihood that a breach in one part of an organization could spill over and affect other systems. Thus, IT must be eternally vigilant to ensure that systems are patched and anti-malware measures are up to date to prevent a breach from spreading horizontally through the organization.

2. Spearphishing is getting more sophisticated

One would think that a CFO would know better than to respond to a midnight email from the CEO saying, “Please wire a million dollars to this overseas account immediately.” One would think that employees would know not to respond to requests from their IT department for a “password audit” and apply their login credentials. Yet those types of scenarios are happening with alarming frequencies—enough that when asked what they lose sleep over, many practitioners responded by saying “spearphishing” right after they said “ransomware.”

Spearphishing works because it arrives via carefully written emails. It is sometimes customized to a company or even a person’s role, and capable at times of evading spam filters and other email security software. Spearphishing tricks consumers into logging into fake banking websites, and it tricks employees into giving away money or revealing credentials.

Continuous employee training is the most common solution offered. Another option: strong monitoring that can use machine learning to learn what “normal” is and flag out-of-the-norm behaviors or data access by a person or system.

3. Cryptomining is a growing concern

Cryptomining occurs when hackers manage to install software onto enterprise computers that surreptitiously use processor and memory resources to mine cryptocurrencies. Unlike many other types of malware, cryptomining doesn’t try to disrupt operations or steal data. Instead, the malware wants to stay hidden, invisibly making money (literally) for the hacker for days, weeks, months or years. Again, effective system monitoring could help raise a flag when a company’s computing resources are being abused this way.

Interestingly, while many at RSA were talking about cryptomining, none of the people I talked to had experienced it first-hand. And while everyone agreed that such malware should be blocked, detected and eradicated, some treated cryptomining as a nuisance that is lower in security priority than other threats, like ransomware, spearphishing or other attacks that would steal corporate data.

What about 4-9?

Read the entire list, including thoughts about insider threats and the split between presentation and detection, in my essay for the Wall Street Journal, “9 Practical Takeaways From a Huge Data Security Conference.

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The perfect sport for CEOs

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd is known as an avid tennis fan and supporter of the sport’s development, having played in college at Baylor University. At the Collision Conference last week in New Orleans, Hurd discussed the similar challenges facing tennis players and top corporate executives.

“I like this sport because tennis teaches that you’re out there by yourself,” said Hurd, who was interviewed on stage by CNBC reporter Aditi Roy. “Tennis is like being CEO: You can’t call time out, you can’t bring in a substitute,” Hurd said. “Tennis is a space where you have to go out every day, rain or shine, and you’ve got to perform. It’s just like the business world.”

Performance returned to the center of the conversation when Roy asked about Oracle’s acquisition strategy. Hurd noted that Oracle’s leadership team gives intense scrutiny to acquisitions of any size. “We don’t go out of our way to spend money — it’s our shareholder’s money,” he said. “We also think about dividends and buying stock back.”

When it comes to mergers and acquisitions, Oracle is driven by three top criteria, Hurd said. “First, the company has to fit strategically with where we are going,” he said. “Second, it has to make fiscal sense. And third, we have to be able to effectively run the acquisition.”

Hurd emphasized that he’s focused on the future, not a company’s past performance. “We are looking for companies that will be part of things 5 or 10 years from now, not 5 or 10 years ago,” he said. “We want to move forward, in platforms and applications.”

To a large extent, that future includes artificial intelligence. Hurd was quick to say, “I’m not looking for someone to say, ‘I have an AI solution in the cloud, come to me.’” Rather, Oracle wants to be able to integrate AI directly into its applications, in a way that gives customers clear business returns.

He used the example of employee recruitment. “We recruit 2,000 college students today. It used to be done manually, but now we use machine learning and algorithms to figure out where to source people.” Not only does the AI help find potential employees, but it can help evaluate whether the person would be successful at Oracle. “We could never have done that before,” Hurd added.

Read more about what Hurd said at Collision, including his advice for aspiring CEOs, in my story for Forbes, “Mark Hurd On The Perfect Sport For CEOs — And Other Leadership Insights.”

You can also watch the 20-minute entire interview here.

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Microsoft Security thinks like Skynet

Got Terminator? Microsoft is putting artificial intelligence in charge of automatically responding to detected threats, with a forthcoming update to Windows Defender ATP.

Microsoft is expanding its use of artificial intelligence and big data analytics behind the current levels of machine learning in its security platform. Today, AI is used for incident detection and investigation, filtering out false positives and making it easier for humans in the security operations center (SOC) team to determine the correct response to an incident.

Soon, customers will be able to allow the AI to respond to some incidents automatically. Redmond claims this will cut time-to-remediation down to minutes. In a blog post released April 17, Moti Gindi, general manager for Windows Cyber Defense, wrote: “Threat investigation and remediation decisions can be taken automatically by Windows Defender ATP based on extensive historical data collected, stored and analyzed in our cloud (‘time travel’).”

What type of remediation? No, robots won’t teleport from the future and shoot lasers at the cybercriminals. At least, that’s not an announced capability. Rather, Windows Defender ATP will signal the Azure Active Directory user management and Microsoft Intune mobile device management platforms to temporarily revoke access privileges to cloud storage and enterprise applications, such as Office 365.

After the risk has been evaluated — or after the CEO has yelled at the CISO from her sales trip overseas — the access revocation can be reversed. Another significant part of the Windows Defender ATP announcements: Threat signal sharing between Microsoft’s various cloud platforms, which up until now have operated pretty much autonomously in terms of security.

In the example Microsoft offered, threats coming via a phishing email detected by Outlook 365 will be correlated with malware blocked by OneDrive for Business. In this incarnation, signal sharing will bring together Office 365, Azure 365 and Windows Defender ATP.

Read more, including about Microsoft’s Mac support for security, in my essay for SecurityNow, “Microsoft Security Is Channeling the Terminator.”

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Make software as simple as possible – but not simpler

Albert Einstein famously said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Agile development guru Venkat Subramaniam has a knack for taking that insight and illustrating just how desperately the software development process needs the lessons of Professor Einstein.

As the keynote speaker at the Oracle Code event in Los Angeles—the first in a 14-city tour of events for developers—Subramaniam describes the art of simplicity, and why and how complexity becomes the enemy. While few would argue that complex is better, that’s what we often end up creating, because complex applications or source code may make us feel smart. But if someone says our software design or core algorithm looks simple, well, we feel bad—perhaps the problem was easy and obvious.

Subramaniam, who’s president of Agile Developer and an instructional professor at the University of Houston, urges us instead to take pride in coming up with a simple solution. “It takes a lot of courage to say, ‘we don’t need to make this complex,’” he argues. (See his full keynote, or register for an upcoming Oracle Code event.)

Simplicity Is Not Simple

Simplicity is hard to define, so let’s start by considering what simple is not, says Subramaniam. In most cases, our first attempts at solving a problem won’t be simple at all. The most intuitive solution might be overly verbose, or inefficient, or perhaps difficult to understand, even by its programmers after the fact.

Simple is not clever. Clever software, or clever solutions, may feel worthwhile, and might cause people to pat developers on the back. But ultimately, it’s hard to understand, and can be hard to change later. “Clever code is self-obfuscating,” says Subramaniam, meaning that it can be incomprehensible. “Even programmers can’t understand their clever code a week later.”

