Cloud Computing

In an era of rapidly evolving technology witnessing a range of innovations every passing day, cloud computing has emerged as a trendy technology option enabling continued network access between shared computing resources. By requiring only minimum amount of interaction between the user organization and the service provider, cloud computing offers flexibility and scalability to the user’s business operations.

Mobile device today, as advanced as our erstwhile desktop computers, play a crucial role in cloud computing concept as it provides manageable and convenient access to numerous forms of data and corporate applications. By enabling access to data from remote and obscure locations using their mobile devices, cloud computing facilitates the users to use various distinctive services such as multimedia, web browsing, email communication easily.  

Despite its widely known constraints related to storage, battery life and processing power, mobile cloud computing has been gathering rapid pace in the recent years. By handling massive data storages, mobile cloud computing has made it possible to execute intensive computing functions through mobile devices. This is beneficial to numerous mobile development communities as it makes it possible for them to develop mobile projects having short lifecycles.  

Through mobile cloud computing, devices and tablets can be used for various purposes such as payment gateways, hosting services, application monitoring and development and web analytics. By radically transforming the way enterprises manage, utilise and operate IT resources, mobile cloud computing has become a paradigm of greater efficiency, agility and business scalability. By playing a pivotal role in the business model of enterprises by building an elastic data center, cloud computing has brought enormous value additions to the business oriented scenarios.

outsourcing IT support

Whether to have an in-house IT support or to farm it out is indeed a difficult decision for any business. In this post, we shall enlighten you with some knowledge that will certainly clear off the obscurity around the subject to facilitate decision making.

Maximising profits by reducing costs:

An in-house IT expert will cost a business anything between 30 – 40 thousand pounds per annum, besides expenditure on his recruitment, additional benefits as well as regular trainings for enhancing IT based skills. In addition, smaller businesses cannot afford periods of downtime and precious staff time spent on issues which they do not fully understand, leading to loss of productivity.

Outsourcing IT support helps a business reduce its costs drastically as they need to make only a fixed consolidated monthly payment as per the contract allowing them to operate within a set budget.

Expertise available at all times:

Today, every business is heavily dependent on IT systems. However, the need of expertise in technology may trough and peak. Yours is a small business and you probably do not have enough space to accommodate a staff. Moreover, in case of an IT emergency, if you do not have an expert at hand, you might have to resort to costlier measures for restoring business operations.

In an outsourced model, you can easily reach out to a dedicated technician as often as you like. These experts not only monitor your systems but also fix issues you encounter.

Complement during crisis:

Sure, you have an in-house expert supervising your IT desk on whom you rely for the stability of IT systems and continuity of business operations. Imagine a critical failure occurs and this expert staff member is occupied in another meeting, on a holiday or simply fallen ill? Besides, what if there are multiple crises at the same time?

If you consider sub-contracting your IT support, you always have a team of experts on call that are never off sick or take any holidays. They skillfully resolve your IT related woes and complement your internal team of experts.

Challenges in recruiting experts:   

Employing the wrong person is one of the costliest mistakes that could damage a business. If you are not from a technical background, how do you ensure that you are employing the right person for a work as critical as support for IT systems? Recruitment is a complicated, time-consuming and expensive process especially if you are at the risk of getting swindled into incomprehensible technical jargon.

With an external IT support team, you don’t have to worry. You will have a lineup of highly trained IT specialists equipped with the latest industry qualifications, most up-to-date technical knowledge and skill sets to resolve your issues on a simple call.

Core business remains your focus:

The heart of any business is its customers and staff wellbeing. The last thing you would want is to get vexed about IT issues and deal with the anxiety of fixing them. If you think that distributing IT responsibilities among your staff internally is a cost saver for your business, then you need to revisit your decision. Chances are that your employees are constantly distracted with issues they do not completely understand, leading to loss in focus and dramatically reducing their productivity in their primary job role.

Outsourced IT support not only speedens problem resolution, it gives you complete peace of mind, takes away the stress of managing your technology needs and allows you to focus on running your core business.

Keeping up with changing times:

Technology is transforming at an express pace and being in harmony with the changing IT landscape is of paramount importance for any business. How do you find out if there is an advanced IT product in the market, a particular software upgrade or application that may benefit your current business operations?

Using outsourced IT support will give your business, an access to a range of partnerships and accreditations with leading technology providers in the industry. Your sub-contractor can gain advanced intelligence and training on the latest technological developments and solutions that will help perk up your business.

