CSC > Leading Edge Forum

Technology Briefing - IBM MobileFirst

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:00:00 -0400

IBM recently announced MobileFirst, a complete mobile solution portfolio, which includes software, services and industry expertise. This briefing, given by David S. Marshak, IBM Senior Product Manager, Enterprise Mobile will introduce the software aspects of Mobile First. Starting with a deep technical overview of Worklight, a mobile enterprise application platform for building native, web and hybrid apps, the discussion will extend to the technical highlights of IBM CastIron (connectivity), IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices (mobile device management), and IBM Tealeaf (customer experience management), focusing on their integrated use in a complete enterprise mobile strategy.

Technology Briefing - July Systems

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 11:00:00 -0400

July Systems powers cloud-based mobile experience innovation for business worldwide. July Systems' self-authoring MX platform enables organizations to create, launch and manage mobile experiences like add-on sites, in-app extensions and ad-based monetization experiences in hours, not weeks. More than 300 global brands in over 150 countries use July Systems to deliver more than 15 billion transactions to more than 140 million unique monthly users. As a leader in mobile application and web platform based solutions, July provides a unique cloud based Mi platform for a variety of mobile solutions including whole site mobile web and app creation and hosting. This platform allows for IDE development and highly customized solutions.

Grant Briefing - Mobile Force

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 11:00:00 -0400

There is a growing interest in bringing mobile solutions into the enterprise, but balancing the benefits and costs associated with leveraging disparate software systems in mobile remains an elusive challenge. A diversity of mobile device platforms and ecosystems along with must-have expectations of security, deployment flexibility and future proofing add to the complexity. Whereas Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms (MEAPs) offer solutions to the enterprise mobility challenge, general purpose MEAPs require significant effort and expense to customize for industry verticals such as insurance. The Breezeway Mobile solution addressed these challenges by using the enterprise integration capabilities of its underlying mobile insurance framework. The Framework Server was used to transform existing business assets into the mobile space. Informational and transactional web services from CSC insurance systems, Salesforce.com and third party applications were transformed into a single lightweight REST API natively accessible to mobile clients. The framework client facilitated creation of cross-platform mobile apps to fully leverage the unique native capabilities of each mobile device platform from a single codebase. The very real concern of security in mobile applications was addressed by leveraging authentication and access control capabilities of existing enterprise systems instead of recreating them. Extended development of the CSC Mobile Framework done as part of Breezeway Mobile was immediately leverageable in implementing robust cross platform mobile applications as a part of the CSC Mobile Insurance offerings as well as for customized client engagements. Investigation of deployment and pricing models on the Force.com platform is enabling a consideration of extending this framework into a Mobile Platform as a Service (MPaaS) offering. The interactive capabilities of Salesforce Chatter implemented in Breezeway Mobile is maturing into a broader mobile messaging and notifications capability of the framework.

Technology Briefing - The Connected Car: Changing Business Models for Automotive

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:00:00 -0500

The Internet of Things is coming online, with computers and chips everywhere and applications managing everything from thermostats, refrigerators and your vital signs to, in the future, heavy machinery and industrial components. As more and more things get connected to each other and the Internet, the need for standards is amplified. Recognizing this need, the automotive industry has taken a lead position in the push for open standards such as HTML 5 to facilitate interoperability between in-vehicle infotainment systems, the Web, mobile devices and application stores. The connected car is just one more mobile device from which people want access to their digital content. In November 2012, Chris Delaney attended a W3C conference in Rome to discuss HTML 5, new standards and their relevance to the automotive industry. The session was attended by a wide range of car makers such Audi, Renault, BMW and Toyota. In this briefing, Chris will discuss why standards are needed, emerging trends in automotive, security and safety issues, and what it all means for CSC.

Grant Briefing - Making Sense of the BI Explosion

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 11:00:00 -0500

Data Practitioners are seeing the earth go from flat to round and the sun stop revolving around the earth. The tenets of the last 25 years - most of our professional lives - are being challenged. Data has stopped being at rest and started to flow with ever increasing velocity. Quantities have changed from a trickle, to a stream, and now to the raging river aptly named Big Data. In a discipline where we have spent 25 years getting clients to conform to a known structured model, our once unified theory now has new "particles" to deal with. This briefing, based on the Craig's CSC Grant research project, answers the question: How do we stay grounded in this explosion of changes?

Technology Briefing - Appcelerator

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 11:00:00 -0500

With 400,000 mobile developers and 1,400 enterprise customers, Appcelerator sits at the nexus of the mobile application ecosystem. Between the quarterly developer reports and thought leading mobile enterprise strategy assignments, the company combines the power of the mobile developer and the reality of enterprise capability and adoption in a single viewpoint. Join Appcelerator for brief look into the mobile application ecosystem, including most popular platforms, mobile application development toolsets for accomplishing multi-device and operation system deployments, mobile security, and the continuing debate around the best application architectures for enterprise apps. Appcelerators director of enterprise strategy, Michael King will cover those topics and Appcelerator's unique technology solution for furthering an enterprise's mobile ambitions.

Grant Briefing - Augmented Reality on the Smartphone: The Real Application Potential

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 11:00:00 -0500

This CSC Grant research project investigated the leading augmented reality (AR) SDKs and toolkits in three real world application examples at Stennis Space Center to determine augmented reality's potential for use in the technical/industrial environment. The past year has seen many of the leading AR tool/hosting providers release many free toolkits in hopes of moving the market toward smart implementation, and getting beyond QR codes popping up dancing characters and restaurant locators in big cities. AR technology development in the defense market has been active for some time, supporting the position that AR can be a usable enhancement to reality and not just a cool toy.

Technology Briefing - Pluralistic Networks

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 10:00:00 -0500

Transformational initiatives have a disturbing tendency to crumble under their own weight and raise the questions: why is it so difficult to coordinate change, and how can we do better? It's not just big projects that struggle. It may be that big projects struggle because we as individuals fail to consistently practice some of the basic skills and sensibilities that determine success or failure in the orchestration of the myriad smaller-scale collaborations that comprise big projects. So what do philosophy of language and Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games like World of Warcraft have to offer business people, consultants and technologists driving business change using new and productivity-enhancing IT solutions? Join Gloria Flores of Pluralistic Networks and Chris Wiesinger of CSC's Border and Immigration Solutions Center of Excellence to discover the thinking behind -- and the experience of -- a four month, immersive course called Working Effectively in Small Teams (WEST).

Technology Briefing - Partnerpedia

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 12:00:00 -0500

In this session, there will be discussion around the challenges and opportunities surrounding enterprise mobility and the impacts of IT consumerizations. Sam will also look at how Enterprise App Store solutions are changing with the convergence of mobile, cloud and traditional applications. Topics Covered: - BYOD - MDM/MAM - Enterprise App Stores - Beyond mobile apps - Customer survey and use cases - Enterprise AppZone product demo Partnerpedia is a leading provider of enterprise application store and marketplace solutions. Leveraging the power of mobility and cloud computing, Partnerpedia helps companies maximize business value through monetization, mobility and IT management solutions. The Partnerpedia team includes veterans from the technology industry with decades of experience working in and with enterprise companies on go-to-market and partner strategies. Partnerpedia has built their reputation on customer satisfaction proven with repeat clients year after year. Founded in 1996, they've helped enterprise companies such as Microsoft, RIM and Alcatel-Lucent achieve success through effective partner strategies.

Grant Briefing - HTML5: The Quiet Revolution

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 23:00:00 -0400

Based on the Daniel's CSC Grant research project, this briefing will explore how rapid adoption of smart phones and tablets and attendant business models - the money - have driven mobile application development to embrace HTML5 software specifications even before they are fully completed and tested. The session will examine the factors transforming a languishing update of Web development specifications with no industry support, into a juggernaut supported by Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Even native OS devotees have embraced HTML5 to stay relevant to their customers. The session will illustrate the quiet HTML5 revolution from 2007-2011 through the coincident history of a CSC cycling fan application from HTML4 to HTML5. The 2011 Australia Tour de Cure was created on three continents, in HTML5, running on all three major smartphone/tablet operating systems, plus PC browsers. It was hosted on Amazon's Elastic Cloud, receiving data from smartphones, specialized devices and Twitter, over 10 days, across 1,397 km from Sydney to Melbourne.

Report - Windows 8

Mon, 6 Aug 2012 17:00:00 -0400

With Windows 8, Microsoft seeks to distinctly position itself as the dominant, long-term player across the entire IT spectrum, from cloud to traditional enterprise IT to consumer IT. You’ll learn about Microsoft’s strategic vision that may have far-reaching effects on how enterprises and society use computers. Understanding Microsoft's new scope and direction for Windows is critical for enterprise IT managers, who need to look beyond the question of "when to upgrade desktops" and examine what role Microsoft may play across all of IT in delivering platforms, frameworks and applications, especially as Microsoft further integrates and blurs them together. Read on about the strategy of Windows 8 and the user interface (for example, no Start button), hubs, touch, tablets and more. With the Windows legacy behind it, and tablets and smartphones in front of it, Windows 8 will be a force to be reckoned with.

Grant Briefing - Android as an Army Platform

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 23:00:00 -0400

The Android platform is a specific combination of Linux, libraries, frameworks, runtime environment, and existing apps. U.S. Army systems are often complete vertical stacks (hardware, O/S, application), but future U.S. Army architecture is based on standard platforms, including mobile. Other vertical markets are deploying mobile applications into an existing enterprise. This session looks at migration to Android as a mobile platform within the context of vertical market needs. Existing platform capabilities (e.g., mapping and contact lists) roughly map to Army needs, but suitability depends on details (e.g., map caching when communications are lost and including Army task organization as part of a contact/identity database). Platform analysis leads to suitability for specific applications. Results include migration guidelines (what is portable, what is not) and software architecture recommendations that enable cross-enterprise interoperability. While Army examples are used, the analysis applies to mobile computing use in vertical markets across other industries.

Grant Briefing - Android as an Army Platform

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 23:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - Visual Analytics

Thu, 17 May 2012 11:00:00 -0400

This session will present an interactive, thought compelling presentation on the use of various visualization and representation techniques for understanding a variety of "big data" domains ranging from financial crimes and money laundering to narcotics-trafficking and counter-terrorism. There will be a number of real-world scenarios that challenge the audience participants to try and interpret the results and explain the outcomes. There are no "right answers" and there are no "wrong answers" only subjective interpretation within the context of the analysis/data. The goal of this presentation is to offer alternative interpretations for obvious situations and complex analytical scenarios. Much of the content presented is based on Mr. Westphal’s recent book, "Data Mining for Intelligence, Fraud & Criminal Detection: Advanced Analytics & Information Sharing Technologies" (CRC Press, December 2008). Chris Westphal is co-founder and CEO of Visual Analytics Inc. (VAI), a leader in creating visualization software, information sharing systems, and advanced analytical training. His clients include federal and state/local law enforcement including fusion centers, all major intelligence agencies, the U.S. Department of Defense, and international Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs). Mr. Westphal has authored numerous publications and several books including Data Mining for Intelligence, Fraud & Criminal Detection: Advanced Analytics & Information Sharing Technologies (Westphal, CRC Press, 2008); Data Mining Solutions: Methods and Tools for Solving Real World Problems (Westphal/Blaxton, Wiley, 1998); and Readings in Knowledge Acquisition: Current Practices and Trends (McGraw/Westphal, Ellis Horwood Limited, 1990). He also authored the "Analyzing Intelligence Data: Next Generation Technologies for Connecting the Dots" chapter in Net-Centric Approaches to Intelligence and National Security (Ladner/ Petry, Springer 2005).

Technology Briefing - Visual Analytics

Thu, 17 May 2012 11:00:00 -0400

Grant Briefing - Enabling Mobile Money through Technical Innovation

Thu, 10 May 2012 11:00:00 -0400

The effect of mobile phone technology on financial services ranges from minimal to monumental. The key factor that determines where on that scale mobile phones land is the market. In developed countries, mobile phones are currently just another way to access traditional banking services. When the Internet came along, banks rushed to provide online banking services. This changed the customer interface and moved services out of the bank branch. Today, mobile phone users pull up an application on their phone rather than on their computer screen. This is hardly revolutionary as the services themselves and the customers have remained essentially the same. In developed countries, mobile phones do have the potential to transform customer behavior through the use of eWallets in conjunction with near field communication (NFC) technology. An eWallet can store payment credentials on a mobile phone. Then through the use of NFC, a consumer can "tap" their mobile phone to make a purchase using any of those payment methods. eWallets are not yet pervasive outside of Japan; however, the momentum for change is building. Mobile phones in emerging markets are poised to bring financial services to billions of consumers who were previously excluded from the formal financial sector. Many refer to this group of people as the unbanked. The more astute identify them as potential clients. Billions of potential clients who need and want financial services and are ready and able to pay for them. Microfinance has already demonstrated that low-income individuals are a profitable target market. It has also demonstrated that offering services to this group can be a win-win and supports the development goals of a number of countries and international groups.

Grant Briefing - Enabling Mobile Money through Technical Innovation

Thu, 10 May 2012 11:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - Hortonworks

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:00:00 -0400

Hortonworks was formed by the key architects and core Hadoop committers from the Yahoo! Hadoop software engineering team that led the effort to design and build every major release of Apache Hadoop from 0.1 to the most current stable release, contributing more than 80% of the code along the way. The team continues to be the leading contributor to core Hadoop (MapReduce and HDFS) as well as many other important Hadoop projects. Hortonworks is also the major driving force behind the next generation of Apache Hadoop. Hortonworks' development expertise is augmented with a rich history of applying Apache Hadoop to create significant business value. While at Yahoo!, the team was responsible for supporting the world’s largest Hadoop deployment, spanning more than 42,000 servers. Hortonworks also has a unique understanding of how to apply Hadoop to transform businesses by maximizing the value of data flowing throughout the enterprise. This is evidenced by the fact that Hadoop is now behind every click at Yahoo!. Apache Hadoop is a powerful technology for managing and processing data but it is still early in its adoption lifecycle. The creation of a vibrant ecosystem around Hadoop is essential in order for Hadoop to become truly viable for the enterprise. During this session, presented by Ari Zilka, you will learn about Apache Hadoop, some of the limitations and shortcomings, and how Hortonworks is enabling the ecosystem to fill the holes so that it can fulfill its promise as the foundation of the next generation data architecture in the enterprise. Ari Zilka is chief products officer at Hortonworks, a leading commercial vendor promoting the development and support of Apache Hadoop. In this position, Ari is responsible for furthering product strategy and direction for Hortonworks and leads the company’s product management function as well as its field and sales engineering teams. Before joining Hortonworks, Ari was CTO at Terracotta which he founded in 2003. Previously, Ari was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel Partners. Before joining Accel, Ari was the chief architect at Walmart.com, where he led the innovation and development of the company's new engineering initiatives. Prior to Walmart.com, Ari worked as a consultant at Sapient and at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Ari has spoken frequently at industry conferences and symposia, including JavaOne, QCon, Devoxx, and The ServerSide Java Symposium. He holds a B.S. in electrical engineering computer science as well as in mechanical engineering from University of California, Berkeley.

