Linux.com (blog) | How China Mobile Is Using Linux and Open Source Linux.com (blog) During the 2016 Mobile World Congress, China Mobile declared that the operational support system running their massive network would be based on open source software. China Mobile is not alone; many major networking vendors are moving to open ... |
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How China Mobile Is Using Linux and Open Source - Linux.com (blog)
HILLSBORO, Ore.February 21, 2017Radisys Corporation (NASDAQ: RSYS), the services acceleration company, today announced that it has open sourced its industry-validated and tested LTE RAN software, making it available under the Apache 2.0 license for ON.Labs open Mobile-CORD (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) 5G architecture. The M-CORD reference solution brings the CORD framework to the mobile edge of the network for 5G services. By delivering an open source RAN for M-CORD, Radisys is enabling communications service providers to fast track their migrations from the traditional Central Office to virtualized data centers built with open source components.
Coming on the heels of Radisys delivering the industrys first Evolved Packet Core open source software for M-CORD, the addition of an open source LTE RAN solution to M-CORD provides communications service providers with an accelerated path to deploying 5G services, said Guru Parulkar, executive director, ONF, ON.Lab and Stanford Platform Lab. Radisys has been a leading proponent of M-CORD as a system integrator and this new open source software offering underscores its unparalleled commitment to M-CORDs success. We look forward to continuing our collaboration efforts with the Radisys team and supplying open source architectures that aid in the deployment of 5G.
Open source solutions have emerged as a major factor in aiding communications service providers migration from the Central Office to a virtualized data center model, but these telecom and service provider access and infrastructure solutions are complex and require diverse skill sets. As such, communications service providers are embracing the open CORD architecture to achieve the benefits of data center economics and the agility of the cloud. Radisys delivery of an open source LTE RAN enables communications service providers to readily adopt the M-CORD architecture and gain its associated benefits of disaggregation for virtualization, network slicing for scalability, and 5G architecture for connectionless mode.
By making Radisys LTE RAN software open sourced, Radisys further cements its commitment to the open source movement as integral part of our corporate strategy to enable communications service providers to avoid vendor lock-in and reduce time-to-market, said Brian Bronson, president and CEO, Radisys. Radisys LTE RAN software is field-hardened and proven globally in deployments around the world. By bringing our LTE RAN to the open source community through M-CORD, we can enable a 5G platform today while also focusing on delivery of a 5G RAN solution.
Radisys open source LTE RAN reference solution for the M-CORD reference architecture will be available March 2017. Radisys own M-CORD solution is a compilation of the companys open source LTE RAN and EPC reference architecture pre-integrated and deployed on its DCEngine platform an open hardware solution based on the OCP-ACCEPTED CG-OpenRack-19 specification from the Open Compute Project. The combination of this open software and hardware solution with Radisys integration, validation and custom development services delivers a service provider-ready solution.
See the M-CORD Demonstration at Mobile World Congress
Radisys and ON.Lab, along with other contributors, will demonstrate M-CORD use cases running on commodity hardware and on DCEngine at Mobile World Congress, February 27-March 2 in its Booth 5I61 in Hall 5. To see the demonstration and meet with Radisys CORD and open source experts, contact open@radisys.com.
More at http://www.opencord.org and http://www.radisys.com.
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Radisys Announces Open Source LTE Radio Access Network (RAN) Software for the Mobile-CORD (M-CORD) Project - Telecom Reseller (press release)
Businesses are feeling their way into the Internet of Things, but theyre not moving very quickly, according to newfindings from a Red Hat Inc. survey that reveal a sizable gap between interest in IoT and actual deployment of projects.
The open source software provider released its newest report today, revisiting earlier IoT trends it uncovered in 2015. In the past two years, interest in IoT has grown 12 percent within the enterprise, with 55 percent of respondents tabbing IoT as important to their organizations. Yet fewer than 25 percent of respondents are actively designing, prototyping or coding an IoT project.
Could open source be the answer to successfully rolling out an IoT initiative within enterprise environments? Red Hat survey respondents think so, with an overwhelming 89 percent utilizing open source technologies for their IoT projects. Middleware was named the most important part of the software mix for IoT implementations, with 22 percent of respondents recognizing the necessity of software integration to convert IoT ideas into business-ready solutions.
This is where the power of the crowd comes into play. Where one business may be overwhelmed trying to devise a solution for a particular problem, another company may have already figured it out. Open sources collaborative approach aids in addressing the complexities of middleware and systems integration, even when its own democratic processes could contribute to those complexities.
Yes, theres a gap between interest and deployment [for IoT], and thats due to a lack of maturity in both proprietary and open source software, explained James Kirkland, chief architect for IoT at Red Hat. At first people tried to build an IoT platform from scratch, rebuilding everything. But those that have been most successful with IoT have picked one problem, addressed it and learned from it.
Kirkland noted several issue for enterprises. Security, knowledge and figuring out where the return on investment comes from in a project, are all concerns for enterprise IoT adoption, he said. From that you learn, grow and do one or two more projects, and build a more overarching solution from there. These are finite projects the enterprise can solve and learn from.
The interest in open source technology isnt surprising for IoT, a market still in its early years. Open source has demonstrated time and again the business perks of collaborative innovation, with each generation of open source technology leading to new potential products. As IoT transitions from a hype phase to a revenue-generating phase, open source is a comfortable go-to for cautious business people.
