Welcome to the weekly highlights edition by CIO Influence. It covers top cloud, cybersecurity, data management, AI and IT news weekly updates. In this roundup, we bring you the latest developments from the tech giants during the week. These updates offer valuable insights into the evolving digital landscape, from cybersecurity measures to technological innovations.
#1 IBM and Mizuho Financial Group Partners to Develop a PoC Using Watsonx
Mizuho Financial Group and IBM announced a collaboration. This collaboration is to develop a proof of concept (PoC) using Watsonx. IBM Watsonx is a generative AI and data platform. This collaboration will improve the efficiency and accuracy of Mizuho’s event detection operations.
Benefits of Using Watsonx:
- Address issues with error detection and difficulty in pinpointing the event cause, which delays recovery time by using watsonx.
- PoC added patterns likely to cause errors in incident response to generative AI and linked an application supporting a series of operations in event detection with watsonx, helping to shorten the steps to recovery and improve recovery speed.
- Allow Mizuho to facilitate in-house operations and allow for the flexible configuration of monitoring and operation menus by on-site personnel when higher levels of security and confidentiality are required.
#2 NinjaTech AI Leverages AWS’s Cloud Capabilities to Build Custom AI Agents
NinjaTech AI, a generative AI company based in Silicon Valley, has introduced its new personal AI, Ninja. It is an evolution beyond AI assistants and Copilots to autonomous agents. The company utilizes Amazon Web Services (AWS) purpose-built machine learning chips, including Trainium, Inferentia2, and SageMaker.
The AI agents help save time and money for all users by bringing the power of generative AI to day-to-day workflows. AWS’s cloud computing capabilities help Ninja conduct multiple tasks simultaneously. This means users can assign new tasks without waiting for existing ones to be completed.
How do these AI agents operate?
AI agents use highly customized large language models (LLMs) modified with techniques like reinforcement learning for accuracy and speed.
Developing these agents requires affordable and flexible chips tailored for reinforcement learning, a challenging and costly task for startups due to GPUs’ scarcity, rigidity, and high computing costs.
AWS addresses this issue with its unique chip technology, enabling rapid training bursts that can scale to thousands of nodes per training cycle. With Amazon SageMaker, which supports open-source models, training AI agents has become fast, flexible, and affordable.
#3 Dell Technologies Introduces Dell PowerStore for Multi-cloud Data Mobility
Dell Technologies introduces Dell PowerStore advancements for better performance, efficiency, resiliency and multicloud data mobility. Dell also expanded its APEX portfolio with new AIOps advancements and enhanced multicloud and Kubernetes storage management.
Also Read: Transforming IT Service Management Through AIOps
Dell PowerStore helps manage increasing workload demands with the industry’s most flexible quad-level cell (QLC) storage1 and significant performance enhancements.
- QLC-based storage: Delivers enterprise-class performance at a lower cost per terabyte compared to triple-level cell (TLC) models. Customers can start with as few as 11 QLC drives and scale up to 5.9 petabytes of effective capacity per appliance. PowerStore’s intelligent load balancing capabilities help save costs and improve workload placement across mixed TLC and QLC clusters.
- Increased performance: Improves hardware performance by up to 66% through new data-in-place higher model appliance upgrades.
Benefits of DellPowerStore:
- Software-driven Performance boost
- Improved Data Protection
- Increased Efficiency
- Multicloud Data Mobility Enhancements
Also Read: Top 10 Multi-cloud Security Solutions to Know in 2024
#4 Intel Announces its Lunar Lake Processor Arriving this Holiday Season
Intel has announced its upcoming client processors (code-named Lunar Lake) will power more than 80 new laptop designs across more than 20 original equipment manufacturers, delivering AI performance at a global scale for Copilot+ PCs.
Lunar Lake will get the Copilot+ experiences, such as Recall, via an update when available. Building on the success of Intel Core™ Ultra processors and with the addition of Lunar Lake, Intel will ship more than 40 million AI PC processors this year.
Importance of Lunar Lake:
- Lunar Lake is expected to be a groundbreaking mobile processor for AI PCs with more than 3 times the AI performance compared with the previous generation.
- With more than 40 NPU tera operations per second (TOPS), Intel’s next-generation processors will provide the capabilities necessary for Copilot+ experiences to come to market.
- In addition to the higher-performing NPU, Lunar Lake will also be equipped with over 60 GPU TOPS, delivering more than 100 platform TOPS.
#5 Nutanix and EnterpriseDB Announce Expanded Partnership to Secure Applications
Nutanix and EnterpriseDB have announced an expanded collaboration that aims to enable customers to harness the power of PostgreSQL to support their most data-intensive and highly secure applications and workloads.
