TECHNOLOGY

How Can Anticipatory Leaders Harness Disruptive Technologies?

Published

1 year ago

August 17, 2023

Embracing the Inevitable: How Can Anticipatory Leaders Harness Disruptive Technologies?

Today, we are in an era of drastic technological transformation.

With the increasing use of digital technologies that include everything from 3D printing to various applications of extended reality, how we do business is constantly and dramatically transforming in ways that we have not seen since the industrial revolution!

While company leaders have long been questioning how to navigate this quickly changing landscape, Anticipatory Leaders are one step ahead, leveraging the ever-evolving digital landscape in front of us. In doing so, they are integrating artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), edge computing as it relates to data processing, and so much more.

How Can Anticipatory Leaders Harness Disruptive Technologies

As a business leader, it’s imperative to grasp that the ongoing technological revolution reshaping the business landscape is an indisputable future certainty—a Hard Trend that’s here to stay. While numerous technological innovations have already initiated substantial shifts in a wide array of business operations, some leaders and managers who prioritize adaptability over forward planning might entertain the notion of a forthcoming pause—a plateau where they can recalibrate and bridge any gaps. However, such a hiatus does not exist, nor will it ever materialize. The trajectory of technological evolution is constant and unceasing.

How we conduct business is changing right now and will only continue to do so with increasing velocity, so the key is to not only embrace the technological disruption, but to anticipate it and find a way to get your team excited about it! The second part of that should be easy, given the opportunities that are bountiful within the disruption itself.

Before all else, you need to transition into a role as an Anticipatory Leader to see where technology is headed in order to find the opportunity for your business.

3 Hard Trends Transforming Technology and Business

Recently, there have been some specific technology sectors that are proving to be the most disruptive yet equally as beneficial for businesses and organizations that are leveraging them. These have been extensively explored in past blog posts I have written, but there are so many new applications for them that they are worth re-exploring.

Datafication involves leveraging data gathered from our daily activities to facilitate the creation of novel products or services, as well as the enhancement of existing ones. Our actions continually generate data across a spectrum of endeavors, ranging from the music we stream on platforms like Spotify to our interactions with digitally sophisticated vehicles during travel. In this context, edge computing stands out as a technological stride that enables data processing to occur in immediate proximity to its origin, presenting a substantial advantage. As 5G networks proliferate and data processing mechanisms streamline, the viability of such edge computing approaches is poised to amplify significantly.

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While we are familiar with specific websites and smartphone apps that adeptly utilize your browsing history to facilitate ongoing purchases or engagement, like Amazon or Google, an even deeper evolution of customer service within organizations has been orchestrated by Vail Systems, Inc. This company employs basic data analytics extracted from customer phone calls to refine and enhance automated customer service systems. This innovative approach eliminates the need for painstakingly enunciating your responses when seeking assistance, heralding a more streamlined and efficient customer support experience.

Extended reality may sound like an addition to mixed reality (MR), virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR), but really, it is simply the umbrella term referring to any type of digital landscape or integration of digital assets into the physical world. Gaming and entertainment have certainly exploded in the past by incorporating MR, VR, and AR; however, I constantly find myself informing business leaders and executives of the many exponential ways these software applications can be utilized in their various industries.

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The concept of any extended reality application is to create an immersive experience that brings the human sensory experience into the digital world on some level. But how can something like AR be used in something tactile like the beauty and cosmetics world — a sector said to be worth nearly half a trillion dollars by some? My Dior answered this inquiry with its smartphone app that projected lipstick colors on its users’ lips, allowing them to sample without ever hitting the “Buy” button!

Another Hard Trend that has long been revolutionizing the business world is the rise of 3D printing, also referred to as additive manufacturing. Using a machine to produce three-dimensional objects off of a two-dimensional blueprint, 3D printing provides easy part customization options, quicker turn-around times, the ability to produce products on demand (minimizing having to ship products from overseas), and ultimately results in reduced manufacturing costs and a far more sustainable industry as a whole.

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Auto manufacturers have slowly taken to 3D printed parts for many integral components of their vehicles, with Volkswagen being a notable leader. They not only produce parts for new vehicles, but they also have been known to 3D print tools and replacement parts for classic cars that are not in production any longer. When looking at the big picture, this can help preserve automobiles and ultimately cut down on large-scale litter of disregarded clunkers.

Find the Opportunity and Make It Your Own

Now that we have identified that the increasing use of datafication, extended reality, and 3D printing are fully predictable Hard Trend future certainties, the second step is to implement your own Anticipatory mindset in discovering exactly where these trends are headed for your industry and to find the opportunity they present to you and your team.

Unfortunately, many business leaders are afraid of where technology is headed, but it is my goal to ease this stress with the power of critical, exponential thinking and the many Anticipatory principles at your full disposal. I do not want you to fall behind the curve; I want you to be the disruptor instead of the disrupted!

What I hope this blog post has illustrated to you and your team is that keeping your opportunity antennae up is not only about looking at the digital disruptions themselves, but also being on the lookout for what other industries are doing with various technologies and how you might be able to adapt that to your industry. You may not be in the data processing, cosmetics, or auto industry, but there are indisputable ways that those same technologies can be critically leveraged to produce exceptional results for new products, services, or processes.

Also, it is time to do a deep dive into your current products, services, or processes themselves and see how today’s new technologies can help you redefine things — redefine your customer base, redefine your production methods, redefine your internal operations, and redefine your company overall. New is not always the answer, as sometimes you can simply rehash what already exists in profound ways.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

10 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.

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TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

11 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

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TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

11 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

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