Musato Technologies Blog

Modernizing legacy IT systems

Published January 17, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

The keys to modernizing legacy IT systems

Legacy technology can hinder your ability to meet changing market dynamics. Here’s how to prioritize and execute IT modernization efforts that drive business value.- legacy IT systems legacy IT systems:

The IT stack at Live Nation Entertainment resembled the setup typically found at most companies of any substantial size and age: a mix of new systems with some older hardware and software.

Similarly, Live Nation found itself in another typical situation: trying to move at the speed of business while dealing with legacy systems not up to the task.

Those situations drove the company’s decision to ramp up modernization, says Jake Burns, the vice president of cloud services at the Beverly Hills-based global entertainment company.

“For a couple of years, I and my peers were starting to feel that way. But then, at the end of 2015, the senior leadership made a decision to modernize IT. It became my project in 2016,” he says.

Since then Burns has led Live Nation’s multiphase modernization efforts. The first phase involved ditching much of the corporate on-premises data center and migrating its applications to AWS, a move that increased efficiency and speed while decreasing costs. Continue reading →

Posted in IT, IT Services, legacy IT systems | Tagged ICT services, IT company, IT modernization, IT systems, legacy IT systems, Musato Technologies

SaaS

Published January 16, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to optimise business operations

Digital business adoption is growing rapidly, as are the revenues associated with it and CIOs stand at the forefront of these changes. Leading a well-thought-out digital transformation requires CIOs to fully appreciate the potential of SaaS Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and to optimise its benefits for internal business operations, customer services and collaboration with partners.

While CIOs understand that cloud computing offers obvious and immediate benefits for most enterprises, they also need to know that—done right—SaaS implementations pay off in both good times and bad. What’s more, they are vital for ensuring a company’s data systems and digital infrastructure are built for innovation and competitiveness, both now and well into the future. Among the top challenges facing today’s CIOs: Continue reading →

Posted in Musato Technologies, Software As A Service, Software Design, Software Designing Tools, Software Development, Software Development Tools, Software-as-a-Service | Tagged Clouds, Digital Transformation, IT systems, SaaS, Software As A Service

App development teams

Published January 15, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

App development teams brace for big change in 2018

Multi-cloud, blockchain and more sophisticated PaaS tools are three trends expected to reshape app development practices in 2018. Is your team ready for the change? – App development

Experts expect 2018 to be a year of change for cloud app development, as trends like DevOps, hybrid cloud and blockchain continue to take off.

Here’s a closer look at these and other emerging trends, what they’ll mean for enterprise app development teams and the potential challenges and risks they pose.

PaaS platforms evolve

In 2018, vendors will attempt to improve their platform as a service (PaaS) offerings to speed up application development and support DevOps workflows. Leading cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle, will continue to roll out tooling to automatically provision PaaS-like capabilities via containers and Kubernetes. In addition, CIOs and app development teams will start to take advantage of higher-level service mesh tools, such as Istio and Linkerd, to recreate the benefits of monolithic apps within a collection of microservices.

However, these more sophisticated cloud tools come with potential vendor lock-in risks, said David Bartoletti, VP and principal analyst at Forrester. For example, AWS provides a set of tools to automatically provision containers with its Elastic Container Service, but those tools won’t necessarily help developers who need to move apps to private infrastructure or manage apps that span cloud platforms. Continue reading →

Posted in Application Development, Applications, Apps, Mobile Apps, Musato Technologies, Software As A Service, Software Designing Tools, Software Development | Tagged App Development, Application Development, Apps, Musato Technologies, Software Development

Analytics applications

Published January 11, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

Five steps to build better predictive analytics applications

An outline approach to planning and manage predictive analytics applications initiatives to help ensure that they don’t miss the mark on meeting business needs.

Citizen data science is on the rise as modern analytics tools empower an increasingly diverse community of data analysts to implement predictive models. Yet a byproduct of the democratization of predictive analytics is confusion about which algorithms to use for what, and whether a particular type of predictive model will perform better than others.