Technology Briefing - Hortonworks

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:00:00 -0400

Grant Briefing - Social Media Analytics - An Emerging New Age of Advanced Business Intelligence

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 11:00:00 -0400

With the advent of Web 2.0 and the growth of social media and networks, customers who used to be isolated and passive actors have started moving to a more centric position in business. Now they can share their experiences and express their opinions quickly and loudly. But this grant work was not about social media itself. It was about the business intelligence that goes along with social media and the business opportunities in this domain. Today most of our clients are present in social media, but few are measuring the ROI or monitoring what is said about them on the web. These clients are showing a growing interest in social media analytics and they are coming to us with questions. One can easily identify the business objectives that stand at the reason why social media activities are undertaken: raising awareness, fostering dialogue, promoting advocacy, facilitating customer support and spurring innovation. Now, it requires some expertise to identify, for each business objective, the perfect set of key performance indicators (KPI) that should be tracked. When it comes to deciding which software solution to use to track the identified KPI, it becomes complex. A framework linking the business objectives, the functionalities and the metrics can be used to assess the match between the business needs and the solution to be used. It is important to understand this end-to-end process since it enables us to approach clients, offer advice in selecting, implementing and fine-tuning the right software and possibly integrate the solution alongside of legacy systems. One long-term objective of this research was to develop expertise in the integration of these social media analytics with other performance indicators in order to enlarge our integration capabilities and service offering in performance management.

Grant Briefing - Social Media Analytics - An Emerging New Age of Advanced Business Intelligence

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 11:00:00 -0400

Paper Briefing - Robotics, Unmanned Vehicles, and Simulation Training

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 11:00:00 -0400

Our experiences in the last decade of conflict have mandated a major change in the way wars are fought. Asymmetric conflict by dispersed bands of enemy combatants utilizing bomb and rocket strikes has become the primary threat our ground forces face rather than anything resembling conventional force conflict of the wars of the 20th century. The theaters of conflict are frequently - wars among the people - in civilian-packed urban centers where the task of distinguishing combatants from non-combatants is difficult for U.S. forces, requiring near instantaneous response and reaction time in order to prevent civilian casualties which compromise their mission, devastate them psychologically, and severely damage the families and social fabric of the societies involved in the conflict. Terrorist cells utilizing suicide bombing tactics to accomplish their own missions in these conflicts have driven the ethical and human value of their military operations to zero; while U.S. military human costs (in both monetary and political terms) are at an all-time high. The economic and human costs of waging war in the 21st century are extraordinary, and the rapid advancement of technology runs contrary to the deliberate pace of bureaucratic decision-making frameworks. By increasing the use of robotics, unmanned vehicles and simulation training, we can improve efficiency and effectiveness across the defense space - and more broadly, across the civilian space. The rapid growth of these industries worldwide is evidence of their burgeoning importance; in engaging the challenges of 21st century defense we should be positioned to lead with these technological solutions. The U.S. military will increasingly seek to use technology to supplant dirty, dull and dangerous missions; and the increasingly capital-intensive systems used in defense will require simulation training to reduce cost curves. In addition, all of these new technologies necessitate improvements in security and legal frameworks.

Paper Briefing - Robotics, Unmanned Vehicles, and Simulation Training

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 11:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - MarkLogic

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:00:00 -0400

Big Data is about extracting value from fast, huge, varied, complex data sets. But simply crunching data is only the first step. In today's world of exploding information, 80% of which is semi or unstructured content, finding the most capable and cost-effective toolset(s) to exploit these varied information sources is a real challenge. Ideally, you would like the business/agency to identify a hard problem to solve so you can go find the data sources to solve that problem. But the world of Big Data isn't that easy. Frequently the business analysts can't articulate, and just flat out don't know, what kind of insights they may gain from exploiting Big Data. Why? Because traditionally it's been too hard to integrate these varied data sources in either a timely or cost-effective way. MarkLogic solves this problem by providing the business analyst with an integrated view of multiple, varied data sets. The analyst can begin to drill down on specific information threads which may yield new insight...or not. If analysis is the name of the game, then the data integration efforts/tools to make Big Data exploitable are the playing field. MarkLogic delivers a playing field for analysis by rapidly integrating multiple data sources to enable real-time, flexible analysis capabilities. In short, MarkLogic makes the Big Data integration problem manageable, scalable, and cost-effective.

Technology Briefing - MarkLogic

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:00:00 -0400

Paper Briefing - Engagement, Intimacy, Knowledge

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 11:00:00 -0500

Have you ever wished you could develop a system that would improve employee engagement, increase customer intimacy, let you know exactly what your staff doesn't know and improve your team's ability to capture and store critical customer-related knowledge? This paper told the story of just such a system, CSC's new License 2 Support assessment and licensing program: how it was born; how it improves and supports effective service delivery at all levels of the hierarchy (from provider to customer); and how we discovered that bigger is not always better, and brand new is not always affordable - but creativity, innovation and passion will always see you through. This paper discussed what went right and what went wrong, what was learned the hard way and what was surprising about CSC's customers. The paper also challenged ideas of what employee engagement, learning and knowledge management may look like in a busy service delivery focused organization. This led the authors to examine the benefits currently being observed from License 2 Support. The paper continues by sharing details about an important lesson learned: While you may be seeking "breakthrough innovation," often you end up with "incremental innovation"; at some point you have to stop planning and just deliver. Finally, the author's conclude with what they hope to see emerge in the next 12 to 18 months and beyond.

Paper Briefing - Engagement, Intimacy, Knowledge

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 11:00:00 -0500

Technology Briefing - Basho

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:00:00 -0500

Basho Technologies, Inc. is the developer of Riak, a distributed database that delivers elastic scalability, high performance, high reliability and high availability with a reduced total cost of operations (TCO). Applications built using Riak remain available under almost any operational condition, with no additional intervention required. Available in both an open source and a paid commercial version, Riak provides unprecedented read-and-write availability and scalability to enterprise, web and mobile applications. Inherent in Riak's database architecture is NoSQL. Justin Sheehy, CTO of Basho, will demystify the strangely-named "NoSQL" movement and give some hints about how to figure out which, if any, of the many new database systems might suit your needs. Then, using one such database -- Riak -- he will discuss some successful use cases that are in production today in order to illuminate some reasons why enterprise developers are increasingly being drawn to alternative databases today. Justin Sheehy directs Basho's technical strategy, roadmap, and new research into storage and distributed systems. Justin came to Basho from the MITRE Corporation, where as a principal scientist he managed large research projects for the U.S. Intelligence Community including such efforts as high assurance platforms, automated defensive cyber response, and cryptographic protocol analysis. He was central to MITRE’s development of research for mission assurance against sophisticated threats, the flagship program of which successfully proposed and created methods for building resilient networks of web services.

Technology Briefing - Basho

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:00:00 -0500

Paper Briefing - Telecom as a Strategy: Building a Framework

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:00:00 -0500

To what extent does the ownership and management of a nation’s information infrastructure represent a question of national security? This question is all the more important because of recent changes in the models by which IT infrastructures are currently deployed, owned, and used. In general, we use the term "protected industry" to refer to an industry or economic segment protected from external competition or influences (e.g., ownership likely to export production and jobs). Barriers to importation are raised to protect domestic industry from foreign competition, while foreign investment and ownership are blocked or restricted in some instances, both to protect domestic production and to preserve the economic benefits associated with a specific industry for domestic players. National security interests may also drive perceptions of whether an industry must be "protected," even as changes in functional and economic models challenge the mechanisms available to provide this protection. A case in point was the 2006 debate over ownership of U.S. ports by Dubai Ports World, which gave rise to heated, though not necessarily well thought-out discussion regarding whether or not port services represent a "protected industry." At the time, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) pointed out that "the U.S. does not have sufficient knowledge to perform a risk assessment on foreign operators already operating at U.S. ports." Dubai Ports further assured the U.S. that it would comply with the government’s Container Security Initiative and employ -to the extent possible- a U.S. management structure. Nevertheless, the company ultimately ended its bid for U.S. port ownership -- not because of a regulatory outcome, but because U.S. public opinion and political rhetoric around the issue became too highly charged. Underpinning all IT infrastructures is telecommunications, which provides the interconnectivity that enables IT to contribute so much to the economy and society. The question therefore arises: How do telecommunications technologies and policies drive international relations, economic development and investment, as well as national security considerations?

Paper Briefing - Telecom as a Strategy: Building a Framework

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:00:00 -0500

Technology Briefing - Aternity

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:00:00 -0500

Recent industry research found that the average IT organization is losing ground in the effort to proactively manage application performance and end user productivity. Analysts estimate that anywhere between 54% and 74% of end user problems are not detected by IT. And, over the past 24 months, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has found that 10% more problems are reported by end users versus being detected by IT personnel or Application Performance Management (APM) software. EMA reports that an average company typically has five APM products, yet the number one problem remains lack of visibility due to not having the right tools in place - those that support business optimization, improvements to IT processes, and increased user productivity. The Aternity Frontline Performance Intelligence (FPI) Platform uniquely monitors, aggregates, analyzes and correlates the three components that dynamically interact, define, and constantly impact end user IT experience -in real-time application performance, device performance, and user productivity. Aternity's platform also dramatically reduces business disruptions and increases end user productivity through preemptive problem detection, impacted user isolation, automatic identification of business impact, and probable cause analysis. With Frontline Performance Intelligence culled from enterprise application performance and usage, enterprises gain immediate awareness and can rapidly respond to end user issues before they impact business results. Rapid implementation and integration results in immediate ROI, making Aternity one of the industry’s fastest path to end user experience management for enterprise applications.

Technology Briefing - Aternity

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:00:00 -0500

Grant Briefing - Being an Effective Entrepreneur in a Cloud Ecosystem

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:00:00 -0500

How can one develop a business directed at a range of market tiers and market types using cloud computing? What are the hurdles to cross and what are the pitfalls? Cloud computing could represent absolute chaos or massive opportunity or both. Past history in enterprise computing technology and software development has been characterized by large, monolithic, comprehensive systems with numerous interfaces and, as a result, enormous inertia, which could be referred to as the "fortress" approach. But the ground is shifting and it is now becoming more probable that this inertia can and will be broken. Cloud computing represents a culmination of other developments. In particular, the development of commoditized infrastructure and the development of service-oriented architectures have opened the door to commoditization of enterprise business software. This does not mean that one can merely move enterprise systems to the cloud. Conversely, it does not mean that it is impossible to construct full enterprise solutions in the cloud. What seems to be true, is that almost anything is possible. The opportunities are broad and deep but the risks are as well. In order to develop a thriving business creating solutions using cloud-based components, one first must look at how cloud changes the business landscape then look at the way traditional notions of enterprise architecture either adapt or are supplanted. This grant looked at a number of possibilities for an entrepreneur ranging from the pure chaos of an ad hoc "software supermarket" of narrowly focused point solutions to a more managed and then enterprise level approach to create organization out of the chaos while trying to preserve the best parts of the supermarket (e.g., variety, flexibility, low price, etc.). The grant also focused on new challenges such as broadened competition from the price of entry into this market becoming much lower.

Grant Briefing - Being an Effective Entrepreneur in a Cloud Ecosystem

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 11:00:00 -0500

Grant Briefing - SAP Accelerated Federal Financials in the Cloud

Thu, 8 Dec 2011 11:00:00 -0500

For many years CFOs of small and mid-sized U.S. federal agencies have been challenged by the cost and complexity of implementing and maintaining compliant financial management systems. There are a number of small agencies looking for fully compliant replacements for aging or non-compliant financial systems. To date, neither CSC nor SAP have been able to provide a solution that meets the cost constraints of this market segment. The development of SAP cloud based architectures provide the technological foundation for providing SaaS solutions that meets former White House CIO Vivek Kundra's Plan to reform federal IT management leveraging "cloud first" shared services and shortened implementation cycles. This grant reviews the feasibility and challenges of productizing existing CSC SAP federal financial implementations to create a fully compliant pre-configured template leveraging a cloud based SaaS delivery model to meet the needs of this market. The proposed implementation approach identifies accelerators needed to reduce the time and cost. A basic financial management system template has been defined, which is capable of being extended with add-on functional modules.

Grant Briefing - SAP Accelerated Federal Financials in the Cloud

Thu, 8 Dec 2011 11:00:00 -0500

Technology Briefing - SkySQL

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 11:00:00 -0500

SkySQL was launched a year ago by members of the original MySQL team. It was funded by both the MySQL co-creators (Monty Widenius and David Axmark), venture firm OnCorps and other private investors and employees with the initial goal of providing an alternative to existing and new MySQL users that wanted any type of help around MySQL, MariaDB and Drizzle. Since the launch, SkySQL has acquired some 175 customers in 28 countries over a wide range of use cases. SkySQL has also expanded the offerings by the addition of a number of partner products and services offerings, making it easier for MySQL customers to deploy high availability solutions. Now, SkySQL has started work to bring MySQL to the cloud. The goal is to deliver a MySQL based database solution that is elastic, scalable and designed specifically for the cloud from the ground up. The objective is to remove and abstract the complexities in deploying and managing high availability databases, something today's solutions can't easily provide. SkySQL will start rolling out this cloud based offering starting in early 2012.

Technology Briefing - SkySQL

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 11:00:00 -0500

Grant Briefing - Hadoop Development

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:00:00 -0500

Not only is the amount of data increasing very rapidly, but the number of different types of data also is growing (data diversity) and now covers a broad spectrum from small packets of RFID data to very large video surveillance files. Businesses, enterprises, governments, researchers, and others want to be able to store ever increasing amounts of information in their data warehouses. They need to mine and analyze data for competitive advantage and use them to open new business opportunities. But they face prohibitively intensive capital purchases to scale existing data warehousing infrastructure to meet unexpected volumes (or types) of data. Hadoop is an open source project that enables cost effective analytics and data mining across many petabytes of data. It is a potentially disruptive technology -- it can be an order of magnitude cheaper to do complex data mining and analytics at scale (hundreds/thousands of terabytes) with Hadoop than with established market solutions.

Grant Briefing - Hadoop Development

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:00:00 -0500

Paper Briefing - An Agile Process for Cloud Application Development

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:00:00 -0500

Cloud Computing is a lot more than how organizations can quickly and efficiently provision and manage computing capability. It also represents a fundamental shift in the mindset on how applications on the cloud need to be built and run. Before one investigates the details of such applications, it is important to understand the basic concepts of the cloud and how they relate to applications. Once that is established, one can explore an agile process framework for cloud application development. By its very nature, cloud-based development offers an organization a high degree of agility; correspondingly, the developmental processes themselves should be agile in nature. This paper provided an overview of the challenges faced in developing cloud applications, and discussed an agile framework that offers a repeatable process for building cloud-based applications. With the growing maturity of cloud computing technologies, enterprises are now exploring their benefits beyond the known efficiencies gained in data center infrastructure. Cloud technologies are being applied and leveraged in different types of applications, a trend fueling the recent growth in the number of Platform as a Service (PaaS) vendors and technologies. PaaS provides the bedrock for cloud-based application development, deployment and management. Given the new architectural paradigms introduced by cloud, we expect to see more and more applications built by merely assembling and orchestrating services, rather than developed based on indigenously built software components. This necessitates a fresh look at existing software development lifecycle processes.

