Big Data and Layer 7 Technologies– A Sea Change of Capabilities in IT

"Big data represents a sea change of capabilities in IT" notes Matt McLarty, Vice President, Client Solutions at Layer 7 Technologies, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan.

McLarty continued. "In conjunction with mobile and cloud, I think Big Data will provide a technological makeover to the typical enterprise infrastructure, drawing a hard API border in front of core business services while blurring the line between logic and data services."

Cloud Computing Journal: Agree or disagree? - "While the IT savings aspect is compelling, the strongest benefit of cloud computing is how it enhances business agility."

Matt McLarty: Agree. We have a number of customers who are able to use Layer 7 Gateways to protect their cloud deployments, and leverage the elastic scaling model of the cloud to handle seasonal or sporadic bursts of traffic dynamically. Historically, these companies would have to try and forecast this and risk over-buying infrastructure. So there is a big cost savings, but dynamic scaling is a new capability that only comes with the cloud model.

Cloud Computing Journal: Which of the recent big acquisitions within the Cloud and/or Big Data space have most grabbed your attention as a sign of things to come?

McLarty: What's grabbed my attention most is the fact that the Big Data - and specifically Hadoop - world is so raw that acquisition targets don't even exist. In its place, we've seen an unprecedented talent acquisition spree for anyone with Hadoop experience and data science skills. Big data represents a sea change of capabilities in IT and will have an impact on people, process and tools. In conjunction with mobile and cloud, I think Big Data will provide a technological makeover to the typical enterprise infrastructure, drawing a hard API border in front of core business services while blurring the line between logic and data services.

Cloud Computing Journal: In its recent "Sizing the Cloud" report Forrester Research said it expects the global cloud computing market to reach $241BN in 2020 compared to $40.7BN in 2010 - is that kind of rapid growth trajectory being reflected in your own company or in your view is the Forrester number a tad over-optimistic?

McLarty: Of course, this comes down to what people define as "cloud computing." Are traditional ASPs already being branded as cloud providers? Regardless, there are enough dimensions of growth for cloud - migration of COTS offerings to SaaS, globalization, support for mobile channels and big data - to justify an order of magnitude in a decade. It is certainly reflected in the growth of Layer7's business, and I'm sure there are more daring projections out there in the blogosphere.

Cloud Computing Journal: Which do you think is the most important cloud computing standard still to tackle?

McLarty: I think a standard/syntax for auto-provisioning cloud services would be quite useful. As I said earlier, much of the unique value of cloud comes from the ability to spec the infrastructure dynamically. Having the ability to migrate or balance workloads across a hybrid or federated cloud would be powerful for companies, but it would undoubtedly be met by resistance from the cloud providers and from the niche companies that have built a business around such a service.

Cloud Computing Journal: Big Data has existed since the early days of computing; why, then, do you think there is such an industry buzz around it right now?

McLarty: Like many technological innovations, Big Data has to have a lot of things coming together to make it appetizing to the mainstream. I remember seeing Sony HDTVs around 1990, but it wasn't until around 2005 that there was a critical mass of content, network capability and parts commoditization to make it palatable for the masses. The same thing is happening with Big Data: we now have the network bandwidth, distributed computing power and caching technology to make unstructured, fragmented data retrieval practical. And most of all we have the burning platform; we have simply outgrown our relational indexing capabilities.

Cloud Computing Journal: Do you think Big Data will only ever be used for analytical purposes, or do you envisage that it will actually enable new products?

McLarty: I believe that Big Data has the potential to augment all existing IT interactions. I would answer a slightly different question: if analytics are now available in a real-time context, how can they be used to augment other business and IT services? In the world of real-time integration - the world Layer 7 thrives in - we have seen an industry build out around Event-Driven Architecture, and consequentially seen that solution area integrate with SOA. Big Data can drastically change that game, and I envision a post-Big Data enterprise integration landscape where real-time business services are analytics-enriched, exposed through secure APIs, and accessible to mobile devices, web apps, and B2B consumers.

PatientSafe Solutions Unveils PatientTouch, a Powerful Wireless Clinical Mobility Solution, at HIMSS 2012

Wireless device delivers clinical mobility enabling clinicians to orchestrate patient care, clinical processes, and data in real time

LAS VEGAS, Feb 21, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- (HIMSS) -- PatientSafe Solutions is reinventing clinical care delivery with the release of PatientTouch 3.2(TM), an industry-changing wireless clinical mobility solution that enables nurses to access patient data and clinical workflows, while communicating with the entire care team from anywhere in the hospital via an intuitive mobile appliance running on the Apple iPod touch(R).