Simple is not necessarily familiar. Subramaniam insists that we are drawn to the old, comfortable ways of writing software, even when those methods are terribly inefficient. He mentioned someone who wrote code with 70 “if/then” questions in a series—because it was familiar. But it certainly wasn’t simple, and would be nearly impossible to debug or modify later. Something that we’re not familiar with may actually be simpler than what we’re comfortable with. To fight complexity, Subramaniam recommends learning new approaches and staying up with the latest thinking and the latest paradigms.

Simple is not over-engineered. Sometimes you can overthink the problem. Perhaps that means trying to develop a generalized algorithm that can be reused to solve many problems, when the situation calls for a fast, basic solution to a single problem. Subramaniam cited Occam’s Razor: When choosing between two solutions, the simplest may be the best.

Simple is not terse. Program source code should be concise, which means that it’s small, but also clearly communicate the programmer’s intent. By contrast, something that’s terse may still execute correctly when compiled into software, but the human understanding may be lost. “Don’t confuse terse with concise,” warns Subramaniam. “Both are really small, but terse code is waiting to hurt you when you least expect it.”

Read more in my essay, “Practical Advice To Whip Complexity And Develop Simpler Software.”

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The ketchup bottle meets cloud computing

The pattern of cloud adoption moves something like the ketchup bottle effect: You tip the bottle and nothing comes out, so you shake the bottle and suddenly you have ketchup all over your plate.

That’s a great visual from Frank Munz, software architect and cloud evangelist at Munz & More, in Germany. Munz and a few other leaders in the Oracle community were interviewed on a podcast by Bob Rhubart, Architect Community Manager at Oracle, about the most important trends they saw in 2017. The responses covered a wide range of topics, from cloud to blockchain, from serverless to machine learning and deep learning.

During the 44-minute session, “What’s Hot? Tech Trends That Made a Real Difference in 2017,” the panel took some fascinating detours into the future of self-programming computers and the best uses of container technologies like Kubernetes. For those, you’ll need to listen to the podcast.

The panel included: Frank Munz; Lonneke Dikmans, chief product officer of eProseed, Netherlands; Lucas Jellema, CTO, AMIS Services, Netherlands; Pratik Patel, CTO, Triplingo, US; and Chris Richardson, founder and CEO, Eventuate, US. The program was recorded in San Francisco at Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne.

The cloud’s tipping point

The ketchup quip reflects the cloud passing a tipping point of adoption in 2017. “For the first time in 2017, I worked on projects where large, multinational companies give up their own data center and move 100% to the cloud,” Munz said. These workload shifts are far from a rarity. As Dikmans said, the cloud drove the biggest change and challenge: “[The cloud] changes how we interact with customers, and with software. It’s convenient at times, and difficult at others.”

Security offered another way of looking at this tipping point. “Until recently, organizations had the impression that in the cloud, things were less secure and less well managed, in general, than they could do themselves,” said Jellema. Now, “people have come to realize that they’re not particularly good at specific IT tasks, because it’s not their core business.” They see that cloud vendors, whose core business is managing that type of IT, can often do those tasks better.

In 2017, the idea of shifting workloads en masse to the cloud and decommissioning data centers became mainstream and far less controversial.

But wait, there’s more! See about Blockchain, serverless computing, and pay-as-you-go machine learning, in my essay published in Forbes, “Tech Trends That Made A Real Difference In 2017.”

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Why you need Security & Systems Operations – SysSecOps

SysSecOps is a new phrase, still unseen by many IT and security administrators – however it’s being discussed within the market, by analysts, and at technical conferences. SysSecOps, or Systems & Security Operations, describes the practice of combining security groups and IT operations groups to be able to make sure the health of enterprise technology – and having the tools to be able to respond most effectively when issues happen.

SysSecOps concentrates on taking down the info walls, disrupting the silos, that get between security groups and IT administrators. IT operations personnel are there to make sure that end-users can access applications, and that important infrastructure is running at all times. They want to optimize access and availability, and require the data required to do that job – like that a new employee needs to be provisioned, or a hard disk drive in a RAID array has actually stopped working, that a new partner needs to be provisioned with access to a secure document repository, or that an Oracle database is ready to be moved to the cloud. It’s everything about innovation to drive business.

Very Same Data, Various Use-Cases

Endpoint and network monitoring details and analytics are clearly customized to fit the diverse needs of IT and security. However, the underlying raw data is in fact the exact same. The IT and security groups simply are looking at their own domain’s issues and scenarios – and doing something about it based upon those use-cases.

Yet in some cases the IT and security groups have to interact. Like provisioning that brand-new organization partner: It must touch all the ideal systems, and be done securely. Or if there is a problem with a remote endpoint, such as a mobile phone or a mechanism on the Industrial Internet of Things, IT and security might have to work together to identify exactly what’s going on. When IT and security share the exact same data sources, and have access to the very same tools, this job becomes a lot easier – and hence SysSecOps.

Envision that an IT administrator spots that a server hard drive is nearing full capacity – and this was not anticipated. Perhaps the network had actually been breached, and the server is now being utilized to steam pirated films throughout the Web. It happens, and finding and resolving that issue is a task for both IT and security. The data gathered by endpoint instrumentation, and showed through a SysSecOps-ready tracking platform, can assist both sides working together more effectively than would happen with conventional, distinct, IT and security tools.

SysSecOps: It’s a brand-new term, and a brand-new idea, and it’s resonating with both IT and security groups. You can discover more about this in a brief 9 minute video, where I talk with numerous market specialists about this subject: “Exactly what is SysSecOps?”

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How AI is changing the role of cybersecurity – and of cybersecurity experts

In The Terminator, the Skynet artificial intelligence was turned on to track down hacking a military computer network. Turns out the hacker was Skynet itself. Is there a lesson there? Could AI turn against us, especially as it relates to the security domain?

That was one of the points I made while moderating a discussion of cybersecurity and AI back in October 2017. Here’s the start of a blog post written by my friend Tami Casey about the panel:

Mention artificial intelligence (AI) and security and a lot of people think of Skynet from The Terminator movies. Sure enough, at a recent Bay Area Cyber Security Meetup group panel on AI and machine learning, it was moderator Alan Zeichick – technology analyst, journalist and speaker – who first brought it up. But that wasn’t the only lively discussion during the panel, which focused on AI and cybersecurity.

I found two areas of discussion particularly interesting, which drew varying opinions from the panelists. One, around the topic of AI eliminating jobs and thoughts on how AI may change a security practitioner’s job, and two, about the possibility that AI could be misused or perhaps used by malicious actors with unintended negative consequences.

It was a great panel. I enjoyed working with the Meetup folks, and the participants: Allison Miller (Google), Ali Mesdaq (Proofpoint), Terry Ray (Imperva), Randy Dean (Launchpad.ai & Fellowship.ai).

You can read the rest of Tami’s blog here, and also watch a video of the panel.

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Ransomware dominates the Black Hat 2017 conference

“Ransomware! Ransomware! Ransomware!” Those words may lack the timeless resonance of Steve Ballmer’s epic “Developers! Developers! Developers!” scream in 2000, but ransomware was seemingly an obsession or at Black Hat USA 2017, happening this week in Las Vegas.

There are good reason for attendees and vendors to be focused on ransomware. For one thing, ransomware is real. Rates of ransomware attacks have exploded off the charts in 2017, helped in part by the disclosures of top-secret vulnerabilities and hacking tools allegedly stolen from the United States’ three-letter-initial agencies.