For the most part, enterprises are using open source for their needs, said Peter Burris, chief research officer at Wikibon,owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE Media. Burris, who has written an extensive report on IoTs potential within the emerging digital economy, sees recent open source developments as an opportunity for businesses to circumvent costly hardware thats suited only to specific needs.
The likelihood is well see a trend to replace specialized hardware with low-cost, general purpose hardware and specialized software, he said. What many in the enterprise hope is the promise of low cost hardware.
Open source can boost IoT deployments in that sense, making hardware more adaptable through software that can be accessed and customized rapidly in the cloud. With open source technologies, the enterprise can experiment with and even fail at IoT services faster, more cheaply and more often, avoiding the restrictive nature of proprietary software.
The fortunate byproduct of open source experimentation is the discovery of new business opportunities within the IoT market, as such projects establish use cases that can scale to revenue-generating services. Fifty-eight percent of Red Hats survey respondents indicated new business opportunities as the primary benefit to IoT, while 50 percent look to improve operations with IoT deployments.
What were finding is that a company builds out its backend and invests in an IoT solution, and they stumble across a business model they can sell to others, said Lis Strenger, a senior product marketing manager for IoT at Red Hat. One example is for a transportation company that ended up selling their model as a platform solution. This other business thats emerging is from insight data collected from the physical world. Theyre realizing they can share that data out to other companies, and add another layer of value to their offerings.
Red Hats findings are in line with other industry reports, with new data from 451 Research LLC revealing that 71 percent of the nearly 1,000 companies surveyed are gathering data for IoT initiatives. Thats a 3 percent increase from the previous quarter. Another report from the International Data Corp. puts global IoT spending at $1.29 trillion by 2020, with the majority of that spending going towards software upgrades to existing physical components and hardware, incorporating wireless data transmission through modules and sensors.
Several computing giants are indeed rolling out enterprise-ready solutions borne from open-source IoT projects, with Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. launching SecureData, a Swiss Army knife for enterprise security looking to transmit data into Apache Hadoop. General Electric Corp. is another instance of open-source spinning out fresh business opportunities, with the Cloud Foundry-based General Electric Co. Predix presenting a platform-as-a-service solution to digitally recreate physical machines for analysis and model-based projections.
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Open source helps Internet of Things jump the hype hurdle at ... - SiliconANGLE (blog)
We find out about the organisation looking to improve software worldwide by categorising and improving its open source components
Its amazing how much of the technology we use every day is dependent on open source software. Developers are continually drawing on free code repositories that have been shared by friendly developers. With them so freely available, its no wonder that these open source libraries can be found in all kinds of software the world over, including in technologies that are essential to how we live our lives.
However, these bits of open source code are often not maintained, not updated, and can lead to security risks such as theOpenSSL vulnerability Heartbleed, which threatened the security of people using the internet. Even if they have been updated, how do you know where those updated libraries are, or which versionsyou should be using in your own projects?
Bath-based developer Andrew Nesbitt (pictured left) has been wrestling with this problem since 2014. To help combat it he created Libraries.iowhich now monitors over 2 million open source libraries across 33 different packet managers. This service helps to ensure developers are using the latest version of the code, as well as showing where those libraries are being used already and in what software projects.
Now, hes been joined by Ben Nickolls (pictured above, in main picture), another Bath-based developer keen to highlightfree and open source projects that are essential, and yet under-supported. To find out more about how the service works and how people can get involved with such a worthy project, we caught up with Ben at The Guild co-working hub to ask him a few questions:
TS:What is Libraries.IO?
Ben Nickolls:In short, Libraries.io (as a project) aims to improve the quality of software. All software. Open source software has been welded into a huge variety of technologies that are fundamental to our modern lives. Its time to make sure those crucial building blocks are properly cared for.
We have three aims: to improve search and recommendation engines. To create tools that help people make informed decisions about what software they use in projects. And to highlight free and open source projects that are essential, and yet under-supported.
By understanding the relationships between software we can very quickly provide a recommendation for a piece of software lets say a Redis client for Ruby by knowing that the recommendation at the top is the one most frequently listed as a dependency in other projects. Its one of three core approaches that were taking to try to improve all software.
TS: How does Libraries.IO work?
BN:Libraries.io harnesses the same techniques Google uses to index the internet, but applies them to software. Andrew substituted a network graph of websites and pages connected by hyperlinks, for one with software projects and links representing the use of code within another project as a dependency.
TS: What will you be bringing to Libraries.io in the new role?
BN:The easiest thing to say is that I will be doing everything that Andrew doesnt, including finding funding. Which is to say that I wont be spending 100% of my time developinglibraries.io though I might sneak a cheeky commit in there every now and again.
TS:How is Libraries.IO funded?
BN: Were currently under what is know as fiscal sponsorship of Brave New Software, which means they actually hold and disperse of the grants that we have received. Were currently funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Ford Foundation, both of whom were born of the motor industry in the US.With them on board we have funding until 1st January 2018 so well be looking for further support in 2017.
TS: You are concerned about the future of open source, what is it that concerns you and how can it be addressed?
BN:Ive spent most of professional life working in or very close to open source. In my professional life it all began with Osmosoft and Jeremy Ruston at BT. I then fell into developing mobile applications using web standards and tools like PhoneGap, around the same time as Node.js was released. Having left software development for 2-3 years while I did other things at BT I suddenly found that I could get so far with these technologies that I could start my own company. So I did.
And herein is the issue.
I like many other developers these days gain so much from open source. Theres a reason why seed funds exist today when they could not in the late 90s. All that value instilled in freely available tools and technologies enables them to stand on the shoulders of those who built them. But while its fair to say that free and open source software has won whatever than might mean I suspect its success could also be its downfall.
I dont think people today contribute enough back to the foundational projects that underpin thousands of others: our core, digital infrastructure. These projects are often supported by individuals or small groups on the basis of some moral obligation. I think this could be catastrophic for open source. I think we need so to make open source as egalitarian as it was back in the day.We also need to tackle the cultural aversion to money in open source, at least when it pertains to work these types of projects.
TS: How can people get involved with Libraries.io?
Contribute! Libraries has a long list of package managersthat it doesnt yet support. We also need users to tell us what they think of the site and whether there are any issues. With only two full-time staff we cant do everything, but were looking at ways to reward those who are contributing from the community. Were also redeveloping our documentation to encourage contributors of all ages and skills
TS: Is it easy to get involved with the open source movement in the West of England? How can people do this?
BN: When I first moved here I was told Bath was the graveyard of ambition, a common clich touted by those who have gone belly up in the sun. I was amazed at just how open a community there is, both here and abroad in Bristol *waves*. This area almost immediately felt like a place I could fall into very easily from a techie POV. Bath:Hacked, Bath Ruby, The Engine Shed/Set Squared lot, all great people, and some amazing companies too. But now Im sounding like a Trumpain demagogue so I will stop myself and say, come say hi.
Many thanks to Ben for taking the time to answer our questions. You can see more at the Libraries.IO websiteand get in contact viasupport@libraries.io, you can also follow them on Twitter here: @librariesio And while you are about it, why not give us a follow too!@TechSPARKuk
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Interview: Ben Nickolls from Libraries.io the open source delivery service - TechSPARK (blog)
Dr Amr Awadallah is the Chief Technology Officer of Cloudera, a data management and analytics platform based on Apache Hadoop. Before co-founding Cloudera in 2008, Awadallah served as Vice President of Product Intelligence Engineering at Yahoo!, running one of the very first organizations to use Hadoop for data analysis and business intelligence. Awadallah joined Yahoo! after the company acquired his first startup, VivaSmart, in July 2000.
With the fourth industrial revolution upon uswhere the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres are blurred by the world of big data and the fusion of technologiesCloudera finds itself among the band of companies that are leading this change. In this interview with Enterprise Innovation, the Cloudera co-founder shares his insights on the opportunities and challenges in the digital revolution and its implications for businesses today; how organizations can derive maximum value from their data while ensuring their protection against risks; potential pitfalls and mistakes companies make when using big data for business advantage; and what lies beyond big data analytics.
Take us through the beginning of Cloudera, your time with VivaSmart, and what it was like to set up these companies.
They were very different processes. When VivaSmart was acquired by Yahoo! in mid-2000 for $9 million, it was mainly an acqui-hire because there were only five of us in the company and we were one of the few experts in terms of compression, which Yahoo! really needed for its shopping service. In retrospect, it was the right thing to do because back in 2000 when the Internet bubble burst, almost all our competition shut down and we were lucky to join Yahoo! when we did.
The lightbulb really went on for me in Yahoo!. I spent a total of eight years therefour were spent working on the compression shopping engine VivaSmart built, and four more on business intelligence and data analytics where I had a number of challenges in terms of scaling from a processingtime perspective and a cost of storage perspective; we were deleting data we wanted to keep, and it was not advancedit could only do SQL and we wanted to do predictive modeling, pattern matching, clustering, and other techniques that were very hard to do in SQL. I was lucky while I was at Yahoo! that Doug Cutting, who now also works at Cloudera, was working with the Yahoo Search team to build the Hadoop technology for Search. I was complaining about all the problems I had and he said to try Hadoop and see if it works for me. And it did! Within six months, all of my backend was switched to Hadoop, the processing time went down from nine hours to five minutes, the cost went down by almost 100x in some cases, and we gained the flexibility of being able to go beyond SQL and do more advanced stuff.
You were one of the first guys working on Hadoop
We were the only Hadoop big data platform for two years.
How did that business model evolve?
That comes from Mike Olson, my co-founder and one of the very first open source CEOs. He had a company called Sleepy Cat, which was an in-memory database that was open source. He was very fundamental in charting the course of Cloudera in terms of how to create the business model around open source.
We knew from day one that the benefits of open source are extremely rapid innovation and lots of word of mouth, but the downside is obviously that its very easy for someone to copy your products, and in many cases customers themselves take the software and dont want to be customers. Mike experienced that firsthand with his first startup, so when we were building out Cloudera, we always had it in our strategy to do a hybrid open source business model. Well keep the core platform and capabilities open, but build value around it that would make it easier, make it enterprise-ready, and make it more about performancethats how we created the differentiation against competition.
Cloudera is now a $4 billion company with 1,500 employees. How is your workforce spread out?
