AI - December 2021

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SAVING LIVES WITH AI

December 2021 | aimagazine.com

Using the power of AI and the Brightics AI Accelerator, the IT services giant is looking to alleviate pressure on physicians worldwide

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The AI Team EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

ALEX TUCK

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PHILLINE VICENTE JACK THOMPSON JANE ARNETA

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FOREWORD

“AI is not without its critics when it comes to vast energy usage”

AI MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED BY

Now is the time to save lives with AI Expo 2020 and COP26 have really brought the world’s attention to the importance of technology and artificial intelligence in particular - in tackling major human challenges.

AI applications could optimise the deployment of renewable energy by channeling solar and wind power into the electricity grid, design smarter and more energy-efficient buildings and improve power storage.

The climate isn’t the only area that’s potentially life and death of course. In healthcare, it is so very vital to create efficiency and reduce human error; as the consequences can be dire. This month we are delighted to highlight the work of Patrick Bangert and his team at Samsung SDS; as they utilise AI-enabled automation to reduce operating costs, increase reliability, and ultimately save more lives.

AI is not without its critics when it comes to vast energy usage of datas centres and the replacement of human labour, but these accusations don’t go unanswered by Bangert.

ALEX TUCK

alex.tuck@bizclikmedia.com

© 2021 | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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CONTENTS

Our Regular Upfront Section: 12 Big Picture 14 The Brief 16 Timeline:

DeepMind 18 Trailblazer:

Larry Lewis 22 Five Mins With:

Chris Hemphill

46

AI Strategy

Government National AI Strategy: What is it and is it any good?

28

Samsung Saving Lives With AI

54

TPG Telecom

TPG Telecom is building a smarter, modern 5G network

76

Technology

Computer vision: How Computers See and Understand the World

102

Tableau Software Visualise to monetise

84

118

Drives AI into new computing era for the energy industry

AI-powered Smart City Technologies

SambaNova

Top 10

94

130

Unlocking the power of AI in manufacturing

Transforming data-led businesses through collaboration

AI Applications

EXL

170

LendingPoint

144 Octo

Smarter Warriors: Octo's battlespace ready AI solutions are making warfighters safer

158

AI-driven, CreditTech

186

Nautilus Data Technologies Naturally cold water cooling for high-performance sustainable data centres

R Systems

Intelligent Automation

200

Ceph Foundation

Democratising Data Storage

COMING SOON FO LLOW N OW

EDU C ATE • MOTIVATE • E LE VAT E

About March8

March8 is an inspiring and informative community for women executives, entrepreneurs, professionals and overachievers.

We recognise, celebrate and champion the achievements and contributions made by women in both business and society.

Our community offers practical and compelling career, financial and lifestyle resources to help women take their careers to the next level and achieve a work-life balance.

A BizClik Media Group Brand

FO LLOW N OW

BIG PICTURE

Baidu’s robotaxi Beijing, China

Over the past year, Baidu launched the Apollo Go Robotaxi service in the Chinese cities of Changsha, Cangzhou, and Beijing. It became the only company in China to start robotaxi trial operations in multiple cities.

This successful service keeps humans safe, and marks a big step for the scalability and commercialisation of autonomous driving.

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December 2021

Image credit: Baidu

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13

THE BRIEF “ Our algorithms give us access to credit that other people don’t have access to and we are able to do this profitably”

BY THE NUMBERS What are the top two areas where retailers are allocating their increased AI budgets to improve bottom-line results

KN Kasibhatla

Chief Technology Officer, LendingPoint  READ MORE

“ An incredible 92% of the Fortune 1,000 companies are all using SAP software” Kyle Rice

CTO, SAP National Security Services 

55% Improved

81% Fraud

Customer Retention

Detection

Johnson Controls introduces an industry-first AI solution This new solution by Johnson Controls is an all-in-one AI-powered manager for optimising both sustainability and health metrics in buildings.

READ MORE

READ MORE

“ Our goal is not to keep the technology just close to us, but help build facilities that are successful” James Connaughton

CEO, Nautilus Data Technologies  READ MORE

14

December 2021

Top 10 robotics companies utilising AI technology Although artificial intelligence (AI) powered robot technology is often demonised in sci-fi movie scenarios, many innovators have shown how applying such technology to robots can innovate further.