Quick Access to additional services:  

Concerned about your business continuity? Require a disaster recovery plan? Wish to support an increasingly mobile workforce? Want to trim down on print and telecommunication expenses? Design the Information Security Policy? Set up a new telephone system?

Your outsourced IT support provider will have answers to all your questions. With extensive knowledge and experience in a large cross-section of IT specialisms, your external support team will assist you with all additional services required to run a business efficiently.

Having an in-house IT desk means your systems are on ‘break-fix’ plan; by the time you know there is a problem, your staff productivity has already diminished and extended periods of system downtime proves costly. Whereas, your IT service provider proactively monitors your systems 24 X 7, all days of the year. Problems can be identified and rectified even before they affect your business almost eliminating any downtime ensuring that your IT systems are on hand whenever you need them.

Now, if you have made up your mind and feel that outsourcing IT support services will be a cost-effective move for your business, contact us immediately. Our subject matter experts will be glad to help you!

Google

Recently, Google announced its two new initiatives in company statement; Cloud Services and Google Apps and it is expected that these tow services aims to help the start-ups and enterprises by fueling its momentum in India.  Google will cover the fees of Google Apps, if any company or business will be locked into an EA (Enterprise Agreement) with another provider till the end of contract. Apart from that Google will also add some of the deployment cost with an aim to help the companies in their success with any one of the Google for Work Partners. Once Enterprise Agreement will up, Google will provide a simple contract without any additional traps. According to experts, it will help the business with basic enterprise agreements and apart from that there will be no dependencies to unlock the savings of up to 70 percent by switching works to Google Apps. This tech major also announced its plan to provide the help of $20,000 in 1,000 Indian start-ups as free credits for Google Cloud services, which will be start from year 2016,it is expected that this Google Cloud Platform will bring new zeal and power in Indian start-up communities because still there are many Indian start-ups which are held back due to lack of computing power or build and deploy scale capability to become next big innovation in cyber space. At the launch ceremony of these initiatives Amit Singh¸ President of Google For Work, stated that “India have the second largest developer population and this country is poised to be the home of next generation start-ups and global software firms. As a world’s leading tech giant we are committed to help these next gen companies and enterprises as a trusted and affordable cloud computing tools service provider to help them succeed”. He more he added that “In past few years, we have gained tremendous momentum while helping the start-ups and new business organizations and at this point of time we are pretty much confident with these new initiatives. At this point of time we are trying to bring down the barriers for companies and start-ups to make the switch to Google Apps”. In present, Google is powering up the IT and Cloud Computing in range of Indian companies such as; Indian-born multinationals; Hero MotoCorp and Bombay Dyeing and Welspun Group. According to Mohit Pande, Country Head of Google for Work India, “We are excited to work on this new initiative and to work with our current and soon-to-be customers, however; with the EA we will offer Cloud Platform credits for startups with an aim to start new chapter in success of Indian start-ups”.

Microsoft

Recently, Microsoft announced its major updates for its DevOps tools and its services at the Connect Conference in New York. These updates will range from new free program for developers to new subscription service in the marketplace of updates to .NET, extensions and the renaming of Visual Studio Online. This is one the major dev tools update at Microsoft its developer S. ‘Soma’ Somasegar, Head of Developer Division left the company, however; currently Julia Liuson is the Head of Developer Division. According to Liuson, “There are few more updates because overall theme is that Microsoft wants to make sure that it has great offerings for those developers who want to build code”.

To help the developers, company announced both free as well as paid Visual Studio Dev Essentials Program, which bundles most of the Microsoft’s free tools and services in single package (with the addition of free Azure credits next year). As a part of Dev Essentials Program, all developers will get access to the Visual Studio Community, Visual Studio Team Services, Visual Studio Code and training services from a number of partners including; Xamarin, Pluralsight and Wintellect.  Howevver; there is little controversy about free program of Microsoft, but it is expected that there will be some discussion regarding Microsoft’s decision to start Monthly and Annual Subscriptions for Visual Studio’s Enterprise and Professional Editions. As per the statement of Liuson, “The idea behind this concept is to provide an opportunity to freelancers, consultants and others developers to access the development environment because they don’t need long-term commitment. Microsoft will continue to sell its perpetual licenses for Visual Studio, but many are wondering that this isn’t just a first step and company’s overall plan is completely different for Visual Studio subscription model.

Pricing and Subscriptions:

In present, pricing for Visual Studio Professional is $45/month (or $539/year) and for Enterprise edition it will be $250/month (or $2,999/year), however; the annual plans will include monthly Azure credits as well as access to dev/test software.

