Schlagwort: 8217

Streaming your next all-hands meeting? Prep execs for their video debut

A CEO may be a great strategist and leader in the office, perhaps even a great public speaker. Yet many executives find it challenging to communicate their passion and charisma when speaking in front of a video camera. Too often, the result is a bland performance that doesn’t inspire employees&8217; confidence. That’s a problem, since video is becoming an essential way for executives to communicate with their global workforces.
Brian Burkhart, President at presentation development firm SquarePlanet and an instructor at Northwestern University&8217;s Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, says bad on-screen performances happen because a live audience provides a palpable energy that the mechanical lens of a camera can&8217;t provide.
“There is something about live human interaction that you simply can&8217;t recreate with a camera,” Burkhart says.
He says that business leaders can avoid a dud performance by following a few tips:
Don’t just prepare between meetings
Burkhart says that the best way to ensure a great performance is by spending the necessary time preparing. “I see many CEOs walk into the room where the camera is set up with their email buzzing, phones vibrating and a very full calendar. They ask, ‘Now, what is it that I&8217;m supposed to talk about?’ right before the camera is turned on.&8221; That tells Burkhart that the CEO is not fully present.
It&8217;s all about having the right mindset, he says. The trick is to view the speaking engagement as an opportunity to connect with an audience by sharing the most important messages.
“It&8217;s a little bit like making a soup. Yes, you can prepare the dish in 30 minutes, but if you let it simmer for six hours, then it&8217;s going to be way better,&8221; says Burkhart. “When CEOs spend time marinating on the message, it becomes fully authentic instead of just reading a script.&8221;
Bring energy and excitement on camera
The presenter must compensate for the lower excitement and energy levels of video compared to those of a live event. To pull it off, Burkhart offers three tips:

Bring the energy: If a CEO gives 50 percent of her energy in a live speech, then they should give 100 percent on camera. Small changes, such as standing up instead of sitting behind a desk, can make a big difference in the energy the audience perceives.
Talk loudly: Presenters often assume that since they are wearing a microphone, they can use their normal voice. This isn&8217;t true. Speaking louder translates into a higher energy level.
Be animated:Use voice inflection, facial expressions and body language to convey energy and excitement. Smile bigger than you think you should. If a CEO has a look of dread, terror or pain as she presents, audiences will notice.

Video, even live video streams, rarely disappear. Those video streams are often recorded for reuse later, or shared on YouTube or the company&8217;s website. But with the right mindset and energy, busy executives can ensure the energy translates into an effective, engaging presentation.

“The bottom line is really truly understanding who you are trying to connect to on the other side of the cameras,&8221; says Burkhart. “It&8217;s not just a lens and metal, but an audience of human beings.&8221;
Learn more about IBM Cloud video solutions.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Don’t go it alone in the team sport of retail digital transformation

The reaction of IT teams to the ever changing “bimodal IT” landscape has been interesting to watch over the past several years at the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) BIG Show.
There have certainly been winners and losers, but not always the ones you might expect. There has been a surge away from centralized IT in past years, in favor of routing new projects to embedded, shadow IT teams or completely outsourced digital projects.
However, those who are succeeding in building a truly winning omnichannel strategy are doing so with the complete inclusion of centralized IT. For these winners, the experience of CTO and CIO teams has been essential.
I often talk to IT directors of large retailers. These are the people who traditionally ran 12 -18-month implementation projects. They now find themselves with a stark decision: be agile or be benched. Instead of sitting on the sidelines while other players from elsewhere in the business took charge, they are becoming the new change agents with a playbook to drive the digital agenda.
What has changed in the past few years is the attitude of the central IT teams to embrace the problem at hand. With a new acceptance of agile principles and the new reality of cloud and hybrid, these same IT teams have a pivotal role to play. They are helping the teams charged with rapid build out and transient projects, where delivery is measured in weeks.
Some recent very public security breaches have helped put the wind at the backs of once-beleaguered CTOs in making the case with boards to have central IT at the heart of every new build out. The move to a world where central IT retains control of the core systems — either on premises or the cloud, while working in partnership with shadow IT — is a newly emerging and powerful trend which ultimately will make everyone better off.
As enterprises react to the opportunities that cloud and digital bring, their IT architectures built over decades face their greatest ever challenge: supporting a new digital world where the connectivity is handled by a whole new generation of empowered users — rookies, if you will —  coming along with diverse skillsets.
For some, this could be categorized as API development tooling, but the further from the data center one looks, the more this morphs into something more fluid. It’s simply part of the business landscape. For the iPad generation who can connect their home world together — to switch on their lights from their smartphone while automatically publishing pics to their social channel of choice — it looks odd that enterprises are unable to apply this level of connectivity to the apps that make up their business landscape.
This broadening connectivity and user landscape changes the game, driving a forever-expanding and critical role for integration software. Integration is a fundamental element of any good team, handling the complexities of connecting and making sense of the data that digital teams need. Whether on the cloud or in the data center, integration is becoming significantly more powerful and ubiquitous, serving a surprising range of user experiences.
We’re driving a new generation of tooling aimed at and promoting collaboration between the spectrum of digital teams driving the omnichannel agenda in leading retailers.
Have you seen the future yet? Come and talk it through with me at NRF or join the discussion here.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Announcing CloudForms 4.2!

