Dole Provides Sober Perspective on Blockchain’s Importance in Avoiding Food Contamination

C. Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

• Dole Food is committed to IBM Food Trust to revamp its supply chain operations.
• Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum are moving towards interoperability via new alliance.

Industry travelers can no longer attend conferences or mega tradeshows such as this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona without being hit with the virtues of blockchain during keynotes and vendor demos. Earlier this month, a Dole Food Company executive offered a sobering account of just how intolerable the food supply chain has become among corporations running their operations on antiquated methods.

Google in Hot Water Over Latest Privacy Misstep

A. DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

• Google is under fire for failing to disclose that its Nest Secure home alarm system has an embedded microphone.
• Privacy advocates are calling for significant change in light of the digital giant’s checkered data handling history.

When Google announced in early February that the company had added a feature to its Google Nest Secure system that allows it to work with Google Assistant to become a smart speaker, some consumers were surprised to learn the home security and alarm system has an embedded microphone. Google copped to failing to disclose the integrated microphone, admitting that detail should have been included in product information.

More Than Governmental Oversight, Responsible AI Takes a Village

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

• What do Facebook’s ‘10-Year Challenge,’ Domino’s ‘Points for Pies’ app, and the early detection of diabetic retinopathy all have in common? They prove the difficulty in separating the peril from the promise of AI.
• More importantly, however, they illuminate the need for an enforceable code of ethics that includes all ecosystem participants.

Technology providers have long trumpeted the importance of responsible artificial intelligence (AI). We began writing about this issue back in 2016, when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella suggested that developers stop focusing on good versus evil AI and instead concentrate on the “values instilled in the people and institutions creating this technology.”

IBM Consolidates Cloud Platforms to Strengthen Strategies in Hybrid/Multi-Cloud and Blockchain

C. Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

• IBM Cloud Integration Platform represents more integration capabilities (MQ, Event Streams, API Connect, App Connect) and a public cloud presence.
• Continued innovation in integration is critical for IBM’s broader cloud strategy founded on IBM Cloud Private (ICP), which now serves as its multi-cloud management offering.
• IBM released a free beta version of its blockchain platform, componentized to work with Kubernetes containers and operate in hybrid and multi-cloud environments and emphasizing a network-agnostic approach.

At the core of IBM’s cloud strategy is ICP, released a year ago to manage Docker and Kubernetes containers. This year, during last week’s Think conference, the platform’s role graduated to that of multi-cloud management, enabled through best-in-class IBM Cloud Integration Platform and the new IBM Cloud App Platform (WebSphere Liberty solutions which we expect will eventually merge with Red Hat JBoss app platforms). For the past 18 months, GlobalData has noted the importance of dominating the private/hybrid cloud space in order to gain a foothold in the broader multi-cloud ecosystem and carry more influence in modern app development technologies and models.

Adapt to Succeed: Wipro Demonstrates Formula for Digital Growth

J. Marcus

Summary Bullets:

• Wipro has grown its digital business rapidly by focusing on customer experience and investing in a consultative approach.
• It showed how at its recent analyst briefing, begging the question of whether it can remain differentiated.

Wipro held an analyst day in the UK this month to showcase its digital business, started from scratch four years ago and boosted by its acquisition of Designit in 2015. Since then, Wipro Digital has grown from less than 50 to more than 5,000 employees generating an increasingly significant portion of Wipro’s overall revenues.

Network Operators Experiment with Edge Computing – Seen as Essential to 5G’s Success

C. Drake

Summary Bullets:

• Initiatives by mobile network operators illustrate the importance attributed to edge computing as an essential component for unlocking the benefits of 5G mobile networks.
• However, plenty of challenges lie ahead for 5G and edge computing, including security concerns and the need to develop viable business models and use cases based on the new technologies.

Immersive virtual reality (VR), self-driving cars, and remote-controlled robots are just some of the things telecommunications service providers expect future 5G mobile networks to make possible. However, most large service providers are in agreement that higher-bandwidth 5G networks will, by themselves, be insufficient to support these emerging applications. Recent initiatives by large service providers, including Verizon, AT&T, and Deutsche Telekom, illustrate the importance being attributed to edge computing as an essential component for unlocking the benefits of 5G.

Operationalizing AI for Broader Adoption

R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:

• A shortage of skilled AI professionals is one of the biggest hurdles to broader AI adoption by enterprises.
• Salesforce is embedding its solutions with Einstein-powered AI to make the technology more accessible to non-data scientists.

Businesses need artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that can be easily adopted and manipulated by line-of-business users. Although many organizations are eager to adopt AI, they are often held back by a lack of access to data scientists that can curate data and develop AI models that address their specific needs. This skills shortage is one of the top hurdles facing organizations when it comes to operationalizing AI. And it is precisely this challenge that Salesforce is looking to address by embedding its solutions with Einstein-powered AI.

Enterprises’ Most Advanced UX Is Enabled in 2019 via New Microservices Innovations

C. Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

• New PaaS offerings from IBM, Red Hat, and Pivotal will include reactive programming in coming months.
• Reactive microservices will play a key role in furthering migration from monolithic to microservices in 2019.

Open source software bodies have turned up the heat on important microservices technologies, grabbing the attention of startups in recent years and larger cloud service providers more recently. IBM, Red Hat, and Pivotal are readying reactive microservices technologies for the coming months, innovations which add real-time streaming and machine learning to cloud-based applications and support a critical component for enterprises migrating from monolithic to microservices-based apps.

Infrastructure Vendor IoT Strategies: What Impact Do They Have on Service Providers?

K. Weldon

Summary Bullets:

• Last week, Nokia announced a strategy to build out private industrial LTE networks, Ericsson carved out four cellular IoT segments, and Cisco offered solutions to bring ‘intent-based’ networking to the edge.
• What do these announcements imply about the future of the IIoT and how should service providers respond?

Last week, three of the most powerful infrastructure and networking equipment vendors made IoT-related announcements, some in conjunction with their Q4 earnings reports. While this clearly denotes how strongly they view IoT as a key growth market, it also brings into question their relationships with the operators which in many cases have been their primary customers.

IBM Releases Images to Improve Facial Analytics Accuracy

R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:

• Concerns over the accuracy of facial analytics have prompted IBM to release a dataset of over one million facial images, including facial coding, that can be used to train facial analytics software.

• Improving the results of facial analytics will bolster public confidence in the technology, promoting adoption by enterprises.

IBM has released a dataset of over one million facial images to the global research community to combat bias in facial recognition software. The announcement comes after researchers from MIT and the University of Toronto made claims that a well-known competitor’s product misclassified women at a higher rate than men, with error rates for darker-skinned women far surpassing error rates for lighter-skinned women. With women accounting for roughly half of the world’s population, inaccuracies in their classification present a serious threat to facial recognition adoption.