Currently on my mind

What an exciting year we have in front of us. My list of top trends of 2014 is based on the buzz across industries where IT is business critical. It’s based on what we, Netlight, are involved within. Netlight is a Genuine Consulting firm, which means we are totally independent, we work and create together for real (to make sure the gathered competence and experience of all consultants are utilized) and we totally focus our work based on the true need of our clients. What we do on a daily basis is totally ruled by the challenges and opportunities of the companies we’re helping. So what we work on is really what is hot currently - and if not we’re doing something wrong. ·          Streaming and VOD (Video On Demand, Music On Demand, Radio On Demand…) ·          Cloud hosting ·          O rganisations and teams – increased productivity ·    ...

I’ve been in both situations, delivering large projects both with and without, and I must say it's a luxury to actually see what is happening under the hood, in real time, that you soon can't live without. Also I must suggest to have a  real time dashboards showing the full picture, ie. both tech and business KPIs in one unified view. I wouldn’t say no to using AppDynamics, Splunk and Qlikview for the job but there are cheaper alternatives (for example  Elastic search/Logstash/Kibana can be used to get full overview of your logs). The cost? Yes, it does cost but it pays back fairly quick in your distributed environment when you have the volumes. Do I need it, you might ask? It depends. How critical is quality? What's the cost of incidents and downtime? Do you want to provide the tools for development to take full responsibility of their code all the way into production?  Follow me on Twitter: mandus_engman