Volume LIV, Issue 6

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In This Issue

Don’t Miss Government Video Expo 2015

Excerpted from GVExpo Announcement

Government Video Expo (GVExpo) is the East Coast’s largest technology event designed for video, broadcast, and AV professionals; and features a full exhibit floor, numerous training options, free seminars, keynotes, panel discussions, networking opportunities, and the Briefing Zone, a new educational series.

Attendees can learn about cutting-edge video technologies and techniques at the DC Post|Production Conference; distance learning and education technology at the day-long seminar on Video Supporting Distance Learning in the Federal Government, presented by the FGDLA; and drone operation and production at the National Drone Show.

In large part, this is a free event; however, if you’re interested in upgrading your experience to include access to the DC Post|Production Conference, DCINFO readers save $50 with code NDSDC10.

Click here to learn more; or register today and don’t miss out on what promises to be a great event.

Last year’s GVExpo brought video production, post, digital media, and broadcast professionals together with government AV/IT specialists, with a combined registration of 6,000.

The 2015 event is expected to draw an even bigger audience… Read More

Close Calls with Drones Spur Federal Registration

Excerpted from Associated Press Report by Joan Lowy

Concerned about rising reports of close calls and safety risks involving drones, the government announced Monday it will require many of the increasingly popular unmanned aircraft to be registered.

Pilot sightings of drones have doubled since last year, including near manned airplanes and at major sporting events, and there are reports of interference with wildfire-fighting operations, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said at a news conference.

“These reports signal a troubling trend,” said Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Michel Huerta.

Registration will increase pressure on drone operators to fly responsibly, he said, adding, “When they don’t fly safely, they’ll know there will be consequences.”

The FAA now receives about 100 reports a month from pilots who say they’ve seen drones flying near planes and airports, compared with only a few sightings per month last year.

So far there have been no accidents, but agency officials have said they’re concerned that a drone weighing only a few pounds might cause serious damage if it is sucked into an engine or smashes into an airliner’s windshield… Read More

Senate Considers Cybersecurity Bill

Excerpted from Reuters Report by Patricia Zengerle

The US Senate on Tuesday began debating a long-delayed bill that would make it easier for corporations to share information about cyber-attacks with each other or the government without concern about lawsuits.

Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate could pass the bill within days.

“We intend to pass the cybersecurity bill,” he told reporters, “hopefully by early next week.”

The House of Representatives passed its version of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) in April with strong support from Republicans and Democrats.

Dozens of industry and business groups, including the US Chamber of Commerce, back the legislation, saying it will help encourage companies and the government to share information that might help thwart high-profile cyber-attacks like those on Sony Pictures Entertainment, Target, and Anthem.

But a few lawmakers, including Republican Senator Rand Paul and Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, have come out against it; and several big tech companies also oppose it, arguing that it fails to protect users’ privacy and does too little to prevent cyber-attacks… Read More

Report from DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty

Click Here for Video

The DCIA is pleased to announce an expansion of our partnership with NewBay Media to include Government Video Expo 2015.

NewBay Media connects and informs millions of constituents in the world’s most dynamic industries through its award-winning content, integrated media capabilities, and high-profile network-building informative events.

NewBay’s brands include Broadcasting & Cable, Multichannel News, TV Technology, Music Week — more than 60 print and digital publications in all, and over 100 integrated web and mobile applications, conferences and conventions, custom marketing services, and e-commerce capabilities.

Government Video Expo is the East Coast’s largest technology event designed for video, broadcast, and audio-video professionals, featuring a full exhibit floor, numerous training options, free seminars, keynotes, panel discussions, networking opportunities, and the Briefing Zone, a new educational series of panel discussions.

Held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC, this three-day educational event takes place on December 1st through 3rd, and includes multiple concurrent sessions.

Attendees can learn about cutting-edge video technologies and techniques at the DC Post|Production Conference; distance learning and education technology at the full-day seminar on Video Supporting Distance Learning in the Federal Government; and drone operation and production at the new National Drone Show.

Featuring conference programs designed to teach, enlighten and inspire, Government Video Expo encourages attendees to get hands-on with the latest video gear in an exhibit hall featuring more than 175 suppliers, dealers, and distributors.

If you shoot, edit, post, store, or distribute video, or use AV solutions, please put the Government Video Expo on your calendar.

Use the code NDSDC10 to access VIP savings compliments of the DCIA. Share wisely, and take care.

