TECHNOLOGY
Zoomed Out? Mix It Up With New Meeting Software
The corporate world keeps on evolving post-pandemic.
Prior to 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic, corporate and client meetings were commonly an even blend between in person, over the phone, and by way of Skype, Zoom, or even Microsoft Teams. Which technology was used in what situation largely depended upon what type of material was covered in these meetings.
In looking back, this was largely because it allowed business leaders and trainers the ability to make certain that all involved in a meeting were fully informed. But once the pandemic hit, nearly every company made the shift to a virtual and, in most cases, hybrid work environment. What this did to meetings and employee or customer communication was remarkable — virtual meetings, video classrooms, and all things Skype, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, FaceTime, and more became the “new normal.”
The likes of these software options were second nature to many who have utilized them since as early as 2015; however, others had to adapt to video conferencing technology like it was a new frontier never before discovered. Our new, completely virtual environment took some getting used to, but before long, we were video conferencing for every little piece of each puzzle we worked through.
But this undoubtedly has led to what we refer to as being “Zoomed out,” no matter what your role is in your individual industry. But being “Zoomed out” in recent years has already proven to be a completely solvable problem, and with a little exponential thinking from my Anticipatory Leader System coupled with some new software applications, another “new normal” for virtual meetings, training, and more has begun.
Understanding Zoom Fatigue
The reason many quickly experienced video conferencing fatigue was the result of our whole lives, not just our professional lives, having to be virtual overnight. We watched performances from our favorite music artists via livestream to get our concert fix, met with family members via video conferencing, took online classes that ordinarily would have met in person, and so much more.
In addition to video, we already had virtual and augmented reality video games for entertainment, and now instead of putting our phones down and going to a local restaurant for fellowship, we used them to order DoorDash or curbside pickup. Everything was through a screen, so come each Monday morning, employees and executives alike would have a slew of meetings via video conferencing, of which they began to tune in and drop out so to speak.
Many business executives picked up on this employee exhaustion as a Hard Trend future certainty, regardless of when the pandemic would end. If Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and other video conferencing software were here to stay, alternatives to those occasional, extremely brief meetings that take more work to put together than to host were a must.
In lieu of this, their leadership mindset shifted to one of anticipation, hoping to pre-solve video meeting exhaustion by simplifying meetings that are too complex to be an email but far too simple to be a full-blown, live organization of employees, customers, and executives. This led to understanding and leveraging the benefits of screen recording and remote collaboration technologies like Loom, Vimeo, and others.
Zoom Fatigue Solved: Simple Screen Recordings
The connectivity of 5G, smartphones, and a multitude of other accelerated digital disruptions have converged to give individuals ease of access to both information and, in the case of virtual and hybrid workspaces, each other like never before. This is why virtual meetings of any kind are a Hard Trend future certainty — the ease of connecting so many clients, co-workers, and customers throughout projects every single time they think of a change.
Software like Loom and websites like Vimeo not only allow business leaders to implement exponential thinking in better solutions to employee and client Zoom fatigue, but they also utilize my Skip It Principle by providing a service that lets users simply record a demo video and share it with a client collaboratively. This is contrary to taking screenshots and trying to either email a description, calling the individual recipient to walk them through what they were looking at, or most recently, schedule a Zoom call every time something simple needs discussing.
Essentially, screen capture software of any kind offers the benefit of video conferencing without having it in real time. What a simple solution to Zoom fatigue!
Now a recipient can simply open and watch a screen recording and, in the event there are further questions regarding the content, schedule a live video call to clear them up. Since 2015, and thanks to the rapid acceleration of digital disruptions caused by the pandemic, screen recording software and the collaborative, remote workspaces that come with them have grown to 14 million users across 200,000 corporations.
No Different Than Email? Video Conferencing Was A Hard Trend
As mentioned above, the likes of Loom and other screen recording software was not founded as an agile response to Zoom fatigue during the pandemic. This software was founded by utilizing my Hard Trend Methodology and pre-solving problems by analyzing Hard Trend future certainties that the owners knew would be hitting the world one day.
The Hard Trend here was not only a rise in video conferencing, but a rise in digital communication in general. As both video conferencing software and screen recording programs emerged as early as 2015, consider what digital technologies already existed for some time: Email, mobile phones (smartphones and on some, FaceTime), computers with webcams, the internet, social media, and more. The entrepreneurs behind screen recording software saw that digital communication would only increase and decided to pre-solve a professional problem in ways that would be exponential, unbeknownst to them at the time.
Using Screen Recordings Exponentially
Of course, work projects and collaborations across a hybrid work environment is any type of screen recording software company’s bread and butter, but as an Anticipatory Leader who thinks exponentially, can you identify different ways to leverage the likes of Loom, Vimeo, and others for different purposes? Let me give you one idea to start.
The pandemic has brought on what is being referred to as the Great Resignation, as I have written about recently. In that, many have taken to freelance work, especially in roles that likely could have been fully remote long before global lockdowns and safer-at-home orders. Marketing, for instance, is a notable one. Marketing departments looking to outsource certain tasks to independents and small business owners can leverage screen recording software in the way of assurance that work is getting complete.
For instance, they could sign up a freelance or remote worker for a software like Loom and have them record what they are working on, instead of leaving it up to them to document their hours in a spreadsheet or via invoice. Perhaps accounting departments can benefit from this exponential use as well, knowing how to document independent work more efficiently.
In all of this, let’s not forget that another integral component to my Anticipatory Leader System is to be human. Zoom fatigue isn’t the real problem in many cases; screen fatigue is. As the pandemic slows a bit more every day, we should all remember that we live in a hybrid, Both/And world. There is an appropriate time for live video conferencing and a time for simple screen recordings, just as there is a time for in-person meetings and conversation.
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TECHNOLOGY
Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3
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
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.
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
Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud
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.
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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