While the available tools provide a rich palette of analytics methods to work with, the plethora of choices can stun inexperienced users into a near-catatonic state as they ponder where, to begin with, predictive analytics applications. As a result, it’s helpful to devise a set of processes and best practices that can guide analysts to match the right methods, algorithms, and models to the business challenges with which they’re presented.

Here are some guidelines on what that might look like at a high level:

Specify the business opportunity and objectives, describe the desired analytics outcomes, and set measurable goals for success. This will also help to define performance metrics that can be used later to evaluate how well different analytics methods work. Continue reading →

Posted in Analytics application platforms, Analytics applications, Data, Data Analytics, Database

Application Architectures

Published January 10, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

Modernize Application Architectures

Business Challenge

Application Architectures: for many organizations, the existing architecture, and systems that support customer- or employee-facing apps are outdated and cannot be scaled or built upon as quickly as required by today’s realities—especially when it comes to
supporting the demands of mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Companies may want to develop new apps, create new customer experiences or expose data to partners or third-party developers, but tremendous improvements to infrastructure, process, management, connectivity, and security are needed to support that plan. This problem is exacerbated when working with partners that use different protocols and databases, making it difficult to connect efficiently.

Solution Overview-Application Architectures

A new digital transformation layer is needed to help benefit from investments in mobile and IoT, integrate new acquisitions or optimize the partner supply chain. Continue reading →

Posted in Application Development, Applications, Apps, Mobile app development, Mobile application, Musato Technologies, Software Designing Tools, Software Development, Software Lifecycles | Tagged Application Architectures, Application Development, Applications, Modernize Application Architectures, Musato Technologies, Software Development

Enterprise Resource Planning

Published January 8, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

5 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Trends to Know in 2018

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) requires many components and many different tools. In this piece, we examine five ways ERP is evolving to make your implementation easier.

Most businesses that have moved beyond the startup phase are likely looking into acquiring enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Whether you’re trying to get a handle on how your customer relationship management (CRM) efforts are impacting your bottom line, or if you’re tracking revenue from point-of-sale (POS) to research & development (R&D), ERP can be an asset to your company.

Although ERP is one of the older segments of the business software landscape, ERP vendors are consistently evolving to become more powerful, more affordable, and less complex. Mega-vendors such as Oracle and SAP have a major share of the ERP market, but newer companies are nudging their way into the space with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) options that are changing the game. In this piece, we’ll examine the most important trends to expect from the ERP industry in 2017. Continue reading →

Posted in Enterprise Computing, Enterprise resource planning, Enterprise Software, ERP packages | Tagged Enterprise resource planning, Enterprise Software, ERP, M Tech, Musato Technologies

Meltdown and Spectre security

Published January 6, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

How the Meltdown and Spectre security holes fixes will affect you

Get ready to patch every piece of computing gear in your home and company to deal with this CPU nightmare. You can’t get away from Meltdown and Spectre. These chip bugs will make your life miserable. Everything you run — and I mean everything — PCs, Macs, iPhones, tablets, cloud computing, and servers — use vulnerable CPUs. Apple, Linux developers, and Microsoft have all released patches. And all of them will slow down at least some of your programs.-Meltdown and Spectre security

While Intel gets most of the heat for these hardware vulnerabilities, it’s not alone. According to Red Hat, ARM, IBM System Z, POWER8 (Big Endian and Little Endian), and POWER9 (Little Endian) processors are all open to attack. AMD claims its chips are largely invulnerable, but it concedes there’s a near zero — but not zero — the risk of exploitation from one class of attack.

So, what does that mean for you? Here’s what the experts say you can expect from your devices and services. Continue reading →

Posted in cyber-security, cyberattack, hacker attacks, Malware, Security | Tagged IT Security, Meltdown, Meltdown and Spectre security, Spectre security

Modern app development

Published January 6, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

For modern app development through open source, users still rule

Open source development brings speed and creativity, but it can also fundamentally change how users employ tech. MIT’s Open Agriculture Initiative illustrates this point. – Modern app development

BOSTON — During conversations about open source technology for developers, common words included speed, experimentation — and empathy.