Financial Industry Rallies Behind Cyber Bill

Excerpted from The Hill Report by Katie Bo Williams

A group of prominent financial industry trade associations threw their support behind controversial cybersecurity legislation on Thursday.

“On behalf of our members, we are writing today to urge you to support the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) and bring this important legislation to the Senate floor as soon as possible,” the coalition wrote in a letter to Senators.

“CISA is a bipartisan bill approved earlier this year on a near-unanimous basis by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and is strongly supported by the financial services sector.”

“It looks like it’s going to be on the floor when we come back,” Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) told a US Chamber of Commerce event on October 6th.

The bill, which is meant to boost the exchange of cyber-threat data between private companies and the government, has been stalled repeatedly by a busy legislative calendar and debate over privacy concerns.

Critics say the bill will funnel personal information to a government that has shown it is incapable of safeguarding it; and privacy groups and a set lawmakers that includes Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have spoken out fiercely against the legislation… Read More

Why Won’t the ALA Read the CISA Bill?

Excerpted from US Telecom Blog by Alan Roth

We at USTelecom have great respect and admiration for our nation’s librarians, whose mission, according to the American Library Association (ALA), is “to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.”

So we were disappointed last week to see the ALA let its love for the rhetoric of some Johnny-one-note organizations overtake its independent judgment as it doubled down on its heretofore quiet opposition to S. 754, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA).

Rather than simply signing on to a letter seemingly written by others, as it’s done in the past, it issued its own press release containing the same misstatements and inaccuracies about the bill that have already been exposed as false in this space and by so many others.

When several civil society groups first claimed CISA promoted mass surveillance, government spying, and invasions of personal privacy, it was perhaps understandable that at least some of these honorable organizations felt they could trust what other groups were saying about the bill.

But in the wake of extensive Senate floor discussion in early August, a unanimous consent agreement to consider 22 amendments… Read More

Verizon’s IoT Sales $500 Million 1st 9 Months of 2015

Excerpted from ZDNet Report by Larry Dignan

Verizon said its Internet of Things (IoT) business delivered about $495 million in revenue for the first nine months of 2015 as the company looks to diversify.

The company disclosed the IoT sales in its third quarter earnings report.

IoT revenue was $175 million in the third quarter.

Verizon counts connections to things as well as services such as its hum telematics service.

On a conference call with analysts, Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said:

With our experience, networks, devices, platforms, and applications, we are creating an ecosystem that will foster innovation and expand the entire IoT market.

Here are a few examples of our early initiatives.

In August we announced the commercial availability of home, and aftermarket vehicle technology and subtraction service creating a connected car driving experience that can operate more than 150 million vehicles in the United States… Read More

Telefonica Makes Call to Monitise the Cloud

Excerpted from CBR Report by James Nunns

Telefonica and Monitise are expanding their cloud relationship with a platform agreement.

The agreement will see Telefonica explore future projects based on the Monitise cloud platform, which was launched earlier in the year.

The cloud platform is designed to deliver digital services to customers and offer software-as-a-service (SaaS) products in addition to build your own, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) capabilities.

This deal will supersede the previous contract between the two companies which was announced in 2013.

According to Monitise, the development is a continuation of its transition to become a cloud business.

Earlier, Telefonica and and China Unicom announced their collaboration to jointly procure smartphones for customers in Europe, China, and Latin America.

The device teams of the two companies will deliver Lenovo and TCL smartphones after completing joint procurement projects for 4G smartphones since the beginning of the year, including research projects, product specifications and global RFQ negotiations… Read More

NetApp CEO Talks about Hybrid Cloud, Customer Challenges

Excerpted from Computerworld Report by John Gallant

In June, NetApp announced that CEO Tom Georgens had left the company and was being replaced by long-time insider George Kurian, who had previously served as Executive Vice President of Product Operations.

In this installment of the IDG CEO Interview Series, Kurian spoke with Chief Content Officer John Gallant about the reasons for the leadership change and how he plans to deal with the financial and product migration issues NetApp has faced.

Kurian explored NetApp’s “data fabric” strategy and talked about how the company is positioning itself as the best provider of hybrid cloud solutions.

He also discussed NetApp’s flash and cloud storage strategies and talked about how the competitive landscape is changing for established and emerging storage providers.

Kurian also explained how the company is encouraging long-time customers to move up to NetApp’s next-gen products.

