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Apple Pay coming to the UK

Posted by on Jun 9, 2015
http://finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=27445 Apple Pay will launch in the UK in July, with eight of the country’s biggest banks, a host of merchants, and Transport for London all on-board. The UK will be the second country to get Apple Pay, which launched in the US last October, enabling users to make online and instore payments with their iPhones and Apple watches. HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Bank and Santander are among the banks backing the service, while Boots, Nando’s and Waitrose lead a host of merchants that will accept iPhone-based payments. In addition, users of public transport in London will be able to pay for journeys with a tap of their handsets. It’s interesting to see Apple launching their payments offering and I love the support of Waitrose and Transport for London, it’s very smart, as is being able to pay for your journey on the...

A HP MicroServer as a cloud caching device...

Posted by on Aug 15, 2014
I continue to think about the HP MicroServer Gen8 as an excellent opportunity to bridge the gap between the physical and cloud/virtual world, as my cloud offline local cache. The vehicle for Cloud services to be hosted and streamed through whether its for email, analytics or collaboration. I tell you what I mean.  This is what I want as a reseller, a fix IT guy, a nonsense removal device for all those SMB’s where they have their own Exchange server, their own file server, their own everything in a box when they have five employees on site and a few people working remotely on their own pc. They’re not sure quite why they have that, but that’s what the nice independent server sales man said they needed. I want a Cloud in a box like the WEDG but with the backing of enterprise grade applications and possibilities to hook into market standard Cloud applications and service providers. I want to switch on a HP MicroServer or similar device. Then a wizard appear. Click next (to define any network specific values) then it say right you want to setup a cloud caching device it then talks me through: Using an existing account and downloading all the settings and caching any pre-subscribed services, establishing the backup and maintenance jobs etc. This enables me to move to another server seamlessly. Or just set me up a new existence a new domain name, a new online platform and...

‘User defined’ processes are the way ahead for customer delight...

Posted by on Aug 15, 2014
http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2014/08/im-calling-from-three-with-informations-of-benefit-to-you.html …I thoroughly admire the operation at Three, I really do. I am massively in favour of the new approach they’ve been leading recently (inclusive 0800 calls, USA roaming included, no price plan hikes during your contract and so on.) Their data network is excellent. But their CRM is a pile of bollocks. What, seriously is the point, in PAYING for someone to PHONE me — a “valued” customer (as the chap from the Indian call centre pointed out) to interrupt my day, to try and flog me something, when a) I’ve already been pre-flogged (at the weekend) and b) when the bod you’ve asked to call me isn’t given the capabilities to actually help me… What Ewan highlights ever so effectively is what larger enterprises suffer from role based and process based operations. There is a department for customer services, there is a department for sales, for billing and public relations. There isn’t a department or team that transverses the internal departments and procedures to focus on end to end seamless delivery. You make a call to customer services to fix your technical problem, if there is a billing issue that needs transferred to billing, now some systems will be linked, but they’re typically cost center based and therefore accessible to those paying for that offering. In the scenario above what we’re experiencing is the cost center process defined process. Sales have called up and said we want to sell you stuff, when...

Win a ticket to VMworld Europe 2014!...

Posted by on Aug 15, 2014
http://vmwareemeablog.com/uk/competition-time-for-our-fast-lane-racer/ Hopefully you will have been practicing, because things are getting serious! Today we’re launching our Fast Lane Racer competition, which means you could win some great prizes. All you need to do is complete tracks 1, 2 and 3 in under 45 seconds each, and you’ll be in with a chance to win an Audi R8 remote control car! On top of this, this is the first in a series of competitions we’ll be running up until the 30th of September. Anybody entering any of these will be in with a chance to win a ticket to VMworld Europe 2014, worth over £1000! See terms and conditions here. Do check this out, they’re offering a free ticket to VMworld Europe which is well worth entry and is by all accounts a great event. Check out the post for more information or click...

End user empowerment and data collection...

Posted by on Aug 15, 2014
I was having dinner with friends the other day and yet again it raised one of my constant campaigns and delights.  The following was a transcript from my head of our conversation and as ever has been crafted so we don’t name names. Mike started at the company on Monday, with the following: A desk A badge and door pass A company email account A laptop A login Now before I continue, in 2014 even today that for a large enterprise is a significant achievement, there have been so many companies whether it’s myself or colleagues where the need for a desk, a login or a computer hadn’t quite been anticipated as a deliverable and therefore the first week wasn’t quite as productive for all as expected. Mike arrived at his desk and noticed there were three pcs and a screen sat there powered off.  Those needed? He asked his manager. No, but we haven’t got around to recycling them, call help desk. Hi this is Jane from help desk, how can I help you today? I need to recycle three pcs Ok that’s fine, can I have your name, location and other stuff… that’s supplied. Right via selfservice you need to log a call. Then that will get done and the conversation politely ends. So Mike goes to selfservice, for each device he is asked to provide: Serial number, hostname, model number and if he wants it recycled Mike gathers all this information...