For another, the costs of ransomware are significant. Looking only at a few attacks in 2017, including WannaCry, Petya, and NotPetya, corporates have been forced to revise their earnings downward to account for IT downtime and lost productivity. Those include Reckitt, Nuance, and FedEx. Those types of impact grab the attention of every CFO and every CEO.

Talking with another analyst at Black Hat, he observed that just about every vendor on the expo floor had managed to incorporate ransomware into its magic show. My quip: “I wouldn’t be surprised to see a company marketing network cables as specially designed to prevent against ransomware.” His quick retort: “The queue would be half a mile long for samples. They’d make a fortune.”

While we seek mezzanine funding for our Ransomware-Proof CAT-6 Cables startup, let’s talk about what organizations can and should do to handle ransomware. It’s not rocket science, and it’s not brain surgery.

  • Train, train, train. End users will slip up, and they will click to open emails they shouldn’t open. They will visit websites they shouldn’t visit. And they will ignore security warnings. That’s true for the lowest-level trainee – and true for the CEO as well. Constant training can reduce the amount of stupidity. It can make a difference. By the way, also test your employees’ preparedness by sending out fake malware, and see who clicks on it.
  • Invest in tools that can detect ransomware and other advanced malware. Users will make mistakes, and we’ve seen that there are some ransomware variants that can spread without user intervention. Endpoint security technology is required, and if possible, such tools should do more than passively warn end users if a problem is detected. There are many types of solutions available; look into them, and make sure there are no coverage gaps.
  • Aggressively patch and update software. Patches existed for months to close the vulnerabilities exploited by the recent flurry of ransomware attacks. It’s understandable that consumers wouldn’t be up to date – but it’s inexcusable for corporations to have either not known about the patches, or to have failed to install them. In other words, these attacks were basically 100% avoidable. Maybe they won’t be in the future if the hackers exploit true zero-days, but you can’t protect your organization with out-of-date operating systems, applications, and security tools.
  • Backup, backup, backup. Use backup technology that moves data security into the data center or into the cloud, so that ransomware can’t access the backup drive directly. Too many small businesses lost data on laptops, notebooks, and servers because there weren’t backups. We know better than this! By the way, one should assume that malware attacks, even ransomware, can be designed to destroy data and devices. Don’t assume you can write a check and get your data back safety.
  • Stay up to date on threat data. You can’t rely upon the tech media, or vendor blogs, to keep you up to date with everything going on with cybersecurity. There are many threat data feeds, some curated and expensive, some free and lower-quality. You should find a threat data source that seems to fit your requirements and subscribe to it – and act on what you read. If you’re not going to consume the threat data yourself, find someone else to do so. An urgent warning about your database software version won’t do you any good if it’s in your trashcan.

Ransomware! Ransomware! Ransomware! When it comes to ransomware and advanced malware, it’s not a question of if, or even a question of when. Your organization, your servers, your network, your end-users, are under constant attack. It only takes one slip-up to wreak havoc on one endpoint, and potentially on multiple endpoints. Learn from what’s going on at Black Hat – and be ready for the worst.

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Almost on my way to London for NetEvents to talk about endpoint security

If you’re in London in a couple weeks, look for me. I’ll be at the NetEvents European Media Spotlight on Innovators in Cloud, IoT, AI and Security, on June 5.

At NetEvents, I’ll be doing lots of things:

  • Acting as the Master of Ceremonies for the day-long conference.
  • Introducing the keynote speaker, Brian Lord, OBE, who is former GCHQ Deputy Director for Intelligence and Cyber Operations
  • Conducting an on-stage interview with Mr. Lord, Arthur Snell, formerly of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Guy Franco, formerly with the Israeli Defense Forces.
  • Giving a brief talk on the state of endpoint cybersecurity risks and technologies.
  • Moderating a panel discussion about endpoint security.

The one-day conference will be at the Chelsea Harbour Hotel. Looking forward to it, and maybe will see you there?

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Save yourself, save your corporate assets, by blocking spearphishing

Ping! chimes the email software. There are 15 new messages. One is from your boss, calling you by name, and telling him to give you feedback ASAP on a new budget for your department. There’s an attachment. You click on it. Hmm, the file appears to be corrupted. That’s weird. An email from the CEO suggests you read a newspaper article. You click the link, the browser seems to go somewhere else, and then redirects to the newspaper. You think nothing of it. However, you’ve been spearphished. Your computer is now infected by malware. And you have no idea that it even happened.

That’s the reality today: Innocent and unsuspecting people are being fooled by malicious emails. Some of them are obvious spammy-sorts of messages that nearly people would delete — but a few folks will click the link or open the attachment anyway. That’s phishing. More dangerous are spearphishing message targeting individuals in your organization, customized to make the email look legitimate. It’s crafted from a real executive’s name and forged return address, with details that match your company, your family, your job, your personal interests. There’s the hook… there’s the worm… got you! And another computer is infected with malware, or another user was tricked into providing account names, passwords, bank account information or worse.

Phishing and spearphishing are the delivery method of choice for identity theft and corporate espionage. If the user falls for the malicious message, the user’s computer is potentially compromised – and can be encrypted and held for ransom (ransomware), turned into a member of a botnet, or used to gain a foothold on a corporate network to steal intellectual property.

Yet we’ve had email for decades. Why is phishing still a problem? What does the worst-case scenario look like? Why can’t training solve the problem? What can we do about it?

Read my story for NetEvents, “Blunting the Tip of the Spear by Blocking Phishing and Spearphishing.” It’s a long-form feature – quite in depth.

Also watch a video that I recorded on the same subject. Yes, it’s Alan on a video!

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Exciting News: BZ Media sells InterDrone to Emerald Expositions

As many of you know, I am co-founder and part owner of BZ Media LLC. Yes, I’m the “Z” of BZ Media. Here is exciting news released today about one of our flagship events, InterDrone.

MELVILLE, N.Y., March 13, 2017 — BZ Media LLC announced today that InterDrone™ The International Drone Conference & Exposition has been acquired by Emerald Expositions LLC, the largest producer of trade shows in North America. InterDrone 2016 drew 3,518 attendees from 54 different countries on 6 continents and the event featured 155 exhibitors and sponsors. The 2017 event will be managed and produced by BZ Media on behalf of Emerald.

Emerald Expositions is the largest operator of business-to-business trade shows in the United States, with their oldest trade shows dating back over 110 years. They currently operate more than 50 trade shows, including 31 of the top 250 trade shows in the country as ranked by TSNN, as well as numerous other events. Emerald events connect over 500,000 global attendees and exhibitors and occupy over 6.7 million NSF of exhibition space.

“We are very proud of InterDrone and how it has emerged so quickly to be the industry leading event for commercial UAV applications in North America,” said Ted Bahr, President of BZ Media. “We decided that to take the event to the next level required a company of scale and expertise like Emerald Expositions. We look forward to supporting Emerald through the 2017 and 2018 shows and working together to accelerate the show’s growth under their ownership over the coming years.”

InterDrone was just named to the Trade Show Executive magazine list of fastest growing shows in 2016 and was one of only 14 shows in the country that was named in each of the three categories; fastest growth in exhibit space, growth in number of exhibitors and in attendance. InterDrone was the only drone show named to the list.

