TECHNOLOGY

Achieve Optimum Office Productivity by Investing in These Technologies

Published

2 years ago

September 16, 2022

Achieve Optimum Office Productivity by Investing in These Technologies

If you’re a CEO and you haven’t yet considered implementing AI technology in your office, then you’re missing out.

Nearly 56% of CEOs say that their businesses have already implemented AI to some extent, and 86% report that AI is considered mainstream technology in their office as of 2021.

If you have a business, you know that a tech-savvy office can enhance the mindset of your employees and make them feel more productive. You also know that AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) can help you save money on electricity and bring down your carbon footprint.

Knowing these things and yet feeling confused about where to invest your bucks?

You’re not alone. That’s why we’re here to help. We’ve compiled a list of 5 ways AI is helping businesses around the world save money, increase productivity, and reduce their carbon footprint:

Smart Lighting

Smart lighting is a way to turn your office smarter. It can be used to automate lights based on the time of day, weather conditions, employee and visitor locations, or even intruders.

This means that when employees arrive in the morning, they will have their office lights turned on automatically by the system. Similarly, when employees leave at night, the system will automatically turn those same lights off again.

The same goes for visitors who are granted access to your office space: if they arrive while it’s still dark outside, but you have set up your smart lighting system beforehand, then all they need do is get out of their car and walk into your building through an entrance door where they will find themselves greeted by fully lit hallways and offices ready for business!

Virtual Receptionist

A virtual receptionist works alongside your current business management system and CRM platform. It captures visitor information with visitor management systems, integrates with your communication channels and streamlines the visitor check-in process, and analyzes data.

Precisely, investing in the right virtual receptionist could help you automatically –

Voice Recognition

Voice recognition is a great tool that can be used to control devices, search for information, and even answer the phone. It can also be helpful in dictating documents or controlling the lights and temperature in an office. Perhaps that is why 43% of people use digital voice assistants.

Some more examples of using voice recognition include:

Virtual Meeting Platforms

Virtual meetings are becoming increasingly popular. They are more convenient for employees, reduce travel costs, and decrease the company’s carbon footprint. Virtual meetings also increase productivity and can be recorded and shared with other employees. But for this purpose, having software and a platform to host the meetings remotely is essential.

A virtual meeting is a meeting that takes place through the use of audio, video, or any other type of electronic communication medium instead of in person. This can include web-based applications or software like Skype or Zoom.

Virtual meetings are becoming more popular every day because they help save time and money. Employees no longer need to travel long distances to attend meetings in person, which reduces travel expenses as well as carbon emissions from all those vehicles on the road!

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including applications, storage, and processing—over the internet. Rather than maintaining computer servers in a local location, cloud computing services are delivered over the internet. Cloud computing allows users to access applications and data from any device with internet connectivity.

The following are some benefits of cloud computing:

Cost Efficiency – Cloud computing eliminates the need for IT department staff to manage hardware and software, leading to lower operational costs. In addition, it helps companies save money by eliminating costly upgrades and maintenance fees associated with servers that can become outdated quickly.

Flexibility – Cloud computing offers improved flexibility for businesses because it allows them to scale up or down as needed without making major investments in additional hardware or software. This enables businesses to respond quickly when markets change, or new opportunities arise.

Security – Cloud computing provides security at all levels, including physical infrastructure security (e.g., data centers), network security (e.g., firewalls), application security (e.g., encryption), user authentication/access control (e.g., two-factor authentication), etc.

Conclusion

Now that you know the essential office technologies to invest in, you can start thinking about which ones are right for your business. If you’re still not sure where to start, we recommend starting with a virtual receptionist at least.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

5 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

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.

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.

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.

TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

5 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

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.”

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.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

5 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

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.

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.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud