In 2025, Microsoft will turn 50. The multinational corporation’s enduring success has been achieved by dint of its commitment to pioneering technology and willingness to evolve. Standing still has never been an option, and even more so in the digital age, according to Robin Sutara, Microsoft UK’s Chief Data Officer, who has clocked up 22 years with the organisation.

“It’s been an amazing company to be with,” she says. “I’ve been fortunate to spend the last two decades enjoying every minute of the transformation that we have gone through.”

Indeed, after Bill Gates and Paul Allen co-founded the organisation in April 1975, Microsoft—a portmanteau of “microcomputer software”—spearheaded the microcomputer revolution and grew to become the world’s largest personal computer software company.

Now, though, its most well-known products range from a computer software operating system to productivity tools, from a cloud services platform to a gaming console. Additionally, Microsoft is leading the way in the mixed reality space with its HoloLens products. So whatever the next frontiers of technology are—whether 5G or even 6G, quantum computing, or underwater data centres—there is a strong chance Microsoft will be an innovator.

Given this famously trailblazing spirit, spanning decades, it is notable that Sutara suggests “driving simplicity” is one of her three ambitions for Microsoft UK in 2022. This is one of her so-called “three Ss”, alongside “skilling” and “sustainability”. “I love threes,” she grins, “and it is in these areas I see most activity happening this coming year.”

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Hand-in-hand: simplification and skills

As an example of simplicity in terms of products, Sutara—appointed Microsoft UK’s first CDO in January 2021—references Microsoft’s recently launched Azure Synapse. It is a single pane of glass that provides easy access and oversight to all the data an organisation holds and manages. This product is valuable for organisations because as the number of tools and their functions grow, development and administration become tougher without clear connectivity. Having a single starting point that can display a holistic view and that simplifies tool interconnectivity helps save time and resources, as well as enabling more insightful analytics.

She asks, rhetorically: “When you think about data insights, all the way from machine learning to dashboards, how do you put meaningful, real-time data in the hands of the organisation to be able to make decisions? How do you create things like citizen data scientists or citizen data analysts who don’t necessarily have to understand code?” Democratising data and taking advantage of low-code, no-code, and other simplification tools is the key, says Sutara.

Moving on to the second S, she continues: “I see the simplification of products and services going hand-in-hand with skilling. For instance, expanding the skills of the SQL (Structured Query Language) database administrators is important, as it has been around for 30 years. So how do we create systems that allow them to leverage those SQL skills into the analytics, data quality and governance space?

“Data management, truly understanding what data exists within your environment—as well as ensuring compliance—will become increasingly vital for businesses. Therefore, we need to make the data platform as simple and intuitive as possible and iterate to ensure that we are empowering as many people—whether analysts, data scientists, or engineers—to have the right skills to be able to leverage that data and deliver against technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.”

Sustainable ambitions and social impact

Last but not least, improving sustainability “is a huge ambition” for the Microsoft UK CDO in 2022. Following the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), most progressive organisations have firmed up their plans in this area and established workable net-zero targets. Microsoft UK’s recent sustainability report indicates that while UK senior leaders (64 per cent) say reducing carbon footprint is part of their organisation’s strategy, just 17 per cent have implemented a detailed programme for mapping their emissions, while fewer than half (47 per cent) monitor them.

Here, notably, the company practices what it preaches. Microsoft has an ambitious 10-year plan to be carbon negative, water positive, use zero waste and to develop a planetary computing platform by 2030. However, to reach those goals, measurement is crucial, she states. And this is where simple products and improving data skills combine to support this third and final S.

“Many businesses are making sustainability commitments, and there is a push for greater transparency, but it is all reliant on data,” Sutara explains. “It’s not just about measuring progress, but also measuring our carbon footprint today and tomorrow. It’s about how we look at the data and come up with new ways that we can provide the greatest social impact with the data we are creating out of our organisation.”

She points to Microsoft’s AI for Good programme, which provides technology, resources and expertise to empower the people and organisations trying to solve humanitarian issues and craft a more sustainable and accessible world.

In late November, Sutara was part of a group that welcomed Prince William to the Microsoft UK headquarters in Reading to discuss one of the projects funded by AI for Good. The Duke of Cambridge was keen to learn about the first-of-its-kind multi-species AI model, created in partnership with Heathrow Airport, that can increase detection of illegal wildlife products being trafficked through international airports, ports and borders.

Meeting the royal was a career highpoint for Sutara, and if she pursues her ambitions in 2022 there will be other reasons for everyone to celebrate. “The illegal wildlife detection technology is a good example of how we can now make systems smarter,” she adds. “If we can put the power of that technology into the hands of the people with the big ideas, on how to solve some of these huge global systemic environmental and sustainability issues, the whole world opens up in what we can achieve together.”