Q: I think the overall sense is that execution has been an issue at NetApp, whether it’s on the sales front, the development front moving things along more quickly, or on the competitive landscape front. What can you tell customers to convince them that NetApp has a clear, strong vision and direction going forward… Read More

New Containers in Azure Aim to Migrate Legacy Apps

Excerpted from Redmond Magazine Report by Jeffrey Schwartz

Sphere 3D this week said its Glassware 2.0’s containerization tools and its hypervisor now work with Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

The entire Glassware 2.0 offering, which includes its containers designed to migrate Windows and open source apps to the cloud, now runs on Azure. Both companies announced a partnership earlier this year to ensure the compatibility.

Glassware 2.0 consists of a thin hypervisor it calls a “microvisor” and a proprietary containerization technology that Sphere 3D considers simpler to implement than open source Docker containers because it doesn’t require a virtualized desktop.

It’s designed to port legacy applications to modern architectures without having to rewrite or translate code.

DevOps teams can port Windows workloads to the cloud with the microvisor into the containers. The company claims microvisors have intelligence to use only those necessary components of the OS to migrate software to cloud-style infrastructure.

Glassware 2.0 technology on Microsoft Azure solves the challenges associated with transitioning applications to the cloud, “be it web scalability, mobility, infrastructure management, or cloud compatibility,” said Sphere 3D CEO Eric Kelly… Read More

Red Hat Jumps into DevOps by Buying Ansible

Excerpted from ZDNet Report by Steven Vaughan-Nichols

Ansible, Chef, Juju, and Puppet: If you know those names, you’re working in cloud development/operations (DevOps).

These are the programs that make it possible to deploy and manage dozens to thousands of virtual machines on clouds without ripping your hair out.

Until recently, these were relatively small, independent companies.

Now with Linux giant and would-be cloud power Red Hat buying Ansible for $150 million, things are changing.

What Ansible brings to the Red Hat’s OpenStack-based OpenShift cloud is an agentless cloud management approach. Like most DevOps programs, it doesn’t require any special coding skills.

This makes it much easier to automate cloud deployment and configuration to rolling upgrades.

Specifically, by adding Ansible to its hybrid management portfolio, Red Hat hopes to help customers to deploy and manage applications across private and public clouds, speed service delivery through DevOps initiatives, streamline OpenStack installations and upgrades, and accelerate container adoption by simplifying orchestration and configuration… Read More

Connected LEDs Will Shape Consumer IoT Market

Excerpted from TelecomTV Insights Report

A new report from the M2M/IoT analyst firm Berg Insight ranks connected LEDs as the most promising vertical market segment in the Internet of Things (IoT).

The global shift from inefficient traditional light bulbs to energy saving LED technology is creating a massive window of opportunity for adding connectivity to the next generation of lighting systems.

Between 2014 and 2023, the global share of lamps sold based on LED technology is expected to rise from 15 percent to 74 percent.

Over the same period the market value is expected to fall by 30 percent due to price deterioration and longer product lifespan.

Berg Insight believes that the global lighting industry will respond to these challenging conditions by adding connectivity features to mass-market products.

“There are 40 billion lamp sockets worldwide and by the next decade, 3-in-4 new lamps installed will be LEDs. Once you add connectivity to this equation, you have the number one volume application for IoT”, says Tobias Ryberg, Senior Analyst, Berg Insight… Read More

2015 Big Data Market Update: Enterprise

Excerpted from Cloud Computing News Report by Louis Columbus

42.6% of all big data apps developed for manufacturing are being created by enterprises today.

38.2% of all big data and advanced analytics apps in use today are in customer-facing departments including marketing, sales, and customer service.

33.2% of all big data and advanced analytics developers are concentrating on the software & computing industry.

19.2% of big data app developers say quality of data is the biggest problem they consistently face when building new apps.

These and other insights are from the recently published report Big Data and Advanced Analytics Survey 2015, Volume I by Evans Data Corporation.

The survey is based on 444 in-depth interviews with developers who are currently working with analytics and databases and are both currently working on and planning big data and advanced analytics projects.

The survey’s results provide a strategic view of the attitudes, adoption patterns and intentions of developers in relation to big data and analytics. You can read more on the methodology of the report here… Read More

Vaultize Integrates File Sharing & DRM with IBM Lotus Notes

Excerpted from Vaultize Press Announcement

Vaultize, the enterprise file security leader and among the 20 Most Promising BYOD Solution providers, announced integration with IBM Lotus Notes to enable large size file sharing with complete security, IT control and visibility to meet compliance and data governance requirements.

