TECHNOLOGY

The Unlikely Marriage Between Mobility Solutions and Enterprise Resiliency

Published

2 years ago

March 28, 2022

The Unlikely Marriage Between Mobility Solutions and Enterprise Resiliency

We’ve learned valuable lessons since the start of the pandemic about resilience: endurance favors those who are prepared, agile and proactive about change.

There’s more to the story, though. To truly thrive in this new world of work, businesses must also create value across the entire organization for a better company culture and customer experience.

Simply put, technology must leap beyond the expected and help craft business resiliency in human terms.

Accelerated digitalization is triggering sweeping changes across many industries: health care, manufacturing, retail, automotive, public sector, finance and banking, just to name a few. With change comes a new game plan for building enterprise resiliency.

Mobility solutions is the technology tool to watch, particularly as the number of IoT devices continues to grow, and the connected smartphone remains a hub in both our personal and work lives.

The story of how connectivity is rapidly evolving begins with 5G cellular networks. In Gartner’s report entitled “Top Trends Driving Enterprise Mobility for 2022,” 5G is predicted to reach 90% of the U.S. population in 2023 (along with Australia, Canada, China, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea; the report predicts other countries will adopt 5G by 2026). While going from 3G to 4G LTE was about speed, 5G is about reimagining possibilities.

With 5G comes mobile solutions that defy how business is conducted today, inspiring meaningful engagement in almost unimaginable ways: customer messaging where and when needed, real-time communication with team members, greater uptime regardless of where people work, mobile security minimizing risk, augmented reality that deepens experiential impact, vehicle-to-everything communication (as well as other transportation mediums like railways), the use of AI in the contact center, and 24/7 access to information tailored to the schedules and lifestyles of real people.

Connecting People in New and Different Ways

As a board member to several organizations, resilience is a topic I hear talked about often by colleagues. In my view, the magic comes from how you use technology to serve others. Mobility solutions empower employees to succeed and, in turn, help their customers succeed. This, to me, is both hopeful and exciting.

In the age of remote and hybrid work, mobile technology has the ability to create stronger relationships and increase employee satisfaction in ways we haven’t seen before.

Gartner’s report, in fact, points out: “The shift to more remote work in the wake of the pandemic has led organizations to move mobile investment to new use cases.” Augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), AI and cognitive, and metaverse (described as a “successor to the mobile internet” by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg who gives the comparison of sending his parents a picture of his family today while in the metaverse his parents can interact with their grandchildren without leaving home) can enable stakeholders and employees to interact more fully and collaborate with ease.

Prioritizing Your Team

According to the Labor Department, 47 million quit their jobs in 2021. Perhaps the pandemic inspired people to reevaluate their priorities and options. Gallup found that engagement is highest for “workers who spend three to four days working remotely.” Imagine that. From a crisis came a new workplace paradigm.

Working remotely does not, however, equate to working alone. AT&T Workforce Manager, for example, is a multi-faceted platform that empowers remote and hybrid workers with wireless forms, instantaneous order and mobile timekeeping. For employees living in areas with unpredictable Wi-Fi, AT&T also has solutions to boost indoor wireless coverage (OK, this doesn’t help if you’re working on the beach, but it will help if you work out of the beach house!).

For the resilient enterprise, creating a fluid workforce means prioritizing your team and embracing a mobile strategy for remote and hybrid workers so they are productive, connected, and happy.

A Final Thought

I believe people thrive at the crossroad of humanity and technology. If technology does not serve real people, then technology fails, and we falter too by not living up to our greatest potential.

Equip your team with tools and knowledge to achieve what technology alone cannot. Inspire your team to dive into the waters of meaningful engagement – being there in a customer’s greatest moment of need, collaborating with coworkers to solve problems faster, and, sometimes, just sharing a kind word when that alone will turn around someone’s day. An early author of self-help books, Napoleon Hill, writes: “It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.” This is what will make great companies stand the test of time. This is truly the path to enterprise resilience.

This article was sponsored by AT&T Business, but the opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent BBN Times and AT&T Business’s positions or strategies.

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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