This article was written as part of a paid-for content campaign with Microsoft

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Software-Defined Storage (SDS) represents one of the hottest trends in data storage with the capability to be hardware agnostic, run in the cloud and provide storage without storage. Let me explain what could be seen as a strange animal.

Instead of doing storage with dedicated storage arrays or file servers, the idea of Software-Defined Storage is to build similar data storage services based on commodity server hardware coupled with an intelligent storage software.

SDS finally transforms a rack of servers into a large storage farm to be used via one or several interfaces, such as block, file and/or objects, like S3. This design implicitly associates the concept of scale-out, such as multiplying servers to provide scalability, capacity, availability, durability and performance.

StorPool picks the block interface and exposes the logical storage space via iSCSI or its own access protocol and targets primary storage. The product is already validated for bare-metal, virtualisation and container environments.

Users adopt block SDS and StorPool in particular for demanding applications deployed on-premises, hybrid or public clouds with clear needs for low latency and pretty high throughput with attractive IOPS.

StorPool software runs on Linux OS and operates in multi active/active controllers. For data protection, the engineering has adopted three-way replication, but also provides snapshots, clones, thin provisioning and changed block tracking.

The storage service can be deployed with classic storage entities connected to applications servers or in a converged mode where applications run directly on storage nodes.

Storage in action

At Dustin Group, StorPool consolidates and replaces legacy platforms such HPE, EMC and NetApp for performance and cost reasons.

For Amito, a UK-based cloud and managed service provider, storage farms powered by StorPool are deployed on multi-site data centers to provide a scalable and resilient storage.

Katapult, one of the largest UK web hosting companies, selected StorPool for its performance, simplicity and its capabilities to provide deployment agility on Linux servers.

With some effort to gain visibility, StorPool occupies a pretty unique position in Europe as a storage ISV able to be deployed in a wide range of configurations, from the high demanding to the classic use cases.

The post StorPool accelerates its Software-Defined Storage capability appeared first on Information Age.

Cloud data warehouses and their management accelerated in 2020. Is this an effect of Covid-19 or a natural trend that started several years ago? It’s not easy to say, but vendors have jumped into it promoting business agility and cost reduction.

As data volume explodes, leveraging an automatic scalable storage infrastructure is one of the key reasons for cloud data management acceleration, capturing data from various sources. But this has added complexity around importing, aggregating, modelling, indexing, searching, analysing and querying all this data coming from different horizons.

Multiplying tools for each step of the workflow increases the time to result, with some risks on the integration of all data sources. Datameer addresses the need for data movement and consolidation with its Spectrum product, a new generation ETL — Extract, Transform and Load — a key component for a successful data processing environment. This data pipeline supports more than 200 data sources and load data into Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse, Databricks and AWS Redshift with a specific angle on security, compliance and governance.

The product is ready to use without any code to embed or develop, it’s not an API either, with just the capability to point and connect to any sources towards massive cloud data warehouses.

The second element developed by Datameer in its Cloud Platform is Spotlight, which is an advanced analytics layer creating a virtualised access to all data coupled with a sharing capability. Connected to on-premises, hybrid or cloud data warehouses and more globally data lakes, even S3 object stores, the product presents a single unified self-service instance that invites data consumers to extract information and collaborate on projects.

The post A clear trend towards cloud data warehouses appeared first on Information Age.

A global leader in tape manufacturing, Fujifilm is also a large conglomerate that generates an annual revenue of $21 billion.

The company has recognised that the role of tape has evolved during last few decades, coming from being the preferred media of choice to a method of data protection and the storage of massive amounts of data.

During the same period, digital transformation touched all domains and various analysts estimate that a few dozen Zettabytes of data has been generated in 2021. Data is created everywhere by numerous applications on many devices, making cloud an obvious approach — both in terms of access method via APIs, such S3 as the de-facto standard and also by the location.

Fujifilm has added their tape libraries to an object storage front-end and expose S3. They develop the solution, Software-Defined Tapes, based on external software. In other words, enterprises are now able to deploy on-premises Glacier-like configurations and fully control all aspects of these environments.

The product is positioned to address various industries for active and deep archive needs. To accelerate market adoption, validation has been made with established object storage vendors to provide S3 to tape. We’ll see how the market and competition will react to this new secondary storage iteration, especially StrongBox Data, Spectra logic and Quantum.

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With 50,000+ edge filers deployed on the planet, CTERA Networks‘ model has been largely adopted and illustrates the perfect alignment of the solution with users’ needs and how companies, departments, groups and teams collaborate (whatever the distance between is). This is more relevant now, in a remote working world, than ever before.

The CTERA team has made great progress during the last 12 months both in terms of product developments, but also with key partnerships that promote the company as the preferred solution for several large IT vendors. HPE on HCI and Nimble dHCI, now extended on GreenLake, and Nutanix have selected CTERA global file services. The product is also validated with AWS Outposts.

