WebSphere Application Server is a software product which helps to perform the role of a web application server. WebSphere is a flagship product and a set of Java-based tools by IBM which allows customers to create and manage sophisticated business Web sites. It was originally created by Donald F. Ferguson, who later became CTO of Software for Dell and the first version was launched in 1998.   

While the central WebSphere tool is known as WebSphere Application Server (WAS). WAS is an application server that helps the customer to connect Web site users with Servlets or Java applications. A Servlet is a Java program that runs on the server rather than on the user's application as Java applets do. Servlets are developed to replace the traditional common gateway interface (CGI) scripts. These scripts are usually written in C language, Practical Extraction or Reporting Language to run much faster and to control all other user requests that run in the same process space. 

In addition to Java, WebSphere also supports the open standard interfaces such as Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and Java Database Connectivity — JDBC.  WebSphere is designed to use across different operating system platforms. You have an option of selecting the version suitable for your business purpose, as one edition of WebSphere will be offered for small to medium size businesses and another edition is for larger businesses with a huge number of transactions. It also has a Studio, which is a developer's environment added with additional components which allow creating web pages’ for a website and you can also the web pages accordingly. Both the versions support Solaris, Windows NT, OS/2, OS/390, and AIX operating systems.  

While the WebSphere Studio includes a copy of the Apache Web server; which helps the developers to test Web pages and Java applications at any given time.

What is WebSphere?

The moment you ask this question, the first thing that strikes in your mind is WebSphere is an application server; but in reality, WebSphere is the name of the product in IBM family. IBM has many more products under the brand name WebSphere, here are some of them WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere MQ, WebSphere Message broker, WebSphere process Server, WebSphere business modeler, WebSphere business monitor, WebSphere integration developer, WebSphere partner gateway.  

WebSphere Application Server Architecture

WAS is built using Open standards such as Java EE, XML, and Web Services. WebSphere application is supported on the following platforms; Linux, Windows, AIX, Solaris, IBM i and z/OS. It was started with Version 6.1 and the latest version is Version 8.5. While the open and standard specifications are aligned across all the platforms. Platform utilization is to an extent it takes place, but now it is done below across all open standard specifications line. 

Security

The WebSphere Application Server security model is based on the services provided by the operating system and as per the Java EE security model. WebSphere Application Server provides implementations of user authentication and authorization mechanisms given that support for various user registries:

•    Local operating system user registry

•    LDAP user registry

•    Federated user registry (version 6.1)

•    Custom user registry

The authentication mechanisms supported by WebSphere are

• Lightweight Third Party Authentication (LTPA)

The biggest question roaming around the industry is why one should go permanent rather than temporary? Well, there are many cons and pros defending the question; more to it the people in the room think that they may earn more with permanent positions along with many benefits. In some instances, this may be in another case. You have to look at the amount of work over a whole year and the bigger picture. While this might not always the best thing to jump into.

Taking a good break and moving in the right direction and up the ladder will definitely bring good progress in your career. This is what you see a lot in senior and permanent employees; who actually earn almost as much as they can from their professional and personal experience. More to salary; you will also entitle to have the below-mentioned privileges’ which include:

Here are few pros and cons of Temp Vs Perm

Temporary

Transparency & Flexibility

Most essential reasons most candidates look before they step in any organization is transparency and flexibility. Both of the reasons are cited by many candidates who are looking for Temp positions. The length of the projects they will be put in will give the exact picture about the time frame they will stay in the temporary project; but in addition, there are plenty of options like project contract extensions, holiday’s, flexibility in the working hours and more are attracting the jobseekers to opt for temp positions. Temp work is always a good option for those who want a bit of freedom and flexibility in their role.  

Financial Opening

Temp work is not just about flexibility and transparency, but the financial opportunities for temp workers are high and potentially more compared to the permanent employees; even the employers don’t need to be anxious about sick pay, holidays or pensions, and paying cash free for daily rate while as in permanent positions.    

Diversity & Practice

Many candidates like to opt for temp projects as they have diverse opportunities to go with and they can easily plan their lifestyle along with choosing the right fit role with good exposure.  There are fewer politics to worry about and no need to think about the benefits that come of gaining experience with diverse employers. Here you will have ample of opportunities to pick and work with.

Employer’s Choice

The best reasons that the contract market continues to thrive today is - it’s great for employers too; they have a choice to pick the employee with their required requirements.  With restrictions in their place, the hiring process for full-time is tougher than the temp positions. Filling the requirement for a certain period is manageable by offering good package and benefits.  However, for many employers, the contract can be a good alternative; as contractors often find themselves in high demand.

Permanent

Association & Safety

Today if we see, many employees are looking for these two reasons which are associated with their jobs and provide them the safety they are looking in for. Close association and safety are two essential things for the employees in today’s work atmosphere. Both need to be closely associated with any kind of work you are going with. Most of the employees like to pick permanent jobs for good association and safety. Whether they’re actual or apparent these kinds of benefits are more usually associated with permanent roles than temp positions.

