X Marks the Spot: Employees Company-wide Support the Customer Experience via XCaaS

Summary Bullets:

G. Willsky

• In combining UCaaS and CCaaS, XCaaS acknowledges that ultimately, employees from all parts of an organization jointly drive the customer experience.

• While the term “Customer Experience as-a-Service” sounds like a gimmick, cloud-based communication, collaboration, and customer service technology are firmly entrenched and will remain so.

XCaaS = UCaaS + CCaaS

On the surface, this equation may resemble algebra, trigonometry, or an amalgam of the two. But you won’t spot it in any mathematics textbook.

Instead, this summation depicts an alchemy that has arisen from the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has driven much higher usage of UCaaS (i.e., Unified Communications as-a-Service) and CCaaS (i.e., Contact Center as-a-Service) solutions which in turn has created a hyper-focus on employee communication and collaboration as well as serving customers. In combining UCaaS and CCaaS, XCaaS (i.e., Customer Experience as-a-Service) is an acknowledgement that every employee ultimately serves the customer, both those who are customer facing and those who are not, and facilitates communication and collaboration between those two universes to optimize the customer experience.

Capgemini’s New Sustainable IT Portfolio Addresses Growing Interest in Decarbonization

R. Bhattacharyya

Summary Bullets:

• Capgemini deepened its commitment to its sustainability practice by announcing a new ‘Sustainable IT’ portfolio.
• IT services providers are well placed to offer carbon reduction consulting services.

Technology providers, enterprise customers, and financial investors are increasingly making business decisions influenced by environmental sustainability considerations.  A growing number are looking at their own carbon footprints and setting timelines for reduced emissions; many are also weighing the environmental impact of organizations when identifying potential partners, providers, vendors, and investment opportunities.

Whatever Happened to AT&T’s AirGig?

M. Rogers

Summary Bullets:            

• AT&T’s announcement of Project AirGig in 2016 was a compelling and novel way to think about providing high-speed broadband services.
• Following a press conference and tease of a 2021 release in 2018, AT&T has gone silent on the project, prompting questions about its future.

Bygone BPL

During the mid-2000’s, broadband over power line (BPL) technology (using power lines to simultaneously transmit data signals) was an exciting topic in the telecommunications industry.  The hope was the technology could deliver speeds equivalent or greater than ADSL and provide a cheap and effective means of connecting rural communities and improving broadband infrastructure in brownfield areas without the need to lay new fiber.  The IEEE developed standards, and various governments, carriers, and even utilities launched trials and services.  While the technology caught on for some utilities as a means to monitor the health of their own grids, most if not all commercial attempts to develop a consumer access product failed.  Failures were blamed on a few factors, including radio interference easily impacting unshielded power lines, complications managing right-of-way access with utilities, and slower than predicted data rates.  Today, BPL for consumer access is all but dead; however, at the end of 2016, AT&T announced a new project, ‘AirGig,’ with a lot of similarities.

Platform Equinix: How the Data Center and Cloud Ecosystem Transforms the Global WAN

S. Soh

Summary Bullets:

• New network service offerings are emerging and giving enterprise customers more options; the Equinix and Coevolve partnership is a good example.
• Cloud connectivity and network edge services will become more important in supporting different IT workloads, and enterprises are better served by service providers that have a strong partner ecosystem.

Even for multi-national corporations (MNCs), there are now alternative providers to global carriers and system integrators for wide area network (WAN) services. With the adoption of cloud services, the ongoing shift to enable remote working, and business uncertainties (e.g., travel, retail, and hospitality), the network solution needs to be more agile to adapt to changing requirements.  The Equinix and Coevolve partnership is just one example.

Cloud Giants Will Drive Supercomputing Demand

Summary Bullets:

C. Drake

• Major cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, are intent on capturing a larger share of the lucrative market for supercomputing.

• Competition between IT infrastructure vendors and cloud service providers will make supercomputing more accessible, while also helping to drive use case development.

Supercomputers have traditionally been major fixed infrastructure investments that are designed for specific tasks, and which comprise hardware provided by IT infrastructure providers such as Lenovo, Dell Technologies, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). However, increasingly the world’s largest cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, are intent on capturing a larger share of this lucrative market.

What’s New in Global IoT Services So Far in 2021?

GlobalData published its latest Competitive Landscape report on IIoT Services in May 2021. In analyzing the large number of new capabilities and alliances that were announced by the top mobile operators, a number of issues are clear:

K. Weldon

• While COVID-19 may have dampened demand early on for IoT solutions, in late 2020 and early 2021 the market came roaring back.

• Market expansion is not limited to COVID-related projects, and announcements are for a wide-ranging set of new IoT offerings that may represent projects for which there was pent-up demand during the pandemic.

• These new initiatives have been energized in part by related capabilities such as private networks, edge computing, and 5G rollouts.

The following list is a super-set of announcements from the GlobalData report showcasing more of the primary announcements that operators in the U.S. and Europe have made over the past six months; they imply solid momentum for IoT.

New Battle Lines Emerge in Push for Higher-Performance Computing Solutions

• 

  C. Drake

  The combined growth of IoT, big data, and AI will drive demand for higher-performance computing solutions over the next five years.

• As IT infrastructure vendors and cloud service providers respond, this will contribute to an increasingly vibrant and competitive market.

Despite the disruption to IT projects caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, IT infrastructure vendors and cloud service providers alike remain upbeat about future enterprise demand for new, more powerful computer processing capabilities. These include servers for artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, high-performance computing (HPC) servers, and supercomputing.

Snowflake Offers Something for Partners, Customers, and Developers in Bumper Summit

Summary Bullets

Alaa Owaineh

• Snowflake’s annual summit sees a slew of platform, data management, and partnership announcements.

• These enhancements bolster its competitive position, but the market remains crowded

At its annual summit in early June, Snowflake announced several enhancements to its data cloud platform, services, and partnership program. These announcements enhance its competitive position, making it more appealing to a wider range of user roles (such as developers) and industries.

Some announcements relate to better support for developers, with the inclusion of Java and Scala support in the Snowpark framework, which allows developers to build queries in their preferred programming languages and execute them on Snowflake’s cloud. Announcements also included support for user defined functions (UDF) in Java, greater ability to handle unstructured data, and support for SQL APIs.

Turning Fiber into Business Services

Summary Bullets:

• Amidst all the fiber network hype and almost daily announcements of new infrastructure plans, Vodafone’s launch of Ethernet services over CityFibre networks means that UK enterprises can now start to benefit from them.

• Enterprises should be aware how fiber expansion can offer an enhanced work from home experience and how emerging technologies (e.g., hollow core fiber) may support advanced services.

Fiber network roll-out announcements have been coming thick and fast recently, but now UK enterprises can finally benefit from actual services, marking a key staging post.

Over recent weeks, there have been announcements on fiber deployment from CityFibre, BT/Openreach, Virgin Media O2, and numerous smaller altnets – including Upp’s announcement on June 1, 2021 that it will invest GBP 1 billion to deploy FTTH to a million premises by 2025.

So far, the focus has been on investment models, premises passed, and connection speeds – which has been of interest to analysts but less so to enterprises. Any actual services have tended to focus on the consumer segment, but now businesses of all sizes and resellers stand to benefit from these fiber builds.

Vodafone has announced that it is launching Ethernet services over its partner CityFibre’s network in Cambridge, Coventry, and Peterborough, with Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Huddersfield, Leeds, Leicester, Milton Keynes, Northampton, Portsmouth, and Southend-on-Sea to follow. The new service is positioned as offering a tailored private data network on a single or multiple premises, and as a complement to Vodafone’s full-fiber (FTTP) broadband.