The latest news shared during the latest virtual IT Press Tour session is the new deal with IBM for the product named COSFA (Cloud Object Storage File Access). CTERA appears to be everywhere and almost seen as a de-facto standard at the moment.

This movement has been accelerated by the pandemic. But, based on several surveys and industry insights, this trend is here to stay with a fast growth of edge utilisation.

At the same time, this new way of working has increased the pressure on quality of services, data protection and security for such usages. And it has become even more challenging at the ‘far edge’ with small teams of groups or users who reside beyond branch or remote offices. This added dimension eliminates fragile solutions and invites only serious vendors for an edge solution.

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CTERA and IBM’s COSFA

The product idea is to maintain file access locally for all consumers with a global namespace across distances, devices, users and sites.

Content can be also accessed with other methods based on needs and endpoint devices. The fundamental concept is to use caching techniques across edges and central repository, where data is stored on on-premises or on cloud object storage.

The key considerations when selecting a product like this are around security, data lifecycle, data granularity, data protection, applications integration, performance and monitoring.

CTERA has also added a small device, the HC100, a bit larger than a smartphone, for small branches and work from home users. It represents a good example on how a company can leverage the challenges of the current pandemic. It can be utilised with 20 users who have data intensive needs and also for some vertical use cases, such IoT or other data capture applications.

During the latest IT Press Tour, the company also shared some future development directions around containers and we can expect some CSI support in the coming months.

The post CTERA Networks accelerates its expansion appeared first on Information Age.

Mainframe continues to be paramount for many businesses and it turns out that 80% of the world’s business data is processed by them, with an aggregated 30 billions transactions per day.

The mainframe is utilised by the world’s large enterprises, who also wish to leverage the cloud on it, like they do with their open systems environments.

Enterprise IT teams have traditionally been conservative, but have started to open their mind to mainframe cloud adoption as it represents a real opportunity to align processes to improve procedures, agility and reduce costs significantly.

Model9

Launched in 2016 in Tel-Aviv by Gil Peleg, Model9, funded by Intel Capital, North First Ventures and Glenrock Israel, was founded to address this growing need of mainframe cloud adoption.

For more than 3 years, the product has presented a clear value proposition to fill the gap between mainframe and cloud storage.

The idea is simple and complements the legacy data management model.

Model9 Cloud Data Manager runs on non-billable CPUs, called zIIp — IBM z Systems Integrated Information Processor — and acts as a gateway that connects the system to on-premises or cloud-based object storage, like MinIO or AWS S3.

The benefits are immediate with the reduction of costs, IT modernisation, cloud transformation of the mainframe environment, the data protection improvement and the associated HA/DR in a very easy and transparent deployment of operations.

Model9 launched a partner program with a number of public cloud providers, as well as Cloudian, Hitachi Vantara, Dell, NetApp, Cohesity and MinIO — who have been identified as some of the key players in cloud storage by Coldago Research.

The company detailed two case studies with America First and France Gallop, the first leveraged Cohesity and the second MinIO for seven days of cache and then migrated to AWS Glacier for cold data.

Both examples present a full hardware transformation with no media, tape drives and library to manage and the absence of footprint in the data centre.

Model9 is also listed on the IBM partner page.

The company presents an interesting solution to test and adopt for mainframe users looking to modernise their monolithic environment.

The post Model9 boosts mainframe cloud adoption to reduce IT costs appeared first on Information Age.

Successfully overcoming the world’s sustainability challenges will depend on technology innovation, a willingness to change and a fundamental shift in how we live.

In this Q&A, Information Age spoke to Lee McCormack, CEO at MyGlobalHome — a smart home technology company — to find out about how smart homes, and smart cities will help shape the future of sustainable living.

Who is MyGlobalHome?

MyGlobalHome is a group of experts shaping the future of living. Our work tackles a wide range of issues facing the sector from carbon neutral construction to facilitating better healthcare in the home. We’re funded by UK Research and Innovation through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.

What is its mission?

Our overriding mission is to promote a better future of living and empower the home occupant all whilst remaining fully aligned with the governmental pledge for carbon neutrality by 2050.

If devices could talk to each other, people could not only better understand how to manage their health but also prevent serious emergencies, such as a respiratory event.

Our vision for the future seeks to connect information and understanding to create homes that look after their occupants and not the other way around.

How is technology integrated into the proposition?

Technology is at the heart of everything we do. From our hardware and software connected home control product through to our smart modular fit out system, technology is baked in. We’re also looking at how we can use technology as an enabler to better connect people within the space, whether that’s occupants, developers or local service providers.

How can B2B businesses work with MyGlobalHome or benefit from its proposition?