"The healthcare industry has been trying to tap into the power of computerization for many years. Adopting electronic medical records is a huge step -- but being able to access critical information from existing HIS systems and quickly document back into these systems via a truly mobile device will revolutionize the care delivery process," says Jim Sweeney, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of PatientSafe Solutions.

Designed exclusively for frontline clinicians, the solution supports Mobile Care Orchestration, a category defining approach that enables healthcare organizations to orchestrate people, processes, and data in real time. When hospitals create such environments, the various components of clinical care are immediately coordinated as nurses are constantly connected to their patients, the care team and existing EHRs.

By expanding the platform to include additional Positive Patient Identification (PPID) modules, care interventions, and clinically contextual communications, this new iteration of PatientTouch will enable nurses to access real time patient information and manage a wide spectrum of care activities at the bedside or from anywhere in the hospital using a single, intuitive handheld device.

According to Steve Shirley of Parkview Medical Center, a nationally recognized 350-bed acute care facility, "PatientTouch will fundamentally change how our nurses deliver care. With this device, they can focus completely on the patient's needs -- without interrupting the care process to search for vital information. Instead, real time data and critical workflows can now be accessed and documented with a single handheld device."

"As we look towards the next stages of meaningful use, clinical mobility platforms such as PatientTouch will be critical in meeting new requirements and augmenting existing EHR systems. Healthcare providers will be pressured to rethink the care delivery process and facilitate care coordination as it relates to real time information access, accurate quality report data capture, timely documentation, and effective care team communications--and that is exactly what PatientTouch can help them do," says Joe Condurso, President and Chief Operating Officer.

PatientTouch communicates directly with existing EHRs and is designed for the clinical environment. Compliant with HIPAA regulations, PatientTouch combines the Apple iPod touch(R) with the electronic Mobile Medical Application (eMMA(TM)), a custom jacket that is ruggedized, IP-54 compliant, outfitted with a barcode scanner, and equipped with extended battery life for full-shift operation.

By connecting frontline clinicians to their patients, care team, and existing EHRs, PatientTouch improves safety, quality, efficiency, and nursing satisfaction, while reducing costs. PatientTouch is expected to help the typical 350-bed hospital realize more than $8 million in annual savings from substantial reductions in medical errors, hospital-acquired infections, falls and pressure ulcers -- as well as from improvements in nursing productivity.

PatientTouch will be on display at HIMSS 2012 in booth 12928. For additional information, visit www.patientsafesolutions.com .

About PatientSafe Solutions

PatientSafe Solutions, a health information technology company based in San Diego, California, delivers real-time mobile clinical solutions to hospitals to improve patient safety, quality, and satisfaction while decreasing costs. The company offers mobile devices that make it possible for frontline clinicians to access data at the point of care or anywhere throughout the hospital, making it possible to improve care delivery, patient safety and organizational workflow.

The company is led by senior executives with a proven track record of solving difficult healthcare problems with innovative technology, solutions, and services. CEO James M. Sweeney is a recognized leader in patient safety and was responsible for the award-winning "Beyond Blame" video, which has become a critical industry standard describing in detail how medication errors affect practitioners and patients. PatientSafe Solutions was named one of the Wall Street Journal's Top 50 Venture-Backed Companies in 2011.

About Parkview Medical Center

Founded in 1923, Parkview Medical Center in Pueblo, Colorado, offers general acute healthcare and behavioral health specialty services. As a private, non-profit organization, Parkview is licensed for 350 acute-care beds and provides a full range of healthcare services including the region's only certified and verified Level II Trauma Center as well as the region's first certified Stroke Center. Parkview Medical Center is the leader in cardiac, women's, emergency, and neurological services as well as behavioral health programs. As a vital healthcare source, Parkview's service area includes Pueblo County and 14 surrounding counties, which together represent 350,000 total lives.

SOURCE: PatientSafe Solutions

Two Layer 7 Technologies Executives to be Featured Speakers at RSA Conference 2012

Scott Morrison Will Discuss API Management and Security, and Francois Lascelles Will Present on Authentication and Identity Federation for Web APIs and RESTful Web Services

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Feb 21, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Layer 7 Technologies, a leading provider of solutions for SOA Governance, API Management and Cloud Integration today announced that Scott Morrison, chief technology officer and chief architect, and Francois Lascelles, director of solutions engineering, will be delivering presentations at the RSA(R) Conference USA 2012 on Friday, March 2 in San Francisco. Morrison will present on enterprise-scale API management and best practices for implementing a secure API strategy. Lascelles will discuss the various authentication and identity federation mechanisms for Web APIs and RESTful web services. Additionally, Layer 7 will host an API security for mobile and cloud best practices workshop on Monday, February 27 at The W Hotel in San Francisco.