The big news today is the launch of CloudForms 4.2. This release represents months of work and over 1,800 improvements to the CloudForms code base. We’ve highlighted some of the main features of this release below.
Networking Providers for Public Clouds
The providers for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform now include full networking providers. This means that you can get a complete inventory of networking entities such as Networks, Subnets, Routers, Floating IPs, Network Ports and Load Balancers.

Also, you can visually see how these various entities are connected with topology view, which is available for all of the providers.

NEW! Storage Provider
Your storage assets now become first-class managed entities with CloudForms 4.2. We have started with support for the OpenStack Cinder (block) and Swift (object) storage modules.

With the new storage provider, you can see inventory, events and metrics for your Cloud Volumes, as well as create and manage snapshots and backups of the storage volumes.
Uniform Dashboards and Reports
We’ve worked on standardizing all of the provider dashboards to have a common, fresh look and feel. This helps make the CloudForms user interface more seamless and allows users to be more efficient in finding the information they need.

Centralized Administration
CloudForms 4.2 can now be deployed in a federated configuration. This allows centralized administrative actions, such as provisioning, power operations and retirement, to be performed at a global region, but executed in local regions.
Performance Enhancements
A lot of attention this release was focused on improving the performance and responsiveness of CloudForms. Pages that presented excessive load times have been addressed, reducing page load times by 90% or more. On the all-VMs page in particular, page rendering times dropped from 93 seconds to 0.5 seconds for 20,000 VMs. Similarly, efforts have been made to address memory consumption on the appliance, in particular reducing the memory consumed processing alert profiles by 50%.
TECH PREVIEW! Middleware Provider
A technology preview of the middleware provider, with support for the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, has been introduced this release. This provider will provide inventory, metrics and events for JBoss application servers and EAP databases. You can manage the deployment of new application servers and data sources, control the servers via power operations, view capacity and utilization data for middleware resources, and use the topology view to see how the various middleware entities are related and cross-linked.

Conclusion
CloudForms 4.2 brings significant enhancements to the cloud management platform and expands into new areas with the Storage and Middleware providers. Performance, uniform dashboards and centralized administration makes it simpler for organizations to gain the efficiency that deploying CloudForms provides. Although we’ve come a long way with this release, there is still more work to do. Let’s pause to celebrate and then on to the next release!
Quelle: CloudForms

API management and innovation can make businesses essential

How do you change your business from just being relevant to your customers to being essential?
The API economy has turned the concept of what it means to go to market completely upside down. The crux of this shift is the ability to use APIs to innovate faster, connect with more partners, and expand the scope of potential customers and new products.
What differentiates a business may not be a tangible product or an offer.  It might be a nugget of data or a simple service that differentiates your business in the wide field of competitors, current and future. That creates an opportunity to change not just your place in the industry, but potentially the entire industry itself.
When people ask me to describe the API economy, I keep going back to one critical aspect: innovation. It sounds cliché, but innovation occurs when you bring together interesting combinations in new ways to create business value that fills an unmet customer need better than your competitors.
APIs present one of the fastest ways to create those new combinations. Enabling teams to collaborate quickly to identify and get to market that new, unique value your customers need. To succeed, organizations must detect market changes and turn those needs into new offerings faster than their competitors. That is how a business becomes essential to customers and develops new, untapped markets.
Where does one get started? In many cases, what we have found is that setting a leading pace in the API economy requires more than any single-point technology product. Instead, it requires  a comprehensive solution with flexibility, scalability and responsiveness as companies quickly create and use APIs as a critical part of their strategies.
That is why IBM has striven to continually evolve IBM API Connect. Through the acquisition of StrongLoop, IBM has created a comprehensive solution which enables customers to create, manage, secure and publish APIs for both an internal and external consumer base. By providing API Connect as a service within the IBM Bluemix platform, it is easier to develop, integrate, and launch APIs and applications in record time.
We believe that thanks to ongoing collaboration with customers, proactive feedback and a joint commitment to being essential to customers, Forrester analysts have positioned IBM as a leader in the API management solution in “The Forrester Wave: API Management Solutions, Q4 2016.”*
IBM has also been named a leader in the “Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management.”** With a holistic approach to transformation that combined API management, platform as a service (PaaS) and integration strategy, IBM delivered a solution that sets it apart in the market.
Read the Forrester Wave report
Read Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management.
Learn more and begin your free trial of API Connect on Bluemix.
* The Forrester Wave: API Management Solutions, Q4 2016
** Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management, Paolo Malinverno, Mark O’Neill, October 27, 2016.  Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