Connecting industry stakeholders with leading innovators and bespoke resources will be the leading purpose of our platform. We’re creating a streamlined process whereby B2B businesses will be able to access high-quality developers in the residential construction market with simplicity to offer their products and services for compelling projects in the space.

What is the opportunity you are seeing in the smart home space currently?

What we’re seeing is a growing demand for smart homes but a slower uptake than expected. Installed solutions are a challenge for developers as they are costly, complex to design and suffer from reliability issues. IoT solutions suffer from integration and interoperability issues, cyber security flaws and long-term reliability problems. The opportunity is there for a robust, cost effective solution that is baked into the core fabric of the home, offering a truly integrated and stable user experience and not reliant on cloud-to-cloud integration of multiple devices.

Alongside this, and perhaps more importantly, smart homes as we currently know them are often simply a collection of gadgets. Whilst most solutions focus on giving control of a specific siloed application from a smart device, we see an opportunity to drive real meaning through smart home technology. Real meaning to us means optimised energy performance, optimised home health and well-being, optimised community engagement, optimised convenience and comfort and much more.

Are smart homes a precursor to smart cities?

They should be. But smart city adoption is accelerating faster than smart home adoption at the moment. It is simpler for a mass district level deployment of technology at a local authority level than deploying technology within each individual home.

Longer term, I actually see smart cities being a precursor to a larger uptake of truly smart homes. After all, a smart home within a smart city context has a lot more meaning to it than a smart home in isolation.

The post MyGlobalHome Q&A — smart homes, smart cities and the future of living appeared first on Information Age.

In today’s high availability, always-on IT environments, technology never sleeps. Services and applications need to remain live 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, because the impact of downtime can be catastrophic to revenue, customer loyalty and reputation. As a result, organisations the world over rely on well established backup technologies to protect their data and workloads.

The recent launch of “Record-ish: The Original Periodic Recorder” as a non-disruptive challenge to the backup industry illustrates an important point about the state of the backup industry. A “technology solution” designed for users who only need backup to work some of the time for their undemanding workloads and applications, Record-ish is positioned as technology that never sleeps — except when it needs a rest. And by delivering the limitations of legacy backup solutions, organisations of all sizes can meet the needs of the pre-cloud era.

Recordish takes a satirical jab at legacy backup solutions and shines a humorous light on what happens when periodic data protection fails. The fictional product – depicted as an old-school tape recording device – markets itself as a backup solution that records “some of your data, some of the time”. In today’s world, that just doesn’t cut it. In an always-on world, Record-ish is an example of a technology paradigm that holds true to backup designs dating back over 40 years.

Investment in this kind of outdated technology is making a huge impact on modern enterprises where hybrid digital infrastructure is evolving. Despite widespread adoption, however, it remains unclear whether the technology is producing the kind of results organisations are looking for.

But, behind the hype, Record-ish delivers an important message intended to help organisations understand the risks they take by using legacy backup solutions, and the opportunities that exist for improvement.

The Record-ish story is a reaction to the technology status quo seen across the backup market. In reality, Zerto is offering to help businesses shift to true continuous replication with zero data loss for full-time data protection. With IT transformation now central to the fortunes of businesses in every sector, modernisation and cloud adoption rely on continuous, ‘always on’ availability — rather than solutions that are ‘sometimes there.’ By delivering backup services with zero data loss to public cloud market leaders such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, Zerto delivers new backup for a new world.

However, the backup industry is still operating in the same way it was decades ago, relying on periodic snapshots — rather than continuous data protection (CDP).

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Continuous data protection — maintaining an always-on customer experience

CDP allows organisations to automatically capture and track data modifications, saving every version of user-created data locally or at a target repository. With little-to-no production overhead, incremental writes are replicated continuously and saved to a journal file. CDP’s change block tracking also allows users or administrators to restore data to any point in time with remarkable granularity.

The bottom line is: what has worked in the past, will not work for the future. Any company still relying on expensive, dedicated backup and disaster recovery infrastructure should be evaluating a software-only platform based on a foundation of CDP.

But how many organisations can say they are fully prepared and confident in their ability to handle these workloads?

The risks are very real. From ransomware attacks and database corruption to accidental deletions, data and application availability can no longer be considered separately. Modern workload movement technology allows applications to move seamlessly from on-premise to multi-cloud. Data availability must move in tandem to assure the greatest agility and meet availability SLAs. Applications and data must remain available, regardless of the disruption, because customer relations and loyalty leave little room for downtime or data loss.

Take ransomware, for example, which is becoming one of the fastest growing recovery headaches for businesses around the world. Once an organisation falls victim to a ransomware attack, files are locked down. And if the latest backup is from last night, last week, or, even last month, the questions become, “How much data can we stand to lose?”, “What’s this going to cost the business?”, and “How will it impact my organisation’s reputation?”

