TECHNOLOGY

Being Anticipatory Ensures Your Place in a Digital World

Published

2 years ago

May 5, 2022

Technology and the disruptions it causes are a Hard Trend future certainty, in that it will continue to upend industry after industry without prejudice.

There are a number of fears surrounding displacement by technology by both business leaders and employees in an array of industries, but the common thread ties tightly to automation software and hardware.

In other words, many fear that robotics and artificial intelligence (A.I.) will lead the charge in permanently removing human beings from their careers, leaving them unemployed and without any new opportunities. Let me dispel it from the start: This is not going to happen. Changes will take place but being human is a highly leverageable asset in the digitally disruptive future.

In my Anticipatory Leader System, there are several competencies that I teach that point to why and how human beings will become more valuable than ever as technology gets more autonomous by the day. Transitioning to an anticipatory mindset as a business leader or employee and using it to shift your company to be an anticipatory organization to stay ahead of digital disruption, is an ongoing end goal in this process.

A.I. Is Prominently Disrupting Business Processes

There are countless applications of artificially intelligent software and hardware in the world today, from content writing applications that can take keywords and generate targeted blogs to robotics in automotive manufacturing that can not only diagnose problems in their systems, but fix them as well using machine learning (M.L.) and edge computing.

It is hard to find an area of the world not impacted by this transformative digital technology. To help get in front of this disruption, let’s look at two current, prominent examples from the past year or so:

Pharmaceutical Labs: In a lab environment, scientists and engineers are constantly at risk of exposing themselves to potentially harmful chemicals while developing anything, really. This is especially true in the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, where a plethora of chemicals both safe and harmful are abundant.

Not only have A.I. and autonomous machines found their way into this world to help with production of medications, but they are starting to become a more favorable option in all chemical-facing areas of a lab, essentially eliminating the need for a scientist or engineer to ever set foot into the same space.

Rideshare Drivers: This is still a few years off, but it is accelerating in many communities across the nation and around the world. As many automobiles hit the market with fully autonomous capabilities, rideshare platforms like Uber and Lyft — who already disrupted the public transportation industries with their applications — will start utilizing those types of vehicles to transport individuals instead of individual drivers.

Rideshare platforms are in what is referred to as the “gig economy,” where individuals who drive under them do it part time for extra money. Fully autonomous vehicles bring a new level of disruption to those who rely on that extra money to help get them by, while allowing the rideshare companies to save customers money by not having to adjust driver rates so frequently.

Valuable Human Competencies Keeping You Valuable

Those two examples may sound bleak and counterintuitive to what I discussed earlier about human beings still being valuable despite autonomous technology and A.I. being a smoother option. But don’t worry; we have reached the positive resolution of this story, and it too is as much of a Hard Trend future certainty as technology causing disruptions in the first place!

What those who are finding themselves professionally displaced by these disruptive technologies must do is first identify some of the characteristics of being human that are irreplaceable by technology, no matter how advanced that technology becomes. Here are a few to get started:

Communication: Machines cannot communicate using body language, tone of voice, or any other way that humans are proficient in. Given this fact, polishing your communication skills, both spoken and written, is integral in increasing your human value.

Collaboration: Working together as employees or leaders with their employees is irreplaceable by even the smartest A.I. Software and hardware that leverages A.I. and automation is programmed to respond, or to cooperate with you, which is a one-way street. So much more can be accomplished on a two-lane highway of collaboration!

Adaptability: The fact that we make mistakes and take missteps is actually a valuable asset in both professional and personal situations. The reason behind this value is since we then problem-solve to find a solution, often uncovering a better way to solve a problem — precisely what an anticipatory mindset is all about!

Creative Critical Thinking: Machines are not sentient beings. Creative critical thinking is a subcategory of adaptability: the act of us thinking critically and getting creative about how to better solve a problem that we either know is going to cause us issues, or one that has already disrupted us. A.I. and automation can only learn so many ways to solve problems systematically.

Relationship Building: Human beings develop long-term relationships with customers, colleagues, and business partners. Artificially intelligent bots that connect with those same individuals can easily be ignored and disregarded for a different bot, leaving you without a trustworthy connection to an individual.

Humans and Machines: A Both/And Combination

If technology and digital disruptions caused by them are Hard Trend future certainties that are not going away, and we as humans will always need to be employable to continue to make money and have purpose, how do these meet?

By way of a competency from my Anticipatory Leader System known as The Both/And Principle, there will always be a place for both human beings and autonomous technologies in all industries.

Revisiting our previous examples, scientists and engineers in pharmaceutical labs may not be able to work hands-on with the development of medication, but they are still irreplaceable by way of creative critical thinking about scientific breakthroughs, or collaboration with like-minded professionals in the industry.

For our rideshare example, there is going to be a growing need for service shops to keep autonomous vehicles used by the likes of Uber and Lyft on the roads, and if they are electric automobiles, there will be new maintenance routines needed that were nonexistent in the past. The adaptability of those who integrated driving under rideshare platforms will shine through, and they may find themselves in a newer, more lucrative career as an autonomous vehicle repair specialist.

In these and so many other examples, using an anticipatory mindset to stay aware of what can and will disrupt your world keeps you ahead of the game. Being anticipatory is a human competency, one that employs all those valuable human traits mentioned earlier, and therefore, you will always have an edge on the machines.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

1 week 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.

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TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

2 weeks 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

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TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

2 weeks 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

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