Of the 1,500, a thousand are in the U.S. and the rest are worldwide. The 500 are mostly in sales and marketing in different countriesSingapore and ASEAN, Japan, China, Australia, and Europe In Budapest, we have the only R&D and engineering office outside the United States. That came out of the fact that theres a significant shortage of skills in the U.S. because the success of Silicon Valley companies like Google and Uber has led to competition becoming very cutthroat in terms of finding talent and retaining them. We made a strategic decision about two years ago that we would open an R&D office outside the U.S. and Budapest, Hungary was our choice.
Eastern Europe is obviously very attractive for many reasonsa very educated skilled workforce, and the cost of that talent is probably half of some of other European nations.
One of the unique things about Budapest is that compared to German, the U.K., France or Netherlands, its a third of the U.S. But the reason we moved was actually not to save money, but to find talent in the first place. H1B [visas] are very tough to get these daysand for a startup, which we still are, we have to be very agile.
Why specifically Hungary over countries like Moldova, Romania, Macedonia, etc.?
It came down to a number of things. First, the country needs to be politically stable, otherwise Ukraine was really on top of our list. Second, the talent we needed should be available. We look for a special type of talent, not just computer science developers, but talent that understands oursystemsand this is the main determining factor why we picked Budapest. We did a survey of the market and found there are already a number of companies over there that were doing that, and we found that the local university was very advanced in terms of teaching that. Finally, there wasnt already a big established presence from Google or Microsoft and other behemoths whom we didnt want to start competing with right away.
How do you see Asia fitting into the whole R&D system for Cloudera?
Even though our size is relatively big, were still a startup. Right now, its not in our best interest to spread R&D out in too many locations because it slows down development. But as we grow as a company and start having more product lines, it would make sense to have more R&D offices in other locations and Asia will definitely be on top of the list.
After having traveled around in Asia, how do you see the maturity of adoption compared to the West?
I would say its very similar to Europeits spotty, and at the same stage. By that I mean there are some companies that are just way cutting edge, way ahead of the curve, and there are some that are still playing catch up and learning what to do. In Europe, telecom and banking tend to be ahead of the curve, and what were seeing in Asia is that telecom is ahead of the curve. The banking industry here has not been as fast.
Would you say banking is generally more conservative here?
I wouldnt say conservativeslow-moving. Thats different because conservative means you take a very long time before to decide. Here, they are actually making the decision; they just take a very long time to get things done.
Where do you see the role of the state and the role of regulation in promoting innovation within a jurisdiction?
I think one of the most fruitful areas to always invest in is talent. Theres no question about that. Weve seen some of the governments around here, Singapore and Malaysia included, that are very active in helping train people. There are governments giving subsidies to companies, like if the company wants to go and train somebody to learn in the data science skills, the government would pay maybe 50% (for example) of the training cost. In Malaysia a couple of months ago, there was an event where they give awards to these top universities, the top students that graduated as data scientists, and I look at that as an area that is very useful, fruitful.
You guys are at a point where youre not a startup, but not yet a massive enterprise either. Do you see your administrative, innovative processes continuing in this direction or do you guys have very different ways of growing the company from here on? What are your plans for growth?
Every year we look at how were scaling as a business and we change the way were doing things to adapt to that growth.
Sometimes the change could be a simple process change, or a change in people. For example, I was the VP for Engineering for the first four years. At some point, it became very clear that I couldnt continue my CTO role in terms of meeting with customers and public speaking while continuing to scale the engineering team at the very fast rate it needs to be scaling at. We had to go out and hire a VP of Engineering who is now running that team.
Same thing happened with our CEO Mike Olsonmy co-founder. He was the CEO for the first five years and in the fifth year was hitting his boundaries in terms of scaling. Hes never scaled the company to this much revenue and people beforehe can go learn it, but if youre growing fast, you dont have the luxury of learning. So Mike kind of fired himself from being the CEOhes still there as the chairman and chief strategy officer, and then we hired Tom Reilly which was one of the best moves that Mike ever did for the company. These are the kind of things that we watch out for as we continue to scale.
What excites you about the industry in the coming future? How do you see the future evolving?
We think there is a data revolution going on right nowand it is going to be as big, if not bigger, than the industrial revolution. In the industrial revolution, we learned how to use machines to build stuff, and companies and countries that figured out how to do that became the leaders of the worldChina, for example.
The exact same thing is going to happen with data. Countries and companies that figure out how to leverage data to automate the decision-making process wherever possible, across multiple disciplines, will be the ones that will win. We have customers in farming collecting data from the fields, drones taking pictures and seeing how the colors of the crops are changing, and theyre using that to optimize the yield. There are hospitals now in the U.S. working on precision medicine initiativesanalyzing the DNA, and making a tailored drug for exactly your condition and not the one-size-fits all approach pharmaceuticals take today. There will be more and more of this personalization and more precision around many things. These will really change the world in the future so significantly that certain jobsthose that are not creative or do not involve dealing with peoplewill be replaced.
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Building a $4 billion company around open source software: The Cloudera story - Enterprise Innovation
HILLSBORO, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
Radisys Corporation (RSYS), the services acceleration company, today announced that it has open sourced its industry-validated and tested LTE RAN software, making it available under the Apache 2.0 license for ON.Labs open Mobile-CORD (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) 5G architecture. The M-CORD reference solution brings the CORD framework to the mobile edge of the network for 5G services. By delivering an open source RAN for M-CORD, Radisys is enabling communications service providers to fast track their migrations from the traditional Central Office to virtualized data centers built with open source components.
