Welcome to Digital Transformation Digest, Constellation's daily compendium of news and analysis covering forward-thinking enterprises, mega-vendors, startups and developers.
Net neutrality's fate is sealed a bit tighter: U.S. President Donald Trump has nominated Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission's general counsel, to an open seat on the FCC's board. As the Register notes, Carr is a longtime associate of FCC chairman Ajit Pai, who is a vociferous foe of Net neutrality. Thus, Carr should be a rubber-stamp vote in favor of rolling back the rules, which mandate that telcos treat all web traffic equally, in a vote later this year.
Carr was Pai's personal attorney for three years and was appointed to the FCC post in January. While Carr's nomination is subject to approval from Congress, there is no indication of any stumbling blocks on that front, and once completely filled the FCC board will have a Republican majority led by Pai.
POV: The net neutrality debate goes back 20 years, to the early days of the Internet. While often framed as a consumer-rights issue, net neutrality should be on the radar of enterprises now more than ever, given factors such as the rapid ascent of IoT, the app economy and an overall march into cloud services. All those things will require more and more bandwidth, with strong reliability, availability and predictable, manageable pricing models across both the wired and wireless network infrastructure landscape.
Java 9 finally ready to pour?: While Oracle gained control of Java when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010, the fact remains that major advancements in the venerable, widely used programming language are governed by an open source community. The current production version, Java 8, was released more than three years ago.
Java 9 has been in gestation ever since, but disagreement among Java Community Process members over the addition of modularity to the language has repeatedly delayed an official release. Oracle has been a strong proponent of the modularity features, saying they will add significant performance and scalability to Java-based applications. Opponents such as Red Hat had argued the specification wasn't ready for inclusion in a formal Java 9 release.
But this week, JCP members voted 24-0 to approve modularity in Java 9, saying enough progress had been made, as InfoWorld reports.
POV: Some readers may wonder why they should care about what from the outside can seem like prototypical academic bickering. But the fact is that Java holds a sizable piece of enterprise IT bedrock, both in terms of commercial applications sold by vendors as well as home-grown ones.
Three-plus years between major releases in the language benefits no one. While modularity is a touted feature of Java 9—which is now set for release in September—it also includes advancements in crucial areas such as security. Oracle has expressed a desire to increase Java's release cadence dramatically once Java 9 is released, with annual updates a goal. That would be a welcome move, but can't happen unless the JCP can shed some red tape.
Adobe wants to hear you talking: Adobe is tapping into the rise of voice-enabled digital assistants for insights into customer behavior and desires, through a new service in its Analytics Cloud. Here are the key details from its announcement:
[B]rands can capture and analyze voice data for all major platforms including Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana and Samsung Bixby. The new capabilities address the complexity in measuring voice interactions, with the ability to capture both the user intent (“play me a song”) as well as specific parameters (“from The Beatles”). Additional data points including frequency of use and actions taken after a voice request is made are provided as well.
Through deep analysis of voice data complemented by artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities in Adobe Sensei, brands can gain robust audience insights and recommendations, while automating the traditionally cumbersome, manual analysis.
Sensei's involvement will give teams more time to work on improving their voice services' core capabilities, Adobe says.
POV: This is a smart move by Adobe, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Cindy Zhou. "As more consumers utilize voice-enabled assistants to manage their day, shop, and find answers to questions, they are contributing valuable data on their habits and intent," she says. "Brands in turn can perform even more targeted searches for lookalike customers or provide improved personalization of offers."
Legacy Watch: Mainframe outage drives Hawaii DMV to a halt: Problems with a mainframe that services DMV branches all over the state of Hawaii have essentially shut operations down all week, with no resolution in sight.
Motor vehicle registration, drivers licensing, state ID’s, moped registration, out of state license and vehicle transfers and "any and all transactions which require logging into the state database" have been affected, according to a press release from the county of Maui.
The DMV is asking that only customers with "urgent needs," such as an about-to-expire driver's license, come down in person for service, the release adds.
Interestingly—but perhaps not surprisingly—the problem isn't related to the mainframe hardware, Hawaii News Now reports:
The issues began on Monday after the system was shut down for maintenance over the weekend, according to Keith Ho, the city's Deputy Director of Information Technology. The problem, Ho says, is a result of the city trying to run old software on a brand new mainframe.
"We turned the system down on Sunday, so that we can do backups, and then when we brought it up on Monday, we started to see (the slowdown), says Ho. "Because not a lot of people are using it on Sunday, maybe just police doing inquiries, we didn't know until Monday (that there was a problem)."
POV: Nobody likes to go to the DMV, but it's a necessary evil. The Hawaii DMV's situation is a good example of how much inconvenience it can cause the public when critical systems like this go down. It's also another reminder of how much legacy assembler and COBOL code, much of it decades old, is still out there and in some cases can be a ticking time bomb.
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