The combined solution integrates Nutanix Database Service’s (NDB) robust developer self-service and database automation with EDB’s performance, high availability, enterprise security, and Oracle compatibility. This solution aims to help joint customers accelerate their adoption of PostgreSQL, supporting new cloud-native and existing enterprise applications at scale in on-premises data centers and public clouds. Additionally, EDB extends functionality beyond transactional workloads to support analytics and AI-infused applications in the future.
Benefits for Customers:
- Consistent Operations
- Database as a code
- Simplified Migration
- Multicloud Infrastructure
- Enhanced Performance and Reliability
- End-to-end Customer Support
#6 Lenovo and Nutanix Brings GPT-in-a-Box along with New AI Infrastructure
At Nutanix NEXT 2024 event Lenovo exhibited Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box qualified on Lenovo ThinkAgile HX665 V3 and ThinkAgile HX650 V3. These turnkey hyper-converged infrastructure solutions support AI inferencing for distributed AI applications from edge to cloud. It is done by leveraging Nutanix Validated Design (NVD) to drive innovation and AI performance breakthroughs.
Generative AI is driving a significant technology transformation, and customers are seeking solutions that enable them to develop and deploy complex AI workloads flexibly. Lenovo’s Hybrid AI solutions are purpose-built to efficiently bring AI to customer data, where and when users need it the most—from edge to cloud—advancing Lenovo’s vision to enable smarter AI for all.
With Lenovo’s Hybrid AI strategy, customers can access the industry’s most comprehensive AI portfolio, which helps them accelerate their AI journey and improve business outcomes.
#7 Chris Donato, New President of Global Sales and Field Engineering at Zendesk
Zendesk welcomes Chirs Donato, the new President of Global Sales and Field Engineering. Chris brings 25 years of experience in enterprise selling and developing Go-to-market organizations. As President of GS and Field Engineering, Chris will lead teams across field sales, presales, customer success and consulting. His basic focus is to champion Zendesk’s market-leading AI customer experience solutions to a wider range of market segments, from small businesses to Fortune 500.
Chris Donato’s Journey:
Donato served as the President of Global Sales at Celonis and was a key member of the Executive Committee. He played a crucial role in expanding the company’s global GTM organization across various regions and industries during his tenure. Before his time at Celonis, Donato spent 26 years at Oracle, holding several leadership positions, including executive vice president of Oracle’s multibillion-dollar N.A. Applications and Consulting Business. He was instrumental in advancing Oracle’s comprehensive back-office and front-office cloud solutions there.
#8 Microsoft Introduces New Version of Copilot Assistant, Team Copilot
Microsoft’s latest copilot assistant, Team Copilot, aims to enhance group collaboration and integrate artificial intelligence into its products. Team Copilot is a meeting assistant that can take notes, summarize key points, and track deadlines. As announced in Build 2024, Day 1 of Microsoft’s annual developer conference, this AI tool will be available to corporate customers later this year. Microsoft’s first in-house central processing unit (CPU) is available in preview for Azure Cloud-computing service customers.
In addition to the Team Copilot announcement, the company offered an update about processor developments.
#9 New Features Announcement by Tigera for Calico
Tigera’s Calico is one of the most adopted container networking and security technologies and has introduced its new features. The latest updates are for Calico Enterprise and Calico Cloud, extending product Runtime and Threat Defense capabilities.
Calico enables Tigera to outfit security, DevOps, and platform engineering teams with deep visibility and is required to support the security of their container platform and their containerized applications.
The New features will provide:
- Enhanced visibility and Rapid Troubleshooting
- Streamlined security operations and Runtime Threat Detection
- Improvements to Workload-centric WAF
- Support from ARM64
#10 OneTrust Expands Solutions to Drive Operational Resilience and Risk Management
OneTrust, a leader in trust intelligence, has announced the expansion of OneTrust Solutions to help organizations drive operational resilience and risk management across its extended enterprise and comply with regulations such as the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).
What is DORA for?
DORA is to strengthen the IT security of financial entities. Its legislation covers banks, insurance companies, investment firms in the EU, and critical information and communications technology (ICT) vendors that enter into contracts with financial entities.
Know about OneTrust and how it helps organizations with DORA
- It helps proactively manage third-party risk, centralizing the end-to-end risk management lifecycle to identify, mitigate, monitor and analyze risks.
- It scales technology risk management and connects entire IT ecosystems to identify, measure and monitor risk and make informed decisions to enhance security posture.
- Drives compliance efficiencies by streamlining ICT control implementation and oversight and access out-of-the-box DORA framework.
- Prepares for compliance audit by offering an integrated yet independent workspace to centralize controls and workpapers.
- Gaining real-time insights across hundreds of regulations and frameworks.
Also Read: What is Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA)?
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