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TECHNOLOGY

How a Germ-Zapping Robot Company Became a 10 Year Overnight Success

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How a Germ-Zapping Robot Company Became a 10 Year Overnight Success

Are you worried your business hasn’t hit the big time yet?

Don’t be, says Morris Miller, former managing director at Rackspace, now the managing partner of Tectonic Ventures. Most of the businesses he’s involved in have become overnight successes, only after being in business for 10 years. 

Morris is also the CEO of Xenex Disinfection Services, a business he was drawn to because the original founders were mission driven to not just change lives, but save thousands of lives by stopping the spread of pathogens within healthcare facilities. 

How? Because Xenex makes UV germ-zapping robots that are 22X better at destroying superbugs than the standard hospital cleaning routine of cleaning, mopping, and bleaching alone. 

So, if you’re concerned that your business isn’t a success yet, don’t miss Morris share the two pillars that contribute to overnight success: listening to customers and the talent density you amass.

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How a Germ Zapping Robot Company Became a 10 Year Overnight Success with Morris Miller

Morris Miller is CEO of Xenex Disinfection Services, the world leader in the manufacture of Germ-Zapping Robots. Robots which are used in almost 1000 hospitals around the world to wipe out pathogens on surfaces.

Morris is also a co-founder of Tectonic Ventures, a VC firm formed in 2016 to invest in and advise founders, established technology companies and B2B startups.

“Not only do we invest in them, but as you and I’ve done for many years, we coach them, work with them, and really try to lead them to be the greatest success that they can be.”

But back to the Germ-Zapping Robots. 

Germ-Zapping Robots – Lightstrike 6

Under Morris’s leadership, Xenex has become a world leader in automated room disinfection. Through the use of patented pulsed xenon technology and innovative hospital disinfection protocols, the company has helped hospitals, which previously struggled to effectively disinfect against pathogens, achieve significant success within their facilities. 

“We’ve been willing to go to hospitals and talk to them about what their goals are. And we have guaranteed them that they will meet their goals. And if we don’t, we won’t even send them a bill. So we’re willing to put these $100,000 robots into the hospitals without any remuneration, until the hospital achieves its goals. Literally every time we’ve worked out a deal with the hospitals, we have helped the hospital achieve their goal, and therefore we get paid.”

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What people don’t know, says Morris, is that most hospitals are still reliant primarily on bleach, ammonia, and other chemicals to clean and disinfect, and that these methods are not very effective at removing pathogens aka superbugs like C.diff and MRSA. 

“There are no antibiotics to fight [superbugs]. And that’s the real issue; we’re running out of antibiotics to fight these infections that people are getting. These dangerous pathogens need to be removed from the environment. ’

What Xenex realised was that most UV device manufacturers were using mercury light bulbs to kill the pathogens. But by using a Xenon lamp, instead of putting out a single wavelength of low intensity light, they pulsed a high power beam that covered the entire germicidal spectrum of UVC light. And the Xenex robot was 4300X more intense. 

“The analogy that I make is that everybody’s seen children, two or three years old, driving around in little toy cars. And imagine that car crashing into the side of your garage, and just bouncing off. It would be very funny and wouldn’t do any damage to your garage. If you take something that’s 4300 times more intense. That would be like loading an 18 Wheeler and crashing it into your garage at 120 miles an hour, which would completely wipe out your house. And that’s the difference in what we do to pathogens versus the old way of making UV light.”

Xenon vs Manual Housekeeping

That’s not to say that there is no place for traditional manual housekeeping in hospitals, says Morris, far from it. You still need housekeeping to get rid of visible dirt and grime, but you need robots to reduce pathogens. 

“There are 10 or 11 things that go into disinfecting an environment. So it’s hand hygiene, it’s antibiotic stewardship, making sure you’re not overusing antibiotics. So I’m not here to say that this is the only thing you need to do, you need to continue to do all of your other processes properly. And then it just turns out, this is the icing on the cake. It brings it all together and gets the result the hospitals have so desperately wanted.”

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Mission Driven Businesses

So why did Morris choose to co-found this particular company? Because he’s drawn to mission driven businesses. 

“2 million people a year go into the hospital to get well. And instead, they come out with an infection, and 100,000 of them die. ” 

In their 10 years, they’ve carried out almost 32 million room disinfection cycles.

“More people die from [Superbugs} than breast cancer, AIDS and auto accidents combined. It’s a huge problem. But the hospital systems, God bless them, they never really wanted to talk about it because they couldn’t do anything about it, because they were using everything they had, which was chemistry.”

10 Years to Become an Overnight Success

The problem with most entrepreneurs is that they don’t see the stress and hard work behind building a business. They think that things are supposed to happen fast: you get started, you build a business and it just happens. They don’t realise the hard graft that goes into creating a great business. 

“It takes 10 years to become an overnight success. And clearly, we had become the worldwide market leader. And then when COVID hit, that just blew every projection we had through the roof because people wanted to buy the robot with the best efficacy.”

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But what are the fundamental pillars of building an overnight successful business? What are the essentials that businesses need to put in place, the foundations they need to get right?

“First of all, you have to be in touch with your customers. And you have to be willing to get on the phone with customers and listen to customers… We’ve now released our sixth version of a robot in just over 10 years. There isn’t usually that kind of innovation in healthcare, and the product development team, they just keep listening to the customer and incorporating more and more things.”

Hiring the Right People

But it’s not just listening to customers that helps a business grow. Morris says it’s essential to hire the right people too. When he hires people he gets them to share what they were like in high school, because he says, that’s when your work ethic is formed and solidified. He also says most people feel threatened by a reference check, but it shouldn’t be a threat, he simply wants to know who his employees worked for and what their previous employers would say about them and why. 

He also believes that employers have a tendency to overlook hiring passionate people: 

“You can feel when somebody has passion, both for life and for their job and for solving problems, and serving customers. You’re really digging to find people who want to do a good job for other people, and who take pride in a job well done. And not everybody is driven that way.”


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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

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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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