For many businesses, being on the receiving end of a ransomware attack is only a matter of time. The problem is, having to restore to a day-old or even week-old backup means data loss and increased time and expense in recovery efforts.

As a result, companies are making the switch to solutions based on continuous data protection that meets the availability SLA’s required of today’s business while supporting hybrid and multi-cloud environments. IDC, for instance, reports that 70% of CIOs have a cloud-based strategy for application deployment. Their Technology Spotlight Report examines a new era of backup and recovery, answering questions on best practices and how organisations can future proof their infrastructure. For any organisation with a Record-ish backup strategy, it’s well worth a look.

To find out more about Record-ish, visit: https://www.record-ish.com

The post Moving away from legacy backup solutions in the enterprise appeared first on Information Age.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared a global health emergency as the coronavirus has already infected more than 392,000 people all over the world — as such, organisations need remote working tools and an effective webinar solution. Countries are asked to make efforts in limiting the spread of the virus through social distancing. Businesses are forced to implement remote work arrangements. Classes in schools and public events have either been canceled or postponed.

While these efforts can effectively slow down the spread of Covid-19, they can also be quite disruptive to organisations as they cope with new realities. To help healthcare organisations continue to operate while telecommuting to the greatest extent possible, webinar platform ClickMeeting is offering free access to its webinar solution, which includes a video communication and collaboration service.

Using the platform, organisations can conduct online meetings, collaborate with teams, and engage customers and other stakeholders through webinars, remote video meetings and online conferences, as in-person interaction is limited.

Organisations in many verticals are hurting

The coronavirus outbreak is projected to cost companies billions of dollars in losses worldwide. Major businesses such as Microsoft and Apple have warned that they won’t hit their initial projected profits. It’s been estimated that 27% of all companies will sustain significant revenue hits caused by the outbreak and its economic ripples.

Implementing remote work capabilities and an effective webinar solution can be tough. Companies with little to no experience with such arrangements can see a dip in productivity as managers and staff members take time to adjust. Managers can also find it difficult to hold online meetings and coordinate with team members, especially if they don’t have effective tools to host these interactions. Without functioning communication, employees can feel lost and confused, severely compromising their productivity.

Some organisations that require face-to-face communication flows — such as training providers, consultants, coaches and educational services — can also face lost income if they fail to implement remote learning. Teachers may not be prepared to use complicated learning management systems and set up virtual classrooms. Smaller institutions may not be able to afford the software and managing costs required to allow their teachers and coaches to hold online classes.

The outbreak has also forced organisations to suspend business travels and postpone or cancel major conferences. The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), for example, has cancelled its global health conference for the first time in 58 years. Cancelled travels and events mean wasted time and financial resources. In fact, the tech industry has already lost more than $500 million from cancelled conferences.

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Webinar platforms can ease the friction

Fortunately, webinar platforms aim to help organisations run their business smoothly amid the coronavirus outbreak. ClickMeeting, for one, allows companies to host live, on-demand and automated webinars and conduct training or classes via virtual classrooms.

The browser-based solution can be used by companies to schedule and hold business meetings online easily through private video conferencing sessions. Presenters can share their screens in order to walk viewers through documents, demonstrate and explain processes, offer downloads and assign tasks to each member for easy collaboration on projects.

Educators and trainers can also use the platform to quickly design online courses and conduct training sessions through a virtual classroom. They can easily discuss concepts using a virtual whiteboard, offer a list of resources, and use tools to give exams to students. These sessions can be revisited if students need to review a certain lesson.

The platform also enables companies to hold events and conferences without requiring in-person attendance in physical venues. Virtual summits can gather different experts and professionals to share their knowledge to individuals all over the world. These are scalable and can handle large online events with thousands of attendees.

“Nobody knows where the coronavirus outbreak will go from here and for how long countries, businesses, and educational institutions will need to be in an emergency planning mode,” said ClickMeeting Managing Director Dominika Paciorkowska.

Simon Grabowski, the company’s CEO, is proud of the support that ClickMeeting’s webinar solution platform can offer healthcare providers in particular. “This way, doctors will receive a free and professional tool for efficient and real-time communication with each other, to run meaningful consultations and share documents,” he said.

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Every bit helps

Beyond the effects of coronavirus on businesses, companies must do the right thing and do their best to limit the spread of the virus and protect their employees. The availability of webinar platforms can help them implement flexible working arrangements, engage customers, and hold online conferences, allowing them to run their businesses as usual without risking their team’s safety.

With capable tools and an effective webinar solution at their disposal, companies should be able to keep their operations performing smoothly, even during a global crisis.

The post ClickMeeting’s webinar solution free to health organisations hit by Covid-19 appeared first on Information Age.

