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TECHNOLOGY

Even the Highest Tech Business Operations Require a Human Touch

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Even the Highest Tech Business Operations Require a Human Touch

In a previous article, I wrote from my Opportunity Hour interview with Brad Peterson, CTO/CIO of NASDAQ, we spent time diagnosing what exponential growth means for businesses and organizations.

Not only that, but we also discussed the many ways to unlock exponential growth, or the nonlinear process it takes to obtain that level of accelerated advancement in your industry.

It is safe to assume that most business leaders and C-suite executives want to be positive in their outlook on exponential growth and how to attain it. They look at the opportunities in front of them as always being possible, especially if they are Anticipatory Leaders at Anticipatory Organizations. They assess Hard Trend future certainties providing them a roadmap to those opportunities and an ability to see potential issues.

1677184142 664 Even the Highest Tech Business Operations Require a Human Touch

However, what is more infrequently explored is the reality of the obstacles and constraints that leaders face when reaching for the world of exponential growth. On paper, all problems, obstacles, and constraints may seem easy to overcome; actually doing so separates the strong leaders from the ones that still have room for improvement. 

Growth constraints are dynamic issues, but for today’s blog, I want to explore two main sectors that have common growth constraints all leaders must overcome. Doing so will make pre-solving problems with my Hard Trend Methodology simple and not just theoretically possible.

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Human Constraints – People Are Imperfect, and That’s Okay!

Let’s be honest—human beings can only do so much. They need breaks, whether those breaks are a half-hour lunch, eight hours of sleep, or a two-week vacation to an all-inclusive resort.

You cannot push a human being to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. This is a major constraint for a business or organization. This is especially true if a business or organization is trying to keep up with the rate of exponential change facilitated by the Three Digital Accelerators I have written about.

Even the Highest Tech Business Operations Require a Human Touch

The Three Digital Accelerators of processing or computing power, bandwidth, and storage have been a force in allowing many tasks to quickly become automated by artificially intelligent software, machine learning, edge computing, and more. A company that does not look to these as Hard Trend future certainties and adapt them to help their human workforce will be left trying to outsmart them with agility—a fruitless effort when you consider these machines and software do not need a break.

Anticipating that technology will only continue to improve and advance allows you and your organization to be more productive without working your staff to death. Ultimately, you are saving your organization in doing so, as overworking employees will continue to drive them elsewhere, especially younger generations that are well versed in more disruptive, autonomous technology and working with those applications. 

Technology Constraints – the Limitations of Hardware and Software

From reading that last section, you may be saying to yourself: “Simple! I will just implement autonomous software and put the business or organization into autopilot!”

I hate to burst your bubble, but this is not the answer either.

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Machines and software are made by those imperfect human beings that we just discussed. Software and hardware have constraints just as human beings do. For instance, autonomous machinery that communicates with other autonomous machinery can break down, the software can freeze or glitch out, or worse, they can and likely will get hacked at one point or another.

In these cases of malfunction, I want to reference the human side of technology yet again. Repositioning your staff to be experts in troubleshooting based on both their understanding of the hardware and software itself and their knowledge of the tasks they once performed that those machines now accomplish makes them valuable assets to keep hardware and software running.

Aside from the systematic capabilities of hardware and software, no matter how intelligent they are, their major constraint is that machines do not have the creative critical thinking and sentience that human beings do. Not only does this limit their ability to fix themselves when errors occur, there are many tasks they cannot accomplish by not having sentience.

1677184142 336 Even the Highest Tech Business Operations Require a Human Touch

Refer to an example I brought up during my Opportunity Hour with Brad Peterson: musical instruments. A piano has a constraint—the number of keys on the piano are limited. But when you mix in the human element, there are unlimited ways those keys can be played! Humans think exponentially about how to implement hardware and software, unlocking exponential growth.

Looking Beyond Common Constraints

The bottom line here is that constraints and obstacles of all kinds that stand between you and exponential growth should never inhibit your ability to grow completely. These are solvable issues that you, as a human being with human teammates, can partner with technology to overcome.

It is possible to see glimpses into the future by utilizing the Hard Trends that you cannot change and Soft Trends that you can to your advantage. For instance, knowing that autonomous software is more prevalent than ever, you can play it like a piano, metaphorically speaking. The software does what it is programmed to do, but you can find creative, critically thought-out ways to implement it in your specific industry, at your specific organization, pairing it with the specific skill sets of your teammates.

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Exponential growth cannot be obtained by relying solely on hardware and software, nor can it be achieved by ignoring the reality that these technological advancements are here to stay as a Hard Trend.

First, accept that there are new ways to accomplish old tasks. Then, absorb as much as you can about hardware and software transforming your industry and the world outside of it. Finally, think critically and exponentially about those disruptions and take control of them by leveraging another Hard Trend—the ever-expanding skills of your human workforce.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

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Cloud Computing News

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

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As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.  

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

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Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

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Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

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Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

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TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

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Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

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With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

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Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud

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