InterDrone 2017 will take place September 6–8, 2017, at the Rio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, NV, and, in addition to a large exhibition floor, features three subconferences for attendees, making InterDrone the go-to destination for UAV educational content in North America. More than 120 classes, panels and keynotes are presented under Drone TechCon (for drone builders, engineers, OEMs and developers), Drone Enterprise (for enterprise UAV pilots, operators and drone service businesses) and Drone Cinema (for pilots engaged in aerial photography and videography).

“Congratulations to Ted Bahr and his team at BZ Media for successfully identifying this market opportunity and building a strong event that provides a platform for commercial interaction and education to this burgeoning industry”, said David Loechner, President and CEO of Emerald Expositions. “We have seen first-hand the emerging interest in drones in our two professional photography shows, and we are excited at the prospect of leveraging our scale, experience and expertise in trade shows and conferences to deliver even greater benefits to attendees, sponsors, exhibitors at InterDrone and to the entire UAV industry.”

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InfoSec requires new thinking about cyberattacks — and fighting back smarter

What’s the biggest tool in the security industry’s toolkit? The patent application. Security thrives on innovation, and always has, because throughout recorded history, the bad guys have always had the good guys at the disadvantage. The only way to respond is to fight back smarter.

Sadly, fighting back smarter isn’t always the case. At least, not when looking over the vendor offerings at RSA Conference 2017, held mid-February in San Francisco. Sadly, some of the products and services wouldn’t have seemed out of place a decade ago. Oh, look, a firewall! Oh look, a hardware device that sits on the network and scans for intrusions! Oh, look, a service that trains employees not to click on phishing spam!

Fortunately, some companies and big thinkers are thinking new about the types of attacks… and the best ways to protect against them, detect when those protections end, how to respond when attacks are detected, and ways to share information about those attacks.

The battle, after all, is asymmetric. Think about your typical target: It’s a business or a government organization or a military or a person. It is known. It can be identified. It can’t hide, or it can’t hide for long. It defenses, or at least their outer perimeter, can be seen and tested. Security secrets and vulnerabilities can be neutralized by someone who spills those secrets, whether through spying or social engineering.

Knowing the enemy

By contrast, while attackers know who the target is, the target doesn’t know who the attackers are. There many be many attackers, and they can shift targets on short notice, going after the biggest prize or the weakest prize. They can swamp the target with attacks. If one attackers is neutralized, the other attackers are still a threat. And in fact, even the attackers don’t know who the other attackers are. Their lack of coordination is a strength.

In cyberwarfare, as in real warfare, a single successful incursion can have incredible consequences. With one solid foothold in an endpoint – whether that endpoint is on a phone or a laptop, on a server or in the cloud – the bad guys are in a good position to gain more intelligence, seek out credentials, undermine defenses, and take over new footholds.

A Failed Approach

The posture of the cybersecurity industry – and of info sec professionals and the CISO – must shift. For years, the focus was almost exclusively on prevention. Install a firewall, and keep that firewall up to date! Install antivirus software, and keep adding signatures! Install intrusion detection systems, and then upgrade them to intrusion prevention systems!

That approached failed, just as an approach to medicine that focus exclusively on wellness, healthy eating and taking vitamins will fail. The truth is that breaches happen, in part because organizations don’t do a perfect job with their prevention methods, and in part because bad guys find new weaknesses that nobody considered, from zero-day software vulnerabilities to clever new spearphishing techniques. A breach is inevitable, the industry has admitted. Now, the challenge is to detect that breach quickly, move swiftly to isolate the damage, and then identify root causes so that future attacks using that same vulnerability won’t succeed.

Meanwhile, threat intelligence tools allow businesses to share information, carefully and confidentially. When one company is attacked, others can learn how to guard against that same attack vector. Hey, criminals share information about vulnerabilities using the dark web – so let’s learn from their example.

At RSA Conference 2017, most of the messages were same-old, same-old. Not all, fortunately. I was delighted, however, to see a renewed emphasis at some companies, and in some keynotes, on innovation. Not merely to keep up with the competition or to realize short-term advantage of cybercriminals. But rather, continuous, long-term investment focused on the constantly changing nature of cybersecurity. Security thrives on innovation. Because the bad guys innovate too.

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Mobility and security at two big shows: RSA and Mobile World Conference

What’s on the industry’s mind? Security and mobility are front-and-center of the cerebral cortex, as two of the year’s most important events prepare to kick off.

The Security Story

At the RSA Conference 2017 (February 13-17 in San Francisco), expect to see the best of the security industry, from solutions providers to technology firms to analysts. RSA can’t come too soon.

Ransomware, which exploded into the public’s mind last year with high-profile incidents, continues to run rampant. Attackers are turning to ever-bigger targets, with ever-bigger fallout. It’s not enough that hospitals are still being crippled (this was big in 2016), but hotel guests are locked out of their rooms, police departments are losing important crime evidence, and even CCTV footage has been locked away.

What makes ransomware work? Human weakness, for the most part. Many successful ransomware attacks begin with either generalized phishing or highly sophisticated and targeted spearphishing. Once the target user has clicked on a link in a malicious email or website, odds are good that his/her computer will be infected. From there, the malware can do more than encrypt data and request a payout. It can also spread to other computers on the network, install spyware, search for unpatched vulnerabilities and cause untold havoc.

Expect to hear a lot about increasingly sophisticated ransomware at RSA. We’ll see solutions to help, ranging from ever-more-sophisticated email scanners, endpoint security tools, isolation platforms and tools to prevent malware from spreading beyond the initially affected machine.

Also expect to hear plenty about artificial intelligence as the key to preventing and detecting attacks that evade traditional technologies like signatures. AI has the ability to learn and respond in ways that go far beyond anything that humans can do – and when coupled with increasingly sophisticated threat intelligence systems, AI may be the future of computer security.

The Mobility Story

Halfway around the world, mobility is only part of the story at Mobile World Congress (February 27 – March 2 in Barcelona). There will be many sessions about 5G wireless, which can provision not only traditional mobile users, but also industrial controls and the Internet of Things. AT&T recently announced that it will launch 5G service (with peak speeds of 400Mbps or better) in two American cities, Austin and Indianapolis. While the standards are not yet complete, that’s not stopping carriers and the industry from moving ahead.

Also key to the success of all mobile platforms is cloud computing. Microsoft is moving more aggressively to the cloud, going beyond Azure and Office 365 with a new Windows 10 Cloud edition, a simplified experience designed to compete against Google’s Chrome platform.

The Internet of Things is also roaring to life, and it means a lot more than fitness bands and traffic sensors. IoT applications are showing up in everything from industrial controls to embedded medical devices to increasingly intelligent cars and trucks. What makes it work? Big batteries, reliable wireless, industry standards and strong security. Every type of security player is involved with IoT, from the cloud to wireless to endpoint protection. You’ll hear more about security at Mobile World Congress than in the past, because the threats are bigger than ever. And so are the solutions.

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The top cloud and infrastructure conferences of 2017

Want to open up your eyes, expand your horizons, and learn from really smart people? Attend a conference or trade show. Get out there. Meet people. Have conversations. Network. Be inspired by keynotes. Take notes in classes that are delivering great material, and walk out of boring sessions and find something better.

I wrote an article about the upcoming 2017 conferences and trade shows about cloud computing and enterprise infrastructure. Think big and think outside the cubicle: Don’t go to only the events that are about the exact thing you do, and don’t attend only the sessions about the exact thing you do.