Broadband installations globally have eclipsed the one billion mark to date. These connections are largely based upon a traditional model of modified existing central office architectures, complemented by copper or fibre access and a relatively simple edge network connecting a handful of devices in the home via wired or Wi-Fi connections.

However, a new digital era is fast emerging, where new technologies such as 5G, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV), a proliferation of devices driven by the Internet of Things (IoT), and a significantly more sophisticated and complex connected home have compounded matters and applied significant pressures to the network architecture and its ability to scale to meet the challenges and opportunities of this new world.

With the number of IoT devices alone growing at a rapid rate — with the market estimated to reach 75 billion connected devices by 2025 — along with the staggering growth in network traffic and the emergence of ground-breaking new technologies, the potential challenges of this new digital age need to be addressed.. The existing network architecture must change and become agile enough to embrace these new challenges and introduce new services.

However, if operators and Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are to realise the full potential of this new environment and new technologies, they must be willing to adopt new initiatives to provide the Quality of Experience (QoE) to which their customers demand. Paving the way for these new initiatives is Broadband Forum, which is unifying the best of open standards and open source to deliver the agile technologies that enable the necessary network transformations and services of the future.

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Embracing the cloud

Utilising cloud technologies including SDN and NFV, Broadband Forum’s Cloud Central Office (CloudCO) is an open interface and a scalable and dynamic network. Not only does CloudCO bring cloud capabilities to virtualisation of the Central Office (CO), as well as improve flow control and enhance functional flexibility, it can also be accessed through a Northbound API, allowing operators and third parties to consume its functionality while hiding how this functionality is achieved from the customer.

Although capable of disaggregation and redefinition of some of the functional pieces, the major challenges the CO faces include issues with migration, questions of how to allow new and old technologies to co-exist, and how to get virtual infrastructure and cloud infrastructure into the CO in the first place.

This is a flagship project for Broadband Forum. This new paradigm enables the community to build systems for the future and ensure that the new era of broadband is realised. CloudCO system integrators and function vendors can foster interoperability in the market and the system acts as a playground for an ecosystem to evolve and to help the thriving community of suppliers and service providers in their quest to embrace the cloud and the benefits that come with it.

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Open Broadband and accelerated deployment

For the efficient delivery of emerging broadband access technologies, unifying open source with open standards is imperative to make them interoperable and flexible. Operators are looking for solutions which can map open source innovations onto existing deployments to allow minimal disruption and reduce expenditure.

Open standards are needed in order to align the industry on common architecture and migration approaches. Without these standards, operators would not be able to comprehensively protect their existing asset investments and launch new opportunities for service development.

Building the next-generation network on open source technology can accelerate innovation. Operators and vendors are looking to reap the rewards of bringing new programmability to their networks by harnessing the immense promise of virtualisation and cloud-based technologies. This has resulted in industry players looking to change their approach to network design and has unlocked the vast potential of other areas of the industry including network convergence.

One ‘open source’ solution which has gained significant traction is Broadband Forum’s Open Broadband — Broadband Access Abstraction (OB-BAA), which allows accelerated deployment of cloud-based access infrastructure and services and facilitates co-existence and migration. OB-BAA can be adapted to many software defined access models and the speed at which service providers can now deploy standardised cloud-based infrastructures has notably improved. This added functionality has enabled flexible solutions needed by SDN/NFV-based networks.

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Our continuing work

Significant progress has also been made in Broadband Forum’s Broadband Quality Experience Delivered (Broadband QED) initiative. At both our Q3 2019 meeting in Milan, Italy, as well as on our Interop Pavilion at Broadband World Forum 2019 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, this fall, a demonstration showcased a practical implementation of Broadband QED. This highlighted how service providers can look beyond conventional measurements such as latency and jitter and complement this information to provide deeper insights to improve the overall broadband experience. This aligns with the publication of Broadband Forum’s Application Layer Test Traffic Architecture and Requirements Technical Report-421 (TR-421), which addresses an area which has been historically overlooked, defining architecture and requirements for the specification of test traffic and measurements associated with the application layer. TR-421 includes a number of use cases which generate test traffic under realistic conditions and can be reliably repeated. This builds on previous test specifications which typically did not capture application layer behaviour.

Another of our expanding Broadband Forum’s initiatives, Open Broadband Labs (OB-Labs), provides a sandbox for advanced CloudCO and SDN/NFV transformation projects and promote the development of network transformation, as well as cloud evolution leveraging open source software. First introduced in 2017 in Asia, OB-Labs are now in place around the world, providing advanced test environments that can combine proprietary, open source and standard implementations to assist service provider evaluation, enable open source collaboration, and accelerate transformation. OB-Labs provide the industry with defined interfaces for how products and solutions can fit into the cloud-based architecture, and their test resources can be used for performance and interoperability testing.

