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GigaSpaces: Why digital transformation is like building a house

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GigaSpaces: Why digital transformation is like building a house

Imagine digital transformation in the enterprise as like rebuilding your house. You can do it yourself, assuming you have the necessary time and skills, or you can get the experts in. But there is more to it than simply connecting the pipes and hoping for the best. The flow of water needs to be consistent through the house; a torrent from one tap and a dribble from another is no good. 

To apply this analogy back to digital transformation, once the platform, or ‘plumbing’ is connected to the system of record, and once the data is exposed, it brings issues like data consistency – such as the flow of water – and security to the fore.

One architectural design which aims to help organisations in this regard is the digital integration hub (DIH). The term was originally coined by Gartner and is defined as ‘an advanced application architecture that aggregates multiple backend system of record data sources into a low latency and scale-out, high performance data store.’ 

By decoupling the digital applications from the systems of record and implementing a decoupled API layer, not only can innovative organisations allow operational gains for the present in the form of data integration and analytics, it can also help futureproof initiatives by enabling scalable expansions and hybrid deployments.

One company at the forefront of DIH is GigaSpaces, and Shai Zmigrod, SVP sales EMEA, illustrates the potential. “When everybody’s talking about digital transformation, actually we are referring to agility and to the ability to introduce new services at a rapid pace,” Zmigrod explains. 

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“Many organisations, especially large enterprises, have a lot of data spread over, they want to go and introduce services – they find it very challenging. Many large enterprises grew up out of mergers and acquisitions and the data is not the same across the board – they need to compete with the new companies that don’t have all these legacy issues they are facing right now.

“For example, if you are ordering an airline ticket, you expect the data you see to be 100% accurate and consistent across all digital channels,” Zmigrod adds. “If different data regarding prices, booking information, or frequent flyer points is displayed in two recurring sessions or on the airline website vs. its mobile app – you’re getting a poor customer experience.

“These kinds of things can be very difficult to achieve, unless you decouple the data from respective applications, unless you are using event-driven architecture.”

Where GigaSpaces comes in is through its out-of-the-box solution, SmartDIH. It is both tech- and industry-agnostic, serving a wide scope of verticals such as financial services, digital banks, insurance, retail and eCommerce and transportation. 

One good example of how the DIH works is in banking, as a blog post from GigaSpaces CEO Adi Paz explains. As each system of record had a different API, it was impossible to get a single view of the company’s data. With the DIH, the data replication enabled real-time asynchronous replication between four banks across three continents – and expansion from 200 to more than 400 applications was possible.

Zmigrod estimates that the company has spent ‘thousands of man-hours’ on developing both the concept and the solution, so not only does GigaSpaces infers it knows what it’s doing in a very complicated space, it also may, diplomatically, infer the customer might not. 

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“It’s not easy, by the way, to develop this,” says Zmigrod, with an element of understatement. “When I talk to many prospects, I say ‘we’re not a magician, but you need to think differently.’ 

“Once they see the product, in 90% of the cases, they say ‘wow, I didn’t know such a thing exists.’ They might be familiar with the architecture concept, but this out-of-the-box solution is something that they are surprised by.”

The Covid-19 pandemic, and the rush to digitisation it prompted in many organisations, may have increased the complexity of their architectures. Companies may have bashed out a project that ought to have taken two to three years instead of three to six months, but they were papering over the cracks.

This realisation has helped accelerate discussions with prospects about how GigaSpaces can assist them in their digitisation journey. “So many built quick and dirty solutions that just fixed [the problem], made sure it can work, but this is not robust enough to scale it, to make sure that it will be working on the next thing,” says Zmigrod. “They understand now that what they have is not sufficient.”

For Zmigrod, digital transformation is a ‘state of mind’; organisations who know what they should be doing, but are somehow not doing so. An example of this is the catch-all idea of moving to the cloud. Gartner noted in February that almost two thirds of enterprise spending on application software will be directed towards cloud technologies in 2025. The cloud, therefore, is not a differentiator.

“Moving to the cloud is just moving the problem from one place to another,” explains Zmigrod. “It does not touch the fundamental of the problem. When people are thinking in a traditional way, they are limiting themselves to what they know.”

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Zmigrod is speaking at Digital Transformation Week Europe, in Amsterdam on September 20, and he hopes his presentation will ‘provoke thinking’ among executives and help them get away from what he describes as the ‘faster horses’ mentality, famously attributed to Henry Ford

Zmigrod will also be delivering a panel discussion on cloud migration strategy alongside technology chiefs from ABN AMRO Bank and boutique hotel chain citizenM.


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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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