Paper Briefing - An Agile Process for Cloud Application Development

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:00:00 -0500

Grant Briefing - Enhancing Enterprise Communication Through Social Networking

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:00:00 -0400

The growth of social networking has been astonishing. It surpasses email in both users and time spent online. Its proliferation is changing how people communicate and creating a continuous stream of user generated content. Social networks have increased the speed at which information disseminates. Not only does information spread instantly throughout the web, but due to the viral nature of social media it is distributed to a wider audience. It has profoundly impacted the enterprise and it will continue to do so. This grant explored how large enterprises are using social networks to work more effectively. What valuable information can be mined from the stream of user generated content? It can be used for improving customer service, reaching new customers, and spurring innovation. How is it used by companies to promote their brand and protect their reputation? Regardless of whether a company participates in social media, there are negative comments being made about businesses by their unhappy customers. Companies listening to the social networks can chose to respond to these messages and restore their customers’ trust in their businesses. Companies that embrace social networking platforms stand to gain and those that ignore them risk being left behind. The grant research also included steps for developing a social media strategy with metrics for measuring key business objectives.

Grant Briefing - Enhancing Enterprise Communication Through Social Networking

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:00:00 -0400

CoE Briefing - Contact Center Solutions

Thu, 6 Oct 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Public sector organizations can significantly increase customer satisfaction with efficient multichannel customer contact centers. Connecting customers via phone, e-mail, interactive voice response (IVR), portals and instant messaging or Web chat allows organizations to deliver information customers need, when they need it, using any channel they select. With today's enhanced communication options, customers expect a higher level of service. As a result, more organizations are seeking a cost-effective, user-friendly and consistent solution for customers and stakeholders. The Contact Center Solutions (CoE) provides an end-to-end customer service experience and manages a range of issues, questions and concerns. This innovative customer service approach helps build customer loyalty by providing customized, responsive customer service while delivering integrated, world-class service in real time. CSC plays an influential role in the strategic planning, design, development, implementation, day-to-day management and technical operations of contact center solutions for the U.S. federal government. The center provides a one-stop solution. The center's service offerings also fully adhere to rigorous standards established by the Customer Operations Performance Center (COPC). The COPC framework ensures the utmost performance in contact center environments, offering a set of comprehensive operation performance standards for processes and procedures, as well as operational requirements for critical functional areas. The center provides a standardized methodology and approach for performance management techniques that result in high-quality contact center operations, where customer satisfaction and quality go up while costs go down. By operating under the COPC guidelines, the Contact Center Solutions CoE provides the most cost-effective and highest quality services available in the industry today.

CoE Briefing - Contact Center Solutions

Thu, 6 Oct 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - Brainware

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Brainware is an innovative provider of intelligent data capture and enterprise search solutions that help companies eliminate costly manual data entry, rapidly process large volumes of documents and retrieve data from across the enterprise. According to industry studies, more than 80% of business documents are unstructured. Invoices, orders, remittances, claims, contracts, and other documents are critical to front and back office operations, yet the variability of forms and layouts necessitates expensive manual data entry to key and validate this information before it can be used by enterprise systems. A recent study by Aberdeen Group found the average cost to process a PO-based invoice manually is $15.40. The same study showed that the average cycle time to process an invoice is 17 days, and a study by The Association for Work Process Improvement found that 1 in 40 keystrokes produce an error. While traditional template and rules-based data capture solutions have succeeded in automating structured forms processing, they have failed to produce the levels of automation in high volume, diverse document processing environments to eliminate costly manual keying, while measurably reducing cycle times and eradicating keying errors. The briefing will present findings from research conducted by Brainware in conjunction with The Institute of Financial Operations. It will explore the science and technology behind intelligent data capture solutions and show how intelligent data capture not only reduces 90% or more of keystrokes, but can serve as a platform for automating document-driven business processes throughout the enterprise. It will review specific case study examples of Global 2000 companies in the healthcare, financial services, and energy industries that have successfully deployed this technology in areas such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, and mailroom operations. Finally, the briefing will conclude with a demonstration of Brainware’s intelligent data capture solution, Distiller, as well as the real-time reporting and business analytics module called Visibility.

Technology Briefing - Brainware

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Report - Data rEvolution

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 09:00:00 -0400

Data has become a factor of production, like labor and steel, and is driving a new data-centered economy. The challenge of the Data rEvolution is to unite and process the data, connect the dots, and glean new insights. And, do all this rapidly.
The Data rEvolution represents a profound shift on many levels, from collecting to connecting, from analyzing to predicting, from information to insights. This report explores these and other shifts by examining five areas:
- Great Expectations: Do More with More (Data) - A Changing Foundation: New Methods to Manage Big Data - The New Alchemy: Connecting the Dots - Enabling the Predictive Enterprise: Strategies to Understand, Anticipate and Plan - Seeing Is Believing: Visualization and Visual Analytics

Grant Briefing - Distributed Databases in the Cloud using NoSQL

Thu, 8 Sep 2011 15:00:00 -0400

Enterprises across many industries ranging from bioinformatics through utilities with smart meters require real-time processing and analysis of rapidly increasing volumes of data. Scalable and fault-tolerant cloud-based applications can support these use cases, but the underlying traditional databases are struggling to keep up. New high performance NoSQL databases that can effectively support large and flexible structured information have emerged as a viable alternative to traditional databases. NoSQL has matured in recent times as evidenced by being the foundation on which large Internet companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon run many of their world-renowned applications. The aim of the research was to investigate the way that NoSQL technology could be applied to enterprise scenarios, including architectural and implementation concerns that need to be addressed. The grant presented a point-in-time critique of popular NoSQL databases, along with guidelines for selecting appropriate NoSQL products, designing scalable applications and deriving suitable data models. Future trends for NoSQL and database technology were also discussed. The NoSQL movement has reignited interest in database technology. While relational databases will likely remain the primary data store for many applications, there are now extra tools to assist with new challenges that cloud computing applications face.

Grant Briefing - Distributed Databases in the Cloud using NoSQL

Thu, 8 Sep 2011 15:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - Space-Time Insight

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Organizations across the globe are facing an onslaught of data both from within and outside their businesses. From a growing pile of individual spreadsheets through complex enterprise systems to real-time feeds from geographically-distributed assets and third party sources, the data now become siloed. This leaves organizations with data that have become almost unmanageable, introducing risks and missed opportunities. Enterprises are finding that the traditional business intelligence and analytics tools they’ve used to understand their data are no longer able to keep up with the volume, frequency of change, demand for real-time feedback, and complexities of correlation across disparate data types for real and actionable Insight. Space-Time Insight tackles this problem by seamlessly pulling together actionable data that business users need to make informed on-the-fly decisions. It also transforms data into configurable visual displays that alert users to issues, help them identify the root cause of problems, and guide them through the steps required for corrective action. Space-Time Insight's situational intelligence software complements an organization's existing infrastructure, incorporating components of existing ERP and back-office systems, business intelligence outputs, GIS systems, and other applications into an integrated solution.

Technology Briefing - Space-Time Insight

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Grant Briefing - Augmented Reality with CSC OmniLocation for the Mobile Worker

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 10:00:00 -0400

Augmented Reality (AR) allows the digital world to be overlaid on to the real-world. It allows information that is stored in systems to be mixed with objects we can see. "Head Up Displays" in aircraft are an example of AR, but with devices like iPhones and Android phones, there is an explosion of consumer level AR applications emerging. For any industry with a large mobile field workforce, AR offers many possibilities to bring improved decision making to the worker in the field by combining location, status and history of objects. CSC already has an Enterprise Visibility solution (OmniLocation) that combines real-time location with object status, but that information is only available via a web browser. If the mobile field worker could be presented with the same information as they work, it would help solve major business problems for our clients, such as: - Improving worker safety by highlighting hazards and showing "virtual fences" around areas workers are not supposed to enter - Mitigating knowledge loss in the workforce due to the retiring workforce (the "Big Shift Change" phenomena) and rapid GenY worker turnover, especially in CENR industries - Improving productivity of workers by providing them information about the objects with which they are interacting. This grant work described the architecture and prototype implementation of a markerless AR application using hands free AR glasses and OmniLocation as its positioning engine.

Grant Briefing - Augmented Reality with CSC OmniLocation for the Mobile Worker

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 10:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - Splunk

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Big data has exploded from the trenches into the boardrooms exponentially. Whether the requirement is for security, compliance, operations or analytics, the need to ingest, process, analyze and store data has emerged as a critical function in IT architectures across all silos of any organization. For the IT professional, gaining greater insights into the wealth of data present in the multitude of technologies can be especially challenging. Dynamic real time situational awareness around events of interest is essential to making good decisions in the incident handling process.

Technology Briefing - Splunk

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Report Briefing - The Future of Healthcare

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Health systems around the world are being strained by a growing aging population, a shortage of care providers, more people suffering from chronic conditions, fragmented care management and rising costs - and need disruptive changes to address these major problems. CSC's Leading Edge Forum recently published a major report, "The Future of Healthcare: It's Health, then Care." The report's lead researcher presents five emerging trends and supporting technologies that are re-shaping and moving the industry from a care-first to a wellness-first perspective. This briefing will take a holistic view of healthcare, putting the patient at the center and linking future healthcare technologies to the foundational electronic health record (EHR) work in progress at many healthcare organizations. The five trends and the technologies described include: E-power to the patient, earlier detection, high-tech healing, resources: more but different, and a global healthcare ecosystem.

Report Briefing - The Future of Healthcare

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - Precyse

Thu, 19 May 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Real Time Locating Systems (RTLS) are a form of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) that is capable of tracking the physical location, and often the condition, of assets and people in real time. Precyse Technologies has developed an innovative technical approach to RTLS that is unique to the market. Precyse provides manufacturing, logistics and defense sectors with the ability to accurately identify, track and monitor their high value assets and to control processes, in order to maximize profitability. Implementing a ‘last-mile’ asset network to generate real time asset information is the corner stone in enabling real-time management of operations. Precyse designed the iLocate Solutions to allow companies to take control over their operations and mission-critical processes by enabling the automation of the new genre of business intelligence data that is derived from wireless location and condition sensors. The CSC Logistics Center of Excellence is pleased to sponsor this LEF briefing. Logistics Center of Excellence CTO Rick Tomredle will be joining vendor partner Precyse Technologies in a shared booth at RFID Journal Live 2011, in Orlando, Florida, April 12-14. This will be the first time CSC has demonstrated a solution at the prestigious conference. CSC and Precyse will be showing the fusion of active RFID-based Real Time Locating Systems with GPS. The differentiation of the CSC/Precyse asset monitoring and maintenance solution is the two way communication for alert and control of sensors and infrastructure, via smart phone or any other Internet connected device. CSC has integrated the Precyse iLocate RFID middleware with OmniLocation serving as the analysis, presentation, and control interface.

Technology Briefing - Precyse

Thu, 19 May 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - Certifi Media

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Digitized books didn't make much sense, until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing came along. When 25 million books have been scanned and their texts are made available, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. There are efforts underway to digitize every archived newspaper, photograph, and microfilm frame ever stored. Most of these data will end up on the Internet. Thus, in a very real sense, the "library of all libraries" is being formed, accessible to anyone at anytime from anywhere. To make this library useful for search, metadata needs to be provided for all of the constituent elements in these documents. The technology for the indexing of content (graphics, photos, text, font, layout, paper type, etc.) needs significantly more development, as today, it is primarily indexed by hand. Certifi Media provides the "nuts and bolts" of this emerging industry. Our technology provides a great first step in assuring that the scanned document will meet the needs of tomorrows segmentation technologies. The briefing will discuss: How we have provided the basis for assuring whether a document in its digital form accurately represents the physical appearance How we are preparing scanned data for the search engines of the future How our technology may provide a better authentication protocol for scanned documents in medical and financial markets

Technology Briefing - Certifi Media

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Grant Briefing - Agent Technology

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Centralizing a corporation was once considered an efficient way to run an enterprise. Decisions and information processing occurred in an orderly, top-down, hierarchical manner. However, it is now clear that this type of system only works in a reasonably stable market. Globalization and changes in technology are causing today's market to be in a state of constant flux. Companies that cannot adapt fast enough to thrive in new markets will be left behind. In response, many companies are now building agent-based systems. These systems employ software agents that distribute functionality across vast computing networks. Furthermore, agents not only adapt to their environment but also evolve by learning from the environment and employ a variety of computational approaches, from object oriented to expert systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and so on. Such an approach prepares enterprises for an increasingly complex marketplace and enables them to respond rapidly to change. Typically, when the word "agent" is used, many people conjure up images from Web spiders and search bots. Yet, these same people feel that there is something more to the concept. For those who wish to know more, the purpose of this paper is to provide: A basic understanding of agents and agent-based technology A summary of how agent-based technology is currently being employed Brief discussions of the major issues being addressed by agent research and development Indications where agent technology is relevant to the Object Management Group (OMG) - and vice versa Suggestions for standardizing areas of this new technology using the OMG process

Grant Briefing - Agent Technology

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - Centrifuge Systems

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Centrifuge Systems delivers a unique approach to interactive data visualization. Using advanced link analysis - complemented by charts, timelines and geospatial views - investigative analysts can discover non-obvious relationships and significant insights within their data more quickly than with other data visualization or data analysis technology. Centrifuge allows analysts to easily combine disparate data sources and explore multiple data visualizations in a single integrated workspace, all through a standard web browser. Centrifuge solves challenging link and data analysis problems in the areas of fraud and money laundering, cyber security, intelligence analysis, law enforcement and other domains. Centrifuge actively partners with software companies, information providers and others looking to enhance their solutions by embedding Centrifuge visualizations.

Technology Briefing - Centrifuge Systems

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - Future Point Systems

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 11:00:00 -0500

Future Point Systems (FPS) is one of the market leaders in Visual Information System (VIS) solutions. FPS provides software for visually managing, understanding, and deriving new knowledge from massive quantities of heterogeneous and complexly related information. The company’s award winning Starlight software is a comprehensive visual analytics platform that transforms mountains of data into actionable intelligence. Future Point Systems was founded in 2006 in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Future Point’s information engineering and visual analytics products are used in government and Fortune 500 organizations worldwide. This briefing will provide a comprehensive overview and demonstration of the Starlight Visual Information System technology. During the demonstration, the speakers will showcase the powerful features and functionality of the Starlight platform, demonstrating how Starlight acts as a "force multiplier," enabling analysts to do the work of many with greater efficiency, accuracy, and higher levels of productivity. In addition, there will be a demonstration of the capabilities of Starlight Data Engineer (SDE), the company’s solution to the significant challenge of engineering, processing, enhancing and utilizing data from any source or format. SDE enables users to quickly set up complex data processors in a fraction of the time required through traditional scripting or programming methods. SDE is a powerful tool for data processing and integration, both for use with Starlight VIS & VIS Lite Edition (LE), and for use with outside data processing tasks. Through Starlight and SDE, FPS offers a complete solution in the marketplace today, enabling all phases of the intelligence analysis process: - Data ingestion, processing, and integration - Visual analysis - Reporting: Web-based and conventional Microsoft Office formats

Technology Briefing - Future Point Systems

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 11:00:00 -0500

Grant Briefing - Testing Applications in the Cloud

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 11:00:00 -0500

New business service delivery models, such as cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS), have the potential to change the enterprise IT structure. The economic downturn has the potential to accelerate adoption of these new models. The constantly evolving characteristics of adaptive cloud environment create an unlimited number of testing variables. Because of the dynamic and shared characteristics of cloud infrastructures, the issue of how to effectively test the applications hosted in the cloud is unique. As an increasing number of organizations adopt web services technologies and seek to reduce overall costs, the need for improved software quality, efficient tools and practices are critical. Organizations have also emphasized the need for more-comprehensive approaches to software quality in cloud, including: - Applications less isolated especially when hosted in the cloud - A higher level of integration requiring more lateral and regression tests than ever before - Diversity of applications hosted in the cloud and exchange of information on the Internet (more languages, platforms, vendors, etc) - Constant monitoring of Web-exposed front-end applications that once tolerated irregular performance (before they were exposed)

Grant Briefing - Testing Applications in the Cloud

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 11:00:00 -0500

CoE Briefing - Natural Resources

Thu, 3 Feb 2011 11:00:00 -0500

In recent times, resources companies have attracted considerable business media focus due to the dynamic, high growth nature of their operations, and their center stage role in global development. Volatile markets, competition for resources, and shareholders with high expectations have called for a far more agile approach to operations, and greater focus on working smarter. The competitive environment is stressed by infrastructure bottlenecks, long lead times, supply constraints, expertise shortages, escalating costs, safety issues, environmental controls, and climate change concerns. These challenges heighten the importance of systems that optimize production capabilities while improving worker safety and lowering costs. The Natural Resources Center of Excellence (CoE) can help organizations grow their business through a wide range of technology and business services specifically tailored to the company's needs. The center currently delivers mission critical services to a growing list of Natural Resources clients, including BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Woodside Petroleum and Newmont Mining. The CoE's expertise spans mine IT planning, end-to-end plan and execute, logistics, equipment tracking, technical data management, remote communications, and information management. Aligning IT investment with business strategy is the best way to achieve maximum return, but you don’t have to be an IT expert. That’s where the Natural Resources CoE comes in. Understanding what you need to achieve, places the center in the best position to advance your business in the most effective way.

CoE Briefing - Natural Resources

Thu, 3 Feb 2011 11:00:00 -0500

Technology Briefing - Greenplum

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:00:00 -0500

In 2003, the co-founders of Greenplum set out on a mission to build the world's fastest and most scalable database system entirely in software capable of running across multiple off-the-shelf commodity systems. It seemed like an audacious goal at the time, but over the last seven years Greenplum's engineering talent has developed a product capable of supporting the massive-scale data processing requirements of some of the world's most respected enterprises. Greenplum's vision is to support an organization's ability to harness and exploit the massive amount of data at their disposal for business advantage. Greenplum, the Data Computing Products Division of EMC, is serving the data warehouse market by leveraging its combined core assets as well as by transforming 'Data Warehousing' into 'Data Computing'.

Technology Briefing - Greenplum

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:00:00 -0500

Grant Briefing - Intelligent Systems for Disease Detection and Surveillance

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 11:00:00 -0500

Non-intrusive technologies capable of disease detection could constitute a breakthrough capability for CSC to help the US government detect and control biological and public health threats in border areas and points of entry into the country. A CSC Grant project reviewed the most current technologies on kinematic motion signatures development based on movement-based feature extraction techniques, neural networks involved in central pattern generators, and parametric and nonparametric shape sequence processing. These technologies remotely detect subjects with illness using image and video processing algorithms. The briefing will outline a conceptual framework based on physiological biomarkers for two disease states as candidates for remotely detecting subjects with illness using this emerging technology. The speaker will also discuss leveraging CSC capabilities through a research and development network with the University of Maryland, Center of Automation Research.

Grant Briefing - Intelligent Systems for Disease Detection and Surveillance

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 11:00:00 -0500

Technology Briefing - Cloudera

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 11:00:00 -0500

Companies are increasingly deluged with data that are coming in a volume, variety and velocity that threatens to overwhelm them. Cloudera offers enterprises a powerful new data platform built on the popular Apache Hadoop open-source software package. By unlocking the storage and processing technologies of the world’s largest Web companies, Cloudera's growing list of global customers can use Hadoop to solve problems and achieve their particular business needs. Hadoop offers a data lifeboat for organizations looking for a solution for low cost storage and analysis functionality that complements their existing data management infrastructure. Hadoop is a powerful data-management platform that can: - Consolidate data, structured or complex, in a single repository for comprehensive analysis - Store information inexpensively and reliably, drive down platform costs and keep more data online for use - Perform sophisticated, detailed processing and analysis of data at very high speed Cloudera offers its enterprise customers a family of products and services that complement the open-source Hadoop platform. These include comprehensive training sessions, architectural and implementation help, and technical support for Hadoop clusters in development or in production. Cloudera also serves a wide range of customers including financial service, healthcare, digital media, advertising, networking and telephony enterprises.

Technology Briefing - Cloudera

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 11:00:00 -0500

Grant Briefing - Next-Generation Location-Based Services for Mobile Devices

Thu, 9 Dec 2010 16:00:00 -0500

A Location-Based Service (LBS) is a mobile computing application that provides information and functionality to users based on their geographical location. First-generation examples include "show me nearby restaurant"-type applications. Next-generation LBS can provide additional benefits for users and service providers, including: - Proactively pushing only relevant information to users to help speed up decisions and activities - Minimising tedious data entry by integrating applications with advanced sensors such as accelerometers, digital compasses and cameras - Allowing service providers to model user behaviour based on their location and route information, which can support improvements of service levels in near real-time and over the longer term - Encouraging sharing of location-based information, such as photos and reviews, generated by other service providers and users As a result, analysts predict explosive growth in the LBS market over the coming years. Apart from the consumer market, there is a good prospect and potential for this technology to find its application in many industries including health, manufacturing, mining and financial services. The aim of this research was to provide further insight into possibilities for smartphone next-generation LBS applications, including a greater understanding of implementation and architectural considerations, and future trends in LBS.The grant outlined the current state of LBS technology, looked into the important issue of maintaining user privacy, and discussed future trends such as improved visualisation through augmented reality and moving towards context-based computing and Semantic Web. The future of LBS in the consumer and enterprise spaces promises to be very exciting; the ultimate goal of true context-aware computing may not be far away.

Grant Briefing - Next-Generation Location-Based Services for Mobile Devices

Thu, 9 Dec 2010 16:00:00 -0500

Report - The Future of Healthcare: It's Health, Then Care

Mon, 6 Dec 2010 08:30:00 -0500

Healthcare: Ripe for Disruptive Innovation The health system is strained by a growing aging population, a shortage of care providers, more people suffering from chronic conditions, fragmented care management and rising costs. In this report CSC’s Leading Edge Forum (LEF) takes a holistic view of healthcare, putting the patient at the center, and identifies five trends that will re-shape the industry. Five Trends That Will Reshape the Industry The healthcare system is moving from a care-first to a wellness-first perspective via the collective efforts and technologies described in these trends: - E-Power to the Patient -- Patients take on a larger, more active role in managing their wellness and health. - Earlier Detection -- Earlier detection maximizes options for successful treatment, leading to a speedier return to good health. - High-Tech Healing -- New technologies can significantly boost outcomes and quality of life. - Resources: More, but Different -- Solving the healthcare resource puzzle requires new players and new care models. - Global Healthcare Ecosystem Emerges -- More information, more connected, leads to better care and better research.

CoE Briefing - Cordys

Thu, 2 Dec 2010 11:00:00 -0500

Over the past two decades, companies have been moving to enterprise systems to consolidate and optimize their business processes. Many adopted packaged software, some consolidated using custom solutions, and others adopted a hybrid approach. While this may have achieved the business objectives at the time, these enterprise systems were found to be inflexible, costly to operate, and difficult to adapt to business change. CSC believes that enterprise systems will evolve into a Business Operations Platform (BOP), a platform that leverages state-of-the-art technology such as Composite Applications, Service Oriented Architecture, Business Process Management, Business Activity Monitoring, and Master Data Management to quickly and efficiently optimize business processes. CSC's Cordys Center of Excellence was formed to advance CSC's leadership in BOP, as well as help our clients and internal business units rise to the challenge of capitalizing on BOP opportunities. Based on our research, we found that Cordys technology provides the world’s most advanced, integrated BOP, and quickly partnered with Cordys in establishing our BOP Center of Excellence. The mission of the Cordys Center of Excellence is to provide: - Thought leadership on agile business transformation leveraging BOP technology - Industry expertise to create demonstrations and solutions for our customers - Robust Cordys delivery excellence - Training programs for our clients and staff - Discussion of best practices and reusable solutions

CoE Briefing - Cordys

Thu, 2 Dec 2010 11:00:00 -0500

Technology Briefing - Fuzzy Logix

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 11:00:00 -0500

Analytics is the fastest growing segment of the technology market, but traditional solutions remain complex, expensive and only available to a handful of highly technical users. For analytic solutions to deliver maximum business value, companies need solutions that are easy to install and manage, possess tremendous processing power and that are easy to put in the hands of decision makers. Fuzzy Logix in-database analytics provide all of these benefits and more. During this briefing, Mike Upchurch will introduce the concept of in-database analytics, demonstrate how these models can be easily deployed pervasively and why they run 10X to 100X faster than other solutions. In addition, the speaker will discuss the business benefits using in-database technology such as achieving a 12 month ROI of 28:1. The speaker will also provide site examples of how companies in banking, healthcare, retail and marketing are leveraging analytics today.

Technology Briefing - Fuzzy Logix

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 11:00:00 -0500

Grant Briefing - Artificial Intelligence, Semantic, and Knowledge - A Way From 2.0 to 3.0

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 11:00:00 -0500

Today's applications are being equipped with larger amounts of intelligence giving them more independence and automation and enable them to make decisions to adapt to different potential scenarios. Web is not an exception and, after the great acceptance of "Web 2.0", work is already being done to create the so-called "Semantic Web" that will culminate in the third generation Web. Where Web's first phase was completely dependent on administrators for managing content, Web 2.0 users provide dynamic content. Semantic Web focuses on processes, mainly in two areas: - Semantic: Content's meaning. Words and expressions are not independent anymore. They depend on the context. - Agents: Programs with enough artificial intelligence to be able to make decisions, adapt to the requirements and create responses based on the requirements. Several experts, including Tim Berners-Lee, have pointed out the importance of Semantic Web, as it is directly related to trends such as: artificial intelligence, Web-oriented architectures, and social software. The range of possibilities offered by this new perspective is wide. This grant aimed to study the different aspects involved (architectures, technologies, applications) in order to gather a comprehensive view and be able to find and apply new solutions both for legacy and newly developed applications. The research also includes search engines and search improvement, one of the main functionalities related to Semantic Web. This grant also worked to include other multiple business opportunities such as: performance engineering, semantic applications and services, B2B and P2P environments.

Grant Briefing - Artificial Intelligence, Semantic, and Knowledge - A Way From 2.0 to 3.0

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 11:00:00 -0500

Grant Briefing - A Reference Architecture for Cloud Lifecycle Management

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 11:00:00 -0400

A cloud architecture reference model is an abstraction of cloud computing concepts and relationships that can be used to educate organizations, and create standards and guidelines to help organizations apply these concepts. Groups such as Cloud Security Alliance, Open Security Architecture and the Distributed Management Task Force are developing cloud reference models to help organizations make informed decisions regarding if and how to adopt these cloud technologies. Recently there has been a surge in cloud providers and cloud management applications for provisioning, operating, monitoring, load-balancing and auto-scaling infrastructure services. However, there is little guidance on how to choose and integrate these coud providers and management applications for a custom solution, partly because of their changing functionality and the many vague, emerging standards. This briefing will discuss research conducted for a CSC grant towards the development of an architecture reference model for cloud service lifecycle management, which will help solution architects select cloud providers and cloud management tools. The speaker will also discuss: - The results of implementing migration, hybrid cloud, testing and development, disaster recovery, and monitoring and scaling scenarios on selected cloud providers and tools - The analysis of these results - The synthesis of these results into an initial cloud reference architecture model.

Grant Briefing - A Reference Architecture for Cloud Lifecycle Management

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 11:00:00 -0400

CoE Briefing - Life Insurance, Annuities, and Pensions

Thu, 7 Oct 2010 11:00:00 -0400

CSC's Life Insurance, Annuities and Pensions Center of Excellence delivers a full array of business and technology solutions to life insurers and providers of annuities and pensions globally. The Center draws on a unique blend of deep industry knowledge, business process and IT expertise, intellectual property and robust operational capabilities to craft solutions that deliver breakthrough business results to over 70 percent of the world's top insurers. The Center offers the world's leading portfolio of software to manage product and policy, and is used by more than 500 insurers across the Americas, Europe and Asia. The portfolio includes complete administration systems, as well as individual components for specific business areas such as distribution management and product development. The Center's application software works independently as components inside the CSC e4SM enterprise architecture as well as within fully integrated systems that extend, enhance and evolve clients' legacy systems. The Center's Indore and Noida, India development hubs have been assessed at Capability Maturity Model (CMMi) Level 5, the Software Engineering Institute's highest rating. The Center is the life insurance, annuity and pension industry's largest business process outsourcing provider for administration of individual life insurance, annuity and pension policies (term, whole, universal and variable). By combining the latest technology with a global sourcing model and large-scale insurance and technology competence, the Center is able to achieve previously unattainable levels of business efficiency and customer service.

CoE Briefing - Life Insurance, Annuities, and Pensions

Thu, 7 Oct 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - Revolution Analytics

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 11:00:00 -0400

With over 2 million users and growing, the open source programming language known as "R" has emerged as the new defacto standard for computational statistics and predictive analytics. Revolution Analytics (formerly REvolution Computing) was founded in 2007 to foster the R Community, as well as support the growing needs of commercial users. Its name derives from combining the letter "R" with the word "evolution." It speaks to the ongoing development of the R language from an open-source academic research tool into commercial applications for industrial use. Though its Revolution R products, the company aims to make the power of predictive analytics accessible to every type of user and budget. Additionally, Revolution Analytics provides free and premium software and services that bring high-performance, productivity and ease-of-use to R -- enabling statisticians and scientists to derive greater meaning from large sets of critical data in record time. Revolution Analytics also offers full-featured production-grade software to the academic community for free, in order to support the continued spread of R's popularity to the next generation of analysts.

Technology Briefing - Revolution Analytics

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Grant Briefing - Open Source System Configuration with Puppet

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 11:00:00 -0400

System Configuration Management is the process of ensuring a set of servers, clients, software packages, etc., are set up in a way that fulfills our requirements for the whole system functionality. Normally this is a manual process, but the increasing complexity of the IT infrastructure at most sites makes that approach a source of problems. One possible solution is the use of client/server tools that use a declarative language to define the desired state of a machine and its resources and then realize said state. Puppet is one of several open-source tools that employ this model, and it’s experiencing a lot of interest and growth lately. This grant looked at Puppet and its architecture, employed it to implement a small webserver/appserver model as an example, and examined the advantages, limitations, and advanced possibilities of it as part of the system administrator arsenal. This session will give an overview of Puppet and its architecture, discuss the advantages and limitations found while employing it to implement a small webserver/appserver model, and discuss the changes since the grant was completed.

