RUG 2011: The future of IT – Mobile and in the Cloud !

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Tuesday 8th November 2011, Martyn Phillips opened the UK Revelation User Group 2011 at The Hilton Metropole in London.  It was well attended with users having travelled from within the UK and various countries in Europe.    Presenters on the day were Mike Ruane and Andrew McAuley sharing product updates and roadmaps and their IT visions.  There were some great hands on sessions demonstrating and teaching the newest functionality within the products.

Product Updates

Robbie our Reporter presents an interactive video with some of the product updates. he covers the salient points on:  Banded Report Writer, O4W, Data Encryption at REST, Editor++, Report Builder, Connectors and OI 64 bit.  

Revelation announced that they will no longer support Sierra Bravo Dashboard as they have O4W and they will cease to support WebOIOpenInsight v9.3 is currently in beta testing and Revelation are about to start active development on OpenInsight 10 and are asking for suggestions from their user base.   Any suggestions you have, please email mp@revsoft.com

Cloud and Mobile Computing

Mike Ruane spent one session on talking about the pros and cons of cloud computing.  In his eyes some of the pros and cons are:
Pros:

  • scales nicely
  • low start up costs
  • buzzword compliant.
Cons:
  • not very secure
  • high running costs
  • data integrity not as high as perhaps the Revelation Community are used to.
 Revelation’s approach to the Cloud has been to investigate it and test the various platforms.  So far they have evaluated Memcached, CouchDB and Cassandra.  All of these have a different approach to it.  Revelation have so far concluded that it is early days yet so they will wait before jumping ahead however, they do believe that Cloud computing is the future of IT.
Revelation firmly believe that the future of computing is in the cloud and on mobile devices and backed this up by a host of amazing statistics.  Portable devices including smartphones, tablets and pads are selling tremendously fast.
  • Devices activated so far:   100,000,000
  • Developers worldwide:  450,000
  • Apps in Android market:  200,000
  • Total number of App installs:  4.5 billion
  • Carriers supporting Android:  215

Mike Ruane expressed surprise if anyone in the software world could think that smartphones and mobile devices are unimportant with the statistics mentioned. Mike went on to say that “although Smartphones represent only 13 per cent of the total global handsets in use today, they represent over 78% of global traffic.  In 2010, 3 million tablets were connected to the mobile network, and each tablet generated 5 times more traffic.”  

With this in mind, Revelation are looking for the best way to help their user base embrace this.  So, they are going for the safest bet with the greatest coverage and are placing their bets on jQuery.  jQuery is a cross browser JavaScript library, cross platform and it’s well supported (included by Google and MicroSfoft).  So, 04W is being enhanced and updated to run on these mobile devices.  O4W allows you to use your existing knowledge set ie  ie BASIC as it is powerful and easy to use and you can also empower customers at various levels to do stuff.  

Photos from the day

 


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