Month: October 2024

Colt Research Finds UK at Bottom Of Long-Term Sustainability Leaderboard

by Rob Pritchard, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate, IT Leader, Secure
R. Pritchard

Summary Bullets:

  • Colt research finds UK CIOs behind the curve on having a multi-year plan to minimize their companies’ environmental impact, despite 71% of CIOs having this responsibility.
  • There has been a broad softening of sustainability targets, but service providers lead the way in facilitating reduced emissions, even despite the impact of AI.

Colt Technology Services has conducted a study as part of its annual ‘Digital Infrastructure Report,’ surveying 1,500 CIOs across 10 countries worldwide. Surprisingly, the survey found that only 18% of UK businesses that responded ‘have a multi-year plan to minimize their environmental impact.’ Leading countries were the Netherlands (42%) and Hong Kong (41%).

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Safaricom’s Deal with SaaS Company tappi Highlights Importance of Startups in Africa’s Tech Ecosystem

by Ismail Patel, posted in Cloud Enable, Mobilize
I. Patel

Summary Bullets:

  • Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startup tappi teamed up with Safaricom’s mobile platform M-PESA to improve the digital presence of M-PESA’s small and medium business (SMB) users.
  • The partnership provides SMBs with tools that scale their operations, enhance their customer engagement, and boost their online visibility in the digital space.

tappi, a Kenyan e-commerce SaaS startup, teamed up with Kenya incumbent and African operator group Safaricom to support its mobile payments platform M-PESA’s network of 650,000 Kenyan SMBs to improve their digital presence. The partnership provides SMBs with tools that scale their operations, enhance their customer engagement, and boost their online visibility to capitalize on the opportunity in the digital space.

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Google Cloud Summit UK: Integrating AI Across Silicon, Platform, Cloud, and Applications

by Beatriz Valle, posted in Big Data, IT Leader
B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

• Google Cloud held its first annual summit at the Tobacco Docks in East London (England) in October 2024.

• Announcements included Google’s expanded data residency to help customers undertake Gemini 1.5 Flash ML processing and data storage entirely in the UK, if they handle sensitive data that cannot leave the country.

Google Cloud held its first annual summit at the Tobacco Docks in East London (England) in October 2024. The event included keynotes, workshops, demos, and the prominent presence of an exciting ecosystem of startups, driven by the launch of the Google Cloud Startup Hub, a new community space for developers and entrepreneurs.

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SMBs Are Part of the AI Boom – Show Me the Telco Money?

by Rob Pritchard, posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable
R. Pritchard

Summary Bullets:

  • Research from Verizon Business and opinion from Deutsche Telekom highlight the growing importance and transformative role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the SMB segment.
  • The challenge is how to convert this demand into money when SMBs have become the focus of telco growth in enterprise revenues.

AI is for hyperscalers, data centers, large corporates, and geeky consumers. Right? Wrong. Research from Verizon Business has found that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the US are rapidly adopting AI. Verizon’s annual State of Small Business Survey found that the proportion of SMBs using AI has more than doubled in the past year (39% from 14% in 2023, with a further 35% considering using AI), as awareness and accessibility to AI in business applications has grown. The leading sectors adopting AI are largely the entertainment, hospitality, and accommodation verticals, which also tend to dominate much of the SMB market. The main use cases for adoption of AI cover marketing/social media, data analysis, and customer service – which makes sense as this has been largely the early adopter case across most markets to date.

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Cyberattack with China Ties Against Major Telcos May Have Tapped into Critical US Federal Government Data

by Amy Larsen DeCarlo, posted in Secure
Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services

Summary Bullets:

• In a published blog, Lumen says its Black Lotus Labs has identified an active exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in its Versa Director servers, which orchestrate its SD-WAN network services.

• Though the company, attributing the attack to threat actors Volt Typhoon backed by China, didn’t specify which of its clients would have been affected, others suggest the attack may have penetrated the infrastructure supporting sensitive government wiretapping communications.

Reports circulated this summer that state-sponsored cybercriminals connected to China hacked into US federal government resources via major telecom providers’ networks. Last week, it was revealed by several journalism sources including the Wall Street Journal that the target of the activity was federal government communications related to court-ordered network wiretapping applications that the hackers accessed through AT&T, Lumen, and Verizon’s networks. Though no one with direct knowledge of the situation was named, anonymous sources say the threat actors could have been tapped into the networks months ago.