The list is organized alphabetically in “must attend,” worth attending,” and “worthy mentions” sections. Those are my subjective labels (though based on experience, having attended many of these conferences in the past decades), so read the descriptions carefully and make your own decisions. If you don’t use Amazon Web Services, then AWS re:Invent simply isn’t right for you. However, if you use or might use the company’s cloud services, then, yes, it’s a must-attend.

And oh, a word about the differences between conferences and trade shows (also known as expos). These can be subtle, and reasonable people might disagree in some edge cases. However, a conference’s main purpose is education: The focus is on speakers, panels, classes, and other sessions. While there might be an exhibit floor for vendors, it’s probably small and not very useful. In contrast, a trade show is designed to expose you to the greatest number of exhibitors, including vendors and trade associations. The biggest value is in walking the floor; while the trade show may offer classes, they are secondary and often (but not always) vendor fluff sessions “awarded” to big advertisers in return for their gold sponsorships.

So if you want to learn from classes, panels, and workshops, you probably want a conference. If you want to talk to vendors, kick the tires on products, and decide which solutions to buy or recommend, you want a trade show or an expo.

And now, on with the list: the most important events in cloud computing and enterprise infrastructure, compiled at the very beginning of 2017. Note that events can change their dates or cities without notice, or even be cancelled, so keep an eye on the websites. You can read the list here.

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Hackathons are great for learning — and great for the industry too

zebra-tc8000Are you a coder? Architect? Database guru? Network engineer? Mobile developer? User-experience expert? If you have hands-on tech skills, get those hands dirty at a Hackathon.

Full disclosure: Years ago, I thought Hackathons were, well, silly. If you’ve got the skills and extra energy, put them to work for coding your own mobile apps. Do a startup! Make some dough! Contribute to an open-source project! Do something productive instead of taking part in coding contests!

Since then, I’ve seen the light, because it’s clear that Hackathons are a win-win-win.

  • They are a win for techies, because they get to hone their abilities, meet people, and learn stuff.
  • They are a win for Hackathon sponsors, because they often give the latest tools, platforms and APIs a real workout.
  • They are a win for the industry, because they help advance the creation and popularization of emerging standards.

One upcoming Hackathon that I’d like to call attention to: The MEF LSO Hackathon will be at the upcoming MEF16 Global Networking Conference, in Baltimore, Nov. 7-10. The work will support Third Network service projects that are built upon key OpenLSO scenarios and OpenCS use cases for constructing Layer 2 and Layer 3 services. You can read about a previous MEF LSO Hackathon here.

Build your skills! Advance the industry! Meet interesting people! Sign up for a Hackathon!

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SharePoint 2016 On-Premises – Better than ever with a bright future

SharePoint-2016-Preview-tiltedExcellent story about SharePoint in ComputerWorld this week. It gives encouragement to those who prefer to run SharePoint in their own data centers (on-premises), rather than in the cloud. In “The Future of SharePoint,” Brian Alderman writes,

In case you missed it, on May 4 Microsoft made it loud and clear it has resuscitated SharePoint On-Premises and there will be future versions, even beyond SharePoint Server 2016. However, by making you aware of the scenarios most appropriate for On-Premises and the scenarios where you can benefit from SharePoint Online, Microsoft is going to remain adamant about allowing you to create the perfect SharePoint hybrid deployment.

The future of SharePoint begins with SharePoint Online, meaning changes, features and functionality will first be deployed to SharePoint Online, and then rolled out to your SharePoint Server On-Premises deployment. This approach isn’t much of a surprise, being that SharePoint Server 2016 On-Premises was “engineered” from SharePoint Online.

Brian was writing about a post on the Microsoft SharePoint blog, and one I had overlooked (else I’d have written about it back in May. In the post, “SharePoint Server 2016—your foundation for the future,” the SharePoint Team says,

We remain committed to our on-premises customers and recognize the need to modernize experiences, patterns and practices in SharePoint Server. While our innovation will be delivered to Office 365 first, we will provide many of the new experiences and frameworks to SharePoint Server 2016 customers with Software Assurance through Feature Packs. This means you won’t have to wait for the next version of SharePoint Server to take advantage of our cloud-born innovation in your datacenter.

The first Feature Pack will be delivered through our public update channel starting in calendar year 2017, and customers will have control over which features are enabled in their on-premises farms. We will provide more detail about our plans for Feature Packs in coming months.

In addition, we will deliver a set of capabilities for SharePoint Server 2016 that address the unique needs of on-premises customers.

Now, make no mistake: The emphasis at Microsoft is squarely on Office 365 and SharePoint Online. Or as the company says SharePoint Server is, “powering your journey to the mobile-first, cloud-first world.” However, it is clear that SharePoint On-Premises will continue for some period of time. Later in the blog post in the FAQ, this is stated quite definitively:

Is SharePoint Server 2016 the last server release?

No, we remain committed to our customer’s on-premises and do not consider SharePoint Server 2016 to be the last on-premises server release.

The best place to learn about SharePoint 2016 is at BZ Media’s SPTechCon, returning to San Francisco from Dec. 5-8. (I am the Z of BZ Media.) SPTechCon, the SharePoint Technology Conference, offers more than 80 technical classes and tutorials — presented by the most knowledgeable instructors working in SharePoint today — to help you improve your skills and broaden your knowledge of Microsoft’s collaboration and productivity software.

SPTechCon will feature the first conference sessions on SharePoint 2016. Be there! Learn more at http://www.sptechcon.com.

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Celebrating Ada Lovelace and doubling the talent pool

626px-Ada_Lovelace_portraitDespite some recent progress, women are still woefully underrepresented in technical fields such as software development. There are many academic programs to bring girls into STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) at various stages in their education, from grade school to high school to college. Corporations are trying hard.

It’s not enough. We all need to try harder.

On Oct. 11, 2016, we will celebrate Ada Lovelace Day, honoring the first computer programmer — male or female. Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace, wrote the algorithms for Charles Babbage’s difference engine in the mid-1800s.

According to the website Finding Ada, this date doesn’t represent her birthday, which is of Dec. 10. Rather, they say, “The date is arbitrary, chosen in an attempt to make the day maximally convenient for the most number of people. We have tried to avoid major public holidays, school holidays, exam season, and times of the year when people might be hibernating.” I’d like to think that the scientifically minded Ada Lovelace would find this amusing.

There are great organizations focused on promoting women in technology, such as Women in Technology International (WITI) and the Anita Borg Institute. There are cool projects, like the Wiki Edit-a-Thon sponsored by Brown University, which seeks to correct the historic (and inaccurate) underrepresentation of female scientists in Wikipedia.

Those are good efforts. They still aren’t enough.

Are women good at STEM fields, including software development? Yes. But all too often, they are gender-stereotyped into non-coding parts of the field—when they are hired at all. And certainly the hyper-competitive environment in many tech teams, and the death-march culture, is not friendly to anyone (male or female) who wants to have a life outside the startup.

Let me share the Anita Borg Institute’s 10 best practices to foster retention of women in technical roles:

  • Collect, analyze and report retention data as it pertains to women in technical roles.
  • Formally train managers in best practices, and hold them accountable for retention.
  • Embed collaboration in the corporate culture to encourage diverse ideas.
  • Offer training programs that raise awareness of and counteract microinequities and unconscious biases.
  • Provide development and visibility opportunities to women that increase technical credibility.
  • Fund and support workshops and conferences that focus on career path experiences and challenges faced by women technologists.
  • Establish mentoring programs on technical and career development.
  • Sponsor employee resource groups for mutual support and networking.
  • Institute flexible work arrangements and tools that facilitate work/life integration.
  • Enact employee-leave policies, and provide services that support work/life integration.