Yes — the revolution of the broadband industry is now upon us. That said, Broadband Forum is here to help, and operators and vendors keen to adopt initiatives of open software interwoven with open standards can tap into our resources and projects and ensure for themselves that the necessary transformation ahead is filled with opportunity.

Written by Robin Mersh, CEO of Broadband Forum

The post Unifying open standards and open source with agile technology appeared first on Information Age.

Stratus Technologies is a US-based company with a global presence in a range of industries, including the industrial market. It has been in business for 39 years.

Over the course of its history, the company has been building ‘ultra-reliable’ computing platforms with data centre and data closet-type products. But over the last few years, they’ve transitioned into an edge computing provider; “over 60% of our product revenues now comes from edge deployments,” confirms Jason Andersen, vice president, strategy and business line management at Stratus.

During this transition, the focus and attention has not only been on the product development strategy but also the company’s go-to-market strategy — it’s now all about being a premier edge computing platform provider.

“It’s very much an evolution for us, it’s a deepening of our relationship into our market segments,” continues Andersen. “Compared to three years ago we would view ourselves more as a horizontal technology provider. Now we’re more a solution provider into industrial automation, energy, financial services and transportation.”

The CTO’s guide to edge computing

Information Age’s comprehensive guide to edge computing for CTOs and business leaders. Read here

Defining edge computing

Every one is relatively new to the edge computing space.

What does it mean? Broadly, it can be defined as the ability to process and filter data near the machine and near the point of production.

Within that, there are what Andersen calls “edge computing subsets”:

“You’ve got gateways, which essentially just push data round or translate data into a format that’s acceptable by a modern computer; you’ve got your IPC market, which is industrial PCs doing a whole variety of different things, running SCADA applications and doing machine learning.”

The ztC Edge

This is where our new product sits, in what we’d call the edge server space. It is a virtualised device which has more robust IT feature set in it, over and above what an IPC can do.

Even though some of them have the same exact form factor, the software inside is very different. It allows it to do different things but those are three subsets of the broader edge computing market that Stratus looks at, studies and partners around.

— Andersen

Facilitating industry 4.0

Organisations are on different steps of the industry 4.0 journey.

With Stratus, it does a healthy amount of what Andersen calls a “mid-size factory refresh” for its clients. This is “our staple industrial business,” he says. In this scenario, a customer will come and ask for an updated SCADA application, for example. Stratus will deploy an edge computer, now, to do that.

There’s still a lot of industrial 3.0 software and hardware out there, so many organisations are in need of a refresh.

But, steadily, organisations are starting to design the infrastructure with industry 4.0 in mind. “I’m going to buy extra capacity and design everything around the software I’m going to need tomorrow,” emphasises Andersen.

Reinforcing the point, he then refers to one of Stratus’ big partners, AVEVA:

“We’ve talked a lot about this particular situation, because how they’re treating their software architecture has become more container-driven and cloud-aware. We’re adapting our platform to work with them as well. It’s an example of how we’re trying to help the customer evolve versus a more revolutionary approach.”

Augmented reality: the new business tool driving industry 4.0

At LiveWorx 2019, four end user customers explained the impact augmented reality was having on their organisation and their journey to it. Read here

Security by design

Industry 4.0 requires a new way of thinking when it comes to design.

Security has to be included in the design process and deploying an edge server can help with this. The virtualisation on it means that organisations running ten-year-old hardware can carry software forward and update accordingly.

Typically, an enterprise customer will replace servers after three or four years. But, that’s because the status quo is focused on quick turnaround and end-of-life policies.

It all comes down to life cycle. “The industrial customer base that doesn’t want to replace equipment often, they have a different buying model. How do you match the world of the people who focus on enterprise technology towards that,” asks Andersen?

“If you’re a typical IT or enterprise software vendor, you’re going to push to replace every three to five years.

But, we’ve been going to market for years and, for example, we’ve had partners in Japan telling us we need your guarantee that you’ll support it for 12 years.”

“We’re starting to build an integrated experience around security and protection” — Andersen

Edge facilitates the autonomous

Stratus is now an edge-focused company. It is shedding some of the availability and fault tolerance moniker, but still delivering that in its products.

“All we’re doing is taking the technology we have and putting it into a more broadly applicable place and building functionality that is more broadly applicable,” says Andersen.

“That’s why I’m really excited about our latest release — it’s the first big step away from our heritage products.

“The product we introduced last year was really to test the market and now, it’s a different beast entirely.”

The post Transitioning to an edge computing provider – Stratus Technologies appeared first on Information Age.

AppGallery offers users a new way to discover content and features a four-layer detection mechanism to ensure that all featured apps are safe to download and use.

