LPWAN Progress: Are We There Yet?

by Kitty Weldon, posted in Mobilize
K. Weldon
K. Weldon

Summary Bullets:

  • Operators were racing to roll out LPWAN networks in 2017, with the aim of generating massive numbers of new IoT deals and new connections.
  • The LPWA World event in London on May 22 and 23 may help provide a reality check on market traction.

The agenda for LPWA World this week in London provides some clues about the burning issues that need to be addressed, as the networks that mobile operators built out in 2017 are now in place and looking for action. Nearly every major operator offering IoT services and some that are new to the game got on the LPWAN bandwagon in 2017, as the market for inexpensive, energy- and battery-efficient technologies to support low-bandwidth IoT use cases looked hugely promising. The hope was (and remains) that many companies that wanted to deploy IoT for mobile use cases but couldn’t afford the high cost of traditional 3G/4G cellular networks would flock to these new fit-for-purpose low-cost/low-power networks. The operators also see potential new growth opportunities in market segments they haven’t been able to penetrate well, such as smart cities/smart lighting and agriculture. While some providers are offering non-standardized networks based on LoRa and SigFox, most mobile operators launched NB-IoT and LTE-M in 2017. Continue reading “LPWAN Progress: Are We There Yet?” →

Red Hat Summit: New Tools Strengthen Red Hat’s DevOps Arsenal

by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in IT Leader
C. Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

• Advanced app platforms concepts introduced a year ago will be productized this year, including low-code capabilities, serverless computing, and reactive systems.

• Red Hat is slowly but steadily moving into some ALM capabilities such as container security via SSO, as well as microservices enhanced with Istio and Envoy.

Last week’s Red Hat Summit provided a roadmap for the open source software leader’s application development tools supporting next-generation architectures – including reactive microservices and serverless computing, along with peeks into plans for low-code capabilities and containerized security.

Numerous examples highlighted ways customers are leveraging RHEL and the OpenShift cloud platform to migrate apps to the cloud and create new cloud apps. As part of that strategy, Red Hat has reorganized its application platforms and DevOps initiatives into five distinct organizations: Agile integration, Cloud native development, Automation management, Hybrid cloud infrastructure, and IT optimization. (Please see Red Hat Summit: Modern Components for the next OSS DevOps Phase , May 15, 2018). Continue reading “Red Hat Summit: New Tools Strengthen Red Hat’s DevOps Arsenal” →

Google I/O 2018: Did Google AI Just Pass the Turing Test?

by Brad Shimmin, posted in Big Data
B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

  • At Google I/O this week, Sundar Pichai walked attendees through a number of impressive implementations of AI, one of which showed how Google Assistant could book a haircut and make a dinner reservation via an unnervingly convincing conversation between human and machine.
  • What happens, then, if that assistant eventually learns how to pass itself off as you?

You know it’s spring when the cherry blossoms appear in force, the birds start singing in unison, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai takes the stage at Google I/O and nonchalantly demonstrates some new bit of technology that simultaneously manages to amaze and terrify. I’m talking about Google Duplex, an interesting blend of natural language understanding (NLU), deep learning (DL), and text-to-speech technology designed to do one thing: use AI to emulate at least one half of an actual human conversation. Continue reading “Google I/O 2018: Did Google AI Just Pass the Turing Test?” →

Why Fortnite Should Convince Telcos to Level Up to 5G

by Josh Hewer, posted in Mobilize
J. Hewer

Summary Bullets:

  • Fortnite has yet to hit Android, but it’s already pulling in $1 million a day on mobile. Demanding low latency and constant connectivity, most gamers are currently confined to WiFi.
  • Next-generation mobile gaming needs 5G, and with a huge global player base, operators should look to gamers to justify 5G.

5G connectivity promises vast improvements in performance over 4G networks; new tech means apps will make use of the available 5G spectrum to ensure faster speeds, and gaming on mobile will benefit. How this technology will be used and potentially adopted at scale will drive the required infrastructure investment. Continue reading “Why Fortnite Should Convince Telcos to Level Up to 5G” →

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe: Another Milestone Event for Kubernetes, but Don’t Expect a Developer-Led, Infrastructure-Agnostic World Anytime Soon

by Chris Drake, posted in Cloud Enable
C. Drake

Summary Bullets:

  • Last week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference in Denmark demonstrated the extent to which Kubernetes has become the industry standard for orchestrating and managing cloud-native applications.
  • The conference saw Kubernetes announcements from Cisco, Red Hat, and Oracle, illustrating the growing commitment of data center infrastructure vendors to open source and application performance management (APM) technologies.

Last week’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference in Denmark saw over 4,000 people descend on Copenhagen’s Bella Center for three days of keynote presentations, technical discussions, and networking with a focus on containers, microservices, serverless computing, and the challenges and options facing cloud-native application development. Continue reading “KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe: Another Milestone Event for Kubernetes, but Don’t Expect a Developer-Led, Infrastructure-Agnostic World Anytime Soon” →

Is Public Safety China’s New Export?

by Rena Bhattacharyya, posted in Big Data
R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:

• Huawei showcased its Video Cloud Platform at its recent analyst event, touting its application for public safety.