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New AMD Pensando Offerings for AI, HPC, and Hyperscalers Shine

by Steven J. Schuchart Jr., posted in Cloud Enable
S. Schuchart

Summary Bullets:

  • On October 10, 2024, AMD announced the latest editions of its DPU lineup from its acquisition of Pensando.
  • The UEC 1.0 standard will be a big deal in HPC and AI circles.

One of the drivers of high-end networking on the server side is the data processing unit (DPU) also sometimes referred to somewhat erroneously as NIC accelerators. These are add-in networking and services cards for servers in high-performance or hyperscaler environments. Not only do these cards handle traditional NIC acceleration tasks and encryption offloading, but they have their own CPUs and memory. They can support advanced processing and are often used for security and monitoring, among other specialized things – the cards are programable. These cards run outside of the operating system on the server and most often feature ARM-based processors. By running separately on their own operating system, they are extremely useful in security and isolation from the base platform.

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Generative AI Watch: Text-based Data is the Next Logical Evolution of Synthetic Data

by Rena Bhattacharyya, posted in Big Data

Summary Bullets:

R. Bhattacharyya

• Synthetic unstructured data, or text, can be used to train and finetune large language models (LLMs) used in customer support applications or chatbot conversations.

• The application of synthetic data, both tabular and unstructured, will continue to grow, driven by a need for additional training data as well as concerns over data privacy.

On October 1, 2024, MOSTLY AI announced that its platform can help enterprises create synthetic text, a timely new capability given the growing interest by enterprises to leverage GenAI to extract insights from unstructured data. Over the past several years, much of the conversation around synthetic data has focused on using GenAI to create synthetic tabular data. Tabular data is structured data that can be neatly organized, for example information that can be arranged in an excel file. The logical next step is to use GenAI to create text-based information that can be used to customize LLMs.

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OpenAI Raises $6.6 Billion in New Funding Round, but Drama is Never Far Away

by Beatriz Valle, posted in Big Data, Cloud Enable, IT Leader
B. Valle

Summary Bullets:

• OpenAI’s latest fundraising round puts it at a $150 billion valuation.

• The startup recently released the OpenAI o1 platform, designed to solve complex tasks in science, coding, and math.

The world’s most high-profile technology startup has been in the news again, this time because of a new funding round that has increased its valuation to $150 billion. Microsoft, SoftBank, and Nvidia joined the fundraising alongside Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures. MGX, the Abu Dhabi (the UAE) investment firm that has also been in the news lately thanks to its investment in data centers (please see: Microsoft Joins BlackRock in $100-billion Investment Drive to Fund Data Center Infrastructure Projects, September 20, 2024) also contributed.

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Salesforce Agentforce Takes Aim at Popular Microsoft Copilot

by Charlotte Dunlap, posted in IT Leader
C. Dunlap Research Director

Summary Bullets:

• Salesforce goes after Microsoft Copilot via Agentforce’s autonomous decision-making abilities.

• Enterprises are demanding abstraction of data and AI in their quest to simplify generative AI (GenAI) strategies/solutions.

The dust has settled from last month’s Salesforce Dreamforce mega-conference in San Francisco. From an enterprise developer perspective, the most provocative takeaway is the newly available autonomous agents (called Salesforce Agentforce, of course) for providing more accessible and advanced GenAI capabilities to the app development process.

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Vodafone Delivers Marketing Innovation With V-Hub

by Rob Pritchard, posted in Cloud Enable, Communicate, IT Leader, Network, Secure
R. Pritchard

Summary Bullets:

• V-Hub offers a range of online advice help from digital experts to help SMBs and SOHOs make the most of technology to optimize their businesses.

• Vodafone’s V-Hub is proving popular with small business customers and has helped improve its Net Promoter Score by 18 points, providing extra customer lifetime value.

Vodafone’s update on progress with its V-Hub business customer portal was very positive and should be seen as a rare telco success story when targeting the market for smaller business customers. For example, across the countries where V-Hub has been rolled out, Vodafone Business has seen an average NPS (Net Promoter Score) improvement of 18 points since launch.

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