One of the first extensions to be featured in the Marketplace is Hockey App, which is for mobile beta testing and crash analytics service. Apart from that Microsoft is also introducing a free tier which will be the developers to manage up to two apps. These subscriptions will be available in the newly launched Visual Studio Marketplace and this marketplace is now in the preview to become main hub to get access for both free and paid Visual Studio extensions from third-party vendors to Microsoft.

“Update 1”:

However; in the same conference Microsoft also announced the next update for Visual Studio 2015 named as “Update 1” will get launch on November 30 with other additional tools for building a pull requests hub, Universal Windows app, support for TypeScript 1.7 and ability to debug Java source code in the IDE.

Apart from tat company is also planning to launch its few more updates for Team Services, which will include IntelliJ support and a task-based Build service to improve dashboards for tracking a team’s progress. Other new tools and features are; Microsoft’s Android emulator for Mac OS X and beta of its free Visual Studio Code text editor for different platforms such as; Windows, Mac and Linux. Apart from updates and tools, company also announced new stats to show the momentum of growth, as Visual Studio 2015 has been downloaded for five million times, Visual Studio Online has 3.6 million registered users and the Visual Studio Code editor has been downloaded for more than one million times.

Liuson added that work culture at Microsoft has changed and now company want to be open by design and for that company is given opportunity to developers to target other platforms as well. The free Visual Studio Code editor for Windows, Linux and Mac and Microsoft’s Android emulator is great example.

Image credits : freom fotolia

May be you are doing it wrong again and again because most of the software developers have never seen successful software projects, as per the statement of Dave Farley, a delivery evangelist. The more he added that may be they have built their careers on doing the wrong things.

Dave Farley, at Mannheim, while kicking off the CLC (Continuous Lifecycle Conference) stated that research after research had shown that even small software development projects can get big success. In one of the study, which was done by McKinsey and Oxford University on more than 5,400 software projects, showed that more than 17 per cent software projects were so catastrophically bad and they have threatened the existence of the company. With these kinds of statics, Dave Farley argued that individuals can easily spend their whole career in software development industry without even encountering an unequivocally successful software development projects. The more he added that according to me, “The maximum software developers have spent the maximum percentage of their careers not even knowing that what they are doing, what will be end project and how a successful software project looks like”.

Dave Farley traced a sorry state in software development projects and its practices which is based on the misreading fundamental of the 1970s Winston Royce paper as it considered the waterfall projects with an aims to shaped the traditional software development practices. This paper is description of what to do or not to do while working on software projects. But Dave Farley’s papers had gone into argument for feedback and testing and do the best possible job twice if possible. Royce was arguing in 1970s iterative development and Farley stated that we have a situation in present time where we prefer to take entirely ad hoc approach for software development which can leads towards the successful outcomes in comparison of previous traditional waterfall approaches. With an aim to improve the chances of producing a successful outcome, Farley advised that his audience should automate different stages of software projects such as; software testing, configuration management, pilot testing and slash cycle times.

Machine Learning API by Microsoft

Recently, Microsoft opens machine learning API to detect the mood of person ie. Person is happy or sad? Now, Oxford API, awing of Microsoft Research is planning to put this artificial intelligence in app to pass on its benefit to consumers in free. Chris Bishop, lead at Microsoft Research and esteemed scientist launch a set of free machine learning APIs (Application Programmer Interfaces), which is able to tell that person is happy or sad.

Chris Bishop, Head laboratist at Microsoft Research in Cambridge revealed that business organizations and individual developers can get their hands on certain tools which are based on Microsoft products with an aim to bring Artificial Intelligence such as; vision, language understanding and speech recognition into their apps. Before a decade ago, software company Microsoft boost the resurgence of machine learning which have root in academics and now it’s making a comeback as advertising on social networks to indentify the potential users and their personalize experiences with products. Chris Bishop is a renowned AI researcher and he stated that machine learning can change the life of humans within 50 years, apart from that fact that till now research has only unlocked only about 2 percent of its potential.

It is expected that soon Microsoft will release public beta versions of several other tools by the end of 2015, and it will also include video; that is able to automatically edit the video though  detecting motion, stabilizing shaky video, tracking faces as seen in the Microsoft Hyperlapse. However; apart from that Speaker recognition will be also available in free by the end of year and it will allow the developers to learn intricacies of an individual’s voice. It can help to develop advance security tools and gadgets, Microsoft said. For more information on APIs you can visit Microsoft Project Oxford website.