Does your organization have a solid representation of women in technical jobs (not only in technical departments)? Are those women given equal pay for equal work? Are women provided with solid opportunities for professional growth and career advancement? Are you following any of the above best practices?

If so, that’s great news. I’d love to hear about it and help tell your story.

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Retrospective: 2010’s ESDC, the Enterprise Software Development Conference

ESDC_2010Today’s serendipitous discovery: A blog post about the Enterprise Software Development Conference (ESC), produced by BZ Media in March 2010. I was the conference chair of that event; our goal was to try to replicate the wonderful SD West conference, which CMP had discontinued the year before. (I am the “Z” of BZ Media.)

Unfortunately, ESDC was not viable from a business perspective, so we only ran it one time. Even so, we had a great conference, and the attendees, presenters and exhibitors were delighted with the event’s quality and technical content.

One of our top exhibitors was OutSystems. Mike Jones, one of their executives, wrote about the conference in a thoughtful blog post, “ESDC Retrospective.” Mike started with

Last week, the OutSystems team attended the Enterprise Software Development Conference (ESDC) in San Mateo California. This is the first year for this show and, as Alan Zeichick notes, it takes up where the old SD West conference left off. As gold sponsors of the show, we got to both attend the sessions and talk to the conference attendees at the OutSystems booth. I just wanted to share a few highlights & take-aways from the show.

One of his cited highlights was

Another highlight: Kent Beck‘s keynote on “Responsive Design: Efficiency Through Safety.”  This was the first time I had heard Kent speak. He started off by referencing Ed Yourdon‘s work on Systems Design and how it led him to try and distill his own working process for design. This was the premise for his presentation. My take-away was that no matter what you do, your design will change. I think we all accept this as fact – especially for application software. Kent then explained his techniques to reduce the risk when making design changes. For each of his examples I found myself thinking ‘This is not really a problem with the Agile Platform because the TrueChange™ engine will keep you from breaking stuff you did not intend to break, allowing you to move very fast with little risk.” If you are hand-coding, then Kent’s four techniques (as described here by Alan Zeichick) to reduce risk when making change is great advice, but why do that if you don’t have to? BTW, I think Kent would love the Agile Platform.

Thanks, Mike, for the thoughtful writeup. Hard to believe ESDC was more than six years ago. (Read the whole post here.)

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Open source is eating carrier OSS and BSS stacks, and that’s a good thing

5D3_9411Forget vendor lock-in: Carrier operation support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS) are going open source. And so are many of the other parts of the software stack that drive the end-to-end services within and between carrier networks.

That’s the message from TM Forum Live, one of the most important conferences for the telecommunications carrier industry.

Held in Nice, France, from May 9-12, 2016, TM Forum Live is produced by TM Forum, a key organization in the carrier universe.

TM Forum works closely with other industry groups, like the MEF, OpenDaylight and OPNFV. I am impressed how so many open-source projects, standards-defining bodies and vendor consortia are collaborating a very detailed level to improve interoperability at many, many levels. The key to making that work: Open source.

You can read more about open source and collaboration between these organizations in my NetworkWorld column, “Open source networking: The time is now.”

While I’m talking about TM Forum Live, let me give a public shout-out to:

Pipeline Magazine – this is the best publication, bar none, for the OSS, BSS, digital transformation and telecommunications service provider space. At TM Forum Live, I attended their annual Innovation Awards, which is the best-prepared, best-vetted awards program I’ve ever seen.

Netcracker Technology — arguably the top vendor in providing software tools for telecommunications and cable companies. They are leading the charge for the agile reinvention of a traditionally slow-moving industry. I’d like to thank them for hosting a delicious press-and-analyst dinner at the historic Hotel Negresco – wow.

Looking forward to next year’s TM Forum Live, May 15-18, 2017.

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Apple WWDC 2016 becomes Apple WTF – No show stoppers there

apple-watchos-wwdc-2016_0014-720x405-cSan Francisco – Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference 2016 had plenty of developers. Plenty of WWDC news about updated operating systems, redesigned apps, sexy APIs, expansion of Apple Pay and a long-awaited version of Siri for the Macintosh.

Call me underwhelmed. There was nothing, nothing, nothing, to make me stand up and cheer. Nothing inspired me to reach for my wallet. (Yes, I know it’s a developer conference, but still.) I’m an everyday Apple user who is typing this on a MacBook Air, who reads news and updates Facebook on an iPad mini, and who carries an iPhone as my primary mobile phone. Yawn.

If you haven’t read all the announcements from Apple this week, or didn’t catch the WWDC keynote live or streaming, Wired has the best single-story write-up.

Arguably the biggest “news” is that Apple has changed its desktop operating system naming convention again. It used to be Mac OS, then Mac OS X, then just OS X. Now it is macOS. The next version will be macOS 10.12 “Sierra.” Yawn.

I am pleased that Siri, Apple’s voice recognition software, is finally coming to the Mac. However, Siri itself is not impressive. It’s terrible for dictation – Dragon is better. On the iPhone, it misinterprets commands far more than Microsoft’s Cortana, and its sphere of influence is pretty limited: It can launch third-party apps, for example, but can’t control them because the APIs are locked down.

Will Siri on macOS be better? We can be hopeful, since Apple will provide some API access. Still, I give Microsoft the edge with Cortana, and both are lightyears behind Amazon’s Alexa software for the Echo family of smart home devices.

There are updates to iOS, but they are mainly window dressing. There’s tighter integration between iOS and the Mac, but none of those are going to move the needle. Use an iPhone to unlock a Mac? Copy-paste from iOS to the Mac? Be able to hide built-in Apple apps on the phone? Some of the apps have a new look? Nice incremental upgrades. No excitement.

Apple Watch. I haven’t paid much attention to watchOS, which is being upgraded, because I can’t get excited about the Apple Watch until next-generation hardware has multiple-day battery life and an always-on time display. Until then, I’ll stick with my Pebble Time, thank you.

There are other areas where I don’t have much of an opinion, like the updates to Apple Pay and Apple’s streaming music services. Similarly, I don’t have much experience with Apple TV and tvOS. Those may be important. Or maybe not. Since my focus is on business computing, and I don’t use those products personally, they fall outside my domain.

So why were these announcements from WWDC so — well — uninspiring? Perhaps Apple is hitting a dry patch. Perhaps they need to find a new product category to dominate; remember, Apple doesn’t invent things, it “thinks different” and enters and captures markets by creating stylish products that are often better than other companies’ clunky first-gen offerings. That’s been true in desktop computers, notebooks, smartphones, tablets, smart watches, cloud services and streaming music – Apple didn’t invent those categories, and was not first to market, not even close.

Apple needs to do something bold to reignite excitement and to truly usher in the Tim Cook era. Bringing Siri to the desktop, redesigning its Maps app, using the iPhone to unlock your desktop Mac, and a snazzy Minnie Mouse watch face, don’t move the needle.

I wonder what we’ll see at WWDC 2017. Hopefully a game-changer.

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FAA Administrator Michael Huerta takes the main stage at InterDrone 2016

dronecon

You’ve gotta be there! Michael Huerta was just announced as Grand Opening Keynote at InterDrone, the industry’s most important drone conference.

