TECHNOLOGY
Cloud preferred deployment method to address supply chain challenges
Apply three quarters (71%) of companies believe the cloud or a hybrid solution will be their preferred deployment method for labeling within the next three years.
This is according to an annual report published by Loftware, a global software company specialising in Enterprise Labelling and Artwork Management solutions.
The global survey, which draws on insights from almost 500 professionals across industries in 55 countries, found a shift in attitudes toward cloud technology. Driven by the need to insulate operations from ongoing supply chain disruptions, product shortages, cost pressures, process inefficiencies, and manual errors, Loftware’s 10th annual report revealed that 50% of businesses already deploy important business applications in the cloud. This compares to just under 40% of companies embracing cloud-first strategies for enterprise applications a year ago.
Josh Roffman, senior VP of marketing and product management at Loftware, said: “Cloud adoption is proving to be the cornerstone of impactful digital transformation programs, as evidenced by the strong feedback we have received from our customers and partners. Among the many benefits on offer, the cloud provides quick deployment times, lower upfront costs, easy access, the ability to scale, and automatic updates.
“As companies of all sizes strive to increase profitability, drive growth, and streamline operations, we expect to see a growing number of forward-thinking organizations adopt the cloud for mission-critical business processes including labelling.”
Gartner, a technology analyst firm, supports this notion and believes that more than 50% of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives by 2027.
Most business leaders surveyed by Loftware (80%) reported that supply chain challenges had directly impacted their business. Furthermore, 93% said that it’s important to have a business model that supports speed and agility in today’s evolving business climate, while 62% of respondents believe that extending labelling to partners and suppliers enables them to avoid re-labelling, thereby saving time, money, and resources. This is no surprise as today’s global supply chain requires new levels of visibility and agility as companies add new suppliers and partners, expand into new regions, strive to ensure continuous operations, and attempt to meet increasing regulatory and customer demands.
Facilitating transparency is a vital step in creating resilient supply chains, with 70% of respondents flagging global traceability as a priority for their business in the coming 12 months. This is because companies need to ensure quality, safeguard products, protect patients, streamline the location of inventory, and guarantee on-time delivery to market. Indeed, 49% of those surveyed believe the inability to effectively manage recalls is the biggest risk of not being able to track products through the supply chain, up from 33% four years ago. As a result, businesses are harnessing the benefits of cloud technology to provide faster reaction times when managing potential recalls, avert risks presented by counterfeit goods, ensure customer safety, and protect brand reputation.
Digital traceability can also help companies to deliver on their corporate social responsibility goals. Of those surveyed by Loftware, 76% reported already having a sustainability initiative within their organisation. Being able to trace products both upstream and downstream will become important for managing the product lifecycle and sustainable sourcing. Intelligent supply chains that leverage cloud technologies can track, trace, and authenticate goods at every stage of the journey, from raw materials to consumer goods. Through the deployment of cloud-based labelling, businesses can reduce inventory, eliminate a large global footprint, and ensure that all products are made, shipped, and delivered to the right place, thereby avoiding unnecessary loss and waste.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution, otherwise known as Industry 4.0, will also have a significant impact on companies and their manufacturing operations in 2023 and beyond. When it comes to printing on the production line, Loftware’s survey illustrates that far too many businesses still rely on closed-loop systems that have disconnected, purpose-built software for different devices, resulting in manual and error-prone marking and coding operations. In fact, 69% of businesses reported using multiple vendors for marking and coding at their facilities, while 41% said that label errors driven by manual processes are one of the biggest challenges in their current marking and coding environment.
Through the advancement of cloud-based technologies, companies can now use their marking and coding equipment as part of a “one size fits all” intelligent factory operation. This offers integration capabilities to manage output for all their devices from thermal and colour laser printing to marking and coding devices, visual inspection systems, serialisation solutions, and more. By adopting such a solution as part of a cloud-first strategy, businesses will gain printing flexibility, accuracy, production line uptime, and efficiency to manage costs and support global growth.
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TECHNOLOGY
Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3
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
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.
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
Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud
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.
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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