Windows 10 can come up in pen

Now it’s clear that with the launch of Windows 10, Microsoft is planning to make a clean and clear break from the past, as its clear at hat it’s going to be the first and foremost edition of Windows, which Microsoft is planning to give away to individual home users. And if we believe on the rumors than its going to be the first operating system of Microsoft or edition of Windows, which will be sold in pen drive instead of the traditional method of selling where they were used to sale it in DVDs.
Why Windows 10 moving into Pen drive:
Windows 10 is moving into the pen drives and it is something bit different decision of Microsoft which was pending for quite long. The main reason behind choosing the pen drives are that it’s faster, easy to carry and work as the better storage device to provide overall a less hassled experience in comparison of DVDs. Now DVDs are seems to be outdated as Apple is not putting the DVD drives in its MacBooks and apart from that other high ended laptops and hybrids devices, including Microsoft’ own surface are coming up without a DVD drive.
Price of Windows 10:
According to one of the listing website of Canada, the Windows 10 can have the name as Microsoft Win Home 10 32-Bit/64-Bit English 1 License USB Flash Drive KW9-00016″ and it is expected that it will cost around Canadian $124 or Rs. 6,000.
Launch date of Windows 10:
According to reports, Windows 10 will be launched on July 29. And soon it will be available for free to all users who are using the genuine version of Windows 8, Windows 8.1or Windows 7 on their computers. Apart from that the good news is that people who are suing the pirated copies of Windows will also get the free Windows 10, but this installation will not turn their pirated version Windows into the genuine copy of Windows.
Why Windows 10 is important for Microsoft?
Microsoft is taking the Windows 10 as the major release, as company is hoping that this operating system to exorcise the ghosts of Windows 8. However; we all know that Windows 8 Microsoft was focused on the touch-screen devices, which was proved as the back fired strategy and failed very badly. Now with Windows 10, again Microsoft is planning to gain the trust of laptop and desktop users. Hence it is expected that this time again Windows 10 will bringing back features such as; the Start Menu and classic desktop-mode by default.
Microsoft is adding some additional features in Windows 10 such as; virtual assistant Cortana, replacement of Internet Explorer with Edge web browser and the feature of multiple desktops.

iOS UI development framework of Facebook

Now ComponentKit frame work is available for general use with a purpose to reduce the complexity of writing codes. Facebook’s ComponentKit is an open source frame work which reacts as inspired framework for iOS.

According to official statement of Facebook, our ComponentKit is a native Objective-C++ view framework which has a functional and declarative approach to build UI.  At Facebook we use it to power the news feed for Facebook (iOS) app and other products within the same Faccebook app for IOS platform. said James Pearce, Head of the open source program at Facebook.  We have rolled out in last year since then we have seen the huge improvement in all terms such as; startup times as well as in the performance and because of that the quantity of code and complexity of code we have to write is really dropped.

It is well known fact that in general ComponentKit is inspired by the React, however the sense which all the developers have declare that how they want to use any interface instead insist of imperatively put it together step by step of piece by piece, explained by Pearce. If you want to found the ComponentKit, so you are free to browse GitHub as on GitHub you can find it. While coming to functionality, ComponentKit emphasizes one way of data flow which is immutable components to immutable models.

The basic components of ComponentKit can describe that how views should be configured and it also allow developers to focus on what the interface itself looks in terms of operation and function, rather than focusing on steps process to build any particular interface.

ComponentKit is now available for everyone and by making it available to everyone, Pearce said now Facebook is expecting to get the same advantage that Facebook has in the form of simplicity of code.

New Chat App API released By Nexmo

Recently, Nexmo has released its new Chat App API on a beta version, and this beta version of Chat App AAPI  will allow the companies to communicate with mobile users on the basis of one on one as their preferred chat application.

According to reports, this new API will consolidates all chat or text messages into the existing communication platforms of company and it will eliminate the need to manually arrange or manage communications on the basis of individual chat applications. This new Chat App API will do all that stuff automatically by connecting and detecting different chat or text messages through the appropriate chat application on the real time. Now onwards publishers will be able to send messages on one on one basis and it will appear on all the relevant chat applications at a single time.

However, only few of us know that Nexmo is also working with each and every chat application to ensure that their messages appear correctly on all platforms at once and it is also informing the different publishers that features are available for each and every chat application. However; Nexmo is much more familiar with the cultural restrictions on the basis of geographical distribution and it is making the clear that these restrictions are in play to help cultural, cultural, and legal obstacles which can prevent different companies from engaging their consumers on the basis of different chat applications.

