mobile Archives • TxMQ Solutions

DataPower Firmware V7.2 Upgrade Details (More Cloud!)

Posted on June 24, 2015 | by admin

One of the coolest things about IBM DataPower is how it provides a single security and integration gateway solution using a simple, policy-driven interface. And it’s ultra-flexible, so it’s easily deployed to multiple cloud environments. And that’s really the trick, isn’t it? The need to deploy across today’s growing mix of public, private and hybrid cloud mixes. It’s not as easy as it seems.
The good news is that the newest DataPower Gateway Firmware V7.2 upgrade extends multiple-cloud support with enhanced security and integration capabilities for mobile, API and web workloads. Want to run DataPower to gate Amazon Web Services? Great, this firmware update is definitely for you.
Cloud environments like Amazon AWS and IBM SoftLayer are hosting environments that allow a business to deploy an optimal set of supported infrastructure resources. Using DataPower, businesses can then quickly build gateway solutions and rely upon the cloud provider to maintain the underlying infrastructure. The result is an overall lower cost to deploy and secure workloads (especially mobile workloads), plus additional flexibility for faster responses to market trends and business opportunities.
The DataPower Firmware V7.2 enables this type of process improvement through several key upgrades:

Use GatewayScript to easily integrate Systems of Record with Systems of Engagement
Deploy IBM DataPower Gateways on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and IBM SoftLayer CCI
Enhanced hybrid cloud integration: Use the Secure Gateway service to securely connect between IBM Bluemix applications and on-premise services secured by DataPower Gateways
Enhanced message-level security for mobile, API and web workloads with JSON web encryption for message confidentiality, JSON Signature for message integrity, plus JSON Web Token and JSON Web Key
Protect mission-critical applications with enhanced TLS protocol using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)
Build automation, deployment and migration scripts more quickly using the new Representational State Transfer (REST)-based management API
Enjoy the increased high availability with enhanced load-balancer group healthchecks
Support for IMS Commit mode 0 for more flexible integration with systems of record.
IBM WebSphereeXtreme Scale 8.6+ support for distributed caching

TxMQ specializes in DataPower upgrades and services. Need some quick advice about deploying this firmware upgrade into production? Want to decouple from core IT and speed your time to market? Want to integrate your systems of record with your new systems of engagement? That’s what we do. Let’s start a conversation today: Click the chat icon below, or email our president chuck@txmq.com.
(Image from Paul)

Mobile Data: What It Means To 'Engage Customers In Context'

Posted on September 28, 2014 | by admin

Here’s a stat to get you thinking:
Only 21% of marketers actively use mobile, but 81% of mobile leaders say that mobile fundamentally changed their businesses
Bottom line: If your business touches the public, and you’re not using mobile, then your business is immobile.
The world of mobile-data analytics and marketing is undergoing a revolution. It’s driving new revenue and forging new connections to the public. And it allows businesses to engage customers in context.
What does it mean to engage customers in context? In the simplest terms, it means the ability to serve customers content and experiences that they want within certain surroundings or as events or experiences unfold.
Wimbledon’s a great example. Only a few hundred thousand people can attend the event. And television coverage is often limited to choice matches at inconvenient viewing times. IBM developed the Wimbledon app and crunched streaming analytics and big data to deliver real-time info on every point in every match on every one of Wimbledon’s 19 courts.
The data involved 101,778 tennis points across 660 matches, corresponding to 852,752 data points. A team of 48 statisticians – all of them high-quality tennis players – provided contextual data (like speed of the serve) to enrich the machine-collected data. All data was combined with historical performance data and live data from the web and social networks, then fed into an advanced set of analytical tools to provide real-time insight to sports analysts, TV presenters and the global audience.
Impressive? Absolutely. But the same tools can be employed within any business that engages customers. Instead of data about serves and historical matches and points totals, businesses can directly engage customers in the act of shopping, or searching, or traveling, or vacationing with information that incorporates social-media activity, preferred brands, coupons, recent purchases, weather forecasts and so on. Businesses that provide value, or important information, or community – in other words, businesses that engage their customers in context – realize a much greater ROI on their marketing spends.
That’s what is means to engage customers in context, and that’s why it’s so important.
It’s not automatic though. Efforts to engage in context take foresight, solid application integration and a business climate ready to embrace change within the new mobile landscape.
Interested in mobile development, deployment or integration? TxMQ can help. Initial consultations are free and communications are always confidential. Contact vice president Miles Roty for more information: (716) 636-0070 x228, miles@txmq.com.