Servergy Joins the OpenPOWER Foundation...

Posted by on Mar 25, 2014
 http://servergy.com/servergy-joins-the-openpower-foundation/ DALLAS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Cleantech IT innovations company Servergy, Inc., announced today the company has joined IBM, Google, Mellanox, NVIDIA, Samsung Electronics, Tyan and Suzhou PowerCore Technology Company in the OpenPOWER Foundation – an open development alliance that makes IBM’s POWER microprocessor architecture available under license. Servergy will collaborate within the Foundation on opportunities leveraging Servergy’s clean and green technology on Power architecture with scale-up and scale-out capability for Big Data, caching, streaming, cloud workload, and distributed storage application in data centers. “We are proud to be an IBM Business Partner and to join the OpenPOWER Foundation” Servergy joins the OpenPOWER Foundation to help drive industry advancement of high-performance, clean and green Power Architecture in the data center. The company intends to extend its product line by developing future OpenPOWER-compliant systems based on IBM’s POWER microprocessors, allowing new levels of performance and capability in Servergy’s Cleantech Server class of clean and green Linux on Power System server products. I’m genuinely excited to see Servergy joining the OpenPOWER Foundation, that future offerings might include an OpenPOWER offering is great news for existing POWER customers in terms of choice and drives further innovation to the POWER...

Microsoft released Security Advisory 2953095 – Microsoft Word 2010...

Posted by on Mar 25, 2014
 http://blogs.technet.com/b/srd/archive/2014/03/24/security-advisory-2953095-recommendation-to-stay-protected-and-for-detections.aspx Today, Microsoft released Security Advisory 2953095 to notify customers of a vulnerability in Microsoft Word. At this time, we are aware of limited, targeted attacks directed at Microsoft Word 2010. This blog will discuss mitigations and temporary defensive strategies that will help customers to protect themselves while we are working on a security update. This blog also provides some preliminary details of the exploit code observed in the wild. Another announcement from Microsoft with regards to a security advisory for Microsoft Word 2010, I noticed this whilst doing some research for security patching and thought I’d float it to remind you of the importance of applying patches and fixes across the software stack, not just the operating...

RiverMeadow Launches vCloud(R) Powered Service Provider Incentive Program...