Getting Further

A permanent position is more defined than temp and often offer strong career path than contract roles with clear opportunities towards the advancement within the organization. Moreover, the permanent employees are more likely to make a choice on the rewards of their hard work on a project than temp, who may previously be on their next project when the approvals are handed out.

Secured Pay

While choosing the temp role can add big numbers in your pay and make your financial map high.  However, a guaranteed pay cheque by the end of each month is a huge incentive for permanent employees, along with the benefits that come within – holiday pay, sick pay and any other bonuses the organization might offer.

Know where you like to land

Though flexibility, diversity, financial stability, are great for some employees, but what others are thinking to opt is what we need to prefer to know and where they are based and what are they doing on a daily basis. However, the permanent roles tend to offer to more locked-down employment practice.

What to opt?

While it is impossible to predict whether a temp or perm, obviously, there’s no ultimate answer to this question - the right answer is the one – that right fits for you.

But whichever side you like to choose, we will help you fit in that role as we being the best recruitment partners for many years now.

Digitalization, digital networking, research, network automation, education and educational networks; are all these the buzz words of recent technology and for education institutions?  Why everyone is talking about digitalization and networks, how are these both interconnected; and what is network automation and education networks are what we are going to know on this blog today .

While what the smaller research say about the education networks and individual campus networks; we can say that both stand for the same aim which is implementing education through current network automation strategies and tools. Are these tools, strategies, and significant efficiencies or the network automation wave more hype than these smaller institutions?

Let us look at some of the regional networks, how they are succeeded and what are the challenges involved in this path of deploying various network automation with relatively small and outsourced staff and support. Also discussed will be the experience of working with this diverse technology and how it increased the awareness about the possible proposed value of network automation and how regional’s can assist smaller schools through this network path. 

Digital learning and collaboration have become an essential part of today’s education. From k-12 schools are implementing the methods of digital learning. These blended learning methods and one to one computing programs are reshaping the classroom studies and engaging more students to become tech-savvy’s. The higher educational institutions are announcing BYOD- which means bring your own device concept; students are also allowed to use their smart phones, laptops, tablets and other gadgets to be connected. This helps the institutions to meet the unprecedented demand for connectivity with high performance and to get recognized as highly reliable campus and data network center solution provider.

Challenges:

The hike of latest technologies, mobile devices and growing appetite for applications and rising security concerns are placing new burdens on educational networks. To meet these challenges, schools are expanding their networks to meet student and faculty expectations for high performance, highly reliable, and always-on connectivity.

The school network is always mission-critical, and downtime will be more and un-tolerable when class lectures, research projects, assignments are involved. We can see diversity and richness using these educational applications as learning is increasingly leveraging interactive curricula, collaboration tools, streaming media, and digital media. The success of the Common Core Assessments hugely depends on connectivity. The higher education, universities, and colleges that have poor quality, non-ubiquitous network access, quickly discover that this is affecting their registration/enrollment rates.

The other challenge is with the number of Wi-Fi devices and the types of devices students bring to a university or college campus; Students commonly have three or more devices like; smartphone, tablet, laptop, gaming device, or streaming media player and expect flawless connectivity. While higher education is deploying wireless IP phones for better communications, IP video cameras to develop physical security, and sensors for a more efficient environment. The projections for the Internet of Things, which will connect hundreds of billions of devices in a few short years, are nothing short of staggering.

The trends that educational networks are looking today for students, faculties and administrator expectations is that of for the connectivity which is rising and the complexity and cost of networking are also growing exponentially. In addition to this growth, the “adding on” to networking equipment for old designs is causing the network to become ever more fragile. IT budgets are tight, and technology necessities are growing faster than the funding.

What if schools took a step back and had a unique opportunity to proactively aim their networks to meet the challenges which hit today and tomorrow? What if deploying the network was simple, not a manual, time-consuming chore? What if your initial design and build could scale for years to come, without having to build configurations on the fly every time? What if networks were easier to plan and build, configure and deploy, visualize and monitor—and had automated troubleshooting and broad reporting?

The tools which are of high configurations help the educational networks are Juniper Networks, HP, CODE42, DLT, EKINOPS, Level 3, cloudyCluster, OSI and much more. It’s time to update the educational institutions towards the design, building, and maintaining the network and taking the advantage of automation and modern management tools to create scale, consistency, and efficiency.

Artificial intelligence has been spread over a very large area of computing since the beginning of the computer, but we are getting closer than ever with cognitive computing models. What are these models and why are we talking about it today. 

Cognitive computing comes from a mash-up of cognitive science which is the study of the human brain and how it functions and a touch of computer science and the results will have far-reaching impacts on our private lives, healthcare, business, and more.

What is Cognitive Computing?

The aim of cognitive computing is to replicate human thought processes in a programmed model. It describes technology platforms that broadly speaking, and which are involved in self-learning systems that use data mining, natural language processing, and pattern recognition to mimic the way the human brain works. With the goal to automate the IT systems that are capable of solving the problems without requiring human assistance the Cognitive computing is growing very fast.