        
        Who:    Caleb Sima, EIR, Andreessen Horowitz
                Ken Owens, VP, security and virtualization technologies, Savvis
                Scott Morrison, chief technology officer and chief architect at
                Layer 7 Technologies
        What:   API
                Security for Mobile & Cloud - A Best Practices Workshop for
                Enterprises
        When:   Monday, February 27 from 1 - 5 p.m. PT
        Where:  The W Hotel, San Francisco
        

Layer 7's API security for mobile and cloud best practices workshop will take place directly following the CSA Summit at the RSA Conference. At the workshop attendees will gain insight into API security and management best practices for mobile and cloud. Sessions include a discussion on open APIs, APIs in the cloud and their security implications as well as a how-to guide for securely managing your APIs.

The complete workshop schedule and registration details can be found at: http://www.layer7tech.com/event-registration/api-security-for-mobile-and-cloud

RSA Conference registration or CSA Summit registration is not required to attend the Layer 7 workshop.

RSA Presentation Details:

Who: Scott Morrison, chief technology officer and chief architect at Layer 7 Technologies What: "Hacking's Gilded Age: How APIs Will Increase Risk and Foment IT Chaos" When: Friday, March 2 at 10:10 a.m. PT Where: Room 302, Moscone Center, San Francisco

Morrison will highlight API security requirements and how they differ from conventional web sites--a point developers with a web-centric background often fail to recognize. Attendees will learn the differences between the security model for the conventional web and the new demands of APIs, how to identify bad practices that are being carried over by developers from the web world into API development, and how to avoid making common mistakes. The audience will have a clear understanding about how to implement a safe and secure API strategy for your company.

Who: Francois Lascelles, director of solutions engineering at Layer 7 Technologies What: "Enterprise Access Control Patterns for REST and Web API" When: Friday, March 2 at 10:10 a.m. PT Where: Room 304, Moscone Center, San Francisco

Lascelles will discuss the various authentication and identity federation mechanisms applicable to Web APIs and RESTful web services, including SAML, OAuth, OpenID, API keys, HMAC, custom tokens and cookies. Attendees will learn how each fits together, how the enterprise can leverage such technologies for enabling trust management and access control.

About Layer 7 Technologies

Layer 7 Technologies helps enterprises secure and govern interactions between their organizations and the services they use in the cloud; across the internet; and out to mobile devices. Through its award-winning line of SOA Gateways, Cloud Brokers and API Proxies, Layer 7 gives enterprises the ability to control identity, data security, SLA and visibility requirements for sharing application data and functionality across organizational boundaries. In 2011, Layer 7 was named the 71st fastest-growing private or public technology company in North America on the Deloitte Fast 500 list. With more than 150 customers spanning six continents, Layer 7 supports the most demanding commercial and government organizations. Layer 7 solutions are FIPS compliant, STIG vulnerability tested and have met Common Criteria EAL4+ security assurance. For more information, please visit www.layer7tech.com , email us at info@layer7tech.com or follow us on Twitter at @layer7.

SOURCE: Layer 7 Technologies

Alacritech CEO Larry Boucher to Speak at 2012 Pacific Crest Emerging Technologies Summit

Santa Clara, CA – Feb. 7, 2012  – Alacritech, the pioneer in NFS storage acceleration, today announced that CEO Larry Boucher will speak at the 2012 Pacific Crest Emerging Technologies Summit in San Francisco on February 14. Boucher will present an overview of Alacritech’s current capabilities, as well as his vision for the future of storage.  Speaking at the Pacific Crest Emerging Technologies Summit is by invitation only.

“In today’s enterprise, efficiently managing ever-increasing amounts of data is becoming both a focus of business execution, as well as a serious financial consideration,” said Boucher. “Many enterprise NAS environments are overstretched as a result of the constant influx of unstructured data. I will discuss solutions that both accelerate the performance and extend the life of existing file-based storage systems while eliminating the need to over-invest in expensive enterprise storage systems, thereby significantly simplifying data management and materially reducing capital and operating expenses.” 

Boucher’s presentation will take place at the Westin Hotel, San Francisco, CA on Feb. 14 at 10:00am, PST, as part of the Next Generation Infrastructure track during the two-day conference from Feb. 14-15. 

