NVIDIA is Poised to Dominate the Edge with its GPU Strengths and Partnership Strategy

Summary Bullets:

• NVIDIA recently unveiled a broad swath of initiatives that will help establish it as a leading player in the emerging market for edge computing technologies.

• New partnerships with Ericsson and Red Hat are specifically designed to help 5G network operators exploit the potential of NVIDIA’s graphics processing units (GPUs) at the edge.

Edge computing is fast becoming one of IT’s hottest new growth areas and is widely seen as one of the technologies that will usher in a new era of digital services for businesses and consumers. Many IT companies are targeting emerging opportunities to deliver edge computing, including NVIDIA, a specialist provider of GPUs for the gaming industry.

At the recent Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Los Angeles, NVIDIA unveiled a broad swath of initiatives that will help to establish it as a leading player in this increasingly important market.

IBM Data and AI Forum: Say Hello to a More Accessible IBM Watson

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

• Just one short year after an internal reorganization to more fully meld artificial intelligence (AI) with data and analytics, IBM is back with a new, more accessible vision for IBM Watson.
• This time around, the company isn’t focused on game shows or scientific discovery but instead on solving very basic, often human-centric challenges.

When it comes to chasing the market’s heated but somewhat unrequited love affair with AI, IBM has certainly done its part in terms of generating hype for its multi-billion dollar investment in IBM Watson. That hype, which has taken aim at some rather lofty goals such as identifying and diagnosing cancer, has not fully panned out, with some early adopters scaling back or halting operations altogether due to concerns over cost and efficacy.

API World 2019: API Security Tops API Management Priorities

C. Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

• A new API lifecycle management approach is founded on emerging security innovations, including AI.
• Pure-play API security providers threaten to outshine API management leaders through best-of-breed security.

This month’s API World in San Jose conveyed one dominant theme throughout keynotes, sessions, and the show floor: API security.

Alongside the usual suspects of leading API management providers, including IBM, Axway, and Akana, were a heap of API security providers, clearly generating a large amount of buzz among attendees. I recall a number of them attending API World last year, but the dominant theme of 2018 was Istio and other service mesh technologies, critical in helping move microservices-based apps into production. Following a year’s progress in digital transformations and the rollout of new app development architectures – including microservices and serverless computing – and the realization of all those unsecured APIs at the heart of DevOps-backed projects, unsurprisingly, security was the new belle of the ball.

Hyperbole Management Specification 1.0

S. Schuchart

Summary Bullets:

• Charts and figures that show explosive growth are unnecessary and induce customer anxiety

• Force anyone presenting to move on to the solutions

In the IT industry we have an ugly addiction. It’s about growth, security, and complexity. Growth in data, growth in bandwidth needs, growth in number of devices. Security issues around every part of IT from edge IoT to the core of the data center. The complexity of managing all these systems, the ones put in to handle the growth and the ones to handle the myriad of security vulnerabilities from bugs to misconfigurations. The claims that “never before have we seen…”

Nutanix Is Reasserting Itself as an Alternative to VMware in the Data Center and in the Cloud

Summary Bullets:

• Nutanix marked its ten-year anniversary with an expanded commitment to providing new on-premises support for emerging workloads, and solutions that enable hybrid and multi-cloud architectures.

• New solutions like Nutanix Xi Clusters on AWS promise to further intensify the growing competition in the fast-changing market for hybrid and multi-cloud solutions.

This year’s Nutanix .NEXT conference in Copenhagen was a milestone event for the company, marking just over ten years since it was first established, and giving Nutanix a timely forum in which to map out its strategy for the next ten years.

Out of Stealth Mode, Edge Computing Startup Pensando Wants to be a Giant Slayer

Amy Larsen DeCarlo – Principal Analyst, Security and Data Center Services

Summary Bullets:

• With John Chambers leading Pensando’s board as well as HPE making a big investment and stepping up as a partner, the startup is looking to make waves.
• The company has grand ambitions to play a major disruptor role–and the leadership and intellect with a potential to achieve them.

