Accenture and Apple's new enterprise mobility venture: Apple is making a new push into enterprise computing through a partnership with Accenture around iOS development. The deal is a true co-innovation effort and not something driven mostly by Accenture, as the companies' joint press release indicates:
Accenture will create a dedicated iOS practice within Accenture Digital Studios in select locations around the world. Experts from Apple will be co-located with this team. Working together, the two companies will launch a new set of tools and services that help enterprise clients transform how they engage with customers using iPhone and iPad. The experts will include visual and experience designers, programmers, data architects and scientists, and hardware and software designers.
“Starting 10 years ago with iPhone, and then with iPad, Apple has been transforming how work gets done, yet we believe that businesses have only just begun to scratch the surface of what they can do with our products,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Both Apple and Accenture are leaders in building incredible user experiences and together we can continue to truly modernize how businesses work through amazing solutions that take advantage of the incredible capabilities of Apple’s technologies.”
The release emphasizes three areas of focus for the partnership: back-end integration with iOS devices, tools and templates for IoT, and converting legacy applications to iOS.
POV: The deal is a smart move by both companies as it helps Apple drive further into the enterprise while Accenture can take advantage of the iOS skills shortage, says Constellation founder and CEO R "Ray" Wang.
"The big areas are more than IoT," he adds. "Apple's augmented reality and virtual reality capabilities, and the new integrations with other devices such as HomeKit and Healthkit are where the future innovations lie ahead."
Apple's goal in lining up enterprise players like Accenture is to get more iOS devices sold into enterprises, notes Constellation VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "I am sure more SIs are in the wings," he adds. "But that cannot distract from the fact that the march to the enterprise for Apple is slow. Consumerization of IT via devices is one thing, getting enterprises to build on a platform is another."
VMWare, Google and Pivotal team up on container service: While software vendors involved with open-source software seek to find ways to offer commercial services around a given project, cooperation with other providers is crucial to the project's growth and customer success. That truism underlines this week's announcement from VMWare, Pivotal and Google around Pivotal Container Service (PKS), which will provide the Kubernetes software container orchestration platform on both VMWare vSphere and Google Cloud Platform.
The service is a commercial version of the open source Kubo project, which was founded by Pivotal and Google in November to bring Pivotal Cloud Foundry together with the increasingly popular Kubernetes. VMWare says it is committing significant engineering resources to the Kubo project in conjunction with the new container service's launch.
PKS will have ongoing compatibility with Google Container Engine, which is kept up to date with the latest Kubernetes releases (which to date have been rolling out every few months). VMWare plans to deeply integrate PKS with its other products, including vCloud Director, vRealize Automation and Wavefront for container monitoring. The initial release of PKS is expected in the fourth quarter. Pricing won't be available until then.
VMWare and Pivotal will be in charge of to go-to-market, aiming PKS at Global 2000 companies as well as service providers.
POV: The move looks like a good one, albeit far from surprising. While VMWare has selected Google rival Amazon Web Services as its preferred IaaS provider, Google cloud chief Diane Greene is a VMWare co-founder and former CEO, and partnering with her alma mater is an extension of her plan to push GCP deeper into enterprises. Google also remains a key player in the Kubernetes project, which it founded, despite having donated the code to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. For VMWare, the deal reflects another step in its hybrid cloud strategy—something it needs to develop wisely as its large installed base of on-premises customers gets more comfortable with the cloud.
"It's good to see these three vendors working together to help customers," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "And it's another win in a long series of wins for Kubernetes to become the de facto container management standard at the moment."
Facebook awarded patent for gesture control system: While Facebook applies for more than 1,000 patents each year, it can take quite a while for a patent to be awarded This month, Facebook was awarded one it filed in 2012 for an in-air, gesture-based control system. Here are some of the key details of the invention, which is solely credited to Facebook's Robert Wang, who works on the company's Oculus VR team:
Because the system does not require instrumentation or gloves, it works well in a typical desktop computing environment. The user can switch between typing or using the mouse to gesturing by simply lifting up his or her hands, without having to put on a special glove or tracking device. Several configurations of the invention fit on top of a normal desk. The robust recognition of the pinching gesture enables the user to make comfortable input motions, reducing fatigue.
Other 3D manipulation applications include training applications for aircraft maintenance where the student virtually manipulates 3D tools to train muscle memory, design of 3D protein structures to match x-ray crystallography data for medical research, gaming applications where the user controls a virtual avatar or virtual hands, computer animation tasks where the user controls the configuration and timing of a virtual actor, and 3D sculpting for free-form modeling.
The hand tracking system described above can be used in conjunction with a variety of display systems including plasma, LCD, stereoscopic, and video wall displays. Processing can be performed either on the computer system connected to the display or on a remote networked computer system to which the camera image data is sent.
POV: You can read the patent in full at this link. A H/T goes to Patently Apple for initially spotting it. Facebook is far from the only company working on this type of technology—from startups such as Myo and Leapmotion to big players like Apple—but it's nonetheless of interest, particularly with respect to the implications it could have on application user experience.
"I believe human-to-machine interfaces will be a key component to helping us get work done more efficiently," says Constellation VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky. "We're quite limited by the keyboards and screens we use today. Facial recognition, eye tracing, sentiment analysis, hand motions and even things like heart rate and repository patterns will play a role in the future.
Rushed go-live blamed for rampant social service system woes: A new lawsuit alleges that potentially hundreds of Washington, D.C. residents who applied for food stamps had their benefits cancelled or delayed for months due to problems with a new computer system that federal officials warned wasn't ready for launch.
Families are going hungry as a result, says the lawsuit filed by the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia and the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, the Washington Post reports:
The trouble began last year, advocates for the poor say, when the city transitioned to a new computer system despite warnings of potential problems from the federal government, which pays for the program.
Before the rollout, U.S. Department of Agriculture officials recommended more testing to avoid backlogs and delays, and told the city that proceeding was “against our best advice” and that the city was moving ahead “at its own risk,” court records show.
Once the system went live, many errors were reported and it took 90 minutes to process an application, compared to 20 minutes with the old system. The added overhead has been exacerbated by the fact that the D.C. program serves 120,000 people, and lines outside agencies to apply start forming as early as 5 a.m., the Post reports.
POV: It's not clear when the matter will be resolved, but in the meantime it holds an important cautionary tale for any enterprise IT shop about the importance of testing and the need to set realistic project timelines. The manner in which testing is done is crucial as well. According to a letter from federal officials to the District of Columbia Department of Human Services, the new system was never tested with a live production pilot. Rather, the old system remained the system of record, while the new one was tested in parallel. The District's methodology was insufficient, federal officials said.