Yes, empathy is a key to open source success, according to folks at Red Hat Summit 2017. The idea rests on the notion that while development speed is great and innovation is necessary — both hallmarks of open source work and modern app development, vendors said — programmers must also stay aware about how next-generation technology can affect users.

The work of the Open Agriculture Initiative (OpenAg) at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass., offers a good example. The OpenAg project works with Red Hat to develop open source agricultural software, with the goal of creating a more agile way to encourage food production among small, local communities.

In other words, residents in a city borough might someday be able to use open source tech and modern app development strategies to grow their own food. Technologists currently undertake that activity in the MIT Media Lab by studying digital farming and plant physiology, growing broccoli via an IP address attached to sensors.

Caleb Harper, director and principal investigator at OpenAg, told attendees at the Red Hat Summit that digital transformation technology could make it possible to introduce 1 billion new farmers into urban neighborhoods along the way to establishing digital growing areas. Continue reading →

Posted in Application Development, Applications, Apps, IT Services, Software Design, Software Designing Tools, Software Development, Software Development Tools | Tagged Application Development, modern app development, software ddeveloper, Software Development

DevOps strategy

Published January 2, 2018 | By Gideon E. M

Four questions to ask about your DevOps strategy

There’s a lot of information about DevOps out there, making it hard to determine exactly what it means. However, there are still key principles you can stick to in order to achieve success through DevOps. Here are four questions that, according to our experts, you should be asking when thinking about your DevOps strategy.

1. Have we established a zone of business impact?

DevOps tasks should be clearly connected to the applications they support, and businesses should, in turn, identify the business processes those applications support. This lets organizations map out what is referred to as a zone of business impact for each DevOps process, and it’s a fundamental part of DevOps documentation. That way, as expert Tom Nolle points out in his piece on the connection between DevOps and enterprise architecture, the impact any DevOps strategy has on business processes — even if the impact is simply a risk of disruption — can be planned for ahead of time. This will also ensure that development teams understand the business process lifecycle or even lifecycles, that their application may impact.

2. Are we deploying continuously?

Implementing continuous delivery means that changes to your application are created and deployed on an ongoing basis. If your apps are not being delivered continuously, it’s important to start thinking about building a continuous delivery pipeline for them by making sure that everyone involved in app development and delivery is working together. According to expert Chris Tozzi in his piece on applying DevOps principles to app modernization, part of this means ensuring you have the infrastructure tools in place to roll out changes quickly from development to production. Continue reading →

Posted in Mobile app development, Mobile application, Mobile Apps, Mobility, Musato Technologies, Software As A Service, Software Designing Tools, Software Development, Technology | Tagged Application Development, DevOps strategy, Musato Technologies, Software Development

Cloud Web Services

Published December 26, 2017 | By Gideon E. M

Build cloud web services with microservices

Building cloud web services with microservices provide benefits, such as scalability, and allows enterprise apps to access new features and tools. Follow these steps to success.-Cloud Web Services

Amazon and Microsoft, the two leading public cloud providers, both offer several dozen web services, each representing a useful application feature or tool that users can invoke through an API. On the surface, these offerings look a lot like microservices. Deeper into implementation, the similarities grow.

A microservice, like a cloud web services, isn’t a part of a single application but instead provides a general resource for applications. Several different applications and many users can access a microservice at the same time — just as they could a cloud web service. A microservice also has the ability to scale in response to load and replace itself if its underlying resources fail, also like a cloud web service.

The only problem with using microservices to build your own cloud web services is that it’s not always clear what gives microservices the desirable properties above. Cloud architects may fail to deploy microservices the right way, and thereby reduce microservices’ value in providing cloud web service features. That’s why planning microservice deployment is critical. Continue reading →

Posted in Cloud Computing, cloud network services | Tagged Cloud Web Services, Musato Technologies, Web Services