Grant Briefing - Open Source System Configuration with Puppet

Thu, 9 Sep 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - Endeca

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Managers and front-line employees in large enterprises already have reports and dashboards at their fingertips to answer questions about what happened in key processes. But they often struggle when it comes to addressing the question, "What should I do now?" The answer is not more canned reports, but a different way of interacting with information that leads to discoveries - unexpected, better decisions that drive unexpected, better results. Endeca is on a mission to provide easy exploration of diverse and changing data for people with no training in BI technologies. This Agile BI technology has already been adopted by visionaries at large automotive and consumer electronics manufacturers. It is now poised for adoption by mainstream IT departments. This presentation will provide an introduction to Agile BI as well as an introduction to Endeca and its unique hybrid search-analytical database. It will cover typical solution areas that already benefit from improved discovery in daily decision making, zero-training user interfaces, and "as-is" data integration that requires minimal modeling and maintenance. In addition, it will cover customer case studies where firms have reduced the complexity of their commodity purchases, improved the graded quality of bills of materials, and gained visibility into on-the-ground promotion effectiveness across an entire dealer network by improving discovery in daily decision making.

Technology Briefing - Endeca

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Grant Briefing - Applied Cloud Computing

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Cloud computing is commonly used as a metaphor for describing a mash-up of existing technologies, architectures, paradigms and principles such as virtualization, distributed computing and multitenancy, but cloud computing is not a technology itself. Cloud computing is a paradigm that proposes a new way of delivering computing resources that involves the separation of hardware and software, with utility computing as the intermediate layer provisioning IT capabilities dynamically on demand. Computing resources can be provisioned anywhere from everywhere as a commodity; therefore, competitive advantage will not come from IT infrastructure per se but rather from how organizations assemble and use IT resources. Cloud computing enables customers to acquire sophisticated IT capabilities at low cost and reach higher utilization rates on optimized infrastructure. At the same time, cloud computing raises security and privacy concerns to a new level. In order to take full advantage of cloud computing, organizations must trust critical data and processes to the cloud provider, with little negotiation power for themselves. Moreover, cloud computing is moving faster than international and national regulatory frameworks that in many cases constrain international data transfers. As a result, organizations must carefully consider benefits, risks and regulatory constraints before adopting cloud computing. With this grant, Juan Diego aimed to develop a guide that any organization can follow in its journey to cloud computing by giving the organization a better understanding of what cloud computing actually means and the current state of the art, providing reference scenarios, and proposing a cloud computing adoption roadmap that outlines the steps along the way. Juan Diego’s work included a review of current international regulatory frameworks for data protection and how they could impact cloud computing adoption.

Grant Briefing - Applied Cloud Computing

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - Joyent

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 11:00:00 -0400

An increasing number of businesses are discovering that cloud computing can save them significant operating and capital expenses. However, cost is not the only reason companies are moving to cloud computing. As with many new technologies proposed for improving business processes, customers have legitimate questions about adapting their critical applications and data to these technologies. This session will address potential business concerns and prevalent misconceptions of cloud computing and will offer concrete business advice for making informed decisions. In addition, this presentation will broadly describe the cloud computing architecture that Joyent offers, including the company’s unique approach to pricing, flexibility, performance, and business resilience. Jason Hoffman, CTO of Joyent, will explore how to overcome the practical impediments of cloud computing. He will describe how to achieve the vision of: - Infrastructure that provides real resource pooling not high-volume hardware virtualization - Architectures that scale vertically in an instant to meet spikes in demand - The data center as a single, programmable computer for application developers

Technology Briefing - Joyent

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Grant Briefing - ERP for all, through Microsoft technologies

Thu, 8 Jul 2010 11:00:00 -0400

CSC recognizes that poor adoption of ERP systems is a major challenge for many organizations leading to them not realizing the full benefits of their investments. The aim of this grant was to explore the options for integrating operational and reporting systems such as SAP and Oracle into more user friendly Microsoft interfaces such as SharePoint and Office. This approach can have significant business benefits for clients, including enhanced productivity, faster more informed decision making, reduced training cost and fewer support calls. The grant also explored current integration options, including CSC partner Sitrion, the new features of SharePoint 2010 and the forthcoming Duet Enterprise. The focus of the grant was mainly integration with SAP as this is the space in which most current developments are taking place. Integration into the Microsoft platform from Oracle for example, has been available for some time particularly data integration with Excel. Nevertheless, the business drivers for integration are the same, regardless of the ERP platform.

Grant Briefing - ERP for all, through Microsoft technologies

Thu, 8 Jul 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - Aster Data

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 11:00:00 -0400

The age of big data - terabytes of information within a company's information systems - has arrived. Companies running ERP, CRM and web solutions have been generating gigabytes of data for years. Add to that the data now available from user-generated content, mobile web, social networks, click stream and external data sets, and what was once large gigabytes of information has become large terabytes of information. With all this additional data at your fingertips, the question becomes, how do we leverage this explosion in data to enable better decision making? This session will explain how Aster Data attempts to solve the big data challenge with a monumental shift in the way data is processed and managed. Aster Data nCluster introduces a whole new architecture for data management and data analysis by allowing analytic applications to be pushed down into Aster Data's massively parallel processing (MPP) database so applications are now co-located with the data itself. With this approach business users get the insights they need in the fastest possible time, taking advantage of the power of parallel computing, for both data and application processing, with unprecedented simplicity and low costs.

Technology Briefing - Aster Data

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - TBS Holding AG

Thu, 20 May 2010 11:00:00 -0400

TBS Holding AG understands that a fingerprint system that cannot handle the last five percent of people with so called "difficult fingerprints" is not good enough for many applications. One of the prevalent correction measures was to lower the threshold for a successful match, neglecting the severe consequences for the security level. Thus, TBS set out on a mission in 2003 to discover a way to improve fingerprint access security, while keeping the system usable and convenient from a user standpoint. After nearly five years of development TBS entered the market in late 2007 with a first prototype installation. After a series of field tests and further development steps, TBS started production and official sales in the second semester of 2009. This presentation will provide an introduction to fingerprint biometrics as well as an introduction to TBS and its unique touchless fingerprinting technology. This session will also cover typical applications that already benefit from the higher image quality, the larger capture surface, the "no-failures-to enroll" and from the interoperability with legacy databases. Typical applications are in time and attendance, physical and logical access control and civil and criminal identification. Frost and Sullivan awarded TBS with the European Biometrics Access Control Product Innovation of the Year Award.

Technology Briefing - TBS Holding AG

Thu, 20 May 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Grant Briefing - Force.com

Thu, 13 May 2010 11:00:00 -0400

The financial services market is looking for ways to bring more value to their customers while reducing their costs. Current economic conditions have led to an increase in interest in such potentially innovative solutions as Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service, which, taken together, could ultimately lead to a complete Cloud-based solution. Tier-1 customers in this market are looking to reduce costs and enhance revenue through innovative delivery mechanisms and better ways to reach their customers. Tier-2 and Tier-3 customers in this space are under greater pressure to do more with less and yet, similarly, need to be able to find better, more agile delivery channels to reach new customers and retain those they have. Generally, financial service companies want more business agility with less cost overhead and to shorten the time needed to conceive, implement and roll out a new business innovation to their customers. This session will address how a CSC Grant project created a proof of concept using the force.com platform (the development and production platform on which the Salesforce CRM solution runs) and looks at: - How the development effort differs on the force.com platform - How to address security and compliance - How CSC can utilize existing intellectual property to define and build a solution (e.g., use of eApp as a model for a New Business cloud solution) - How functional capabilities can be distributed within the layers of cloud (that is, what belongs in a public cloud and what does not) - The business relationship between CSC and Salesforce.com

Grant Briefing - Force.com

Thu, 13 May 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - CSC, the City of Los Angeles, and Google Apps

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 11:00:00 -0400

CSC and Google are making the silver lining of cloud computing a reality for the city of Los Angeles. During the worse of the economic downturn the city of Los Angeles had a difficult decision to make; the current email system was failing and in need of substantial capital improvements with a budget that could not even afford the status quo. The timing was perfect to exploit the economic promise of cloud computing. CSC assembled a team to convince the city that this migration to the cloud, could be done quickly, securely, and performed with a high degree of confidence. Mid December 2009, with the business case made and the solution sold, Team CSC began the migration of more than 30,000 users into the cloud. This session will highlight the city’s business case, briefly demonstrate the features of the Google Application product suite, discuss the implementation/integration approach, the security challenges, and discuss key lessons learned.

Technology Briefing - CSC, the City of Los Angeles, and Google Apps

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Paper Briefing - Multiple Strategies and Technologies to Combat Counterfeit Drugs

Thu, 8 Apr 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Counterfeit drugs are an increasing threat in the marketplace. These substandard drugs affect human lives as the quality and/or type of drug is harmful to the patient. These products may not cure the targeted diseases and could possibly even kill patients. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has seen a rise of counterfeit drug cases since 2000 when there were only six. In 2006, the number of cases rose dramatically to 54. The market for counterfeit drug is approximately $40 billion. According to the Center for Medicines in the Public Interest, counterfeit drug sales globally will reach $75 billion by 2010. This represents an increase of 90 percent from 2005 and will represent 14 percent of the total drug market. Furthermore, it is estimated that 10 percent of the global medicines are counterfeit. Approximately 60 percent of counterfeit drug cases occur in less developed countries in which 25 percent of their drug supply is counterfeit. An anti-counterfeiting strategy helps to effectively detect counterfeit products, increase audit compliance, enhance supply chain management capabilities, prevent brand erosion, and eliminate supply chain routing leakage (e.g., misplaced inventory and drug expirations). This strategy can identify multiple best-fit solutions for meeting a company’s requirements via Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFID), ePedigrees, label security, dosage unit level security, nanotechnology, and other capable solutions to combat counterfeiting of drug products. Government regulation will play a future role in the coming years in determining the strategies companies will use. A recent trend is the push for covert strategies such as nanotechnology and biomarkers to safeguard the supply chain to protect high revenue drugs. These are safe for human consumption and are added to the labels or pills directly. They are confirmed for authenticity via an external reader based on spectral properties or receptor binding assays. One item alone will not protect the companies from counterfeit drugs, but a strategy with a multi-level approach will lead to safeguarding the supply chain and increasing revenues. This will result in decreasing the number of counterfeit products in the marketplace and improving patient safety and enhancing product authenticity and identification.

Paper Briefing - Multiple Strategies and Technologies to Combat Counterfeit Drugs

Thu, 8 Apr 2010 11:00:00 -0400

CoE Briefing - Identity Management

Thu, 1 Apr 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Whether you are protecting critical infrastructure or vital information, whether your concern is a secure facility or a secure border, you need to answer the same question: In a world of multiple and shadowy identities, how do you establish, with absolute certainty, that someone is who they claim to be? Identity Management is a complex, mission critical implementation for public sector and commercial clients which requires integration of multiple commercial products, business processes and seamless policy execution. The Identity Management Center of Excellence (CoE) helps government and commercial clients navigate the complex world of identity management. The center helps clients and internal business units address the growing concerns with respect to identity fraud, breaches, privacy of information, and increasing regulatory compliance. The CoE assists in achieving optimized architecture development, best of breed technology evaluation, and reflective testing.

CoE Briefing - Identity Management

Thu, 1 Apr 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - Microsoft Azure

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Windows Azure is Microsoft’s flexible cloud computing platform that can be used to develop internet-based applications. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the internet through Microsoft datacenters. To build applications and services on Windows Azure, developers can use their existing Microsoft Visual Studio expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML, and PHP. By using Windows Azure, organizations can drive innovation faster and reduce efforts and costs of IT management. This session will provide a business-focused overview of this new cloud service platform by exploring the components and the key scenarios ideal for leveraging cloud computing. Additionally, these sessions will feature case studies of real customers deriving benefits from the Windows Azure Platform.

Technology Briefing - Microsoft Azure

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:00:00 -0400

CoE Briefing - Advanced Air Traffic Management

Thu, 4 Mar 2010 11:00:00 -0500

CSC's Advanced Air Traffic Management Center of Excellence supports the worldwide aviation community with air traffic management (ATM) solutions that range from researching new concepts and decision support tools for NextGen applications to developing, deploying and operating current-day ATM systems. With more than 35 years of experience in ATM, CSC's unique capabilities span areas such as air traffic flow optimization, time-based flow management to include regional metering, arrival and departure metering, air-ground data link and tactical air traffic control for all phases of flight.

CoE Briefing - Advanced Air Traffic Management

Thu, 4 Mar 2010 11:00:00 -0500

Technology Briefing - Force.com

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:00:00 -0500

Organizations of all sizes need a platform that is secure, reliable, and fast. The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com, fine-tuned over the past 10 years, includes a database, security, workflow, user interface, and other tools that step you through the process of building powerful business applications. Developers everywhere are using Force.com for business application development, creating cloud computing applications like enterprise resource planning (ERP), human resource management (HRM), and supply chain management (SCM) in the cloud, 5 times faster and at about the cost of traditional development platforms. This is achieved by simplifying the programming model to build cloud computing applications that branch out well beyond CRM. Force.com now powers approximately 67,900 businesses running more than 135,000 applications that 1.5+ million users count on every day.

Technology Briefing - Force.com

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:00:00 -0500

Paper Briefing - A Security Architecture for Health Information Networks

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:00:00 -0500

Health information networks may be considered to be specializations of general Business-to-Business (B2B) networks, with especially rigorous requirements of data confidentiality (to protect patient privacy) and clinical data integrity (to support patient safety). Given the relatively low level of IT adoption in the healthcare delivery industry, network security architecture needs to balance advanced security technology controls with ease of implementation in technology-challenged healthcare enterprises. This paper is based on work performed by CSC for a nationwide health information network architecture prototype in the US. A nationwide network, or any large-scale data sharing network, is likely to develop as a collection of interoperating sub-networks. Interoperability of security mechanisms between sub-networks is, therefore, a key consideration in overall network security. Therefore, a simple, open-standards based architecture that would protect data security and privacy is needed. Starting from basic health information network messaging and transport requirements, the paper identifies the core security requirements that need to be addressed to ensure confidentiality and integrity. Trust models and threat analysis enable us to develop a security interoperability architecture that may be realized through relatively simple Internet technologies. The findings in this paper provide a practical route for broad adoption of secure health information networks, as well as extension to general purpose B2B networks, such as eCommerce exchanges and procurement networks.

Paper Briefing - A Security Architecture for Health Information Networks

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:00:00 -0500

CoE Briefing - Healthcare

Thu, 4 Feb 2010 11:00:00 -0500

CSC's Healthcare Center of Excellence is the premium outlet for unveiling new and innovating solutions to the United States government, US state governments and the commercial sector. The center combines commercial and government health IT capabilities across the entire healthcare continuum -- payers, providers, public health, integrity and life sciences. Their solutions focus on Medicare, Medicaid, Health Information Exchange (HIE), Electronic Health Records (EHR), Bioinformatics and Pharmacy Benefits Management (BPM). Targeting health care quality through better information, the center's capabilities enable providers to efficiently share information with government/private health plans, provider networks (public, private, institutional), PBMs and regulatory agencies. The center showcases CSC's strength, fluency and business knowledge in the full healthcare delivery lifecycle and enhances CSC’s status as a thought leader and premium solutions provider in the health care industry.

CoE Briefing - Healthcare

Thu, 4 Feb 2010 11:00:00 -0500

Report - Cloud rEvolution: A Workbook for Cloud Computing in the Enterprise (Volume 4)

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:00:00 -0500

The most important value the cloud brings is not lower costs. It is improved agility, not just for IT, but for the business as a whole. The biggest cloud computing benefits are being gained in business effectiveness areas such as speed, availability, responsiveness and innovation. This final volume in our Cloud rEvolution series takes the form of a practical, hands-on implementation guide produced by the LEF Executive Programme, based on their in-depth cloud computing research over the last two years. A Workbook for Cloud Computing in the Enterprise, now available, encourages organizations to consider issues such as quality, cycle time and customer/employee satisfaction, and then run a workshop jointly with business and IT staff that: 1. Examines cloud opportunities 2. Reviews potential issues 3. Considers where and how specific information should be processed 4. Proposes a series of concrete steps organizations can take to begin doing business in the cloud

Grant Briefing - Bioinformatics and the Future of Medical Research and Clinical Practice

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:00:00 -0500

The enormous advances in biological technology over the past four decades have led to a profound change in how information is processed; conceptual and technical developments in experimental and molecular biology disciplines such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, immunomics, and countless other "omics" have resulted in a veritable sea of data with the potential to alter biomedicine radically. Yet, with this wealth of data comes a challenge: How to transform the data into information, the information into knowledge, and the knowledge into useful action. Nearly coincident with the advances in biological science (and rapidly outpacing such advances) has been the advent of the modern computer and associated advances in information storage, retrieval, and processing made practical with microelectronics and informatics. The power of modern information technology is ideal for capturing and storing the huge volume of biological data being generated; However, the respective languages and concepts of biology and computer sciences have, until recently, been disparate enough to prevent the logical next step of combining the two disciplines into a more powerful tool. The discipline of bioinformatics has emerged to capture the information stored in living systems and help turn it into actionable technology. During his CSC Grant research, Robert House explored the precepts of bioinformatics, the tools, and the potential inherent in this powerful meta-technology.

Grant Briefing - Bioinformatics and the Future of Medical Research and Clinical Practice

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:00:00 -0500

Report - Cloud rEvolution: The Cloud Effect (Volume 3)

Thu, 7 Jan 2010 17:00:00 -0500

Where once it was important to understand the "network effect" of the Internet on your business, today it's the "cloud effect." The cloud effect is the influence of cloud computing - of on-demand, elastic, pay-per-use IT - on IT and the business. This influence is significant and far-reaching, for when a fixed asset like a computer becomes variable and on demand, all sorts of agility and new cost structures open up. Cloud rEvolution: The Cloud Effect, now available, explores six cloud effects impacting IT and business: 1. The Stack Transforms to Services 2. Structural Deepening Expands the Cloud Ecosystem 3. Cloud Enables New IT Options 4. Mega Data Centers Power It All 5. Cloudonomics Provide Financial Incentive 6. Cloud Drives Business Value

Technology Briefing - Cordys

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:00:00 -0500

In a world where response to new market demands can be a matter of weeks, days, or even hours, true business innovation needs next-generation BPM (Business Process Management) software that enables rapid implementation, short time-to-market and a cycle of continuous process improvement. The unique combination of BPM and cloud technology in the Cordys platform empowers enterprises to dramatically improve the speed of change and fundamentally alter the way they innovate business operations. The Cordys platform combines existing structured business logic (back end) with the unstructured information of the Internet (front end) to establish flexible business processes and operations that can be continuously optimized and improved, faster and quicker than ever. Cordys technology helps CSC provide solutions that make business processes visible, manageable and operational without changing the existing application landscape and IT infrastructure. Cordys deployment models enable an integrated cloud/on-premise deployment strategy of critical business processes, whether for a small department, an enterprise, or a dedicated value chain of multiple enterprises.

Technology Briefing - Cordys

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:00:00 -0500

Grant Briefing - Enterprise Performance Management: Trends, Tools, and Opportunities

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:00:00 -0500

The era of information began with one key message: "better information leads to better decisions and better ways to manage business processes." Until recently, businesses and IT primarily focused on information automation, not on decision-making itself. Lately, this focus has been shifting towards the more holistic scope of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). EPM is a set of tools and methods that enables better and quicker decision making based on timely, accessible and structured information of good quality. EPM helps organizations establish a systematic and integrated approach to link strategy to core processes and activities. In other words, it makes efficient use of the financial, human, material and information resources as key assets for profitability and competitive advantage. Dieter's grant work covered both the business and technical viewpoints on EPM. First, he analyzed the trends of business initiatives, challenges and executives’ expectations in terms of EPM. From this, he then defined a number of success factors and explored the role of EPM beyond the confines of the finance department and elaborated on several do’s and don’ts regarding an EPM system implementation.

Grant Briefing - Enterprise Performance Management: Trends, Tools, and Opportunities

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:00:00 -0500

Grant Briefing - Integrating Agile Methods into Catalyst

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:00:00 -0500

Agile software development evolved in the mid-1990s as a reaction to the regimented, micro-managed use of the waterfall model of the development. One of the problems of the waterfall model is that the process model does not fit well with dynamic environments - environments that change quickly. There are numerous cases of waterfall software development project failure. Even when these development projects deliver on time and on budget, they often suffer the failure of being out-of-sync with the requirements of the environment at the time of delivery. To address this process-environment mismatch, agile software development employs an iterative development process that continuously delivers valuable software and employs frequent customer inspection, feedback, and adaptation. In addition, in agile software development, heavyweight methods are replaced with lightweight methods to enable the development team to move quickly and smartly through the development process. In agile software development, the iterative process and lightweight methods are combined to achieve an adaptive, "just-in-time" development process better matched to the dynamic nature of the environment.

Grant Briefing - Integrating Agile Methods into Catalyst

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:00:00 -0500

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Journey Beyond the Cloud: Keeping it Real

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 09:35:43 -0500

The cloud promises many benefits but also risks. This talk addresses the approach taken by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to discover which aspects of the cloud will provide the biggest net benefits. Tom Soderstrom will examine questions such as: Which part of the cloud should I do first? Where's my biggest ROI at the lowest risk? What are the real obstacles encountered so far? How do I get started? How do I keep it real? He will also discuss lessons learned and ongoing plans.

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Journey Beyond the Cloud: Keeping it Real

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 11:35:50 -0500

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Reaching for the Clouds - ETS's Experience with Public Cloud Application Deployment

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 09:45:47 -0500

Public clouds, the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model, provide short- and longterm, utility-based, on-demand computing capability unavailable in most managed data center offerings today. Given that a significant portion of ETS’s business processing is not only cyclical in nature, but also involves dynamic peaking, the public IaaS model is very attractive to ETS for the following reasons: - Significantly reduces ETS infrastructure costs by paying only for what we use or need, thereby allowing us to avoid paying for idle computing resources. - Allows ETS to quickly ramp up to meet variable or dynamic peaking demand, as provisioning of additional hardware happens in minutes rather than weeks. - Allows ETS to reduce overall processing time by adding temporary resources to complete a task. ETS has learned much on its journey into cloud computing. While there have been some successes, adoption of this technology has been slower than desired because of a number of challenges. Bob Foy will describe ETS's experiences, including real and perceived business and technology benefits, the challenges in realizing those benefits, and ways that ETS has addressed these challenges. He will share lessons learned as a result of moving forward with public cloud computing.

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Reaching for the Clouds - ETS's Experience with Public Cloud Application Deployment

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 09:45:15 -0500

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Doing Business in the Cloud

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 09:00:14 -0500

The questions about cloud computing have moved on from last year's questions about the possibilities and the feasibility of cloud computing to this year's questions about implementation. What should I move to the cloud? When should I do it? What layers of the cloud stack should I use? And how should I do it? Doug Neal will share lessons learned from early cloud adopters, as well as describe the findings of this year’s LEF Study Tour on cloud computing, with special focus on the issues of cost, agility, and collaboration.

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Doing Business in the Cloud

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 09:00:56 -0500

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Cloudonomics: Business Value and Costs of Cloud Computing

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 16:30:54 -0500

Why are people excited about cloud computing? What are the business drivers? How can an enterprise leverage these new capabilities? In what ways are the cloud providers doing something fundamentally new in economic and business terms, not just technological terms? What can enterprises do to exploit these new capabilities, and why aren't costs the primary driver? Mark Masterson will offer answers to these and similar questions, and shed some light on the secretive and increasingly important world of cloud computing providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. He will explore the difference between "fine china" and "paper plates" IT, the importance of workload diversity, and the secret of getting personnel costs to be less than 10 percent of overall data center costs. Mark will examine strategies that can lead enterprises to shorter time-to-value and enable innovation and business agility, while also reducing costs - strategies that make the entire value chain inside an enterprise leaner and faster.

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Cloudonomics: Business Value and Costs of Cloud Computing

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 16:30:23 -0500

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Desktops as a Service

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 16:00:21 -0500

Delivering a complete desktop experience to every user in an organization should be easy however today this is a complex and costly task for IT. Through virtualization technology, IT can now transform static data centers into highly dynamic delivery centers, optimizing the delivery of applications and desktops as an on-demand service to any device with a rich, high-definition experience. Mick Hollison will discuss how IT can become a strategic business enabler, giving users ultimate flexibility with an enterprise app store that lets them choose what they need, when they need it - apps, desktop or any IT service.

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Desktops as a Service

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 16:00:13 -0500

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Situation Normal, Everything Must Change

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 14:30:38 -0500

In today's computing world, it can often feel like we are drowning in wave after wave of new trends such as mash-ups, service oriented architecture and cloud computing. This sea of concepts is simply the manifestation of an underlying change in IT. Our industry is moving from a product to a service-based economy. This shift is a result of the commoditization of IT. But then again, not all IT is being commoditized - some is still an innovation, isn't it? Simon Wardley will introduce the main concepts behind commoditization and innovation before explaining what is going on in IT. Focusing on the field of cloud computing, he will examine its benefits and downsides before examining how standardization can create more innovation, not less. He will use as an example Canonical’s Ubuntu-Eucalyptus partnership to create open source private clouds that match the interface of Amazon’s EC2.

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Situation Normal, Everything Must Change

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 14:30:48 -0500

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Lunch Session: Overview of CSC's Trusted Cloud Services Program

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 12:45:39 -0500

Ron Knode will outline CSC's corporate Trusted Cloud Services strategy, plans and progress. Yogesh Khanna will highlight a specific direction of that strategy that brings Trusted Cloud Services to the North American Public Sector (NPS) using CSC’s partnership with Terremark.

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Cloud rEvolution: Improving Agility, Cutting Costs and Accelerating Business Innovation

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 11:45:23 -0500

Cloud is a rEvolution: an evolution in technology and a potential revolution in business. In over a year of research, the LEF has examined cloud with an eye towards the enterprise. How do we use the cloud for agility, efficiency and innovation? To get to the heart of this, the LEF examined five research areas: 1) IT foundations of cloud computing; 2) abstraction, a core building block of cloud that provides efficiency and flexibility; 3) the "cloud effect" on IT as products morph to services; 4) the "cloud effect" on business to revolutionize cost structures, time-to-market and innovation; and 5) transitioning to the cloud, as cloud is a matter of when and how, not if. Yale Esrock, Rick Muñoz and Doug Neal, chief researchers for the Cloud rEvolution report series, will provide an overview of their research findings and lead a panel-based discussion with attendees.

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Cloud rEvolution: Improving Agility, Cutting Costs and Accelerating Business Innovation

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 11:45:35 -0500

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Business/IT Co-Evolution - The Role of the Cloud

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 11:00:24 -0500

Once a mere adjunct to the organization, information technology is now increasingly inseparable from the organization it serves. We are used to thinking about the many ways that IT has changed business (e-commerce, e-mail, databases, etc.), but we don’t usually think as much about the ways that business and societal forces - such as advertising, property rights and governments - are shaping the course of information technology. The LEF believes the phrase business/IT co-evolution provides a powerful metaphor with which to describe and anticipate this two-way process of change. Cloud computing will prove to be the single, biggest step in this co-evolutionary process thus far, as - through virtual and variable resources - it increasingly supports a unified model for business/IT agility and change. David Moschella will discuss the importance of business/IT co-evolution, and why we think cloud computing is such an unprecedented and important industry tipping point.

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Business/IT Co-Evolution - The Role of the Cloud

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 11:00:09 -0500

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Technology, Innovation and Cloud Computing

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 09:00:51 -0500

Brian Arthur's new book, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, has recently been stirring much excitement in the technological community. Brian will draw from it to answer a number of questions: How exactly do new technologies arise? What constitutes innovation and how is it achieved? Why are certain regions - such as Silicon Valley - hotbeds of innovation, while others languish? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? Brian will use cloud computing to illustrate many of the key ideas. Cloud is currently redefining the meaning of computing, and Brian will discuss its (r)evolutionary potential to alter business and the economy.

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - Technology, Innovation and Cloud Computing

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 09:00:37 -0500

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - LEF Overview

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 08:30:33 -0500

Bill presents a quick update for attendees on LEF's program portfolio.

Forum - Cloud rEvolution - LEF Overview

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 08:30:39 -0500

Bill presents a quick update for attendees on LEF's program portfolio.

Report - Cloud rEvolution: The Art of Abstraction (Volume 2)

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:00:27 -0400

Abstraction, long used in IT to mask complexity, is an essential ingredient for cloud computing. It's the secret sauce that sets up hardware and software to be delivered as services from the cloud.
Abstraction includes the many variations of virtualization, as well as services and multitenancy. In addition to enabling new combinations of IT components, abstraction helps the enterprise reduce cycle times. With abstraction, we can do in minutes what used to take days or weeks. Further, we can match IT demand to supply far more accurately, doing away with excess IT inventory.

Technology Briefing - Infoglide

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:00:00 -0400

Infoglide Software Corporation has worked with CSC and is one of the leading providers of entity resolution and analytics software for government and commercial industries. Their software assists in finding matches and non-obvious relationships across disparate data sources with no need for cleansing or warehousing. The company's Identity Resolution EngineT (IRE) product connects data sources with a view to understanding possible identity/entity matches and non-obvious relationships across multiple, possibly remote, silos. It analyzes all of the information relating to individuals and/or entities from a wide range of data types, and then applies likelihood and probability scoring to determine which identities are a match and what, if any, non-obvious relationships exist between those identities. This technology sits at the epicenter of Secure Flight - DHS' US airline passenger screening, and includes features such as automated link analysis, cultural names variations, and rules and decisioning built right into the engine.

Technology Briefing - Infoglide

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:00:00 -0400

Grant Briefing - Document and Content Management with Open Source Solutions

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 11:00:00 -0400

Open source technology has evolved dramatically in recent years, becoming a serious option for enterprises that, until now, had relied on commercial software. Open source has matured from promise to reality, not just because of its reliability and good results, but also because in the market it has already been accepted as a robust alternative to commercial software. The rate of acceptance has been particularly important in terms of document management, and now the range of services offered extends from the most traditional, such as storage, archiving or organization to the most innovative, such as those offered in web content management or collaboration environments. Pablo de la Hera focused his grant research on studying the key features of document and content management open source products in terms of benefits, risks, legal issues, regulations, standards, trends and challenges and on how to provide solutions for the current needs in document and content management with these products.