Cognitive computing systems use machine learning algorithms; which repeatedly acquire knowledge from the data fed into them by mining data for information. These systems treat the way they look for patterns and as well as the way they process data so they have become competent of anticipating new problems and modeling possible solutions.

Cognitive computing is used in numerous artificial intelligence applications (AI), including expert systems, neural networks, natural language programming, robotics and virtual reality.  While computers are proved the faster machines at calculations and meting out the humans for decades; these machines haven’t been able to accomplish some tasks that humans take for granted as simple, like understanding natural language, or recognizing unique objects in an image. The cognitive computing represents the third era of computing: it from computers that could tabulate sums (the 1900s) to programmable systems (1950s), and now to cognitive systems.

The cognitive systems; most remarkably IBM and IBM +0.55%’s Watson, depend on deep learning algorithms and neural networks to process the information by comparing it to an education set of data.  The more data the systems are exposed to, the more it learns, and the more accurate it becomes over time, and this type of neural network is a complex “tree” of decisions the computer can make to arrive at an answer.

What can cognitive computing do?

As per the recent TED Talk from IBM, Watson could ultimately be applied in a healthcare setting also, this helps the administrative department of healthcare to collate the span of knowledge around conditions, which include the patient history, journal articles, best practices, diagnostic tools, and many more. Through this, you can easily analyze that vast quantity of information, and provide your recommendations as needed.

The next stage is to examine, which will be proceeded by the consulting doctor, who will then be able to look at the evidence and based on the recorded evidence the treatment options will be released based on these large number of factors including the individual patient’s presentation and history. Hopefully, this will lead to making better treatment decisions.

While in other scenarios, when the goal is not to clear and you look to replace the doctor, and the doctor’s capabilities by processing the humongous amount of data available will not be retained by any human and thus providing a summary of potential application will be overdue. This type of process could be done for any field such as including finance, law, and education in which large quantities of complex data will be in need to be processed and analyzed to solve problems.

However, you can also apply these systems in other areas of business like consumer behavior analysis, personal shopping bots, travel agents, tutors, customer support bots, security, and diagnostics.  We see that there are personal digital assistants available nowadays in our personal phones and computers like —Siri and Google GOOGL -0.21% among others, which are not true cognitive systems; and have a pre-programmed set of responses and can only respond to a preset number of requests.  But, as tech is on high volume we will be able to address our phones, our computers, our cars, our smart houses and get a real time in the near future when thoughtful response rather than a pre-programmed one.

The coming future will be more delightful for us as computers will become more like humans and they will also expand our capabilities and knowledge. Just be ready to welcome the coming era when computers can enhance human knowledge and ingenuity in entirely new ways.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has quickly turned out to be one of the most adapted and maybe, most advertised jargons across IT & ITES industry. However, it is completely defensible and is backed up by the numbers. Beyond of its extensive range of benefits, the state of the art of this trend being involved in the IT sector is inevitable.

The IoT of things are not all-purpose devices, such as smartphones and computers, but dedicated objects, such as vending machines, jet engines, connected soap dispensers and many other countless examples.

IoT will have a great impact on the economy and many enterprises will look into transforming their businesses into digital and facilitate their business models by improving efficiency to generate good ROI. It’s a tradition that enterprises always look up for successful trends and for sure Industries are looking at IoT, but the implementation is still premature. Even though there is some immaturity, but there is still some evidence of planned uses across a wide range of industries. We may find an answer from these existing evidence to the question of the hour, what needs to be done to build IoT at the enterprise level. 

Sensors

Objects that contain sensors found useful in all studies, for example, you can fix a sensor to the products in a grocery store and if the item is spoiled it will give you a buzz to replace the item, the cost of purchase and installation of a sensor is relatively cheap and it also reduce the stress on the workforce.

Connectivity

You can always stay connected to your IoT device via your smartphone or through a hub or the device itself contains the Internet connectivity.

Processors

Without a processor there is no computing or a smart device. IoT devices will have capabilities of computing and storing relevant data passed on to it. There is a need to equip these devices with some useful features, so there is a need of advanced processors equipped with these devices.

Energy-efficiency

Think about the high-end business models, where there will a lot of flow of customer and immense pressure on your workforce, you need a device which has the conservative amount of energy, which will not ask you for a battery charger or replacement battery during peak hours.

Cost Effectiveness

The Business goal of IT companies is providing the users with the technology and features that they needed the most. However, there will be a significant cost for maintaining and supporting the user’s technology. IoT is the answer to reducing the signification cost and ensure flawless deliverability in the IT process or project.

Quality Standards

You need to operate your devices under harsh outdoor atmospheric conditions for a long time. There should be proper parameters and quality checks on the (IoT) devices produced by the industries.

Security

Securing your device or network is a critical mission, Devices that are associated with a network through IP’s have immense threats of being hacked/spoofed. Managing ID’s and access, saving the databases are critical to the triumph of the IoT. However, traditional approach and old school techniques cannot cope with the complexity that the IoT needs from the enterprise.  It is the time for Business leaders and technology giants to reconsider their approach towards cyber security, and they should raise the curtains for the new set of security rules.