Coming on the heels of Radisys delivering the industrys first Evolved Packet Core open source software for M-CORD, the addition of an open source LTE RAN solution to M-CORD provides communications service providers with an accelerated path to deploying 5G services, said Guru Parulkar, executive director, ONF, ON.Lab and Stanford Platform Lab. Radisys has been a leading proponent of M-CORD as a system integrator and this new open source software offering underscores its unparalleled commitment to M-CORDs success. We look forward to continuing our collaboration efforts with the Radisys team and supplying open source architectures that aid in the deployment of 5G.
Open source solutions have emerged as a major factor in aiding communications service providers migration from the Central Office to a virtualized data center model, but these telecom and service provider access and infrastructure solutions are complex and require diverse skill sets. As such, communications service providers are embracing the open CORD architecture to achieve the benefits of data center economics and the agility of the cloud. Radisys delivery of an open source LTE RAN enables communications service providers to readily adopt the M-CORD architecture and gain its associated benefits of disaggregation for virtualization, network slicing for scalability, and 5G architecture for connectionless mode.
By making Radisys LTE RAN software open sourced, Radisys further cements its commitment to the open source movement as integral part of our corporate strategy to enable communications service providers to avoid vendor lock-in and reduce time-to-market, said Brian Bronson, president and CEO, Radisys. Radisys LTE RAN software is field-hardened and proven globally in deployments around the world. By bringing our LTE RAN to the open source community through M-CORD, we can enable a 5G platform today while also focusing on delivery of a 5G RAN solution.
Radisys open source LTE RAN reference solution for the M-CORD reference architecture will be available March 2017. Radisys own M-CORD solution is a compilation of the companys open source LTE RAN and EPC reference architecture pre-integrated and deployed on its DCEngine platform an open hardware solution based on the OCP-ACCEPTED CG-OpenRack-19 specification from the Open Compute Project. The combination of this open software and hardware solution with Radisys integration, validation and custom development services delivers a service provider-ready solution.
See the M-CORD Demonstration at Mobile World Congress
Radisys and ON.Lab, along with other contributors, will demonstrate M-CORD use cases running on commodity hardware and on DCEngine at Mobile World Congress, February 27-March 2 in its Booth 5I61 in Hall 5. To see the demonstration and meet with Radisys CORD and open source experts, contact open@radisys.com.
About CORD Project
CORD (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) brings datacenter economics and cloud flexibility to the telco Central Office and to the entire access network. CORD is an open source service delivery platform that combines SDN, NFV, and elastic cloud services to network operators and service providers. It integrates ONOS, OpenStack, Docker, and XOSall running on merchant silicon, white-box switches, commodity servers, and disaggregated access devices. The CORD reference implementation serves as a platform for multiple domains of use, with open source communities building innovative services for residential, mobile, and enterprise network customers. The CORD ecosystem comprises ON.Lab and organizations that are funding and contributing to the CORD initiative. These organizations include AT&T, China Unicom, Google, NTT Communications Corp., SK Telecom Co. Ltd., Verizon, Ciena Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Intel Corporation, NEC Corporation, Nokia, Radisys, and Samsung Electronics Co. See the full list of members, including CORDs collaborators, and learn how you can get involved with CORD at http://www.opencord.org.
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CORD is an independently funded software project hosted by The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems.
About Radisys
Radisys helps communications and content providers, and their strategic partners, create new revenue streams and drive cost out of their services delivery infrastructure. Radisys hyperscale software-defined infrastructure, service aware traffic distribution platforms, real-time media processing engines and wireless access technologies enable its customers to maximize, virtualize and monetize their networks. For more information about Radisys, please visit http://www.radisys.com.
Radisys is a registered trademark of Radisys. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170221005446/en/
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Radisys Announces Open Source LTE Radio Access Network (RAN) Software for the Mobile-CORD (M-CORD) Project - Yahoo Finance
Tapping into an ongoing merger arrangement with Open Networking Lab, the Open Networking Foundation recently unveiled its Open Innovation Pipeline targeted at counteracting the move by vendors using open source platforms to build proprietary solutions.
ONF said the initiative will tap into network virtualization work behind software-defined networking, network functions virtualization and cloud technologies, with those contributing work into the OIP being able to benefit from inclusion into ON.Labs Open Network Operating System project and central office rearchitected as a data center platform, and vendors gaining access to operator deployments.
Now that the SDN movement, first initiated by the ONF, has successfully set in motion the disaggregation of networking devices and control software and fostered the emergence of a broad range open source platforms, the industry needs a unifying effort to build solutions out of the numerous disaggregated components, ONF noted in a statement. A trend has emerged where vendors leverage open source to build closed proprietary solutions, providing only marginal benefit to the broader ecosystem. The ONFs Open Innovation Pipeline in intended to counteract this trend by offering greater returns to members who participate in the ONFs collaborative process.
ONF also said it plans to promote interoperability with diverse components of the open source ecosystem by using a software defined standards approach to developing interoperability application program interfaces and data models.
Open source is moving much more quickly than the traditional standards process, and as such we are recrafting the ONFs mission around standards to include a focus on deriving interoperability APIs and data model from open source in order to promote interoperability, explained Timon Sloane, VP of standards and membership at ONF. It is very important to us that all the pieces of this new ecosystem can play well together and we see this expanded focus as central to enabling the crafting of solutions from the disaggregated components now taking shape across the industry.