Grant Briefing - Document and Content Management with Open Source Solutions

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 11:00:00 -0400

Report - Cloud rEvolution: Laying the Foundation (Volume 1)

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:00:00 -0400

Cloud computing is taking IT by storm, and with it enterprises across the commercial and government sectors. As cloud computing changes the game in IT and opens up enormous agility and innovation for the business, enterprises are seeking to understand how they can benefit from cloud. According to economist Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute, cloud computing represents a morphing of the digital domain. This morphing is evolutionary from a technology standpoint, and potentially revolutionary for its business impact, as cloud (the latest major phase of IT) infiltrates all aspects of the economy over time. Or as Arthur puts it, "The economy is an expression of its technologies." To better understand cloud's impact in terms of technology and business, the Leading Edge Forum has examined cloud computing in a year-long research effort that culminates with the release of Volume 1 of the Cloud rEvolution report series today on csc.com. Volume 1, Cloud rEvolution: Laying the Foundation, examines the core building blocks of the cloud, focusing on three areas: universal power, universal information and universal access. Armed with a solid understanding of cloud's foundations, enterprises will be better equipped to take advantage of advances in cloud computing, address its current limitations, and cut through the hype and doubt that currently surround cloud. Volume 1 kicks off the four-volume Cloud rEvolution series, which probes the cloud continuum from its foundational technologies to abstracted technologies to the ultimate abstraction: the cloud itself. The series explores IT and business implications, covering technology advances, examples, concerns and practical guidelines. The four-volume series is as follows: Volume 1: Cloud rEvolution: Laying the Foundation Volume 2: Cloud rEvolution: The Art of Abstraction Volume 3: Cloud rEvolution: The Cloud Effect Volume 4: Cloud rEvolution: A Workbook for Cloud Computing in the Enterprise

Chairman's Award Briefing - OASIS

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:00:00 -0400

CSC's OASIS methodology cuts through the complexity and helps an organization define the best total solution to optimize midrange server infrastructure. The four-step methodology delivers a future state roadmap for servers and storage that maximizes efficiency and investment. The OASIS toolset is composed of: OASIS Discovery Engine (ODE) OASIS Analysis Tool Assessment Cost Calculator Deployment Guides Report Templates ODE rapidly scans a client’s environment to generate an inventory which the OASIS Analysis Tool then uses to perform automatically a detailed analysis and assessment. The output of the assessment provides an automated future state roadmap, generates multiple detailed reports and lists potential optimization projects for all servers and storage in the environment. OASIS received the 2009 CSC Chairman's Award for Excellence.

Chairman's Award Briefing - OASIS

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - Eucalyptus

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 11:00:00 -0400

Eucalyptus and the Elastic Utility Computing Architecture is an open source software infrastructure that implements IaaS-style cloud computing. The goal of Eucalyptus is to allow sites with existing clusters and server infrastructure to host a cloud that is interface-compatible with Amazon's AWS and (soon) the Sun Cloud open API. In addition, through its interfaces, Eucalyptus is able to host cloud platform services such as AppScale (an open source implementation of Google's AppEngine), and Hadoop making it possible the "mix and match" different service paradigms and configurations within the cloud. Finally, Eucalyptus is capable of leveraging a heterogeneous collection of virtualization technologies within a single cloud making it possible to incorporate resources that have already been virtualized without modifying their configuration.
This briefing will focus on specific features of the system that are designed to enable rapid development, prototyping, and deployment of local computing clouds, particularly for debugging and/or application development purposes. There will also be discussion around experiences with hosting the Eucalyptus Public Cloud (EPC) as a free public cloud platform for experimental use and the ability to use the EPC in conjunction with commercial web development services that target AWS, such as Rightscale. Finally, the briefing will discuss experiences in building and supporting open source cloud infrastructure and point to potential future directions that could enable greater innovation.

Technology Briefing - Eucalyptus

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 11:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - 3Tera

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:00:00 -0500

Successful online services have millions of users, and serving that many users means scaling applications to hundreds and often thousands of servers. Running that many servers also requires at least as many networking and storage devices, adding to the challenge. For this reason, scaling online applications is an enormously difficult problem. 3Tera has solved this problem by harnessing the power of grid computing. AppLogic is the first grid operating system that runs and scales existing real-world web applications on grids of commodity servers. Partnering with leading hosting providers, this breakthrough technology enables true utility computing for the first time. AppLogic makes it possible to visually assemble existing software directly into portable applications that run on any grid and scale from a fraction of a server to hundreds of servers with a single command. In this session, 3Tera's CTO and founder Peter Nickolov demonstrates a few real-life examples of the benefits delivered by private clouds: - Providing an autonomous datacenter -- self-healing infrastructure that improves SLA while reducing labor cost - Integrating a self-service IT portal for multi-tenant datacenter services with detailed metering for charge-backs and billing - Delivering packaged multi-site disaster recovery for all applications - Enabling SaaS and multi-tenancy through replication.

Technology Briefing - 3Tera

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:00:00 -0500

Grant Briefing - Semantic Business Process Management

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:00:00 -0400

The world of Business Process Management (BPM) is currently gaining significant attention and many BPM tools are already available and in use, including some from SAP. However designing and implementing business processes is still a labor intensive activity simply because the business process information is not available in a machine accessible format. An emerging solution combines the modeling constructs of Semantic Web Services frameworks with BPM to create a new technology: Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM). However the work to date in this area has been mainly confined to academics and research institutions. This grant work utilized years of real-life SAP experience to explore the potential value for business in SBPM, the opportunities it offers to rethink the approach to business system implementations and to look into the future to predict directions in which it could grow whilst assessing its potential for being a disruptive technology.

Grant Briefing - Semantic Business Process Management

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:00:00 -0400

Technology Briefing - 3Leaf

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:00:00 -0400

A traditional server is a self-contained piece of hardware constructed from various modules such as processors, memory, and I/O boards. These basic resources are integral to the server and are available for use only by the server. If the server does not fully use its resources, those resources are wasted. What if, however, the resources within a server could be liberated? What if these basic compute resources could be "extracted" from each server and aggregated together into data center-wide resource pools that could be drawn from as needed? This would simplify management since entire resource pools could be managed instead of large numbers of individual servers. Spikes in demand could be more easily accommodated. And, resource usage would be improved since pool resources could be dynamically allocated to form virtual servers with various characteristics as needed. Servers would no longer be limited to just their internal resources. Virtual servers with very large amounts of memory or processing power could be constructed on-the-fly, and can also grow and shrink totally on demand and without needing a reboot. This type of technology is demonstrated by 3Leaf Systems' Virtual Compute Environment (VCE), which harnesses the resources of many, commodity x86 servers to deliver variable performance levels. Using both ASIC and software technologies, commodity switch fabrics of up to 20 gigabits per second of networking bandwidth per server, and processor interconnects from both AMD and Intel, VCE allows a single guest operating system to span multiple cores and physical servers with shared memory across servers. The result is a flexible computing fabric that can deliver small server or supercomputer performance.

Technology Briefing - 3Leaf

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:00:00 -0400

CoE Briefing - Testing

Thu, 28 May 2009 11:00:00 -0400

The Testing Center of Excellence (CoE) offers Independent Validation and Verification (IVV) services to CSC's customers who want to improve business user / customer satisfaction with application quality and reliability and improve agility of applications to business demands with minimized cost of delivery and ownership. The CoE's third-party IVV services span across verticals and industries - functional testing (including test automation) for custom applications, enterprise validations (SAP, Oracle Apps and PeopleSoft), non-functional testing (performance and compliance), specialized validations (SOA testing, security testing, embedded testing, gaming, etc.) and IVV consulting. Proven client benefits include: - Faster progression towards test automation - Compatibility with off-the-shelf automation tools achieving increased and reliable degree of automation - Minimal dependency on programming language knowledge for scripting - Ease of script maintenance - Increased reusability

CoE Briefing - Testing

Thu, 28 May 2009 11:00:00 -0400

Grant Briefing - Virtualization with Xen

Thu, 14 May 2009 16:00:00 -0400

Xen is a software product used to present a number of virtual machines using only one physical server. This type of technology is called virtualization. From an end-users perspective, each virtual machine is a separate server. Each virtual machine has its own operating system and its own network address. Without the use of virtualization, it has been shown that CPU utilisation for a server is only about 17% on average. Virtualization therefore provides the opportunity to utilise unused capability by consolidating a number of physical servers with low system requirements onto one physical server. Server consolidation provides a number of cost-saving opportunities including a reduction of physical hardware which will reduce purchasing and maintenance costs. Using less hardware also uses less power and reduces demand on data centre cooling systems. Less hardware also uses less real estate.

Grant Briefing - Virtualization with Xen

Thu, 14 May 2009 16:00:00 -0400

Forum - The Business of IT - The Changing Face of Enterprise Computing: Platform Transformations and the Cloud Effect

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:20:59 -0400

The face of enterprise computing is changing as the computing platform evolves along many fronts and to a certain degree "disappears" before our very eyes. As the need for speed pushes silicon to its limits, as virtualization turns computer boxes into bits, as the traditional application platform is redefined, and as the Internet ecosystem matures to support Web access everywhere from any device, the platform is poised for transformational change. Yale Esrock will give a preview of the LEF’s research on platform, the subject of this year's LEF research report, which will be published in the fall. The research focuses on changes to the computing infrastructure and application platform, and the "cloud effect" at these two levels.

Forum - The Business of IT - The Changing Face of Enterprise Computing: Platform Transformations and the Cloud Effect

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:20:13 -0400

Forum - The Business of IT - Cloud Computing - Storm Clouds Looming?

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:30:07 -0400

Cloud computing has sparked more discussion on definitions and taxonomies, more vendor hype, more heated blog debates and more contradictions than any other technology development in recent years. One thing is clear: innovation is occurring at a rapid pace but it will be some time before "cloud computing" reaches maturity. In reality, cloud computing is nothing more than an alternate delivery and acquisition mechanism for IT services, but along with this shift comes a number of unique challenges that threaten adoption rates. IDC (Enterprise panel, August 2008) identifies security as the number one adoption issue that needs to be overcome. Shane Buckley will review the more accepted definitions and taxonomies of cloud computing and discuss in depth the security and risk issues related to the cloud delivery model.

Forum - The Business of IT - Cloud Computing - Storm Clouds Looming?

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:30:06 -0400

Forum - The Business of IT - Bioinformatics and the Future of Biomedical Research and Practice

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:40:52 -0400

The past two decades have seen an astounding advancement in the generation of biological data. In particular, increasingly sophisticated technologies for deciphering the genome of living organisms - such as genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics - are providing access to the language of life. However, the letters of the genome must be turned into words, the words into sentences, and the sentences into instructions that can lead to further advances in human health. To do this, the power of information technology must be harnessed using a variety of tools collectively known as bioinformatics. By developing new techniques for managing the raw data proceeding from various technology platforms, standardizing and collating these various data streams, and integrating the resulting information into existing biomedical practice, the long-sought goal of personalized medicine can finally become a reality. Robert House will examine the current and future state of bioinformatics, which has lessons for all organizations as it turns mountains of data into high-value information powering new opportunities.

Forum - The Business of IT - Bioinformatics and the Future of Biomedical Research and Practice

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:40:23 -0400

Forum - The Business of IT - Introducing Reasonable Computing

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:20:11 -0400

Today's executive is drowning in data. We all are, with no end in sight. There's so much content streaming at us through corporate portals, dashboards, e-mail, instant messaging, social networks, and even voicemail, that we spend most of our time exploring for relevancy and importance. Our constant search for what is important leaves us little time for understanding and taking appropriate action. The very systems we use as a strategic weapon to gain competitive advantage are, in effect, shooting us in the foot. There's simply too much data on our screens.

To address this issue, Mike Wetzer and Thom Theriault will introduce the concept of "Reasonable Computing," a term coined by Malden Labs and defined as the integration of multiple content streams in a highly configurable, actionable, logic-driven and importance based application, expressed within a rich multi-device user interface. Applications based on Reasonable Computing also contain intelligence, immersive and pervasive components that allow for exceptional business awareness and integration, automated alerting and actions, meaningful visualization, and high fidelity collaboration.

Forum - The Business of IT - Introducing Reasonable Computing

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:20:54 -0400

Forum - The Business of IT - Advanced Applications of Modeling and Simulation in Aerospace and Defense: Hew Horizons for Proven Capabilities

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:30:39 -0400

Modeling and simulation (M&S) have long histories of use in the aerospace and defense (A&D) industry. The tools have occupied important roles in the manufacturing sector, covering product development, design, testing, deployment and life cycle management. M&S improves product quality and reduces costs and time-to-market. The capabilities are also vital to the armed forces in command and control, training and performance evaluation. As M&S capabilities advance and user interfaces enable more complex and realistic models, new uses are emerging.

Jeff Miller will review trends in the broader use of M&S tools across the operations and product support realms of A&D product manufacturers. Taking cues from military applications of M&S, he will discuss prospective opportunities to apply M&S to improving the field readiness and performance of A&D products and systems. The IT architectural implications of capturing and using sensor data, field spares management data, logistics visibility data and other operations components will be discussed, along with the implications for key business process performance indicators. M&S contributions to mission assurance through improvements to operations will also be explored.

Forum - The Business of IT - Advanced Applications of Modeling and Simulation in Aerospace and Defense: Hew Horizons for Proven Capabilities

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:30:39 -0400

Forum - The Business of IT - Findings from the LEF Study Tour: The Consumerization of Enterprise IT - Choices and Risks in Moving to the Cloud

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:10:20 -0400

Doug Neal will report on findings from the LEF Executive Programme Study Tour to Silicon Valley, where he and 40 LEF Executive Programme customers visited a dozen companies, from the largest in the business to those just emerging from stealth mode, to discuss The Consumerization of Enterprise IT - Choices and Risks in Moving to the Cloud. We heard them explain their definition and use of the cloud before discussing among ourselves how we saw their story fitting into the bigger map.

Essentially, cloud computing is part of a wave of change that is washing over IT organizations. Components of the wave include the consumerization of IT, the rise of much more tech-smart employees, and a shift in business models from vertical integration to horizontal, networked businesses.

Backed by the massive scale of consumerized offerings, the cloud is a source for new services for enterprises at multiple levels including infrastructure, platform, software application and process. Doug will point out where firms are having success today, as well as where capabilities still need to evolve before enterprises can make full use of the cloud. In developing their roadmap to the cloud, clients will need to keep in mind that for many, the future of their horizontal, networked business is collaboration. And the future of collaboration is in the cloud.

Forum - The Business of IT - Findings from the LEF Study Tour: The Consumerization of Enterprise IT - Choices and Risks in Moving to the Cloud

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:10:07 -0400

Forum - The Business of IT - No Excuses - A Business Process Approach to Managing Operational Risks

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:00:56 -0400

While credit and market risk have recently taken center stage, there is a third type of risk that has been grabbing headlines for years for organizations as diverse as Société Génerale, Comair, TJX, WorldCom, Enron, Exxon, Halliburton, Mattel and others. These headlines have three things in common. First, there are no excuses for events such as these. Second, these events represent losses due to failures of people, processes and/or systems. Third, in the absence of proactive measures, these or similar events will occur in the future and regulators will increasingly get involved.

The risks of events such as these have come to be known as operational risks. The avoidance or mitigation of, and/or the insuring against, such events has come to be known as operational risk management or ORM.

In his recently co-authored book No Excuses, Bob Flast presents an innovative Integrated Operational Risk and Business Process Management Framework. In addition to describing this integrated framework, he will explain how people, processes and particularly systems can be both the sources of business risk as well as the means for mitigating or avoiding these risks.

