WebProNews

Category: CloudPlatformPro

  • OpenX Moves to Google Cloud to Leverage 5G Innovations

    OpenX Moves to Google Cloud to Leverage 5G Innovations

    The advent of 5G is a big reason OpenX has decided to move to Google Cloud Platform, says OpenX CEO Timothy Cadogan. “When consumers start to move to 5G on their phones and have a very rapid experience, the advertising experience needs to be incredibly compelling,” says Cadogan. “We wanted to make sure that we could run on infrastructure there. That’s why we wanted to move to the public cloud.”

    “Marketing has evolved significantly over recent years, and the old way of operating is no longer sustainable,” said Cadogan.  “As we look at the programmatic market today, we see a sector that has experienced massive growth and adoption, but at the same time has stalled in its ability to deliver real innovation for marketers and publishers.  We believe it is time to take a completely fresh look at the market and place a major bet on building the infrastructure necessary to drive the next wave of innovation.”

    The company says that prior to 2019, almost one-quarter of the OpenX tech workforce was dedicated to maintaining legacy infrastructure. They say that the transition to Google Cloud Platform will free resources to focus on new growth areas for the company, such as people-based marketing, video, and CTV.

    “Both OpenX and Google Cloud are dedicated to helping customers achieve their goals with cutting-edge technology,” says Chris Klayko, Managing Director, Americas, Google Cloud. “This collaboration will allow for continued innovation leveraging both OpenX’s Exchange Platform and Google Cloud’s commitment to performance, collaboration, and big data optimization at scale.”

    Timothy Cadogan, CEO of OpenX, discussed why OpenX is moving its platform to Google Cloud Platform on Bloomberg Technology:

    We Process Over a Trillion Transactions a Day

    We run one of the largest advertising exchanges which means we process over a trillion transactions a day. The volume that we’re working with is huge. As we started to think about all of the new innovation we want to bring to the market over the next couple of years we realized that’s going to require even more computing power. We also need that computing power to be extremely efficient.

    We started to map out a path to move to the public cloud, which is Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon (AWS). We really wanted to focus on a system that would give us an incredible amount of scale and enable us to innovate at a rate that would really make a difference in the industry. We didn’t want to have to continue to work on a lot of the maintenance of our own infrastructure that we had to do with our own servers.

    5G Requires Rapid Compelling Advertising Experience

    An example of the importance of this is moving to 5G. When consumers start to move to 5G on their phones and have a very rapid experience, the advertising experience needs to be incredibly compelling. We wanted to make sure that we could run on infrastructure there. That’s why we wanted to move to the public cloud.

    With Google, what you have is really the largest advertising infrastructure in the world and they do a lot of the foundational work that we can build on top of.

    https://youtu.be/3vr8ofEZerU

  • Cloud is Really the New Normal for Financial Services

    Cloud is Really the New Normal for Financial Services

    “Cloud is really the new normal,” says Scott Mullins, Head of Worldwide Financial Services Business Development at AWS. “If you look across enterprise companies and financial services today, the vast majority are considering cloud as a major part of their IT strategy going forward. It’s just picked up that much momentum. I think we’re just scratching the surface in cloud for the industry.”

    Scott Mullins, Head of Worldwide Financial Services Business Development at Amazon Web Services recently discussed how cloud has become a major part of every financial organization’s IT strategy:

    Financial Organizations Are Moving to the Cloud

    I get to actually lead a team of financial services experts whose sole function is to help our customers both from the standpoint of FinTech startups, all the way up to the largest banks, broker-dealers, exchange companies, and insurers use our tools. That’s what we do on a daily basis and we’re having a lot of fun doing it. It’s really fun to watch.

    I think the big stories in 2019 are going to probably be a couple things. The first thing is if we look historically back at the last several re:INVENT’s we’ve seen more financial institutions coming forward and talking about what they’re doing in the cloud. I think the reason for that is because we’re getting more muscle memory from these organizations.