When a startup enters the IT landscape with the kind of backing that Pensando Systems has, the industry takes note. Founded in 2017 by Cisco veterans Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero, and Soni Jiandani, the team behind a number of cutting edge products including the Nexus 9000 switch series, the company disclosed that it has secured third-round funding valued at $145 million from HPE and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Pensando also announced HPE CTO Mark Potter is joining the board of directors and that his company will be a key distribution partner for its technology.

Never Stop Learning!

Summary Bullets:

• To maximize the investment in I.T. companies should have a robust training program

• Regular training will benefit everyone, as well as make the workplace run smoother.

“Never stop learning” – a pithy phrase, something you could see on a motivational poster next to the one with the adorable kitten clinging to a branch that says “hang in there.” But the significance of the phrase “never stop learning” is one that comes with particular meaning in the tech industry. The pace of the tech industry overall requires a learning process that can’t stop. Everyone in technology, from day to day techs, senior administrators, coders, management, and senior management all need to keep learning. But how we treat learning in IT is still outdated and is centered around 1950s-era notions of top-down control, where workers don’t need to know that much, management will know for them, and that knowledge is based on professional certifications.

AWS Adds More ASEAN Customers as the Cloud Battle in the Region Heats Up

A. Amir

Summary Bullets:

• As the cloud battle in ASEAN continues, AWS has the advantage in the direct connect and go-to-market through partnerships with the domestic providers.

• The provider is also rapidly growing its customer base with various new references.

The public cloud competition in the emerging ASEAN region (excluding Singapore) is heating up. Alibaba Cloud entered the market early by opening a data center in Malaysia in October 2017 followed by another one in Indonesia in March 2018. Seeing the huge potential in the region, Google made an announcement in October 2018 to have its facility in Indonesia ready in early 2020 while AWS responded to its global rival with a similar announcement in April 2019. Despite AWS’ late move in the region (compared to Alibaba Cloud and Google), AWS has the upper hand in the direct connect or edge network as well as in the domestic go-to-market and brand share. This is achieved through its long partnerships with the domestic carriers and SIs.

Comcast Business Details New Enterprise 2.0 Strategy During Analyst Conference

R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:

• Comcast Business is looking to move beyond its small and mid-sized business roots and expand into the large enterprise market.

• As part of its vision to serve large enterprise customers, Comcast is looking towards international expansion and to grow its product portfolio.

On September 4th and 5th, 2019, Comcast Business hosted industry analysts at the newly opened Comcast Technology Center and Four Seasons hotel in Philadelphia. During the conference, Comcast outlined its Enterprise 2.0 strategy that will drive its agenda over the next year, highlighted its plans for leveraging recent acquisitions, and detailed its launch of two new security-related solutions. It plans to build on the success it has already seen in the business market, which includes revenue growth of 10.8% of 2018 (which compared to 2017), a base of 2.3 million business customers, and a team of over 10,000 employees dedicated to business services.

Alibaba Cloud Adds an Application PaaS Solution via the Terminus Acquisition

S. Soh

Summary Bullets:

• The acquisition of Terminus has given Alibaba Cloud an attractive application PaaS solution that it can take to market and help to boost cloud adoption in China.
• The Terminus PaaS is evolving and it has a strong roadmap; the multi-cloud approach is a crucial factor when Alibaba Cloud extends the solution internationally.

Terminus and Its Application PaaS

Terminus is a Chinese software provider founded in 2012 with a strong focus on addressing the needs of retail, procurement, and the supply chain functions. The company was acquired by Alibaba, and its products are now offered based on Alibaba Cloud while retaining the Terminus product brand. The Terminus team remains intact and is driving product development, but tapping into Alibaba’s ecosystem, go-to-market machinery, and its infrastructure and technologies to accelerate business expansion.