READ MORE

National AI Strategy: Can the UK really lead the way?

The UK has announced a ten-year plan to turn Britain into a world leader in AI. We ask AI firm Skymind about some of the pros and cons of the proposed strategy.

READ MORE

What is predictive analytics?

Predictive analytics is the use of data, statistical algorithms and machine learning to identify the likelihood of future outcomes.

Based on historical data, the aim of predictive analytics is to go beyond knowing what has happened to provide the best assessment of what will happen in the future.

Why should businesses adopt predictive models now?

Due to the growing volumes and types of data, along with the increased interest industries are seeing in using data to produce valuable insights, predictive analytics is another way for businesses to unlock the power of data. Additionally, in a time of tougher economic conditions, incorporating a predictive analytics model into operatives gives businesses competitive differentiation.

What are the different types of models?

Different models have been developed to meet the different needs of organisations and industries. Predictive analytics models include forecast, classification, outliers, time series and clustering models.

 SPEECHMATICS Speech recognition company, Speechmatics, launched its Autonomous Speech Recognition software that outperforms Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, equating to a 45% reduction in speech errors. The company also outperforms competitors on children’s voices.  HEALTHCARE AI MARKET The healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) market is expected to surpass USD 34.5 billion by 2027, as reported in a research study by Global Market Insights Inc. Artificial intelligence has revolutionised the field of healthcare.  RELIGIOUS AND RACIAL BIAS A team of computer and analytical researchers led by Abubakar Abid of Stanford University found that one of the most complex programmes being used for AI use is throwing up results that are offensive to Muslims and other religious minorities.  FACEBOOK Facebook claims it uses artificial intelligence to identify and remove posts containing hate speech and violence, but the technology doesn't really work, according to internal documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

U P

DEC21

D O W N

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TIMELINE How IBM Watson Became a Popular AI Tool for Business Today, Watson is IBM’s portfolio of businessready tools, applications and solutions. It has the number one ranking in IDC’s AI Market for 2021 AI Software Platforms.

Developed from 2004 to 2011, IBM originally created Watson to beat the best humans at the television game show, Jeopardy!

Here, we look at the development of this impressive portfolio to learn how it became what it is today.

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December 2021

01

The drive to develop Watson In 2004, Charles Lickel, an IBM Research Manager at the time, came up with the idea of creating software that could beat a human in the game Jeaopardy!.

This game involved using complex behaviours such as language to reach a computer how to beat this game.

IBM was able to identify ways to commercialise this technology and bring it to businesses.

02

The beginnings of Watson After its initial development, IBM ran its first tests on Watson and compared its results against the competition. Watson was far below what was necessary to compete live. Not only did it only respond correctly 15% of the time, compared to 95% for other programs, Watson was also slower.

03

More development to perfect the software IBM staffed a team of 15 and gave a three to five-year timeframe to perfect this new software. This time was essential as the game proved hard for Watson because language was a difficult concept for computers to grasp. By 2010, Watson was successfully winning against Jeopardy! Contestants.

04

Expanding Watson’s capabilities Following its success with Jeopardy!, it was reported that IBM started to work with other companies to create apps embedded with Watson technology. Later, the company announced it would make Watson's API available to software application providers, enabling them to build apps and services that are embedded in Watson's capabilities.

05

Utilising Watson in today’s technology-driven world With its impressive speed of memory and an algorithm that can employ different techniques to learn has made Watson a leader in AI computing. It has come a long way from beating humans at Jeopardy! and is now used by 70% of global banking institutions. It also has over 100 million users and 13 of the top 14 systems integrators use Watson. aimagazine.com

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TRAILBLAZER

LARRY LEWIS Utilising data and AI to prevent civilian casualties in warfare

W

Vice President and Director of the Center for Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence, CNA

ith a PhD in Physical Chemistry, Larry Lewis shifted from analysing data in a laboratory to drawing upon data from real-world military operations.

“The world is now my laboratory,” explains Lewis.

Throughout his career, Lewis has dedicated himself to combatting the ever-present issue of civilian casualties in warfare.

His keen interest in the power of data has drawn Lewis to look into events in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other battlefields to see if he could support militaries as they receive more pressure to reduce the number of civilian casualties.

He continued: “I was drawn to going to the battlefield, for context, but also getting the data to challenge common assumptions, the way people think about civilian casualties.