    2019 Will Bring an Accelerated Transformation

    They’ve had experimentation, they’ve had some foundations they’ve been laying over the course of the last couple of years, and now they have confidence. They have confidence to do two things. Number one to move much more quickly to embrace these tools and to move more workloads over and to build net new things, but also to talk about it. Most financial institutions don’t want to talk about something until they know it well and they know it works for them and that they’ve really de-risked it for themselves.

    We saw Goldman Sachs last year. This year we saw Guardian Life Insurance talking about how they’ve changed the 158-year-old company and how they made it nimble and agile. They’ve actually been able to close data centers. I think we are going to see more of that. What that means is we’re going to see a much more accelerated transformation of the industry itself. I think we’re going to see more and more of those organizations coming out and talking about how cloud is a major part of their IT strategy going forward.

    Going to See a Much Richer Ecosystem of ISVs

    The second thing I think we’re going to see is a much richer ecosystem of ISVs. Just look across what we have today and what’s been announced this week. Bloomberg came out talking about B-Pipe on AWS. Refinitiv a couple of weeks ago was talking about the fact that Elektron runs on AWS. We’re working very closely with Broadridge. We’re working closely with Finical and Temenos and a lot of different vendors in the industry and that’s going to continue to happen at a rapid pace.

    Financial Industry Undergoing Massive Transformation

    The reason for that is twofold. Number one, you’ve got a lot of those customers who are going through massive transformations and they’re saying to their ISPs, I love the relationship that we have but I’m moving to the cloud. If we’re going to continue to have a relationship you’ve got to move to the cloud with me and those vendors are responding very positively.

    Or you’ve got some vendors like IHS Markit who several years ago said, you know what, the future of financial services is in the cloud and I need to start moving before even my customers are telling me so that I can be ahead of the game. Those are two things you’re going to see be very key themes in 2019.

    Cloud is Really the New Normal

    Cloud is really the new normal. If you look across enterprise companies and financial services today, the vast majority are considering cloud as a major part of their IT strategy going forward. It’s just picked up that much momentum. I think we’re just scratching the surface in cloud for the industry. There’s going to be a room for not just one cloud provider, but multiple cloud providers and opportunities for everyone.


  • SAP Massively Going for Expansion Into Multi-Cloud World, Says CTO

    SAP Massively Going for Expansion Into Multi-Cloud World, Says CTO

    “We’re massively going for the expansion into this multi-cloud world,” says Björn Goerke, SAP CTO & President of the SAP Cloud Platform. “We strongly believe that the world will remain hybrid for a number of years and we’re going in that same direction with the SAP Cloud Platform.”

    Björn Goerke, SAP CTO & President SAP Cloud Platform, recently discussed the future of the SAP Cloud Platform in an interview with Ray Wang, the Founder & Chairman of Constellation Research:

    Massively Going for Expansion Into Multi-Cloud World

    We’re massively going for the expansion into this multi-cloud world. We strongly believe that hybrid clouds will play a major role in the coming years. If you also follow what the hyper scalars are doing, Amazon was the last one to announce an on-premises hybrid support model. We strongly believe that the world will remain hybrid for a number of years and we’re going in that same direction with the SAP Cloud Platform.

    We announced partnerships with IBM and ANSYS already and there will be more coming. We’re totally committed to the multi-cloud strategy driving the kind of choice for customers that they demand. But then what we’re more and more focusing on is business services and business capabilities. It’s about micro services as well. It’s really about business functionality that customers expect from SAP. We are an enterprise solutions company.

    It’s Really About No Code and Low Code Environments

    With our broad spectrum of 25 industries we support all the lines of business within a corporation from core finance to HR to procurement, you name it. We are focused on a high level of functionality that we can expose via APIs and micro services on a cloud platform to allow customers to quickly reassemble and orchestrate customer specific differentiating solutions.

    There is no other company out there in the market that has the opportunity to really deliver that on a broad scale worldwide to our corporate customers.

    That’s where we’re heading and that’s where we’re investing. We’re working on simplifying the consumption of all of this. It’s really about no code and low code environments. You need to be able to plug and play and not always force people to really go down into the trenches and start heavy coding.