BZ Media’s InterDrone will be Sept 7-9, 2016, in Las Vegas. (I am the “Z” of BZ Media.)

InterDrone 2015 was attended by 2,797 commercial drone professionals from all 50 states and 48 countries, and InterDrone 2016 will be even bigger!

New for 2016, InterDrone offers three targeted conferences under one roof:

Drone TechCon: For Drone Builders, OEMs and Developers

Content will focus on advanced flying dynamics, chips and boards, airframe and payload considerations, hardware/software integration, sensors, power and software development.

Drone Enterprise: For Flyers, Buyers and Drone Service Businesses

Classes focus on enterprise applications such as precision agriculture, surveying, mapping, infrastructure inspection, law enforcement, package delivery and search and rescue.

Drone Cinema: For Aerial Photographers and Videographers

Class content includes drone use for real estate and resort marketing, action sports and movie filming, news gathering – and any professional activity where the quality of the image is paramount.

A little about Mr. Huerta, the Grand Opening Keynote:

Michael P. Huerta is the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. He was sworn into office on January 7, 2013, for a five-year term. Michael is responsible for the safety and efficiency of the largest aerospace system in the world. He oversees a $15.9 billion budget, more than 47,000 employees, and is focused on ensuring the agency and its employees are the best prepared and trained professionals to meet the growing demands and requirements of the industry. Michael also oversees the FAA’s NextGen air traffic control modernization program as the United States shifts from ground-based radar to state-of-the-art satellite technology.

See you at InterDrone 2016!

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Sauron hacks the Internet of Rings as a state sponsor of cyberterrorism

sauronBarcelona, Mobile World Congress 2016—IoT success isn’t about device features, like long-life batteries, factory-floor sensors and snazzy designer wristbands. The real power, the real value, of the Internet of Things is in the data being transmitted from devices to remote servers, and from those remote servers back to the devices.

“Is it secret? Is it safe?” Gandalf asks Frodo in the “Lord of the Rings” movies about the seductive One Ring to Rule Them All. He knows that the One Ring is the ultimate IoT wearable: Sure, the wearer is uniquely invisible, but he’s also vulnerable because the ring’s communications can be tracked and hijacked by the malicious Nazgûl and their nation/state sponsor of terrorism.

Wearables, sensors, batteries, cool apps, great wristbands. Sure, those are necessary for IoT success, but the real trick is to provision reliable, secure and private communications that Black Riders and hordes of nasty Orcs can’t intercept. Read all about it in my NetworkWorld column, “We need secure network infrastructure – not shiny rings – to keep data safe.”

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Wearable IoT technology is getting under my skin, thanks to bodyhacking

HannesSjöblad

CeBIT Preview, Hannover, Germany — It looks like a slick Jedi move, but it’s actually the Internet of Things. When Hannes Sjöblad wants to pay for coffee, he waves his hand in front of the pay station. When he wants to open a door, he waves his hand in front of the digital lock. When he wants to start his car, he waves his hand in front of the ignition.

No, he’s not Obi-Wan Kenobi saving two rebel droids. Sjöblad is a famous Swedish bodyhacker who has implanted electronics, including a passive Near-Field Communications (NFC) transmitter, into his own hand. So, instead of using his smartphone or smartwatch to activate a payment terminal, a wave of the hand gets the job done.

Speaking to a group of international journalists at CeBIT Preview 2016 here in Hannover, Sjöblad explains that he sees bodyhacking as the next step of wearable computing. Yes, you could use a phone, watch, bracelet, or even a ring to host small electronics, he says, but the real future is embedded.

Read more about Sjöblad’s bodyhacking in my story in NetworkWorld, “Subdermal wearables could unlock real possibilities for enterprise IoT.”

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Hackathons build community

diet-cokeA hackathon – like the debut LSO Hackathon held in November 2015 at the MEF’s GEN15 conference – is where magic happens. It’s where theory turns into practice, and the state of the art advances. Dozens of techies sitting in a room, hunched over laptops, scribbling on whiteboards, drinking excessive quantities of coffee and Diet Coke. A hubbub of conversation. Focus. Laughter. A sense of challenge.

More than 50 network and/or software experts joined the first-ever LSO Hackathon, representing a very diverse group of 20 companies. They were asked to focus on two Reference Points of the MEF’s Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) Reference Architecture. As explained by , Director of Certification and Strategic Programs at the MEF and one of the architects of the LSO Hackathon series, these included:

  • LSO Adagio, which defines the element management reference point needed to manage network resources, including element view management functions
  • LSO Presto, which defines the network management reference point needed to manage the network infrastructure, including network view management functions

Read more about the LSO Hackathon in my story in Telecom Ramblings, “Building Community, Swatting Bugs, Writing Code.”

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Bimodal IT — safety and accuracy vs. speed and agility

gartner-bimodal-itLas Vegas, December 2015 — Get ready for Bimodal IT. That’s the message from the Gartner Application, Architecture, Development & Integration Summit (AADI). It wasn’t a subtle message. Bimodal was a veritable drumbeat, pounded home over and over again in keynotes, classes, and one-on-one meetings with Gartner analysts. We’re going to be hearing a lot about bimodal development, from Gartner and the industry, because it’s a message that really describes what many of us are encountering today.

To quote Gartner’s official definition:

Bimodal IT is the practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on stability and the other on agility. Mode 1 is traditional and sequential, emphasizing safety and accuracy. Mode 2 is exploratory and nonlinear, emphasizing agility and speed.

Gartner sees that we create and manage two different types of projects. Some, Mode 1, being very serious, very methodical, bet-the-business projects that must be done right using formal processes, and others, Mode 2, being more opportunistic, quicker, more agile. That’s not to say that Mode 1 projects can’t be agile, and that Mode 2 projects can’t be big and significant. However, we all know that there’s a big difference between launching an initiative to implement a Black Friday sale on our website or designing a new store-locator mobile app, vs. rolling out a GAAP-compliant accounting system or migrating critical systems to the cloud.

You might argue that there’s nothing revolutionary here with bimodal, and if you did, you would be right. Nobody ever claimed that all IT projects, including software development, are the same, and should be managed the same way. What Gartner has done is provide a clear vocabulary for understanding, categorizing, and communicating project differences more efficiently.

Read more about this in my story “Mode 1, Mode 2: Gartner Preaches Bimodal Development at AADI,” published on the Parasoft blog.

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Attack of the six-rotor quadracopter photo drones

quadracopter-droneDrones are everywhere. Literally. My friend Steve, a wedding photographer, always includes drone shots. Drones are used by the military, of course, as well as spy agencies. They are used by public service agencies, like fire departments. By real estate photographers who want something better than Google Earth. By farmers checking on their fences. By security companies to augment foot patrols. And by Hollywood filmmakers, who recently won permission from the United States Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) to operate drones on a movie sets.

Drones can also be used for mischief, as reported by Nick Wingfield in the New York Times. His story, “Now, Anyone Can Buy a Drone. Heaven Help Us” described how pranksters fly drones onto sports fields to disrupt games and infuriate fans, as well as animal-welfare activists using drones to harass hunters and scare away their prey.

Drones are everywhere. My son and I were shopping at Fry’s Electronics, a popular Silicon Valley gadget superstore. Seemingly every aisle featured drones ranging in price from under US$100 to thousands of dollars.

