Cloud Expo 2019 Shows The Way

This week we had the annual Cloud Expo Exhibition in Excel (London), combining multiple tracks for IoT, Cyber Security, Big Data, Blockchain, AI, Data Centres and Big Data.

As usual the show was massive and noisy, though this year definitely there was more buzz and energy than last year and there appeared to be more exhibitors including a new batch of database and big data tool providers as well as old school adaptors such as Oracle and IBM.

Cloud Expo has a continuous stream of presentations, but to be honest they are difficult to extract much value from, as they are short and the venue is extremely noisy. The couple that I attended just served to reinforce what I thought that I knew already.

One of my personal favourites, Dark Trace, was there with its machine learning enhanced security technology (see past blogs), but I got more excited to see that Check Point had launched CloudGuard. Whilst Dark Trace will help dig you out of problems, Checkpoint is there to stop you getting into them in the first place. On a first inspection of claims and taking Checkpoint's pedigree into account, CloudGuard provides essential and robust means for securing SaaS and IaaS solutions and provides a platform for securing heterogeneous services such as Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform as well as many major SaaS applications such as G-suite, Salesforce, DropBox and 0365.

The other great thing which leapt out at me was Aptio's extended offering around cloud. Aptio, if you are not familiar with it, provides ABC (Activity Based Costing) software for IT operations. This assists greatly in understanding the unit costs of your key services at both an infrastructure tower level and an application level. So for example you can calculate how much it costs to support a user of an ERP system, or to digitally support a retail client, as well as understanding basic things such as what does it cost to run a server or support our business continuity plan. As the Aptio software plugs directly into the Finance Module of most ERPs, it uses real financial data and adapts to changes in pricing as they are incurred. So what's new? Aptio has added the capability to deal flexibly with cloud service providers. This makes it much easier to model the costs of say a cloud migration and compare different service providers, For existing users of cloud services it provides the means to model costs of hosting on different platforms on a day-to-day basis and adapt to changing pries and cost models of vendors to identify re-hosting opportunities for cost optimisation. Given the sheer volume of data and relationships to be addressed, this is an almost impossible task to keep up with if performed manually with a spreadsheet, so is obviously a great tool to assist in managing an enterprise estate.

Smart Gardens Take the Cool Award

Last week was an interesting week in many ways. Intel and Juniper announced that Singapore was leading the way in Smart City adoption, beating 19 other advanced adopters. One of the more interesting statistics was around how much time lost to congestion can be saved. Average figures suggested that over 80% of the time lost to congestion can be freed up by using Smart City technology to manage traffic flows better. Whilst this is interesting to motorists in the UK as town planned continue to persecute them with more and more "traffic calming" measures such as speed bumps, lights, constrictions in road width etc. it is also good news for those interested in urban health. Less congestion equals less emissions as well as a lower carbon footprint.

Moving on from this, India was identified as the leading Asian country for cashless money adoption, driven by widespread electronic purse adoption on phones in a country where many people don't have bank accounts.

Meanwhile in London, Cloud Expo returned to Excel with its partner exhibitions. This was definitely more interesting than last year (which had been a disappointment following the great show 2 years ago). It was noticeable that a wider set of companies are now offering global services with a first appearance (that I am aware of) from China telecom. there were more companies looking at clod orchestration and Oracle was making its pitch for differentiation from the mainstream service vendors such a Azure (Microsoft), AWS (Amazon) and GCS (Google) by featuring its cloud DNS services and Systems Management as a Service. The latter being apparently multi-platform for hetergeneous technologies and offering an automated and intelligent Machine Learning capability to features normally associated with companies such as Splunk.

The coolest show stealer however was on the diminutive stand for Gartenzwerg. Gartenzwerg offers an indoor automated gardening kit which uses smart technology to control lights, watering, temperature and pH. This apparently enables you to grow things all the year round and at 3 times the normal rate of growth. So you can have all the herbs, chillies etc. that you want. Anyway, in the stark and quite sterile ambience of a trade show, the luscious and colourful display was a verdant knock out.