The question I always ask is, “what does the data say?””

These false assumptions meant that the military repeatedly said 18

December 2021

it didn’t need help with the issue, even when rising levels of civilian casualties in multiple conflicts seemed to say differently.

Despite repeated resistance, Lewis’ sheer determination meant he kept looking for opportunities to analyse data to better understand how civilian casualties happen and develop practical ways of reducing them.

One such opportunity was the Joint Civilian Casualty Study, supporting US and international forces in Afghanistan in the face of increasing civilians. He worked with Dr Sarah Sewall on this groundbreaking study.

“The study combined this data and the research foundation I had built.

But we also travelled to Afghanistan.

“General Petraeus sponsored the work and even flew me around Afghanistan in his jet. We met with forces all around the country to understand the challenges and the context. Data is invaluable, but you have to understand the context as well. General Petraeus called it the first comprehensive assessment on civilian harm and it was,” added Lewis.

Discussing his work in Afghanistan, Lewis said: “ I gathered all the data on civilian harm incidents and analysed them, and I started seeing patterns.

This gave us a clearer picture of how civilian harm happens, and it was fundamentally different from what the military thought; they had this misunderstanding about how civilian harm happened. They would put measures in place to fix it but they wouldn’t work as they didn't understand how it happened in the first place.”

LARRY LEWIS received CNA's Board of Trustees award in 2013, the Phil E. Depoy Award for Analytical Excellence in 2003, and a NASA Summer Faculty Fellowship in 1997. aimagazine.com

19

My work shows that there are practical ways to better protect civilians from harm.

We can do better

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December 2021

TRAILBLAZER

The military started acting on his evidence-based recommendations and civilian casualties decreased as a result.

“Following this, the state department called as they wanted my expertise on civilian casualties to inform US policy.

To do this, I joined the State Department as a senior advisor for civilian harm. I drafted an executive order on civilian casualties that President Obama signed, making national commitments to better protect civilians,” explained Lewis.

Lewis was also part of the US delegation to the UN on talks about autonomous weapons, intended to increase understanding of autonomous technology and address concerns around the technology in war. While the primary focus has been on understanding and mitigating risks, in his most recent work Lewis highlights the opportunities for technology to better protect civilians and gives specific examples that militaries can start with for using AI to spare civilians in war.

Lewis did highlight the wins he has had in his career: “There have been some victories, such as helping to contribute to reduced civilian casualties in the field, the Executive Order on civilian casualties, and the US AI strategy that was published in 2018. Within it, it says the US will use AI to help reduce civilian casualties. That’s a sign of greater awareness that we can better protect civilians with technology.”

He added: “There's really no one else that's done this work of analysing civilian casualties. I don't understand it, honestly. But, my work shows that there are practical ways to better protect civilians from harm. We can do better.” aimagazine.com

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FIVE MINUTES WITH...

CHRIS HEMPHILL VP, Applied AI and Growth at Actium Health, Chris Hemphill discusses the company’s approach to healthcare and the issues with bias in artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. Hemphill also shares their insights into the benefits AI can bring to healthcare and how to tackle bias in algorithms.

Q. CAN YOU TALK ME THROUGH ACTIUM HEALTH AND THE SERVICES IT PROVIDES?

» Actium Health is a healthcare

analytics company. There are tonnes of healthcare analytics companies out there. So what is the difference?

The focus at Actium Health is not just on providing data and saying, “Hey, here's an analysis of your market, or here's what these patients look like.” The real purpose is on what actions you should take based on the prediction given. We look at the types of engagements we should do to help these patients to proactively manage their health care. It's about the actions that people take rather than just providing analytics and predictions.

Q. CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT YOUR ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES?

» It's my job to help healthcare

leaders understand what approaches, what algorithms and what models they should be using to best meet their strategic needs and do the best for their patient populations.

What does this include? Well, it includes a lot of communications with clients, but it also includes working with our data science team on some of the algorithms.

I also host a podcast called Hello Healthcare, where we look at the intersection between various aspects of healthcare strategy, such as the rise 22

December 2021

“ ACTIUM HEALTH LOOKS TO SEE IF THE BIAS IVS EMBEDDED INTO ANY PREDICTOR THAT WE'RE USING OR IS THERE AN OVERALL BIAS, JUST BASED ON THE IMBALANCE OF THE DATASET”

in healthcare consumerism, or the spreading infodemic. We look at the intersection between these and data science every week.