AppGallery is now available in 178 countries. To support developers, HUAWEI offers full onboarding and expert technical support along with open access to HUAWEI’s automated test lab and performance optimization for HUAWEI devices.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) are some of the most exciting developments in technology right now. In the last few years, numerous companies have made tremendous strides in the field, with HUAWEI bringing AI/AR closer to the consumer than ever before. The Kirin processors have allowed every single one of us to access AI/AR wherever we go, even when we lack a connection to a cloud service.

AI is always as smart as the apps using it — and HUAWEI has made it its mission to curate the best and most innovative AI apps in the HUAWEI AppGallery. StorySign, SketchAR are the examples of the capabilities that AI/AR offers – and of solutions, that were only made possible with the new technology. StorySign and other AI apps can be found in the AppGallery under the collections of “Power of HiAI”.

HUAWEI provides its partners with an open global platform for open capabilities. Developers have full use of the increasingly rich and open capabilities of our chip–device-cloud systems. Bear this in mind, AppGallery works with Station F, the world’s largest startup facility, to help innovators to join HUAWEI ecosystem by promoting their work to global HUAWEI and HONOR users. On May 31st, HUAWEI will hold a workshop together with Station F, elaborating on how to release an app in AppGallery, tackling technical problems using AI and AR capabilities.

As well as technical support, HUAWEI offers promotional support to partners including featuring top apps and games on the AppGallery home page. Developers can take advantage of this chance to engage in AppGallery promotions, drive traffic by creating unique themes and wallpapers, and cooperate with HUAWEI in online and social media campaigns. In this way incubated companies can focus on their project, while HUAWEI expands their distribution channel and business network.

The post The HUAWEI AppGallery: supporting innovation appeared first on Information Age.

When we said we were going to do more case studies on organisations, beginning with IGEL making waves in the end user computing market, we weren’t lying.

In this article, we’re going to explore how Virtusa — the digital business technology provider — is helping organisations scale robotic process automation (RPA) across entire businesses, while delving into their USP.

The USP

Virtusa aims to help clients achieve their digital goals — “this is what makes us unique,” says Ravi Palepu — global head of telco solutions.

He claims that other providers support clients in the digital transformation process simply by identifying an issue and implementing a digital solution — automating any manual process with RPA, for example. “We take a more holistic view,” Palepu says. “We provide end-to-end support for clients, assessing their existing operations and capabilities to help them identify their digital goals and create a roadmap to get them there.

“We also differentiate based on our approach to prototyping — we provide clients with a low-risk, low-investment ‘sandbox’ environment to help narrow down their problem areas and create a realistic prototype of the right solution.”

RPA: the key players, and what’s unique about them

We sat down with some of the key players in RPA: Automation Anywhere, NICE, UiPath, Blue Prism, Kofax, and Another Monday; to ask: ‘what’s special about you’? Read here

Relevant to my organisation?

Virtusa’s classic customer is a large enterprise looking to embark on or extend the digital transformation process.

In today’s uber-competitive environment, many large — perhaps more traditional — firms are finding “themselves under serious pressure to build digital capabilities, but face a number of challenges in doing so,” continues Palepu.

The majority of organisations face the same problem: IT departments are to focused on ‘keeping the lights on’ to consider digital transformation.

Desktop-as-a-Service and the future of IT working for digital transformation

Embracing Desktop-as-a-Service, and other cloud-based services, will free up IT teams to focus on the digital transformation demands being placed on them. Read here

Further to this, Palepu highlights “that the complexity of existing IT operation holds them back from implementing digital processes, or they may not have the internal experience of running large digital transformation projects.”

Overcoming these IT transformation hurdles is “Virtusa’s ‘sweet spot’,” claims Palepu. “We help these firms re-imagine their existing business models and give them a roadmap to digital transformation. We have run so many of these projects that we know where the most common mistakes are made and how to avoid them.”

Scaling RPA: before automating processes, improve them

Most enterprises aren’t scaling RPA across their entire organisation, in part, because they don’t understand their processes to begin with. Read here

Scaling RPA

How does Virtusa help organisations scale RPA across their business?

Palepu tells Information Age that “we offer a range of services to guide clients at every stage of the process — from identifying use cases, through to building their CoE (centre of excellence), through to deployment and ongoing support.”

The provider’s strength lies in the fact that it is a business consultant, as well as a software engineer expert. As a result, Virtusa can talk to companies about their business objectives and then show where technology can help — and also show them, in some cases, where RPA might not be the right solution.

From a technology perspective, Virtusa have also developed a series of domain and process-specific accelerators to help increase time to value for businesses investing in RPA.

One example would be it’s Smart Document Processing (V-SDP) solution, which digitises scanned invoices, contracts and bills from multiple sources and formats. This enables “seamless reconciliation of the accounts payable process, data extraction from various fields, and advice on the next-best-action, with minimal human intervention,” according to Palepu.

The post How is Virtusa helping companies scale RPA? appeared first on Information Age.