Forum - The Business of IT - No Excuses - A Business Process Approach to Managing Operational Risks

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:00:58 -0400

Forum - The Business of IT - Dynamic Sourcing: A Step Change in IT Services

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:10:33 -0400

Dynamic Sourcing can deliver a step change in IT services for the business. This new model aligns IT with business needs, keeps pace with change, and maximizes outsourcing value. Dynamic Sourcing offers a new way to model the relationship between IT and the business, and between the IT organization and its service providers. The model helps organizations create agile, collaborative IT service provision environments that foster innovation and deliver growing value to the business over the long term.

Unlike traditional outsourcing models, Dynamic Sourcing has built-in mechanisms to govern the alignment of IT services with business needs and to keep them aligned as the business and technology change. These mechanisms encourage IT service providers to collaborate and innovate, deliver IT that has direct impact on users and the business, and continually improve the price/performance of services. Dynamic Sourcing preserves the strength in service delivery of traditional outsourcing models, within a wider governance and management model that overcomes the inflexibilities and management hassles of older ways. Fundamentally, Dynamic Sourcing enables organizations to outsource the delivery of IT to address business needs, not merely IT needs. Axel Schulte will explore, with the audience, Dynamic Sourcing and how it helps organizations adapt to changing environments.

Forum - The Business of IT - Dynamic Sourcing: A Step Change in IT Services

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:10:44 -0400

Forum - The Business of IT - Process as a Service, Now and Safely: Executing Continuous Business Process Innovation While Retaining Compliance and Control

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:50:28 -0400

Fortis Bank de-merging from Fortis Belgium and re-merging with ABN-AMRO needs to deliver customer value even as these gyrations take place. Citibank needs to innovate its treasury and receivable services while re-organizing. KPN wants to grab as many triple play services as it can, even as its capital expenses and operating expenses get dramatically cut.

Increased pressure for fast business returns while companies merge, reorganize and downsize is being coupled with a maniacal attention to compliance with an ever-growing flow of regulations. The model for IT that governed architectural and operational discussions just six months ago, including traditional requirement specification processes, is plainly unsustainable now.

Organizations need to drive process change, process development and process deployment across any application platform while harnessing any data and application logic. More importantly, business operations people need to be able to design processes and change them directly while IT continues to preserve application access, security and visibility.

Impossible? No. It just cannot be done with traditional applications and traditional integration models. Welcome to the era of Process as a Service.

Forum - The Business of IT - Process as a Service, Now and Safely: Executing Continuous Business Process Innovation While Retaining Compliance and Control

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:50:12 -0400

Forum - The Business of IT - General Motors: Driving Performance in IT Acquisition using CMMI-ACQ and Visualization

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:00:52 -0400

In a world of global sourcing, acquisition competencies and world class requirements development are fast becoming essential strategies for IT leaders to tackle today’s business challenges. Recognizing this, General Motors partnered with industry and government leaders worldwide to create the Capability Maturity Model Integration for Acquisition (CMMIACQ) model. The CMMI-ACQ recognizes that acquiring systems is significantly different than developing systems and provides a maturity framework and best practice model for organizations that acquire systems and technology.

Richard Frost will discuss how GM became an early adopter of the CMMI-ACQ model, using it as a framework to help benchmark the organization and processes as GM moved to a new global model of IT sourcing. Essential competencies highlighted by the CMMI-ACQ include requirements development, collaboration, and communication along with architecture and project management. Leveraging the CMMI-ACQ, GM has implemented global standardized processes and a relentless focus on requirements development using visualization. Since project teams cross organizational boundaries, geographies, and suppliers, it is critical that business solutions are visualized clearly ahead of time. GM has found that giving global stakeholders the ability to fully experience and interact with high fidelity mockups of proposed applications early in the process drives faster consensus and ultimately lower cost of delivery.

Forum - The Business of IT - General Motors: Driving Performance in IT Acquisition using CMMI-ACQ and Visualization

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:00:14 -0400

Forum - The Business of IT - Tapping the Long Tail for Problem Solving at Pfizer

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:40:03 -0400

Chris Anderson's The Long Tail highlights how the scale and economics of the Internet, led by brands like Amazon and iTunes, have forever changed the landscape of retail. Similar analysis of very large data sets, from three years of managed innovation systems at Pfizer and elsewhere, shows that many aspects of innovation (participation, ideation, idea triage, outcomes) also have robust "long tail" or scale-free properties. Rob Spencer will show, by analysis and simulation, what the underlying human behaviors are that generate these long tail observations and thereby put innovation on semi-quantitative footing. He will explore the consequences for your own organizations as they apply to questions of scale, cost, infrastructure, expectations, and behavior.

Forum - The Business of IT - Tapping the Long Tail for Problem Solving at Pfizer

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:40:54 -0400

Forum - The Business of IT - Herding and Hearing Flocks of Brains

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:50:35 -0400

Most people think of innovation only in terms of R&D or new product development - but taking an idea and turning it into cash is an effort in problem solving that involves almost every part of a company. To manage this extremely broad set of interrelated activity as a unified process, CSC has turned to a concept called idea management. If the phrase brings to mind the proverbial company "suggestions box", think again. Idea management, or "ideation," focuses the creativity of employees on critical business problems and increases their participation in solving line-of-business and "big picture," market and revenue-related issues. CSC will describe its approach for eliciting and identifying the best ideas from employees, partners and customers - ideas aligned to well-defined and specific business challenges. Participation from thousands globally - the "long tail" - is both practical and intentional. It takes more than opening a suggestions box. The leading tool and methodology will be demonstrated in conjunction with a case study of an important CSC internal ideation event.

Forum - The Business of IT - Herding and Hearing Flocks of Brains

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:50:22 -0400

Forum - The Business of IT - LEF Overview

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:30:17 -0400

Bill presents a quick update for attendees on LEF's program portfolio.

Forum - The Business of IT - LEF Overview

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:30:39 -0400

Bill presents a quick update for attendees on LEF's program portfolio.

Technology Briefing - Aternity

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:00:00 -0400

Recent industry research found that the average IT organization is losing ground in the effort to proactively manage application performance and end user productivity. Analysts estimate that anywhere between 54% and 74% of end user problems ARE NOT detected by IT. And, over the past 24 months, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has found that 10% MORE problems are reported by end users versus being detected by IT personnel or Application Performance Management (APM) software than they were a year ago. EMA reports that an average company typically has five APM products, yet the #1 problem remains lack of visibility due to not having the "right" tools in place - those that support business optimization, improvements to IT processes, and increased user productivity. The Aternity Frontline Performance Intelligence (FPI) Platform uniquely monitors, aggregates, analyzes and correlates the three components that dynamically interact, define, and constantly impact end user IT experience - in real-time: application performance, real and virtual desktop performance, and end user productivity. Aternity's platform also dramatically reduces business disruptions and increases end user productivity through preemptive problem detection, impacted user isolation, automatic identification of business impact, and probable cause analysis. With Frontline Performance Intelligence culled from enterprise application performance and usage, enterprises gain immediate awareness and can rapidly respond to end user issues before they impact business results. Rapid implementation and integration results in immediate ROI, making Aternity one of the industry’s fastest paths to end user experience management for enterprise applications.

Technology Briefing - Aternity

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:00:00 -0400

Recent industry research found that the average IT organization is losing ground in the effort to proactively manage application performance and end user productivity. Analysts estimate that anywhere between 54% and 74% of end user problems ARE NOT detected by IT. And, over the past 24 months, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has found that 10% MORE problems are reported by end users versus being detected by IT personnel or Application Performance Management (APM) software than they were a year ago. EMA reports that an average company typically has five APM products, yet the #1 problem remains lack of visibility due to not having the "right" tools in place - those that support business optimization, improvements to IT processes, and increased user productivity. The Aternity Frontline Performance Intelligence (FPI) Platform uniquely monitors, aggregates, analyzes and correlates the three components that dynamically interact, define, and constantly impact end user IT experience - in real-time: application performance, real and virtual desktop performance, and end user productivity. Aternity's platform also dramatically reduces business disruptions and increases end user productivity through preemptive problem detection, impacted user isolation, automatic identification of business impact, and probable cause analysis. With Frontline Performance Intelligence culled from enterprise application performance and usage, enterprises gain immediate awareness and can rapidly respond to end user issues before they impact business results. Rapid implementation and integration results in immediate ROI, making Aternity one of the industry’s fastest paths to end user experience management for enterprise applications.

Back in Time - Larry Smarr and Mosaic

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 08:51:07 -0400

In the 1990s CSC hosted several multiclient programs, one of which was CSC Vanguard. In this September 1994 talk at CSC Vanguard, Larry Smarr discusses the power of the newly released Mosaic browser to form global communities on the Internet. At the time, Smarr was the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where Mosaic, the first Web browser, was created and released in 1993. CSC was there from day 1 of the Internet/Web/browser revolution (Smarr originally introduced Mosaic to CSC Vanguard in January 1994).

Grant Briefing - Nanotechnological Applications in Quantum Cryptography

Thu, 2 Apr 2009 09:32:40 -0400

Long-term, quantitative research shows that a quantum network, already available in environments requiring guaranteed security, has been demonstrated in the worldwide, mainstream environment. Quantum networks offer dynamic, provable security for online data transmission through quantum nanotechnologies. Today’s technologies offer point-to-point solutions; tomorrow’s solutions provide dynamic offerings. MIT Technology Review and Newsweek magazine identified quantum cryptography in 2003 as one of the "ten technologies that will change the world." Top companies are expending much effort to prepare for the propagation of a quantum network that’s expected to revolutionize the market (think Cisco, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Siemens, AT&T, Nokia, Nortel Networks, Verizon, Toshiba). Research has found the majority of adults have heard just a little or nothing about nanotechnology. However, a major industry forecasting firm found 2007's nanotechnology goods in the global marketplace totaled $147 billion. Specifically, quantum security solutions are expected to revolutionize online security, with many forecasts predicting exponential growth to reach $200 million within a few years, and long term, $1 billion annually. It is critical that such a low level of awareness be improved in order to stay on top of the economic wave, provide for increasingly sustainable solutions, and provide for the 1.15 billion people of the middle class world market expected by 2030.

Grant Briefing - Nanotechnological Applications in Quantum Cryptography

Thu, 2 Apr 2009 09:32:15 -0400

Technology Briefing - Zepheira

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:21:55 -0400

Some say that SOA is dying, and we're hearing more about Web 2.0 and Enterprise Mash-ups. What most people don't realize is that SOA, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are all components of a broader vision for the future of IT. Business is all about relationships: the relationships between one employee and another, organized into a staff hierarchy, and into departments and business units; the relationships between these departments and the internal resources of the company. And let's not forget the relationships between the company and its customers and partners, either as a whole, or increasingly -- in this age of blogs, wikis, and personalized customer experience -- between individuals within the company and their outside correspondents. Information is the lifeblood of these relationships, and businesses have recently been paying more respect to this fact by focusing on some keenly identified relationships, such as that between IT and the executive (the declared target of SOA), and between specific groups in the form of collaborative tools such as wikis and folksonomies. What's missing from these narrow approaches is the fact that the Web has enabled an overall foundation to support such relationships with a huge amount of flexibility. There is an emerging understanding of how to better build on this foundation using a combination of Web architecture, which provides the flexible IT infrastructure, and Semantic technology, which supports communication and collaboration between people. Applying this understanding is key to not just jumping from hype to hype, but rather building something specific to your needs from the actual substance of these emerging developments.

Technology Briefing - Zepheira

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 11:21:42 -0400

Grant Briefing - Tag-less Tracking Using UWB Radar

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 11:00:00 -0500

There are situations when the need for tracking the movement of humans for safety or security is best done covertly. However, the commercially available technology for such covert tracking is limited. This briefing highlights Rick Tomredle's CSC Grant project, which he undertook to determine if the use of simple, low-cost, commercially available, ultra-wide-band (UWB) ranging radar holds promise as an alternative method to satisfy the need for covert tracking of individuals. He chose UWB due to its unique characteristics of being able to penetrate nonmetallic materials and to resolve range to within 1 foot of accuracy. A test was performed in an open laboratory area using two radars placed at right angles to one another. Data was recorded as the subject moved in a 10-foot diameter circle between the two radars. The recorded data was then processed to reveal a calculated track of movement. The results were analyzed to determine if this approach held merit and what modifications might be considered for improvement. Testing demonstrated that this approach is fundamentally sound. It is capable of effectively tracking the movement of an individual within the parameters of the test environment. The study also found that, although the basic method is affirmed, there are a couple of modifications that should be considered: the use of a Synthetic Aperture Radar approach rather than multilateration and a different antenna design to reduce environmental reflective clutter. It was also discovered that signal processing can be used to obtain finer accuracy than the digitized return data alone.

Grant Briefing - Tag-less Tracking Using UWB Radar

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 11:00:00 -0500

CoE Briefing - Training

Thu, 5 Feb 2009 11:00:00 -0500

For over 25 years, the Training Center of Excellence has been meeting the needs of government and commercial clients to create and sustain human capabilities in the workspace. The center assists organizations in maximizing the abilities of their people by assessing performance requirements and then leveraging leading practice methodologies and technologies to design, develop and implement effective solutions. With more than 200 full-time professionals, the center produces a full range of human performance solutions. At one end of the spectrum, it supports senior executives in developing strategies and solutions that keep their workforces trained and aligned with the goals of their organizations. At the other end, the center develops and integrates the components required to make these strategies work. Additionally, the center produces components of solutions including: learning and knowledge management systems, portals, traditional and Web-based training, expert tools, simulations, and various analysis and modeling products. Center facilities include an audio studio, classrooms, research labs, audiovisual conference rooms, and a Special Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) for classified projects. The center was one of the first ISO 9001:2000 certified custom training product organizations in the world. Its content management system, Utopia 2000, is a Web-based content authoring and conversion system that enables developers and subject matter experts to work together remotely, using only a Web browser, to produce training that conforms to the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) and complies with Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act. The Center’s Collaborative Document Development System provides a consistent, standardized methodology for program document development and review. It is a suite of software and business applications that enables organizations to develop and deliver critical information rapidly using the Collaborative Writing Environment, a Web-based collaborative enterprise application. The center also has a state-of-the-art document conversion facility, providing conversion services for technical manuals, catalogs, administrative documents, training manuals, training courseware, photographs, maps, graphical materials and advertising materials.

CoE Briefing - Training

Thu, 5 Feb 2009 11:00:00 -0500

Technology Briefing - Replicus

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:40:43 -0500

REPLICUS develops software to solve, in a new and revolutionary way, the hard problems in scalable storage management. Storage is critical to our enterprises, with the amount of data growing at 60-100 percent each year. But this growth is also creating a huge storage complexity crisis, which REPLICUS aims to relieve with radically simple products.

REPLICUS has developed a self-managing storage architecture called Adaptive Virtual Storage (AVS), which along with our FileSpace Manager (FSM) client application, virtualizes files out of PC and Mac clients and stores them in local and remote storage cells on the network. These cells automatically collaborate behind the scenes to replicate information to achieve optimum latency and greater levels of availability than any other means known today. And it’s green, REPLICUS has the most effective way yet invented for efficiently and automatically hibernating unused storage and adaptively managing power across the Adaptive Storage Network.

REPLICUS has two complimentary product components in development, the FileSpace Manager (FSM), and Adaptive Virtual Storage (AVS) Cells. The former is the client application, and the latter is the back-end pool of storage units which presents clients with an ultra-reliable storage service.

Technology Briefing - Replicus

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 09:37:39 -0500