Tag Archives: Cloud

Analytics, Architecture, Azure, Bing Speech API, Cloud, Cognitive Services, Data Visualization, Drone, Face API, Internet Of Things, IoT, IoT Hub, PowerBI

The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing Drone Journey – Last Installment

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Introduction to the Drone Journey

Final Installment

This post is the eleventh, and final, post in documenting the steps I went through on my journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. There are 10 other posts building up to this one which you can find at the end of this post.

Focus of this post

In this post I will share a video of the complete end-to-end demo and share details of the architecture which sits behind it. I will also share information on what I bought/used to bring this all together and relist all the different software, services and node packages in a single place.

Pulling It All Together

A lot of what we have been doing with this project is humanizing the way we communicate with machines/computers/things. That means talking and observing to drive intelligent interaction rather than using a mouse, keyboard or touch screen.

Our Autonomous Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone is a smart drone which showcases, albeit crudely, how interaction with services filled with intelligence is going to evolve. It highlights the importance of cognitive services to the success of organizations in the future.

So with that said take a look at the entire end to end demo in the video below.

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing Drone Journey – Last Installment →

Cloud

Visualizing your cloud strategy and developing cloud competency

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Visualizing your cloud strategy and developing cloud competency

Speaking to organizations embracing the cloud, with a clear cloud strategy, results in two reoccurring to-do’s they recommend I will share in this post and dig into.

  1. You should have  simple way to categorize potential cloud projects. Cloud Strategy: To-Do ListThis often requires consideration of numerous dimensions shown visually so all can see the plan. I call this visualizing your cloud strategy.
  2. You should have a plan in place to increase the cloud knowledge of the organization so they can best leverage the new environment and explore ALL its options. To me this is all about developing cloud competency at your organizations or as an individual.

Let’s dig into those some more.

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Cloud

The Cloud – Do You Know The Many Hidden Benefits?

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The Cloud – Many Hidden Benefits

If you are planning to move to the cloud business plan Cloud Business Planis the first step and often a requirement for most organizations. That plan will contain expected outcomes. The success of the move to the cloud will then be judged by if those outcomes materialize. In this post we explore what most organizations put into those plans.

The post takes a look at the unexpected outcomes organizations, that have jumped to the cloud, are seeing they did not include in their original plans.  Lets call those the hidden benefits of the cloud.

The general expected outcomes

Almost every company starts their journey looking into the cloud as a money saving exercise. Saving Money With The CloudThis makes sense as it is rare for investment to happen without some payback expectation. Investments in the cloud are no different.

Costs organizations generally factor into that business case, that they hope cloud can help with, can include many things but often these 4 are always present:

  1. New hardware capital expenditure as things scale.
  2. Maintenance capital expenditure around existing hardware (including any extended or special warranties).
  3. Operational expenditure around running a physical location (buildings, cooling, electricity and more) – could also be a capital expenditure if they have to buy the property outright.
  4. Capital and/or operational expenditure focused on support and maintenance of parts of the software stack (applying hotfixes, having access to technical support etc).

Continue reading The Cloud – Do You Know The Many Hidden Benefits? →

Architecture, Cloud

Where should you start your cloud journey?

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Your cloud journey – where should you start?

If you are reading this expecting me to tell you the answer then I am afraid I will disappoint you. Every single organization I have spoken to is different and I expect your organization is too. The cloud journey can take many different directions and what is the right place to start for one organization might not be right for another.

Beware of anyone that tells youCloud Journey Compass their view of the “right answer” without first understanding your company, its priorities, its history and without first showing you the breadth of options available from which you can make your first steps.

This is a journey that needs to be navigated in partnership. It is your cloud journey not mine!

Early advice

  1. Make sure you understand the breadth of what you can do today in the cloud.
  2. Make sure you understand there are many different ways to work with the cloud. When you think about your cloud journey remember it is not a one size fits all.
  3. Think about what your first, second and third workloads might be to decide who will be the best vendor for you.
  4. Try to avoid falling into the trap of ending up with 10 cloud providers. Remember that learning multiple clouds is not in your best interest longer term and you will probably consolidate later.
  5. Do something now. Your competitors are.

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Architecture, Cloud

Quantifying Cloud Adoption – Is It Really Happening?

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Quantifying Cloud Adoption – Is It Really Happening?

In my post from yesterday, Cloud – Are You Already Falling Behind?, I shared my view that there is a shift of many companies to the cloud.  In this post I want to share a little external validation that backs that up and helps quantify if cloud adoption is really happening or coming to an organization near you soon!

What the Analysts and Management Consultants are saying

We all know that not everything analysts and management consultants predict, and say, comes true. They are in a tough spot having to predict the future for sure reliant on information flowing from their many contacts and surveys. What we can do though is look at a variety of sources and from that draw some clear conclusions.

  • Gartner – Source
    • By 2020, a Corporate “No-Cloud” Policy Will Be as Rare as a “No-Internet” Policy Is Today”
    • … organizations are saving 14 percent of their budgets as an outcome of public cloud adoption, according to Gartner’s 2015 cloud adoption survey
    • By 2020, more compute power will have been sold by IaaS and PaaS cloud providers than sold and deployed into enterprise data centers.
  • KPMG – Source
    • The question is no longer: ‘How do I move to the cloud?’ Instead, it’s ‘Now that I’m in the cloud, how do I make sure I’ve optimized my investment and risk exposure?
    • Cloud continues to drive disruption in the business world across the globe. In fact, a recent global KPMG survey 800 technology industry leaders ranked cloud as the technology that will have the greatest impact in driving business transformation for enterprises.

Continue reading Quantifying Cloud Adoption – Is It Really Happening? →