IBM's SoftLayer and MobileFirst Portfolios Create Leadership Position In Latest Gartner Magic Quadrant Report

Posted on September 28, 2014 | by admin

Gartner recently recognized IBM as a leader in its 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Managed Mobility Services (MMS). The distinction is noteworthy for several reasons.
First is the scale of the report. Gartner evaluated 14 vendors, and among them, IBM was the only leader based on what Gartner described as “completeness of vision” and “ability to execute.” To distill it a bit more, IBM’s suite of services, including SoftLayer cloud services, delivers a top-to-bottom mobile support and integration solution – very important for shops that don’t want the hassle of mix-and-match technology and platforms.
IBM’s mobility services fall within its IBM MobileFirst portfolio – an enterprise initiative that is the first product of the recently announced partnership between Apple and IBM. MobileFirst enables clients to build and deploy mobile applications, and at the same time protect and manage the mobile infrastructure and engage customers in context. Think of it as a ground-up mobile approach – not a simple “desktop migration.”
Even though IBM continues to invest in its mobile-support and enablement portfolio, the Gartner report clearly shows the importance of a growing Soft Layer investment combined with the MobileFirst focus. That strategy continues to be strengthened with further acquisitions including the purchase of Fiberlink, which specializes in mobile-device management and security.
Interested in a new way to develop and manage mobile? TxMQ is an IBM Premier Partner with capabilities across IBM’s mobile platforms. Contact vice president Miles Roty for more information: (716) 636-0070 x228, miles@txmq.com.
(Photo by Michael Coghlan under Creative Commons license.)

IBM Worklight V6.0, IBM Mobile Applications Platform Pattern V6.0, and IBM Mobile Foundation V6.0

Posted on June 26, 2013 | by admin

IBM® Worklight® and IBM Mobile Foundation are open standards-based mobile application foundations, which enable accelerated delivery of innovative mobile solutions. As elements of IBM MobileFirst, they help you build rich, cross-platform applications using standard technology, and connect mobile applications to a variety of enterprise back-end systems and cloud systems.
IBM Worklight V6.0 delivers an open, comprehensive, and advanced mobile application platform for smartphones and tablets, offering:

Mobile application development and delivery
Complete end-to-end mobile device management
Advanced connectivity to back-end systems and cloud-based services that is optimized for mobile devices
Advanced application management for updates push and version control

IBM Mobile Foundation V6.0 is a member of the IBM MobileFirst family of products that include IBM Worklight V6.0, IBM Mobile Application Platform pattern V6.0, IBM EndPoint Manager for mobile device management, and IBM WebSphere® Cast Iron® for connectivity. Together, these products help organizations of all iszes extend their business by providing copabilities to efficiently implement, connect, secure, and mangage HTML5, hybrid and native mobile applications.
IBM Worklight helps you by:

Using standard technology, such as HTML5, the native client platform software development kits (SDKs), and integration with the growing ecosystem of third-party tools, libraries, and frameworks
Connecting mobile applications to back-end systems and cloud services through mobile-optimized middleware
Enabling you to manage a portfolio of applications and the lifecycle of their content from one centralized administration console
Helping you secure mobile applications through numerous protection mechanisms, such as encrypted storage, online and offline authentication

Enhancements in IBM Worklight V6.0 Include:

Automated functional testing for accelerated delivery cycles of native and hybrid, cross-platform mobile applications
New advanced IT analytics for application usage insight, triggering of actions based on analytics events, and location-based services such as geo-fencing
Improved application development and testing abilities to record and run tests of mobile applications on devices and emulators
Expanded mobile operating system support, including support for new levels of iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows 8 and RT, and Windows Phone 8 in addition to third-party software support updates for JQuery Mobile and Dojo Mobile
Easier, more guided, hybrid application development, with tools and building blocks such as improved Dojo Mobile setup and screen templates
Improved application startup performance

IBM Worklight V6.0
IBM Worklight is designed to provide an open mobile application platform for developing, deploying, and managing mobile applications on an open extensible platform. Enterprises can deliver mobile content that takes advantage of existing enterprise security, scalability, management solutions, and service-oriented architecture (SOA) service investments.
Worklight is based on open standards, which may help you protect your mobile investment, reduce development costs, and avoid technology lock-ins. Worklight delivers a range of application development and management capabilities to support a wide variety of mobile devices and mobile application types, while taking advantage of existing technologies, skills, and investments.
IBM Worklight V6.0 provides five main capabilities:

A comprehensive, cross-platform, standards-based extensible environment that maximizes code reuse and per-device optimization.
Includes a rich, drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG development environment
Helps to simplify the development of mobile web, hybrid, and native applications across multiple mobile platforms, including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows, Windows RT, and Windows Phone

Mobile-optimized middleware that provides a services layer to support back-end integration, version management, security, and unified push notification mechanisms.
Supports Mobile Application Management (MAM) and mobile authenticity check, mobile usage statistics, and reports
Facilitates authentication framework integration for single sing-on (SSO)

Extensible libraries and client API’s that expose and interface with native device capabilities, such as the camera, accelerometer, and contact lists, using standard web skills.
Provide on-device, synchronized, and encrypted storage facilities for storing sensitive data on the device

Administrators can remotely disable applications based on predetermined rules of application version and mobile device
Directs users to a new version of the application, if necessary
Can deploy new versions of an application’s web code and automatically push the versions to users
Administrators can monitor the push notification framework and enable or disable notifications to specific applications
Administrators can access reports describing application adoption and usage, or integrate with the enterprise business intelligence (BI) system to perform custom analytics on mobile usage data

