TECHNOLOGY

The Inevitable Increase in Autonomous Business Processes and How to Lead the Charge

Published

2 years ago

July 21, 2022

The Inevitable Increase in Autonomous Business Processes and How to Lead the Charge

Mindset is absolutely everything in this world we live in, and having a specific mindset in the professional world is a quantifiable asset.

How we think on a daily basis determines our professional output, whether we are an entry-level employee, middle manager, or a C-suite executive. Out of those categories, having a positive mindset about your industry as a business leader is perhaps one of the most critical, as business leaders make integral decisions that trickle down through an organization, directly impacting employees at all levels.

Technological Factors That Impact Your Mindset

Of course, maintaining a positive and even transformative professional mindset as a business leader is not as simple as motivational videos and literature may make it seem. The world both inside and outside of your industry has a direct impact on your mindset.

Common factors that may impact your professional mindset may include organizational culture, the state of the economy, or perhaps even personal home life, which all of us carry to the office in one way or another. But today, it is worth noting that disruptive digital technology is definitely a leading factor in the mindset of a business leader.

For many seasoned C-suite executives and other business leaders, there is still a sense that the good days are long behind us, and that too much is being transformed by exponential digital acceleration. For instance, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is a digital transformation happening in nearly all industries. Given the connectivity of 5G alongside Edge Computing, both of which better facilitate the functionality of A.I., business processes will continue to become autonomous — a Hard Trend future certainty that you cannot change.

A business owner or C-suite executive at an organization that views A.I. as a threat to their organizational structure and many employee roles will naturally shut down any ideas that include its application. This in turn shuts a door on ways in which their business or organization can both positively transform their industry and continue to grow. Essentially, they have a pessimistic mindset and negative outlook on the future.

Understand What You Don’t Understand

Largely, business executives and other leaders balk at new, disruptive technology like in the A.I. example above because they simply do not understand it. A lack of understanding around what exactly something like A.I. is erases entirely the potential for them to think exponentially about the transformative software and hardware applications.

Perhaps this comes from that same type of generalization that often encompasses talks about mindset that I mentioned earlier in this writing. Most of the marketing surrounding A.I. applications appears to legacy thinkers at businesses or organizations as robots taking jobs away from humans.

But whether you are “old school” in your thinking or fully embracing new technologies, the key to leveraging new technology exponentially and having a positive mindset toward them is quite literally by understanding what you might not already understand. Carve out small pockets of time to learn more about the technologies that directly impact your industry to develop an actual understanding behind their functionality instead of a general overview that leaves you with uncertainty.

Mastering Soft Trends to Think Exponentially

In the Hard Trend Methodology that I teach in my Anticipatory Leader System, there is a component that business leaders and executives can actually create an impact with — Soft Trends. These are future possibilities surrounding Hard Trend future certainties that are more open to influence.

Artificial Intelligence itself is a Hard Trend as mentioned earlier; however, how A.I. is implemented is a Soft Trend that you can influence! Too often, new technologies are soaked up by industry leaders as one-trick ponies, when in reality there are boundless opportunities that surround them, all unique to their industry and more specifically, their organization itself.

If we isolate A.I. for a moment, how you implement A.I. at your organization to improve business processes or better serve your external customers is the Soft Trend that is open to influence. When you take a Soft Trend as such and use it to your organization’s advantage, you are thinking exponentially as a human in a digital world!

An accounting firm that shifts its mindset from believing that A.I. applications on the outside will steal their customers to a mindset of utilizing the A.I. internally in custom, unique ways to better serve customers will find significance and success in the industry.

The Human Competency in Digital Technology

Even if you think exponentially about how you implement autonomous digital technology at your organization, what sets you apart from competitors that utilize the same digital technology?

Human beings and their individual characteristics! Human competencies in our digital world coupled with autonomous technology like A.I. are vital to leveraging these digital advancements exponentially. This is commonly witnessed in the world of customer service. You can have the most advanced A.I. chatbot to help your customers 24/7; however, many from all generations still want to speak to a person to have their problem solved.

Pairing digital components with human cognition is how an organization offers unique services to its customers, stays ahead of the curve of disruption and change, and most importantly, fosters a positive Futureview® organization-wide. And with this newfound mindset around how to integrate digital technology with your human workforce exponentially, you as a business leader can now watch for more Hard Trends and be Anticipatory in thinking exponentially about what is to come.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

5 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.

TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

5 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

TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

5 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