ONF and ON.Lab announced their merger plans last October, with the new entity set to run under the ONF name and be headed by Guru Parulkar, ON.Lab founder and executive director. The organizations noted the legal combination is not expected until late 2017, with both entities maintaining the integrity of both organizations and separate, but closely affiliated operations focused on SDN and open source platforms until that time.
The move came one month after ONF lost its long-standing executive director Dan Pitt, who had headed the organization since its founding in 2011 by a handful of technology and telecom heavyweights, including Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon Communications and Yahoo.
The combined efforts of ON.Lab and ONF are set to include operations, membership, budget and employees. ONF counts 110 member companies, while ON.Lab states its ecosystem includes more than 70 companies and 17 partners.
We see a lot of value in combining the best of ONF and ON.Lab, noted Andre Fuetsch, president of AT&T Labs, CTO at AT&T and ONF board member, at the time of the merger announcement. To continue driving adoption of SDN, we need both high-quality open source software for the necessary but nondifferentiating infrastructure as well as open standards and APIs. This will allow us to quickly create and deploy innovative new services above and to control standard hardware below. A unified organization enables software to inform new standards and help drive much faster adoption of SDN.
Until the merger is completed, ONF is being governed by a board of directors composed of one delegate elected by its membership and additional delegates from AT&T, Google and NTT Communications. SK Telecom also includes a delegate to represent the ONOS projects CORD platform and Verizon has a board seat in representation of ONOS. Other members include ONF co-founder Nick McKeown, current ONF board member Jennifer Rexford and Parulkar.
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ONF unveils Open Innovation Pipeline to counter open source proprietary solutions - RCR Wireless News
Slide: 1 / of 2. Caption: Numerai
Slide: 2 / of 2. Caption: Caption: Richard CraibNumerai
Wall Street is a competition, a Darwinian battle for the almighty dollar. Gordon Gekko said that greed is good, that it captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. A hedge fund hunts for an edge and then maniacally guards it, locking down its trading data and barring its traders from joining the company next door. The big bucks lie in finding market inefficiencies no one else can, succeeding at the expense of others. But Richard Craib wants to change that. He wants to transform Wall Street from a cutthroat competition into a harmonious collaboration.
This morning, the 29-year-old South African technologist and his unorthodox hedge fund, Numerai, started issuing a new digital currencykind of. Craibs idea is so weird, so unlike anything else that has preceded it, that naming it becomes an exercise in approximation. Inspired by the same tech that underpins bitcoin, his creation joins a growing wave of what people in the world of crypto-finance call digital tokens, internet-based assets that enable the crowdsourcing of everything from venture capital to computing power. Craib hopes his particular token can turn Wall Street into a place where everyones on the same team. Its a strange, complicated, and potentially powerful creation that builds on an already audacious arrangement, a new configuration of technology and money that calls into question the markets most cherished premise. Greed is still good, but its better when people are working together.
Based in San Francisco, Numerai is a hedge fund in which an artificially intelligent system chooses all the trades. But its not a system Craib built alone. Instead, several thousand anonymous data scientists compete to create the best trading algorithmsand win bitcoin for their efforts. The whole concept may sound like a bad Silicon Valley joke. But Numerai has been making trades in this way for more than a year, and Craib says its making money. Its also attracted marquee backers like Howard Morgan, a founder of Renaissance Technologies, the wildly successful hedge fund that pioneered an earlier iteration of tech-powered trading.
The system is elegant in its way: Numerai encrypts its trading data before sharing it with the data scientists to prevent them from mimicking the funds trades themselves. At the same time, the company carefully organizes this encrypted data in a way that allows the data scientists to build models that are potentially able to make better trades. The crowdsourced approach seems to be workingto a point. But in Craibs eyes, the system still suffers from a major drawback: If the best scientist wins, that scientist has little incentive to get other talented colleagues involved. The wisdom of the crowd runs up against Wall Streets core ethos of self-interest: make the most money for yourself.
Thats where Craibs new token comes in. Craib and company believe Numerai can become even more successful if it can align the incentives of everyone involved. They hope its new kind of currency, Numeraire, will turn its online competition into a collaborationand turn Wall Street on its head in the process.
In its first incarnation, Numerai was flawed in a notable way. The company doled out bitcoin based on models that performed successfully on the encrypted test data before the fund ever tested them on the live market. That setup encouraged the scientists to game the system, to look out for themselves rather that the fund as a whole. It judged based on what happened in the past, not on what will happen in the future, says Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of marquee bitcoin company Coinbase and a Wall Street veteran.
But Craib feels the system was flawed in another waythe same way all of Wall Street is flawed. The data scientists were still in competition. They were fighting each other rather than fighting for the same goal. It was in their best interest to keep the winnings to themselves. If they spread the word, the added competition could cut into their winnings. Though the scientists were helping to build one master AI, they were still at odds. The fund and its creators were at cross-purposes.
Why is tech positive-sum and finance zero-sum? Richard Craib
Today, to fix that problem, Numerai has distributed Numeraire1,000,000 tokens in allto 12,000 participating scientists. The higher the scientists sit on the leaderboard, the more Numeraire they receive. But its not really a currency they can use to pay for stuff. Its a way of betting that their machine learning models will do well on the live market. If their trades succeed, they get their Numeraire back as well as a payment in bitcoina kind of dividend. If their trades go bust, the company destroys their Numeraire, and they dont get paid.
