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Snowflake launches Telecom Data Cloud to help telecoms service providers monetise data

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Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, has launched the Telecom Data Cloud, which unites Snowflake’s data platform, Snowflake- and partner-delivered solutions, and industry-specific datasets.

The Telecom Data Cloud helps telecommunications service providers break down data silos within companies and across the ecosystem, allowing organisations to easily and securely access data in near real-time, enrich it with machine learning (ML) models, and then share and analyze it to drive better decisions. With the Telecom Data Cloud, Snowflake and its ecosystem of partners can help telecommunications service providers accelerate digital transformation, enable superior customer experiences, maximise operational efficiency, and monetise new data services.

Mobile devices and broadband connectivity are now part of every aspect of day-to-day life. For that reason, the telecommunications sector remains a driver of growth, innovation, and disruption for all global businesses, especially in rapidly growing industries such as video streaming, Internet of Things (IoT), and virtual and augmented reality. The revenue shift from traditional products to innovative cross-industry collaboration solutions requires an evolution of the telecommunications business model. To stay ahead, telecommunications companies must transition away from complex legacy technologies in order to modernise their networks and to deliver value to partners across industries.

With Snowflake’s Telecom Data Cloud, telecommunications companies can adjust to this new reality and use Snowflake to:

  • Modernise the telecom network: Snowflake’s Telecom Data Cloud offers a single, fully-managed, secure platform for multi-cloud data consolidation with unified governance and elastic performance that supports virtually any scale of storage, compute, and users.
  • Maximise operational efficiency: With one unified platform, teams across IT, network engineering, data science, network operations, and product management can collaborate using data to improve planning, make faster business decisions, rapidly respond to customer needs, better manage network resources, and reduce time to market on new services. 
  • Advanced AI and ML capabilities: Snowflake and Snowpark enable machine generated data in near-real time using ML models to predict faults, schedule maintenance ahead of time, and to reduce operational downtime.
  • Monetise data and applications: Telecommunications service providers can create more personalised data and application service offerings with Snowflake Marketplace and launch innovative new services, including monetisation around advertising and selling IoT data to any industry.
  • Leverage industry leading network of telecommunications partners: Take advantage of a rich partner ecosystem and their industry-specific, prebuilt templates to build valuable industry solutions faster.

Phil Kippen, global head of industry, telecom at Snowflake, said: “The next wave of growth and innovation in the telecommunications industry will undoubtedly be powered by data and requires collaboration across businesses and industries.

“Snowflake’s Telecom Data Cloud unlocks these opportunities by creating one unified platform, enabling secure data collaboration by connecting telecommunications service providers with a rich ecosystem of applications, data, and technology partners.”

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Some of the largest global customers in the telecommunications industry are already using Snowflake’s Telecom Data Cloud to grow revenue and maximise operational efficiency. Customer use cases include:

  • AT&T – With Snowflake’s Data Cloud, AT&T is driving to a single source of truth for their data across the organisation where business partners can seamlessly access AT&T’s data to improve their customer experience and maximise operational efficiencies.
  • OneWeb – The low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications company was able to move their data operations over to Snowflake in just six weeks and is leveraging Snowflake to harness the power of space data for the enhanced performance of its network, as well as to monetise data through new space data services.
  • M1 – Singapore’s first digital network operator uses Snowflake to combine data from M1’s CRM, billing systems, website, and mobile app to provide a more complete view of the customer experience as it drives transformation and evolution in the local telecommunications landscape.

Within the Telecom Data Cloud, customers can access industry-specific solutions to leverage best practices, reduce time-to-value, and increase overall impact. Companies announcing new pre-built solutions include:

  • Applications Powered by Snowflake, like the one developed by AMDOCS, allow telecommunications providers to modernise their business (including moving to the cloud and 5G monetisation efforts) and simplify business processes around charging, billing, and new digital services.
  • Snowflake Marketplace partners, like Flywheel, OneWeb, and TransUnion enable live access to a variety of data sources leveraging Snowflake’s privacy-preserving collaboration technology, including satellite, geospatial, or demographic data to unlock new revenue streams and power innovative business solutions.
  • Consulting and service companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cognizant, SDG Group, Prodapt Consulting, and Wipro Limited can reduce time-to-value for customers with pre-build partner solutions that help solve for top priority use cases, including integrating OSS and BSS data, maximising operational efficiency, and monetising data to help grow business value.
  • Technology partners like Alteryx, CARTO, DigitalRoute, H2O.AI, Informatica, Sigma Computing, and ThoughtSpot provide integrations and out-of-the-box solutions so customers can attain deeper insights and realise the full power and ease of use of the Telecom Data Cloud.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and LondonExplore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Tags: Snowflake, Telecom Data Cloud

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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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