Can function as an enterprise application store by providing a place to deploy mobile applications across platforms with appropriate access control and role based security
If you want to deploy mobile applications to the IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices, the process of moving mobile applications from development with IBM Worklight to production deployment with IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices is simplified

The following products integrate well with IBM Worklight and IBM Mobile Foundation solutions to deliver unified front-end and back-end mobile development:

Rational® IDE V8.5.1 products
- Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software
- Rational Software Architect for WebSphere Software
- Rational Developer for System z
- Rational Developer for Power® System Software

The following products provide specific support for IBM Worklight and IBM Mobile Foundation, and provide a more robust solution:

IBM Mobile Development Lifecycle Solution
- Rational Requirements Composer
- Rational Team Concert
- Rational Quality Manager
- IBM Worklight
- IBM WebSphere Portal

Prerequisites are mobile operating systems that include iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows RT, and Windows Phone and IBM PureApplication™ System V1.0 for IBM Mobile Application Platform Pattern. In addition to this, the program will run on AIX®, Linux™, Mac OS, and Windows operating systems.
The planned available date for the media packs is July 19, 2013 and the electronic delivery packages have been available since June 14, 2013.
IBM Worklight V6.0, together with the additional products from IBM’s MobileFirst initiative, enables you to address the entire lifecycle of your mobile initiative.
For more information on Worklight V6.0 or TxMQ IT Solutions and Staffing please contact Miles Roty, Senior Account Manager? Miles@txmq.com 716-636-0070 ext 228

IBM® MessageSight: The appliance for Mobile Messaging and M2M

Posted on June 14, 2013 | by admin

On April 23, 2013 IBM® announced MessageSight that delivers massive scale communication within and beyond the enterprise.
As many people have come to realize, the Internet is no longer just for web browsing. Consumers and application owners expect near, real-time interactions between mobile phones, sensors, machines and applications.
IBM MessageSight is a messaging platform that delivers the performance, scalability, and value organizations required to meet the demands of the hyper-connected world. IBM MessageSight allows organizations to expand their applications beyond the data to provide a truly interactive experience.

IBM MessageSight delivers:

High-performance, reliable and scalable messaging
Security
Simple deployment
Extension of existing enterprise messaging
Developer friendly design

With IBM MessageSight you can sit at the edge of your enterprise and can extend your existing messaging infrastructure or use MessageSight as a standalone.

IBM MessageSight allows organizations to implement a variety of use cases:

Connected vehicles
Event-driven sensor networks
Interactive mobile applications including notifications
WebSocket HTML5-based web applications
Near, real-time date collection for Big Data analytics
Scalable alerting and notification systems
High-scale asynchronous publish and subscribe for service-oriented architectures

IBM MessageSight Features:

One appliance can handle:

1M Concurrent Connection

13M non-persistent msg/sec

400K persistent msg/sec
Predictable latency in the microseconds under load

MessageSight has efficient MQTT messaging protocol that is faster, requires less bandwidth and less battery than traditional https. In addition to this, it’s event oriented paradigm allows for better customer experience. It has support for JavaScript, C and Java APIs and apps can be HTML5 web apps, native or hybrid. MessageSight also integrates easily with IBM Worklight.

Hardened appliance form factor ensure that there is secure firmware (signed and encrypted by IBM) and no user-visible, general purpose OS. There are also fine-grained messaging policies with SSL/TLS (including FIPS 140-2), authentication and deny-based access control. MessageSight is highly available (without shared resources) and there are various options for Quality of Service including Assured delivery.

Simple yet powerful API’s consistent across multiple platforms

Simple paradigm: connect, subscribe, publish
Promotes loosely coupled and scalable applications

Protocols:

Active development community on developer Works
Could-based demo systems for rapid prototyping

MessageSight is compatible with a variety of environments such as; JMS support for Java Standard Edition (JSE) environments, WebSockets support for Rich Internet Applications and MQTT protocol with many open source clients. There is built-in connectivity with WebSphere MQ and one appliance can connect to multiple WebSphere MQ queue managers. Lastly there is IBM Integration Bus support through the JMS nodes.

MessageSight’s goal is to be up and running within 30 minutes. They use task oriented UI guides to administrate through the first steps and implement simple and scalable management through policies.

Implementing the IBM MessageSight allows your business to scale to the demands of the mobile and m2m use cases. It easily extends your existing messaging infrastructure across the Internet and it is easy to develop applications with simple programming interfaces.
IBM MessageSight is the best way to implement the event driven architecture at the edge of the network. It delivers unprecedented level of scale, it is secrue and reliable and yet remains simple to use.

High-level architecture of the demo:

The all-new IBM MessageSight appliance is a secure, easy-to-deploy messaging server that is optimized to address the massive scale requirements of the machine to machine and mobile use cases. It can handle a million connections, and millions of messages per second. MessageSight is designed to sit at the edge of the enterprise and can extend your existing messaging infrastructure or be used as a standalone. MessageSight extends and complements the existing IBM Connectivity and Integration portfolio.

Appliance Connectivity:

For more information on MessageSight or TxMQ IT Solutions and Staffing please contact Miles Roty, Senior Account Manager
Miles@txmq.com 716-636-0070 ext 228