5 ways smart companies keep internal cloud video secure

It’s not hard to see why so many businesses have adopted cloud-based streaming video. It&8217;s an ideal way for an organization to stream a CEO presentation, introduce a marketing campaign, launch a new product, or encourage employee training and collaboration.
The benefits abound, but many business leaders have nagging concerns about security and data protection. A recent survey of corporate executives by Wainhouse Research found that more than half of respondents said that the ability to secure video content is a top priority in purchase decisions. The good news for companies eager to use cloud video is that providers such as IBM are taking steps to tighten security and allay customer fears, enabling easy-to-use internal video streaming with a level of security that&8217;s as good (or better) than on-premises alternatives.
“Whether it’s more secure or less secure, [the cloud is] at least as secure as most enterprise environments,” John Treadway, Senior Vice President at Cloud Technology Partners, told NetworkWorld.
Cloud video undoubtedly creates value more quickly. Cloud deployments offer much greater agility at scale.
Here are five simple tips for securing your organization&8217;s video content, live and archived:
1. Establish strong authentication
Authentication confirms that users are who they say they are by requiring a valid login and password combination. A widely used technology, single sign-on (SSO), permits a user to employ one set of login credentials to access multiple applications for a pre-determined period of time. When setting up a streaming video system, be sure to change default passwords and passcodes and make your new passwords difficult for outside parties to guess.
2. Control authorization
Authorization allows only to a specified set of users to access video content. For example, you may want everyone within the company to watch the latest corporate all-hands meeting, but you may want to only a few specific team members to see a video about a product that&8217;s in development. Authorization enables companies to create customized directory groups that limit who can access specific content.
3. Set up secure, role-based access control
Similar to authorization, role-based access control (RBAC) is a security method that regulates access to network resources based on a user’s role within an organization. A company could, for example, limit executive training videos to VP-level employees and above.
4. Employ strong encryption
Data transmission is one of the most vulnerable aspects of streaming video security because the information often must travel over multiple public and private networks. Encryption encodes data to maintain confidentiality and guard against snooping attacks. Without strong encryption, hackers may be able to view and record streaming video, or even steal logins and passwords.
5. Protect video streams and back up data
Organizations should protect their video streams from being rebroadcast on unapproved sources, such as video players residing on other websites. Secure streaming video systems can detect exactly where a video player is located and instantly disable an unauthorized player. Video systems must also have rigorous data backup and recovery processes to protect stored content should the system unexpectedly crash.
In short, if your video content isn&8217;t properly secured, your organization&8217;s confidential information could become a rival&8217;s competitive advantage, or even worse, the latest viral video. By taking proven precautions and selecting a cloud video platform that has comprehensive security capabilities, you&8217;ll avoid exposing your video content to unnecessary risks.
For more information on internal corporate video security, read the Enterprise Video Components and Services white paper.
 
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

5 cloud predictions for 2017

2016 has shown that expert predictions don’t always play out in quite the ways people expect.
If anything, the mantra of “expect the unexpected” seems to be the only one to follow right now. With this as a backdrop, I thought about what the world of cloud might expect to see as 2017 begins.
With your expectations set accordingly; here are five of my predictions:
1. Increased agility will continue to be the main business driver for cloud.
As business demands change at ever faster rates, companies look to cloud for agility. Client engagements show us that traditional IT approaches don’t meet this need. Many companies­­ will discover that their existing culture and processes act as an impediment to using cloud to drive innovation. Cost savings, while still important, are no longer the leading driver of a move to cloud.
2. Organizations will increasingly get rid of on-premises infrastructure.
I’m no longer surprised by organizations that say that they don&8217;t want to own infrastructure, often expressed as a “we don’t want to own and run data centers” message. Industries in which this would be unthinkable a year ago are now “ditching the data center.”  This trend will only continue apace.
3. Public cloud will become the primary delivery vehicle for most cloud adoption.
With this comes two casualties. To start, it undermines the idea that “hybrid” is only about on- to off-premises connectivity. This now becomes a view of &8220;hybrid&8221; being &8220;any-to-any.&8221; It also supports the notion that the hybrid state is a step along the journey to public cloud. Hybrid is no longer the end goal for many clients, but a transition state to the future.
4. &8220;Conservative&8221; industries will adopt cloud.
Many companies will announce moves to “cloud first” models. Many clients are waiting for the first players in their industry to move. This will trigger a mass move to cloud. The ways that cloud can address regulatory issues are now well understood. As a result, organizations that avoided cloud previously will adopt it in droves.
5. Continued fallout from the move to cloud.
This will manifest itself in many ways. Traditional IT organizations will struggle even more with their role in the new world. Traditional IT vendors will also struggle to understand how to do business in the new world. Both of these struggles will lead to knock-on effects on jobs, roles and skills.  Cloud opens up new opportunities, but only for those willing to embrace this new world.
As Niels Bohr supposedly said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”
Considering where predictions got us in 2016, I fall back on this quote should mine above prove to be inaccurate.
Learn more about IBM Cloud solutions.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud