Insighter Nov 8
 

Ace is the place…for insight

October 18, 2017 by Michael O'Neil

The world’s largest hardware retail cooperative, Ace Hardware relies for its success on the accurate linkage of incoming inventory with customer product demand - linkage that is delivered by increasingly sophisticated levels of analytics.

Ace has progressed through the descriptive, diagnostic and descriptive stages of analytics adoption, and is now experimenting with forward future prognostication. Ace's Tom Brynda noted, “the whole idea behind predictive is like a magic eight ball. People put a lot of trust in it. There’s going to have to be a lot of verification behind the models.” To learn more about how Ace will build this up over time, and through testing read more here.

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How can we fix stupid?

October 10, 2017 by Lynn Greiner

Hanlon’s Razor says, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Are the bad guys really behind the increasing incidence of data breach or is there something else at play?

Sloppy IT security practices and practitioners who let vulnerable systems stay in production are at least part of the problem. To learn more about some simple security hygiene, and how patching, passwords and training can help read on.

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CenturyLink booth at VMworld 2017

CenturyLink booth at VMworld 2017

Reinventing IaaS adaptation

October 5, 2017 by Mary Allen

Cloud adoption is an exercise in adaptation; cloud users must align their data, systems and processes with the requirements of cloud platforms, while acclimatizing to new financial models born out of providers’ techniques for optimizing IT delivery at scale. Many businesses continue to wrestle with this challenge.

To help, CenturyLink has built a new hosted private cloud offering on VMware's Cloud Foundation, merging the speed and efficiency that converged infrastructure delivers with new value added services to support its "customer-centric" approach. To find out how the company has done this while reducing the price it charges customers by 20 percent click here.

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How AI platforms are stacking up

October 2, 2017 by Denise Deveau

Three factors have converged to enable AI platform development: compute has evolved to the point it can support the intense demands of machine learning and other advanced applications; smart devices have unleashed the "data deluge" needed for AI training; and innovation has reached a tipping point, driving research to mainstream. But what exactly is an AI platform and how are the major IT players assembling it?

According to Steve Irvine, CEO and founder, Integrate.ai, the best way to answer this question is to draw the AI stack. For Irvine's vision of AI platform integration check out the rest of the article here.

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Vitamin Y: moving the dial on gender in tech

October 23, 2017 by Mary Allen

As women across the continent engage in a collective remembrance of sexual abuse in the #Me too campaign, ongoing issues with equality of experience for different genders in ICT take on additional meaning.

To raise awareness of workplace and workforce abuses - and better behaviours that can address inequalities - Manulife’s LOFT: Lab of Forward Thinking innovation hub and Women@Manulife, mounted a “Gender diversity in Tech” session at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto last month. For more on how we can "Move the dial" access the four keY takeaways here.

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DCD Insight logo

Save the Date! Toronto workshops to spur SMB cloud adoption!
Wednesday, December 13, 2017
9:30 PM to 4:30 PM, reception to follow

Metro Toronto Convention Centre, North Building, Hall 1, 255 Front Street West, Toronto, ON

Cloud is a familiar technology concept, but as a business proposition it is less well-understood. In Canada, confusion around the cloud value proposition has had predictable outcomes: while 80 percent of SMBs in the US are already in the cloud today, only half of Canadian small businesses are experiencing the benefits of its deployment.

To accelerate cloud adoption, the Toronto Cloud Business Coalition is working with the Government of Ontario and DatacenterDynamics to deliver a ground-breaking Canadian SMB Cloud Summit in Toronto on December 13th. The free, full day event will feature interactive workshop sessions, guest presenters, plenty of networking - and you are invited!

Learn more and RSVP here

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About InsightaaS

The Insighter is a bi-weekly e-newsletter that, like its parent website InsightaaS, is dedicated to exploring "the 'why' in enterprise technology."

Our enews offers unique and depth perspective on Analytics, Cloud, Data Centre, IT Management (including security), The Internet of Things, and Vitamin Y, a concise view of industry trends and events. If you are interested in staying current with our research, featured content and editorial coverage in these areas, click on any of the articles in this e-newsletter. If you are interested in a steady stream of thought leadership, click on the link below and we'll subscribe you!

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