Posted by on Mar 25, 2014
http://rivermeadow.mwnewsroom.com/press-releases/rivermeadow-launches-vcloudr-powered-service-provider-incentive-program-1088327 SAN JOSE, CA–(Marketwired – Feb 10, 2014) – RiverMeadow Software™ Inc., developer of the world’s only automated cloud onboarding and workload mobility platform developed specifically for carrier and service provider clouds, and a member of the VMware Technology Alliance Partner program, today introduced a new incentive program for VMware vCloud® Powered service providers aimed at minimizing technical and economic risks associated with shifting IT applications to the cloud. The program will provide participating service providers with 50 free migrations from RiverMeadow to jumpstart customer onboarding, driving enterprises and SMBs to migrate IT resources to their vCloud Powered service providers. “While cloud computing offers significant advantages, the risk of shifting mission critical applications to the cloud, along with the outlay of economic resources, can lead to slowed progress in end-user cloud adoption,” said Mark Shirman, President and CEO, RiverMeadow. “Our goal with this program is simple, to add value and remove the friction. RiverMeadow’s Cloud Migration SaaS allows vCloud Powered service providers to offer clients a means to test and verify application integrity and performance before cutting over. Add in free migrations to ease the economic investment and a fair amount of the associated risk is removed from the process of shifting to cloud.” I was on the RiverMeadow site checking out what they were working on in the cloud space and noticed this announcement.  They’ve been working on empowering service providers to migrate their customers to the cloud which is very cool. I’m...
recent from Cloud Transform, Digitise, Agile, Cost Reduction and more with less
I was speaking with a consultant friend of mine about transformation and he was asking about the determinants of success, this was following on from a conversation that I had in which you might deliver a project but fail to meet your key performance indicators – your determinants for success. It stems from the following transformation means many things to many people, key performance metrics can mean many things to different stakeholders and indeed success can be internalised within a business line but not the wider group.  Transformation could be me migrating an application from a legacy data warehouse platform on an unsupported version of Solaris to a new Big Data solution, but often in such scenarios the financial savings are not direct in nature, we take out a suite of legacy costs (which should not be discounted) and introduce a different range of services or cost resulting from the replacement Big Data solution. Therefore defining what your key performance metrics are and what those mean is crucial. In the example above to HR, I might have reduced their spend on Solaris by $40,000 a year in IT charges, to the Solaris team, I might have enabled a physical server and some associated costs to be cancelled, but to group IT, the costs might be neutral. The level of cost transparency you have not only in the re-charge but the direct PnL charges need to be in place so that at the right level you can align projects, and goals with outcomes, a financial SQL query if you like, to achieve this target what do I need to transform or take out.  At the same time we need to recognise that decommissioning a platform, application or service should create opportunities for savings as we scale up those changes. If we transform enough legacy platforms, for example we got rid...
recent from Data Center Red Hat Summit is coming soon!
Red Hat Summit is June 23rd to 26th and is set to be a great event, you can register for the event here: I will be watching the coverage online, what I’ll be looking out for is announcements on the journey towards innovation in OpenStack, DevOps and empowering both business and IT to bring together the right combination of technology and technology services to deliver an end to end solution for transformation and enhancement. Do check out the agenda here and the available training or certifications that are on offer and consider that attending these events is not only an investment in technical aspect of your career, it’s the people you meet, the connections you make and the ability I always find to ask questions which I might not feel comfortable asking directly of my colleagues/service provider.  The ability to grab someone and say, I’m having this problem have you seen it before? The official coverage lives here: Red Hat Summit blog: http://summitblog.redhat.com/ Red Hat Blog: http://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog I’ll be watching both online and re-tweeting content so follow me on twitter:...
recent from Servers HPE Intelligent Provisioning overview
There are two versions of HPE Intelligent Provisioning, for HP ProLiant servers dependent on the generation or ‘age’ of the machine: Version 2.50 supports all new HPE ProLiant Gen9 platforms. Version 1.63 supports all new HPE ProLiant Gen8 platforms. You can upgrade the version of HPE Intelligent Provisioning without affecting data, this is done by downloading the ISO and booting from the ISO, it runs the update and reboots. It lets you: Perfom an assisted OS install (and configure the array if necessary) Run maintenance/diagnostics The steps therefore for a new server build out would be: Configure ILO Download the latest appropriate Intelligent Provisioining ISO and run the update Download and run the latest Service Pack for ProLiant (currently April 2015) Run Service Pack for ProLiant and bring the server firmware up to date Boot the server and run the Array configuration utility F5 – configure the array, set the boot order and reboot Run F10 to boot into Intelligent Provisioning and perform OS install – select custom install to specify the server name and specifics (including drivers/management software if you want) If the install fails due to language settings try leaving language US English Complete OS install and configuration Re-run the Service Pack for ProLiant to install any missing...
recent from Virtualisation P2v quick reference guide
I was speaking with a colleague about some work I’d been doing with a colleague about p2v (converting their physical servers to virtual machines).  In this case it was a mixture of Compaq and IBM servers running Windows 2003/2008 which they needed to migrate to virtual machines to reclaim data center space whilst the project to upgrade to Windows 2008/2012 was initiated. He asked how I approached the p2v process and I’ve made some notes below. Check ILO/IMM works ok and that you know the local administrator password – for post conversion/roll back Verify server health (nothing is alerting that might potentially stop the server from booting) Delete temporary files if possible – c:\windows\temp and c:\temp also IIS logs/middleware logs Defrag the hard drives beforehand – you don’t have too but it’s nice to do and shouldn’t take long Set the hardware management agents and non essential services to manual ipconfig /all >c:\ipconfig.txt – Captures networking information to a text file. Download pspcleaner referenced here. At this point some fundamentals of approach.  I always wanted to do the conversion in as few reboots as possible, so at a high level it’s the following: Before P2V steps: Disable server monitoring including hardware monitors/backups Log on as local administrator (verifying password) Verify accessiblility of IMM/ILO (use online tools to reset password if required) Install VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Set HP/IBM hardware agents to manual Clear down space – log files/temporary files etc Using command prompt: ipconfig /all >c:\ipconfigbfc.txt Defrag server – defrag c: -a -v defrag d: -a -v Set the flag (converter-worker.xml) to ssl value = false Restart VMware services Run conversion Conversion steps Remove networks – we will add network cards later Advanced Options – Select power on destination machine Advanced Options – Select install Vmware Tools on the destination virtual machine On completion of the P2V shut down...