The new system encourages the data scientists to build models that work on live trades, not just test data. The value of Numeraire also grows in proportion to the overall success of the hedge fund, because Numerai will pay out more bitcoin to data scientists betting Numeraire as the fund grows. If Numerai were to pay out $1 million per month to people who staked Numeraire, then the value of Numeraire will be very high, because staking Numeraire will be the only way to earn that $1 million, Craib says.
Its a tricky but ingenious logic: Everyone betting Numeraire has an incentive to get everyone else to build the best models possible, because the more the fund grows, the bigger the dividends for all. Everyone involved has the incentive to recruit yet more talenta structure that rewards collaboration.
Whats more, though Numeraire has no stated value in itself, it will surely trade on secondary markets. The most likely buyers will be successful data scientists seeking to increase their caches so they can place bigger bets in search of more bitcoin rewards. But even those who dont bet will see the value of their Numeraire grow if the fund succeeds and secondary demand increases. As it trades, Numeraire becomes something kind of like a stock and kind of like its own currency.
For Craib, a trained mathematician with an enormous wave of curly hair topping his 6-foot-4-inch frame, the hope is that Numeraire will encourage Wall Street to operate more like an open source software project. In software, when everyone shares with everyone else, all benefit from the collaboration: The software gets better. Google open sourced its artificial intelligence engine, for instance, because improvements made by others outside the company will make the system more valuable for Google, too.
Why is tech positive-sum and finance zero-sum? Craib asks. The tech companies benefit from network effects where people behave differently because they are trying to build a network, rather than trying to compete.
Craig and company built their new token atop Ethereum, a vast online ledgera blockchainwhere anyone can build a bitcoin-like token driven by a self-operating software program, or smart contract. If it catches on the way bitcoin has, everyone involved has the incentive to (loudly) promote this new project and (manically) push it forward in new ways.
But getting things right isnt easy. The risk is that the crypto-economic model is wrong, says Ersham, Tokens let you set up incentive structures and program them directly. But just like monetary policy at, say, the Federal Reserve, its not always easy to get those incentive structures right.
In other words, Craibs game theory might not work. People and economies may not behave like he assumes they will. Also, blockchains arent hack-proof. A bug brought down the DAO, a huge effort to crowdsource venture capital on a blockchain. Hackers found a hole in the system and made off with $50 million.
Craib may also be overthinking the situation, looking for complex technological solutions to solve a problem that doesnt require anything as elaborate as Numeraire. Their model seems overly complicated. Its not clear why they need it, says Michael Wellman, a University of Michigan professor who specializes in game theory and new financial services. Its not like digital currency has magical properties. Numerai could try a much more time-honored approach to recruiting the most talented data scientists, Wellman says: pay them.
After today, Craib and the rest of Wall Street will start to see whether something like Numeraire can truly imbue the most ruthless of markets with a cooperative spirit. Those thousands of data scientists didnt know Numeraire was coming, but if the network effects play out like Craib hopes they will, many of those scientists have just gotten very, very rich. Still, that isnt his main purpose. Craibs goals are bigger than just building a hedge fund with crowdsourced AI. He wants to change the very nature of Wall Streetand maybe capitalism. Competition has made a lot of people wealthy. Maybe collaboration could enrich many more.
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An AI Hedge Fund Created a New Currency to Make Wall Street Work Like Open Source - WIRED
If you're a small business looking to take the next step in your evolution, you may be looking at implementing a customer relationship management (or CRM) solution. But with enterprise-grade vendors like Oracle and Salesforce charging such a high premium for their services, how can smaller companies afford to get started with CRM software?
The answer lies in open source. As with many kinds of software, there are multiple vendors who provide open source CRM solutions that are completely free to use. They may have restrictions on them, such as limited features and support, but for small businesses looking to try out CRM, they can be an excellent starting point.
Open source software alternatives have their pros and cons, and CRM software is no exception. The principal benefit, of course, is that it's free - this makes it an excellent choice for businesses who may not be able to afford a fully-fledged enterprise CRM package like Salesforce.
It eliminates some of the commitment risks of traditional software, too. Unlike major vendor offerings, open source providers typically don't require customers to sign lengthy licensing agreements. This means that you're free to try it out, without the fear of being saddled with a system that you don't get on with for months or years.
Open source CRM software is also highly customisable. If your organisation has very specific needs, open source software allows you to tweak and refine your CRM platform until it meets all of your criteria. This also lets you tweak it to keep up with changing market demands.
There are pitfalls too, however, with lack of support being the main offender. A common trade-off in the open source world, the price companies pay for freely available software is that support is either limited or expensive.
Compatibility can be an issue as well; since open source software development often features multiple concurrent strands and forks, it can be hard to ensure that your software is up to date, and that it works with that of your partners and customers.
Open source CMS software can suffer visually as well, especially compared to larger rivals. This may seen like a minor issue, but the layout and user interface of a CRM system can prove pivotal; if your sales staff can't intuitively navigate a CRM package, they won't get the most use out of it, making your business less efficient as a result.
The question of which open source CRM is best is a difficult one to answer, largely because the answer will vary from company to company. A CRM package that fits one company perfectly might be entirely wrong for your organisation.