• The company pointed to widespread adoption and success in China, but can it find a market for its solution overseas?

During Huawei’s Analyst Summit in Shenzhen, China, executive keynotes emphasized the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the company’s vision to create a more connected, more intelligent world. The company’s vision is to use AI to improve people’s daily lives and to benefit society as a whole. Unlike some competitors, who often showcase the application of AI to improve the customer experience, or point to use cases that incorporate natural language processing or natural language generation, Huawei was keen to highlight its video strategy. The company has roughly 5,450 members of its staff involved in developing video solutions and eight research and development centers that focus on video technology (three in China, as well as sites in the US, France, Ireland, Russia, and Japan). Huawei envisions several use cases for the application of AI and video, including identification of abandoned objects, intrusion detection, crowd density monitoring, facial control/admission processing, and vehicle, facial, and physical attribute identification. Continue reading “Is Public Safety China’s New Export?” →

Why Company Culture Is Critical to Successful Collaboration Technology Deployments

by Tim Banting, posted in Communicate, IT Leader
T. Banting

Summary Bullets:

  • Company culture is pivotal to the successful adoption of collaboration solutions.
  • Task cultures are more likely to succeed in reacting to change and adapting to the organizational challenges required to transform a business using collaborative solutions.

Technology alone does not allow a business to change and transform. It won’t make organizations more efficient, productive, creative, or innovative unless businesses are able to assimilate the technology into their culture. Company culture is pivotal to the successful adoption of collaboration solutions; indeed, oftentimes there is too much focus on technology rather than addressing change and rethinking how employees, partners, and customers work together. Continue reading “Why Company Culture Is Critical to Successful Collaboration Technology Deployments” →

Huawei Analyst Summit 2018: Edge Computing, Hybrid Cloud, and AI are Central to Huawei’s Future Vision of the Data Center

by Chris Drake, posted in Cloud Enable
C. Drake

Summary Bullets:

• Key themes from the 15th Huawei Analyst Summit (HAS) in Shenzhen, China, included edge computing, hybrid cloud enablement, and the application of AI to data center technologies.

• To unlock commercial opportunities and reinforce the competitiveness of its solutions, Huawei would benefit from a stronger articulation of both its hybrid cloud and edge computing capabilities.

Judging by the themes of the 15th HAS in Shenzhen, China, 17-19 April, Huawei expects data center technologies to become increasingly more intelligent, more distributed in the way they are deployed, and more diverse in the use cases they support. Key themes from the Summit, with particular relevance to data centers, included edge computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), multi-cloud and hybrid cloud enablement, and the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to both data centers and the use cases they support.

The Summit saw a recurring emphasis on the theme of “boundless computing”, reflecting Huawei’s commitment to a single infrastructure platform that blurs the boundaries between CPUs, servers, and data centers and supports the delivery of resources wherever they are required. There was considerable discussion of edge computing, which involves the maintenance and operation of IT resources at locations that are closer to the points of data generation, and to the end users of digital content and applications. Huawei already offers several solutions that support enterprise edge computing initiatives, including its Cloud Fabric SDN solution and a version of its hyperconverged infrastructure offering, FusionCube, which is specifically optimized for remote office and branch office (ROBO) and edge computing deployments. Continue reading “Huawei Analyst Summit 2018: Edge Computing, Hybrid Cloud, and AI are Central to Huawei’s Future Vision of the Data Center” →

It’s Time to Orchestrate AI Hardware for Maximum Effect

by Brad Shimmin, posted in Big Data
B. Shimmin
B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

  • There are many AI-savvy chipsets on the market right now, each fine-tuned to support specific AI workloads, development frameworks, or vendor platforms.
  • But, what if developers could flexibly combine AI-specific hardware resource pools on the fly, on-premises as well as online?

There’s certainly enough buzz in the industry right now about artificial intelligence (AI). If you look beyond the doomsday predictions of a machine uprising, the prevailing view is that AI is a literal Swiss Army knife of circumstance, able to cut through any and all problems, ready to assemble opportunity out of nothing more than data. It seems that every vendor has one or two machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) frameworks lying about. It’s no wonder. There’s TensorFlow, Caffe, Theano, Torch, and many, many more to choose from, most of which open source and are quite accessible to the broader developer community. Continue reading “It’s Time to Orchestrate AI Hardware for Maximum Effect” →

Cloud Foundry Summit: CF Goes to Battle Against AWS, Red Hat, DIY Options

by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in Cloud Enable
C. Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

  • Cloud Foundry, AWS, and Red Hat OpenShift will duke it out in the OSS PaaS space over the coming year.
  • Cloud Foundry members favor the OSS community’s growing ecosystem in a multi-cloud era.

The phrase ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer’ never rang truer as AWS contacted the Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) at the eleventh hour asking to be a sponsor at this month’s annual Cloud Foundry Summit in Boston. The open source project’s top rivals are AWS, Red Hat OpenShift, and enterprise DIY projects. Perhaps Amazon wanted to get a peek into the goings-on between the 63 members which make up the Cloud Foundry community, including the newest member, Chinese telco giant Alibaba. Continue reading “Cloud Foundry Summit: CF Goes to Battle Against AWS, Red Hat, DIY Options” →