    SAP Embedding Machine Learning Into Applications

    Beyond that machine learning is all over and on everybody’s mind. What we’re doing is making sure that we can embed machine learning capabilities deep into the application solutions. It can’t be that every customer needs to hire dozens and even hundreds of data scientists to figure these things out.

    The very unique opportunity that SAP has is to take our knowledge in business processes, take the large data sets we have with our customers, and bring machine learning right into the application for customers to consume out of the box.

    RPA is a big topic as well of course. We believe that 50 percent of ERP processes you can potentially automate to the largest part within the next few years. We are heavily investing in those areas as well.

    Focused on Security, Data Protection, and Privacy

    Especially if you think about the level of connectivity and companies opening up their corporate environments more and more, clouds being on everybody’s mind, and the whole idea to make access to information processes available to everybody in the company and in the larger ecosystem at any point in time from anywhere, of course, that raises the bar that security has to deliver. So it’s a top of mind topic for everybody.

    There are a lot of new challenges also from an architectural perspective with how these things are built and how you communicate, We have a long-standing history as an enterprise solution provider to know exactly what’s going on there. There’s security, there are data protection and privacy that companies have to comply with these days. I think we’re well positioned to serve our customers needs there.

    https://youtu.be/JwXU89MrdaA


  • Still in the Early Days of Cloud Adoption in the Enterprise

    Still in the Early Days of Cloud Adoption in the Enterprise

    We are still in the very early days of cloud adoption in the enterprise says ServiceNow CEO, John Donahoe. Also, something that is often overlooked is that governments are finally embracing the cloud which presents a huge opportunity to all of the big cloud players.

    “Governments are now aggressively embracing cloud, not just the US government, but government’s all over the world,” noted Donahoe. “Just like in our consumer lives where cloud-based applications gave us better user experiences, hid the complexity and greater efficiency, the same things now happening in the enterprise and in government.”

    John Donahoe, ServiceNow CEO, recently talked about cloud adoption by the enterprise and government in a conversation on CNBC:

    Still in the Early Days of Cloud Adoption in the Enterprise

    We’re still in the very early days of adoption of cloud in the enterprise. You see it in companies and you see it in governments. Governments are now aggressively embracing cloud, not just the US government, but government’s all over the world. Just like in our consumer lives where cloud-based applications gave us better user experiences, hid the complexity and greater efficiency, the same things now happening in the enterprise and in government. They need to deliver better experiences for their customers and their employees and they need productivity and cloud can deliver all three. If it were a baseball game I would say we’re in the second or third inning.

    What I hear from customers is that they want to adopt four to six core strategic platforms, sort of modern tech stack of the future. Typically that includes a Salesforce, a Workday, a ServiceNow, maybe an Office 365, an Adobe, and SAP. They want to put as much as they can on those core platforms and take all that data together and deliver better experiences for their customers and better experiences for their employees. What ServiceNow does, sort of unique among that, is we help build some of the connective tissue across the different platforms.

    Very Large Government Entities Embracing Cloud

    I see a shift with governments and the cloud. Two to three years ago government’s were suspicious of cloud, they were worried about security and that has changed and that has changed in a powerful way. Governments are under pressure to deliver better services to their citizens, whether it’s the IRS or any other sector, and drive efficiency in productivity.

    You see very large government entities embracing cloud. You saw the contract yesterday with Microsoft. We’re seeing it both in the federal government in the US, federal government’s around the world, and many state and local governments, because cloud platforms like ServiceNow enable them to drive tremendous productivity and provide better experiences.

    There is Enormous Growth Left with Cloud

    It’s the early innings. There is enormous growth left with cloud at the infrastructure level and at the software level. At the infrastructure level where AWS and Azure and Google Cloud play you see that cloud adoption happening around the world. I think there’s going to be a lot of growth for both organizations.

    If you talk to customers, customers don’t want to be sole source on this, customers want to have choice. Even in the public cloud, they’re often embracing one or two or three different public cloud providers to make sure that they’re they’re mitigating the risk and they’re getting the best of what each of those platforms has.