Seamless integration of Lotus Notes with enterprise digital rights management, enterprise file sync and share (EFSS), mobile collaboration, mobile content management (MCM) under a single platform strengthens the position of Vaultize as the leader in enterprise file security – giving enterprise IT end-to-end security, control, and visibility, while providing consumer-like user experience to end-users.

The Vaultize Plug-in for IBM Lotus Notes replaces email attachments with secure links – enabling better IT control while reducing email storage (both in the mailbox and on email server) and network bandwidth.

Further, Vaultize’s embedded enterprise digital rights management (eDRM) (or information rights management aka IRM) further enhances file security by converting the file attachments into their DRM-encrypted versions so that access control on shared files is always maintained – even after the recipients have downloaded the files.

Everything is driven through centralized IT policies with embedded access controls like IP/Geo fencing, DRM… Read More

Can Container Management Make Government more like Google?

Excerpted from GCN Report by Adam Clater

I spent a portion of my column on platform-as-a-service (PaaS) extolling the virtues of Linux containers as a piece of the puzzle for attaining greater agility and flexibility.

The momentum behind containerization ensures that Linux-based containers will be part of government IT systems for years to come.

There is good reason for this belief, as my colleague David Egts wrote, “Linux containers bring a host of benefits to the agency IT world beyond general isolation and standardization, including… speed… density… and flexibility.”

With that in mind, we must also acknowledge that containers, while they are a piece of the puzzle, are not the whole solution.

In order to truly reap the benefits of containerization at scale — hundreds of coordinated containers, scaling on demand to customer demands — a rich orchestration engine is required.

At Google, “everything runs in a container,” and it starts more than 2 billion containers each week.

Accordingly, Google engineers have invested a tremendous amount of time and energy learning the best way to manage containers… Read More

Evangelists Insist Purity Will Rule

Excerpted from Technology Spectator Report by Paul Wallbank

Dell’s planned takeover of fading storage giant EMC marks the ­formal end of the PC era as the once-dominant personal computer vendor seeks to shore up its declining core business.

The cloud battle-lines are now drawn and the traditional heavyweights risk becoming irrelevant.

The combat in enterprise computing is now between the pure cloud evangelists and those who see a mixed, hybrid model of on- premise and off-site services.

The stakes are high, Gartner forecasting the industry growing at 30 per cent a year until 2019.

Dominating the purist view is Amazon Web Services.

Boasting revenues of $1.8 billion last quarter and claiming 81 per cent year-on-year growth, AWS used its Re: Invent conference in Las Vegas to announce a plethora of new products — from business analytics to Internet of Things (IoT) services and even a portable hard-drive array to help customers move data.

In AWS’s view, the movement to the cloud is unstoppable… Read More

Coming Events of Interest

2015 US Cyber Crime Conference — November 14th-20th in National Harbor, MD. This is the only event of its kind that provides both hands-on digital forensics training and an interactive forum for cyber professionals to network.

Cloud Asia Forum — November 24th-25th in Hong Kong. Now in its sixth year, this major highlight of the Cloud World Series sponsored by Informa Telecoms & Media is the most comprehensive cloud computing event in Asia.

Government Video Expo — December 1st-3rd in Washington, DC. Sponsored by NewBay Media, GVE 2015 will be the East Coast’s largest technology event designed for video, broadcast, and audio-video professionals.

Internet of Things World Forum (IoTWF) — December 6th-8th in Dubai. IoTWF is an exclusive event that brings together the best and brightest thinkers, practitioners, and innovators from business, government, and academia to accelerate the market adoption of the Internet of Things.

CES — January 6th-9th in Las Vegas, NV. The world’s gathering place for all who thrive on the business of consumer technologies. CES has served as the proving ground for innovators and breakthrough technologies for more than 40 years.

ADRM Working Group Meeting — January 28th via Global Videoconference. Contact the DCIA for information about joining the group and attending the meeting that will focus on interoperability among DRM platforms and simplifying DRM implementation.

Cloud and DevOps World Forum 2016 — June 21st-22nd in London, England. Now in its eighth year, C&DWF is firmly established as the leading content-led exhibition for the European Cloud and DevOps community and the premiere meeting place for CIOs.

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