Pacific Crest is one of the leading investment banks in the technology sector, with a proven track record of success after working exclusively with technology companies for its 21-year existence.  The Summit is structured to provide programs with unique content and interactive formats to foster the highest level of interaction between corporate management, institutional investors, private equity investors and venture capitalists. To provide this unique forum, the Summit is an exclusive, invitation-only event. If you have any questions please contact your Pacific Crest representative.  For more information, please visit www.pacific-crest.com. 

About Alacritech

Founded in 1997 by network storage pioneer Larry Boucher and group of respected storage executives, Alacritech sets new records for the delivery of increasing amounts of enterprise cloud, video and other rich application data. The company’s first NFS Acceleration appliance, the ANX 1500, mitigates Network Attached Storage (NAS) sprawl and dramatically improves the performance of NFS infrastructures, and does so without requiring the replacement of existing ecosystems or the surrender of ownership of mission-critical data. The ANX 1500 pays for itself faster than any other storage infrastructure solution and provides by far the lowest cost per operations per second (OPS). The company holds 54 patents and has received $34 million in funding from Alloy Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Berkeley International Capital Corporation, Munder Capital Management, Needham Capital Partners, and Quantum Technology Ventures. Learn more at www.alacritech.com.

Layer 7 Pulls Ahead of Tech Security Rivals

Vancouver company’s ‘pizza box’ hardware delivers to clients such as the U.S. Department of Defence

 

By SCOTT SIMPSON, Vancouver Sun February 6, 2012

It’s a modest-looking device with a list of big-name customers any technology company would kill for.

Layer 7, based in Vancouver, sells so-called “gateway” hardware that allows digital information to flow in and out of a business or government agency — while blocking anybody from accessing anything they shouldn’t be looking at.

It’s a service for which demand is booming, especially for companies that want their iPad-carrying, smartphone-using salespeople and executives to have sales, pricing and production data at their fingertips when a potential customer has a question and expects an immediate answer — or wants first-hand access to shipping and inventory data on the premise that it could help them lower their costs.

“A lot of enterprises in the U.S. — certainly we’re seeing this trend in the U.K. as well — are asking themselves, ‘how do we equip employees with the iPad? How do we share information on that iPad?’ If they make a sales call, they could demo something, they could call up some information quickly. They could do all kinds of things,” Dimitri Sirota, Layer 7 vice-president for marketing and alliances, said in an interview.

“We have a very large pharmaceutical company that’s doing just that. They just rolled out a service for their sales force in the field. The sales force walks around with these iPads, and if they want to be able to call up stats [or] images, they can do that straight from the iPad. But of course that app you have on that iPad is now calling information that resides inside of the enterprise.”

Layer 7’s hardware is designed to choke the data flow down to what’s necessary, while keeping the proprietary stuff secure.

Customers include the U.S. departments of defence, homeland security and customs and border patrol, a notable chunk of the Fortune 500 including General Motors, and Canadian government agencies including B.C.’s attorney-general’s office and Quebec’s ministry of finance.

“It really just looks like a ‘pizza box’ server — nothing really interesting about it,” Sirota said. “We sit at the edge, particularly in a wiring closet somewhere in a data centre — a physical device you slot into a cabinet — and traffic comes in and goes out.

“We look at the traffic that’s going in and out and we let you define all the rules around what’s allowed in, what’s allowed out, whether the data needs to be transformed, all that kind of stuff.

“We sell to IT shops. That’s our buyer, no different than a Cisco or a Juniper. In our particular class, with the type of traffic we deal with — mobile, partner integration and so forth — we have a number of competitors, but we just happen to be one of the top vendors in the world.”

Last October, Deloitte named Layer 7 the 15th fastest growing public or private company in Canada, and 71st fastest in North America. They’ve also been recognized by senior tech sector analysts Gartner Inc. and Forrester Research.

Last week, Layer 7 CEO Paul Rochester announced that the company achieved record annual revenue growth for 2011. It has averaged 101 per cent compound annual growth for five consecutive years. They’ve turned a profit in each of the last three years.

“As enterprises embrace mobile and cloud [computing] in 2012, Layer 7 is best positioned to capitalize on the need for enterprise mobile and cloud access solutions,” Rochester said in a news release.

The company has grown to more than 100 employees — including more than a dozen it recruited from IBM, which now has a smaller market share than Layer 7 in the security hardware realm, according to Sirota.

“IBM has been a rival for five years, and in the last year we were able to pull their head of sales for the division that competes against us, their head of technical sales and another dozen of their leading salespeople,” Sirota said. “The fact that they came to Layer 7 probably says something. ...

“We are an exporting company. We made our name in the U.S. market. To be respected in the IT world you’ve got to be able to sell to the U.S. feds, U.S. financial services, and those related industries.”