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TECHNOLOGY

Why data democratisation is a gamechanger for business

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A love heart depicted as data with a series of 0s and 1s.

Every day, technology is advancing. It’s removing barriers to success, allowing the broader adoption of applications that were once too sophisticated for the everyday person. It’s placing the power of AI (artificial intelligence) into more hands, inching us increasingly closer to solving some of the world’s most pressing issues. At its core, technological advancements are fundamentally an act of democratisation, making specialised tasks and capabilities simpler, more affordable, and more accessible to all.

By and large, this is exactly what should be happening in the world of data and analytics. The promise of BI (business intelligence), after all, was to enable everyone to make smarter, data-driven decisions. However, this promise has yet to be fully realised.

Even though self-service analytics has placed reporting tools in the hands of business users, companies continue to rely heavily on specialists to interpret and contextualise charts and dashboards – and in many cases, to build them.

The true act of democratising data analytics – to seamlessly deliver insights from data into the hands of all – is well within reach. There have been incredible advancements in automation and AI (artificial intelligence) that have generated real-life examples of what people are capable of when they have the power of data in their own hands.

Driving better healthcare outcomes with data

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Imagine a more intelligent healthcare industry where doctors become data scientists, patient treatment is personalised, caregivers truly care, and patients are more than satisfied with their care. With analytics, this new era of health care is well within reach, with some innovative industry players already taking the lead.

The medical-tech company Ava, for instance, uses AI and IoT (internet of things) to help women become pregnant without intrusive techniques or treatments. Through its work in personalising medical care for women, Ava has helped 30,000 babies come into the world. We are literally seeing new life right in front of us, due to creative uses of analytics.

Another company making improvements in health care is Res Consortium, a management consulting organisation that’s helping to bolster the performance of healthcare providers in the UK. The company is using infused (embedded) analytics in its software to inspire behavioural improvements and help the healthcare system be more efficient with budget and patient care.

GeriMedica, a multi-disciplinary electronic medical record (EMR) company in The Netherlands that services the elderly care market, rolled out analytics not only to aid the billing and finance departments, but to help its practitioners improve the quality of care.

The staggering volume of data that the healthcare industry creates presents a huge opportunity for analytics to find patterns and actionable insights, which can improve the lives of patients. As datasets grow and analytical questions become more challenging, healthcare teams will increasingly rely on the analytics embedded within their EMR systems and other software.

However, just serving up insights won’t be enough. As analytics become more mainstream, users will want the power to dig into data themselves, perform ad hoc analyses, and design their own dashboards. With the right tools and training, even frontline users like doctors and nurses can be empowered to become builders, creating their own dashboards to answer the questions that matter most to them.

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Empowering insights for faster, smarter decision-making

If democratising data analytics provides so many benefits as demonstrated in the healthcare industry, then why aren’t other companies and industries following suit? The answer is simple. Doing so requires a fundamental evolution in how analytics is approached in the first place.

Most companies today ask their knowledge workers to make data-driven decisions by first learning additional tools. These tools come in the form of standalone dashboards and self-service analytics apps, which despite improving on the days of submitting data requests to IT, still require training, upskilling, and sometimes enrolling in certification courses. Not only is this often ineffective, but it also takes too much time; time that knowledge workers don’t have to begin with.

To truly democratise data analytics, knowledge workers must be empowered to make data-driven decisions without learning an entirely new discipline. The ideal scenario would be to have actionable insights extracted from data and then infused into workers’ existing workflows, apps, and devices, providing a natural flow to their decision making.

Imagine a CRM that crunches data to automatically suggest which accounts to contact, a customer service platform that proactively identifies accounts likely to churn, or a retail app that detects shifts in purchasing trends and recommends changes in inventory.

All of these examples empower knowledge workers to make smarter decisions faster. They no longer need to stop what they’re doing and dig through separate dashboards for insights. In short, insights from data are presented directly to them – not the other way around.

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Driving innovation with analytics

It’s understandable that many people wonder if analytics will turn the population into optimisation robots who are controlled by the data. But the truth is precisely the opposite. Like other technologies, when analytics and insights from data are placed into the hands of all, everyone benefits. In fact, people have already begun using analytics in creative new ways like inventing entirely new products and services.

According to Deloitte, 44% of UK executives say AI is helping them to widen their lead or leapfrog ahead of their competitors by automating tasks and driving better business decisions into the future. Even more, recent reports indicate that 70% of businesses will be using AI, and the majority (95%) of customer interactions will use some form of AI-related functionality by 2030.

Look at the UK’s pioneering recipe-box company Gousto, for example. This company is providing households with convenient and easy-to-cook recipes to the tune of eight-million meals monthly, while reducing food waste. Independent builders merchant Huws Gray is a one-stop-shop for its customers, providing everything from below-ground drainage products to roofing materials. And Disciple, an industry leader in SaaS solutions for the creator economy, is helping its digital creators build unique and targeted app-based communities around their content outside of mainstream social media channels. Each of these companies provides a product and/or service made possible by powerful analytics made invisible to the everyday person.

This is what’s possible when data analytics is democratised. These achievements didn’t come to light because of specialist reporting teams in IT or self-service BI tools delivered to business users. No, they came to fruition because everyday people have insights at their fingertips, enabling them to make smarter decisions.

The future of analytics is now. It’s up to the most innovative companies to keep pushing forward and putting insights into the hands of everyone in a way that makes sense to them. In doing so, everyone will benefit in ways unimaginable.

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Tags: data democratisation


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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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