  • Microsoft AI CTO: A Cloud AI Service Behind Every Device

    Microsoft AI CTO: A Cloud AI Service Behind Every Device

    What could change us from having to wrestle with physical devices? That was the question posed by Microsoft AI CTO Joseph Sirosh at the 2018 AI Summit in San Francisco. He was specifically referring to a prosthetic, but that is only an example of how Cloud AI Services could impact the usefulness of all devices.

    Joseph Sirosh, AI CTO at Microsoft, talks about how a Cloud AI Service will eventually be driving every device:

    Top Macro Trend: A Cloud AI Service Behind Every Device

    The most important macro trend is a cloud AI service behind every device. It might be a prosthetic, it might be any device that you use in your house. Of course, your apps on your phone have AI services behind them eventually, some of them already have AI, but others well. Everything in the world that is connected with Wi-Fi or Internet connectivity can now be backed up by an AI service. That’s very powerful and profound when you think about it.

    Now, think about this one, the grip classification (on a prosthetic). How it works is there’s a muscle sensor that I’ve attached to my arm here, there’s a camera in the hand. So, through the electronics, it goes to an Azure Custom Vision Service, where our classification model has been set up, a deep-learned model that recognizes objects and classifies it to the right action and then that triggers the appropriate grip classification in the Servo motors connected to an Arduino board in the arm.

    The Magic Provided by a Cloud AI Service

    Two undergraduates built this. Hamayal Choudhry from the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and Samin Khan from the University of Toronto. They did this for the Microsoft Imagine Cup. They were the winners in 2018. Building this took them a few weeks. Of course, then the magic was provided by a cloud AI service to be able to make this device intelligent. That’s a power. Even an undergraduate can build something as powerful as this today.

    Why is this Revolutionary?

    So, why is this revolutionary? Step back and think about this device. Look, there are over a million amputations per year. That’s an amputation every 30 seconds. WHO estimates that 30-100 million people in the world live with limb loss. Only 5 to 15 percent of these have access to prosthetics, even though prosthetic devices have been around since the Egyptian times. Even though these devices have been there, they have been purely physical devices and very severely limited. Limited by cost.

    The bionic arms that you have heard about today, they cost tens of thousands of dollars and it takes a lot of effort to fit them on you. They’re limited by availability, very few people have access to it, and they’re limited by the interface you can attach to the body.

    Breaking Physical Limits via Cloud AI Service

    Above all, they’re limited by the nervous system that we have because we’ve got to train ourselves to use that device. In fact, literally, we had to force our will into these devices to be able to use them effectively. How could we change all of that? What could change us from having to wrestle with physical devices? How could we break these limits? The answer is an AI or a cloud AI service backing it up.

    Think about this, what if you had low-cost electronics to build with it? What if we could change the game of availability with 3D printing? So, you can print these things anywhere in the world. What if you had a Cloud AI service behind it that provided the ability to recognize things and make the movements? What if it could be personalized? What if it could be adapted? What if other people, your friends could train your arm to make the right kind of movements, in the right kind of environments? How could you have customizability of all types? What if you could tap into the knowledge of the world beyond our senses through the cloud service so that you can keep improving it? What if all of these things came together for a very low cost like the $100 it took for this arm to be built?

    That would be revolutionary, right? Imagine, now every prosthetic in the world or orthosis in the world which is, let’s say you break your arm and [inaudible] sling and you need assistance? What if you could get something very cheap that you could move around but it’s controlled by a Cloud AI service and all you have to do is express your intent to that Cloud AI service somehow and it does the more complex task of actually doing the grasp?

    Affordable, Intelligent, Cloud-Powered and Personalized

    See, this is the difference that the services can make. What you do is you express your intents and your constraints, and the service generates the behavior you need. So, it’s a generative service. The behavior is generated but from high-level intention that you communicate. So, the future is affordable, intelligent, cloud-powered, personalized, prosthetic devices and really devices of every type. That’s hugely revolutionary.