A popular nickname for consumer-quality drones is a “quadcopter,” because many of the models feature four separate rotors. We got a laugh from one line of inexpensive drones, which was promoting quadcopters with three, four and six rotors, such as this “Microgear 2.4 GHz. Radio Controlled RC QX-839 4 Chan 6 Axis Gyro Quadcopter Drones EC10424.” I guess they never thought about labeling it a hexcopter—or would it be a sextcopter?

As drones scale up from toys to business tools, they need to be smart and connected. Higher-end drones have cameras and embedded microprocessors. Platforms like Android (think Arduino or Raspberry Pi) get the job done without much weight and without consuming too much battery power. And in fact there are products and kits available that use those platforms for drone control.

Connectivity. Today, some drones are autonomous and disconnected, but that’s not practical for many applications. Drones flying indoors could use WiFi, but in the great outdoors, real-time connectivity needs a longer reach. Small military and spy drones use dedicated radios, and in some cases, satellite links. Business drones might go that path, but could also rely upon cellular data. Strap a smartphone to a drone, and you have sensors, connectivity, microprocessor, memory and local storage, all in one handy package. And indeed, that’s being done today too. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a Samsung Galaxy S4!

Programming drones is going to be an exciting challenge, leveraging the skills needed for building conventional mobile apps to building real mobile apps. When a typical iPhone or Android app crashes, no big deal. When a drone app crashes, the best-case scenario is a broken fan blade. Worst case? Imagine the lawsuits if the drone hits somebody, causes an automobile accident, or even damages an aircraft.

Drones are evolving quickly. While they may seem like trivial toys, hobbyist gadgets or military hardware, they are likely to impact many aspects of our society and, perhaps, your business. Intrigued? Let me share two resources:

InterDrone News: A just-launched newsletter from BZ Media, publisher of SD Times. It provides a unique and timely perspective for builders, buyers and fliers of commercial unmanned aerial vehicles. Sign up for free.

InterDrone Conference & Expo: Mark your calendar for the International Drone Conference and Exposition, Oct. 13-15, 2015, in Las Vegas. If you use drones or see them in your future, that’s where you’ll want to be.

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The wisdom, innovation, and net neutrality of Bob Metcalfe

bob-metcalfeWashington, D.C. — “It’s not time to regulate and control and tax the Internet.” Those are words of wisdom about Net Neutrality from Dr. Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, held here at the MEF GEN14, the annual conference from the Metro Ethernet Forum.

Bob Metcalfe is a legend. Not only for his role in inventing Ethernet and founding 3Com, but also now for his role as a professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin. (Disclosure: Bob is also a personal friend and former colleague.)

At MEF GEN14, Bob gave a keynote, chaired a panel on innovation, and was behind the microphone on several other occasions. I’m going to share some of his comments and observations.

  • Why didn’t WiFi appear earlier? According to Bob, radio links were part of the original work on Ethernet, but the radios themselves were too slow, too large, and required too much electricity. “It was Moore’s Law,” he explained, saying that chips and circuits needed to evolve in order to make radio-based Ethernet viable.
  • Interoperability is key for innovation. Bob believes that in order to have strong competitive markets, you need to have frameworks for compatibility, such as standards organizations and common protocols. This helps startups and established players compete by creating faster, better and cheaper implementations, and also creating new differentiated value-added features on top of those standards. “The context must be interoperability,” he insisted.
  • Implicit with interoperability is that innovation must respect backward compatibility. Whether in consumer or enterprise computing, customers and markets do not like to throw away their prior investments. “I have learned about efficacy of FOCACA: Freedom of Choice Among Competing Alternatives. That’s the lesson,” Bob said, citing Ethernet protocols but also pointing at all layers of the protocol stack.
  • There is a new Internet coming: the Gigabit Internet. “We started with the Kilobit Internet, where the killer apps were remote login and tty,” Bob explained. Technology and carriers then moved to today’s ubiquitous Megabit Internet, “where we got the World Wide Web and social media.” The next step is the Gigabit Internet. “What will the killer app be for the Gigabit Internet? Nobody knows.”
  • With the Internet of Things, is Moore’s Law going to continue? Bob sees the IoT being constrained by hardware, especially microprocessors. He pointed out that as semiconductor feature sizes have gone down to 14nm scale, the costs of building fabrication factories has grown to billions of dollars. While chip features shrink, the industry has also moved to consolidation, larger wafers, 3D packing, and much lower power consumption—all of which are needed to make cheap chips for IoT devices. There is a lot of innovation in the semiconductor market, Bob said, “but with devices counted in the trillions, the bottleneck is how long it takes to design and build the chips!”
  • With Net Neutrality, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission should keep out. “The FCC is being asked to invade this party,” Bob said. “The FCC used to run the Internet. Do you remember that everyone had to use acoustic couplers because it was too dangerous to connect customer equipment to the phone network directly?” He insists that big players—he named Google—are playing with fire by lobbying for Net Neutrality. “Inviting the government to come in and regulate the Internet. Where could it go? Not in the way of innovation!” he insisted.
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The future of computing: Android Everywhere

googletvGOOGLE I/O 2004, SAN FRANCISCO — What is Android? It’s hard to know these days, and I’m not sure if that’s good or not. We all know what happened when Microsoft began seeing Windows as a common operating system for everything from embedded systems to desktops to phones to servers. By trying to be reasonably good at everything, Windows lost its way and ceased being the best platform for anything.

Once upon a time, Android was a free operating system for smartphones, conceived of as a rival for Symbian and (believe it or not) Windows Mobile. Google purchased Android Inc. in 2005; the Open Handset Alliance launched in 2007; and the first smartphone running Android appeared in 2008. Today, Android-based phones dominate the market, with the most visible handset makers being Samsung and LG. Some estimates show that at the end of 2013, more than 81% of all smartphones were running Android.

From its origins in smartphones, it was natural that Android would expand to tablets. Although no Android tablet has emerged as a clear market leader, there are many manufacturers, from Samsung to Amazon to Google to Asus. While Android has decisively eclipsed Apple’s iPhone in the smartphone market, the iPad still defines tablets.

What else? Android is now an operating system for head-mounted displays, smartwatches, wearables, televisions and automotive entertainment systems.

We’re all familiar with Google Glass, which is based on Android. The company is working hard to recruit developers to build Glassware. This spring, Android announced Android Wear, which is described as “your key to a multiscreen world,” especially if one of those screens will be a smart watch. A few companies, including LG, Samsung and Motorola, have announced watches.

Remember Google TV? It was not a success in the market. The replacement, announced this week here at the annual Google I/O developer conference, is called Android TV. According to Google, “Thousands of apps in the Google Play Store are already optimized for TVs.”

Google is clearly interested in cars, and not only because it wants to build self-driving vehicles. A few aftermarket audio system makers have used off-the-shelf Android as the driver in replacement automotive head units. This week, Google announced Android Autoas a competitor to Apple’s iOS-focused CarPlay. As with smartphones, Google set up a vendor alliance — in this case, the Open Automotive Alliance — to developer industry specifications and to drive alliances with car manufacturers.

From the looks of things, Android is now intended to become a general-purpose operating system. Good for embedded, small-footprint, app-based, highly connected devices.

Google’s emphasis, though, isn’t on the hardware, but on that increasingly multiscreen world. With screens spanning the wrist, phone, tablet, head-mounted displays and televisions, Android looks to be everywhere. And that means that Google Play will be everywhere. Thus Google advertisements everywhere too. I mean, duh.

I guess that’s the future of computing: Android Everywhere.