Instead, you should focus on finding the best CRM software for you. Examine your business needs, and work out what exactly it is that you need a CRM to do. Here's some of the top capabilities you should be looking at when choosing a CRM package.
The first thing businesses should be looking for when choosing an open source CRM is how well it scales. You might only have a handful of people on your sales force right now, but you're going to want a CRM package that can grow with your business, which means looking at a package without hefty upgrade fees.
You should also take migration into account. It's well worth putting in a bit of extra legwork early on to make sure that if you do decide to move to one of the larger, business-class CRM solutions, you'll be able to do so with a minimum of hassle.
Most CRMs will perform equally well when it comes to basic functions, but where the real value lies for many businesses is in their integrations with other business tools. Modern CRMs will work seamlessly with software like MailChimp, Xero and Google's G Suite apps.
Linking all your tools together can have an immeasurable impact on speeding up your organisation's workflows. Do a full audit of what software is in use within your business, and then look for a CRM package that will directly integrate with as many of them as possible.
One of the benefits of using a CRM solution is that it allows businesses to make informed decisions based on concrete data. However, this only works if the CRM package in question allows the business to surface relevant insights.
Organisations should be on the lookout for software that contains strong reporting capabilities, good archiving and any other features that will make use of the large amount of data it harvests.
Support is the biggest real stumbling block for many open source CRMs. Support will frequently only be available to customers on a paid subscription plan, or will be provided by the community rather than an enterprise grade support team.
This can turn out to be an unexpected problem for unwary businesses. If there's no professional support structure to help when its CRM goes down, the unfortunate enterprise could be faced with days of downtime, if not longer.
While it's impossible to definitively state which CRM package is best (for the reasons stated above), we can narrow down some great options for specific tasks and applications, with the caveat that many others are available, so consider these simply as a starting point.
Odoo CRM offers great reporting options for businesses that are looking to derive the maximum amount of insight from their sales and workflow data. Forecasting is excellent, and reports are simple to generate.
Thanks to a simple, easy-to-use interface, Anteil CRM is an excellent choice for businesses that want to get started with their first CRM package. Navigation through the browser-based frontend is intuitive, and its lightweight nature means it shouldn't be too hard to set up.
Based on the popular SugarCRM platform, SuiteCRM is widely hailed as one of the most fully-featured and polished open source CRM packages around. It boasts a wide range of capabilities, modules and integrations, and is an excellent choice for experienced users.
vTiger is an incredibly flexible CRM offering, thanks to the ability to create modules from scratch with matching workflows. While it requires a fair degree of technical knowledge to perform some of the more advanced customisations, power users will find that they can shape it to suit all of their needs.
What sets Zurmo apart from rivals is that it's 'gamified', allowing users to earn scores, achievements and badges for completing certain tasks. The idea is to not only make the software fun, but also to help users become more proficient in its use by incentivising them to increase their skillset.
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The best open source CRM software - IT PRO
Building on the success of CORD and ONOS, the foundation is industrializing and opening the unique process that enabled the creation of these platforms. Central to the approach is to leverage the ONFs deep relationships with operators to validate the vision, a focus on high-value use cases and solutions, and solidifying pre-established paths for taking solutions into operator PoCs (proof of concepts), trials and deployment.
Now that the SDN movement, first initiated by the ONF, has successfully set in motion the disaggregation of networking devices and control software and fostered the emergence of a broad range open source platforms, the industry needs a unifying effort to build solutions out of the numerous disaggregated components. A trend has emerged where vendors leverage open source to build closed proprietary solutions, providing only marginal benefit to the broader ecosystem. The ONFs Open Innovation Pipeline intends to counteract this trend by offering greater returns to members who participate in the foundation's collaborative process. Through making active contributions to the Open Innovation Pipeline, vendors benefit from inclusion in CORD and ONOS solutions, thereby gaining access to operator deployments.
With the ONF now opening this process to its full breadth of its 200+ members, the power of this model is being made available to a much larger cross section of the industry. Now, any member with a valuable contribution can insert their unique innovation anywhere along this open pipeline, and the momentum of the pipeline will pull the innovation into operator PoCs, trials and beyond.
Furthermore, to promote interoperability with diverse components of the open source ecosystem, ONF is driving a Software Defined Standards approach to developing Interoperability APIs and data models. Through this effort, the ONF intends to help the ecosystem craft diverse solutions ready for production deployment.
The ONFs Open Innovation Pipeline lowers the barrier to entry by providing a broadly applicable framework built on open source building blocks to deliver complete solutions for network operators, said Guru Parulkar, executive director of ONF, ON.Lab and Stanford Platform Lab. Perhaps more importantly, this pipeline allows members of all types to bring their unique innovation and value into the solution. Operators, vendors and integrators all have a role to play, and the pipeline helps integrate these contributions into consumable solutions for operators.
- Integrators: Pent up demand for network transformation has resulted in a skills gap within operators, creating a unique market opportunity for integrators. System integrators can add value to the Open Innovation Pipeline by contributing with service customization, solution packaging, verification and deployment assistance, all based on the common CORD and ONOS framework.
- Vendors: The ONFs deep relationships with operators gives member companies a unique view into the future of networking. Active members benefit by remaining on the leading edge of technology, and by leveraging the pipeline to help drive their unique innovations into operator networks.
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Developing open source software defined standards | App ... - App Developer Magazine