Apache Cordova, offering you standard APIs to go cross platform

In the age of technology when everyone loves and trying to save time and money, so no one will like to develop the native app for different mobile platforms. Apache Cordova can save your much more time and hard work as well by providing standard APIs which is for device specifichardware.

If you are developing the apps for moderns application so major question which arises that how to deal with wide range of platforms which are expanding on daily basis. From tablets to smart-phones to PC and wallscreens, the crew of motley makes it hard for developers and designers to select which device they should target and how to set the priority while selecting them. The best solutions to deliver the apps for two or more than two popular mobile ecosystems, it is every easy and best way to dominate on Apple App Store as well as on Google Play Store. If you are planning to deliver the apps for wide range of device platforms such as; Windows Phone devices¸ Android devices, Apple devices or the BlackBerrys for your business to meet compliance requirements, than you need to reach and think beyond the non-Google Android app stores in the country like China for a significant proportion of budget in Korea for Tizen devices or very low cost Firefox OS devices in current developing market.

For a more reach, we need to go back in the history of apps development when Steve Jobs suggested that soon web is going to be the key for delivering mobile apps. However; smartphones will quickly went to native code for cross performance reasons where elements of Apple’s initial app strategy will make the sense of way to develop the cross platform apps. Apart from building a multiple apps, developers should build a tool that will be able to render the HTML as well as JavaScript content through using the native platform tooling. Whereas; the rendering engines can be the best package to deliver the app specific codes.

Approach of Cordova for cross platforms:

Perhaps Apache Cordova is the best known implementation of this specific technique as Apache Cordova is an open source mobile framework which is based on the Nitobi’s PhoneGap tools and opens for the Adobe bought Nitobi. However; Adobe keep the name of PhoneGap for their mobile HTML5 development services and tools whereas; Apache renamed the projects that will many mobile development frameworks to include the Adobe and Intel’s XDK. The work of Cordovais really simple as it provides s the standard set of API in the format of JavaScript to access the device specific hardware. And after that different platform developers can produce and map those APIs to by saying that Windows Phone’s accelerometer or Android’s camera tools or the iPhone compass.

Once the code of tool on its place than you can build the different cross platform app in JavaScript and HTML5 to run the resulting code with the help of Cordova wrapper service with an aim to produce different apps which can be distributed in all app stores including the non Western stores. The main difference between a pure Web app and Cordova app is that everything can run on this device and hence there is no need to connect eh it with web server, which means users can access the work in offline mode or they can also test the service API to connect it with cloud app by reducing the bandwidth requirements and needs and service latency too. Now users don’t’ need to wait for the any content or to download the render which they don’t need for using the WebKit browser.

The basic recipe of Cordova:

But now the main question is that how you are going to build a Cordova app? The best tool to start is the Adobe’s PhoneGap all you need to start it by downloading the relevant SDKs for the devices. To build an app it doesn’t need any special tool or techniques, all you need to know the good programming language with text editor and HTML IDE.

The main heart of any Cordova app is none other than the config.xml file that contains all the description of the app as well as services that will use with a manifest of files. The app can be launched from familiar index.html page, so that developer can build the test app by using the web browser by pointing it towards the file system whereas; there is no need to construct the server and test devices for start the device specific plug-in. If you are planning to use the Cordova for the purpose to wrap up the existing website as an app than you need to ensure that your app is able to work on different device screen sizes. For the purpose to start the cross platform apps development, first you need to download the Cordova tools with none other than Git client as they can run on the top of Node.js, and you will have to use the Npm to install them. You are free to use the command line tools for the purpose to construct and develop the basic structure for an app with all the directories for platform features and specific codes.

In present Cordova is also looking to build tools which can handle the building, wrapping and compiling of different apps and for that you will need an appropriate SDK for the specific platform for which you are going to use it such as; for iOS apps, Mac OS machinewith Xcode and for Windows Phone, Windows machine and Windows Phone tools. If you will opt for the service of Adobe PhoneGap than you can use it through cloud compiler with a purpose to build your own apps including iOS and Android. The basic Cordova doesn’t come with installation option or any plug-ins which means you will need to download and install the additional features on pre application basis. There are also available growing library with extra features and it also includes tools to handle the mobile advertising tolls with an ability to use in app for the purpose to purchases the enable features.

Cordova tool can simplify application for the purpose of testing and development. Adobe’s tools include desktop server as well as developer mobile app, so that one can pair the two tool and it will let you edit to your app in HTML format and design with server and developer app to show that what your code looks like and how it going to change without having to push code on Cordova build server.