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How We Look At Cars Today Is Changing How We Make Them

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While the look and feel of our cars has changed, the way we drive them hasn’t.

Early in my career, I remember being at a stoplight, looking over and admiring a sleek, red McLaren next to me.

For a long time, I wanted that car (then I moved to Chicago and an SUV seemed much more practical!). Today, the automobile industry is in a sea change that may make stories like mine hail from another era.

Where once many people (I included) had their eye on vehicles that brought them status, luxury, style or even an amplified expression of self, buyers going forward will be more pragmatic. Will consumers continue to buy cars? Of course. Will automotive manufacturers continue to make cars? Absolutely. The reasons that inform both, however, are changing, in part, due to the global pandemic. Many of us have realigned what is most important to us and changed how we conduct our daily lives. In an article entitled “Building the Automotive Industry of 2030” published by management consulting firm Oliver Wyman, the firm predicts that “in the future, the majority of people will be ‘mobilists’ who simply want to get from point A to B and are not emotionally involved in cars.”

Qualcomm, for example, is answering the needs of the next generation of drivers that will use their car as a connected tool, one that provides a way to get to their destination, and also achieve their work and personal goals through fluid mobility. I predict connectivity in and out of the car will be one of the most important consumer demands for the automotive industry. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wireless Platforms are designed to enhance vehicle connectivity and are engineered to provide secure, intelligent, personalized and safer experiences through its comprehensive platforms to help connect your vehicle to the cloud, each other, and virtually everything around them, all while supporting next-level intelligence for enhanced in-vehicle experiences, new connected car services, higher levels of safety and autonomy.

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As a part of the growing portfolio of Snapdragon Wireless Platforms, the company offers 4G and 5G automotive solutions, which support ultimate performance for in-vehicle experiences, while providing low-latency speeds, lane-level navigation accuracy and integrated C-V2X functionalities, as well as the newly introduced Qualcomm Car-to-Cloud (C2C) services to support new connected services and monetization opportunities. On-demand hardware capabilities include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity services and more to offer auto manufacturers connectivity tools that meet consumer needs and support new business models.

Combining these breakthrough wireless platforms with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon automotive cockpit solutions transforms in-vehicle experiences for both the driver and the passenger, helping support highly intuitive AI experiences for in-car virtual assistance, natural interactions between the vehicle and driver and contextual safety use cases.

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As we see this transformation of the customer experience rapidly unfold, a look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is helpful. We’re seeing a greater emphasis for reliability and safety. These needs are part of life’s more basic needs and are found lower on the hierarchy. Other needs, like self-esteem and self-actualization are felt more fully in times of robust economics and confidence where status becomes more important.

As we celebrate Manufacturing Day, we also celebrate automobile manufacturing as a sector that has and will continue to play a huge role in everyday life. In the aforementioned article, Oliver Wyman states that “Electronic systems – and mobile communications in particular – will enable drivers to spend less time driving while in their cars and more time doing other things.” This more untethered approach to driving and mobility unleashes new possibilities for consumers to focus on more meaningful parts of their lives. Connectivity found in more intelligent driving technology is key.

Now let’s switch to reimagining worker demands. With the new normal, organizations need to build a more resilient and flexible workforce to respond to changing consumer needs. This is an opportunity to innovate! The old way of connecting the workforce needs to be refreshed. Frontline workers safety procedures need to be refreshed and workers’ skills need to be expanded. Always-on and everywhere connectivity is more critical than ever. For example, a mobile app could alert frontline workers about safety procedures and offer compliance training while workers commute to work. I see tremendous value for them to connect people while they are driving, again reinforcing the concept that cars will be a critical tool rather than a trendy symbol of wealth or style (although people will most likely still want that too!).

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All this brings us to a business ecosystem that will rely more heavily on alliances rather than single company solutions.

While players remain the same: customers, makers, innovators. The roles of each are changing. And while the cars may look different and the technology be more advanced, these words by Henry Ford remind us to always look forward rather than the way it’s always been: “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.”

Time to rethink how automobiles will get the next generation of drivers where they want to go.


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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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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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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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