Q. HOW DOES ACTIUM HEALTH OVERCOME ISSUES WITH AI SUCH AS BIASES IN DATA AND MACHINE LEARNING?

» Research by Dr Ziad Obermeyer

showed that cultural and economic differences are reflected in algorithms. To overcome this, you first need to acknowledge that data just like everything else can be extremely aimagazine.com

23

FIVE MINUTES WITH...

biased and we need to determine what causes this. Actium Health looks to see if the bias is embedded into any predictor that we're using or is there an overall bias, just based on the imbalance of the dataset. Once we have run these tests and are able to confirm we make interventions such as adjusting thresholds of the algorithm across racial groups or adjusting the types of predictor variables that we use to make sure that we eliminate that bias.

Q. WITH BOTH EXPERIENCE IN THE HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY AND WITH AI, WHAT BENEFITS DO YOU THINK INCORPORATING THIS TECHNOLOGY INTO HEALTHCARE BRINGS?

» One benefit is the ability to be able to measure disparities. If you want to make sure that you're being racially equitable and balanced well, using these algorithms allows you to make sure that you're providing equitable outreach to the broad market. That’s an important one to focus on, the potential to eliminate or remove all kinds of biases. These biases can include race, gender, age and sex.

Q. IN WHAT WAYS DO YOU EXPECT ACTIUM HEALTH TO UTILISE AI-POWERED TECHNOLOGY IN THE FUTURE?

» We keep a close eye on the type of algorithms that are being developed.

In recent years, there have been some really powerful advancements in terms of content development and in terms of what we can learn based on how people interact with 24

December 2021

content and things like that. I see the future of Actium Health kind of keeping this process of being really tied to our product team and our customer success group, so we

actually know what our customers want rather than just playing with a bunch of algorithms in a black room somewhere, which would be fun, but not profitable.

“ IT'S MY JOB TO HELP HEALTHCARE LEADERS UNDERSTAND WHAT APPROACHES, WHAT ALGORITHMS AND WHAT MODELS THEY SHOULD BE USING TO BEST MEET THEIR STRATEGIC NEEDS AND DO THE BEST FOR THEIR PATIENT POPULATIONS” aimagazine.com

25

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December 2021

SAMSUNG SDS

SAVING LIVES WITH AI WRITTEN BY: ALEX TUCK

PRODUCED BY: GREG ST QUINTIN

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SAMSUNG SDS

Using the power of AI and AutoLabel, the IT services giant is looking to alleviate pressure on physicians worldwide

S

amsung SDS stands for Samsung data services, and it is one of approximately 20 companies that make up the Samsung Group: well-known for manufacturing mobile phones, TV sets, laptops, chips, hard-drives, home electronics like fridges and dishwashers and even operating in heavy industries building ships.

One of the core offerings of SDS is the operation of data centres, in which they also run the Brightics AI Accelerator automatedmachine learning (AutoML) platform; enabling users to create AI models much more efficiently, accurately, and quicker than ever before.

Dr. Patrick Bangert, Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at Samsung SDSA, directs the AI engineering and AI sciences teams. The AI engineering team develops the Brightics AI Accelerator, providing distributed training and automated machine learning to speed up the creation of an AI model. The AI sciences team makes models, provides expert consulting services, and develops AutoLabel to automatically annotate datasets in preparation for AI modelling. They supply the full spectrum of AI model development, backed by state-of-

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December 2021

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SAMSUNG SDS

the-art technology and human expertise.

The AI team sources projects inside and outside of Samsung Group, maintaining their own computing infrastructure and covering a global footprint.

The human benefits of automating the imaging process A big focus for Samsung SDS has been the healthcare sector, where AI has been automating imaging processes in areas such as radiology. As Bangert states in no uncertain terms: “The medical system worldwide is overloaded. There are not enough doctors around to fulfill the demand and they are heavily impacted by workflows, bureaucracies, and billing processes. The amount of time that any physician can spend with the real human patient is really a minority of their time. A doctor’s opinion might be wrong about 30% of the time, and so complex diseases – diagnosed Ricky Datta, the director from complex medical of AI engineering at images – are often Samsung SDS, observes; either missed or mis“AI models typically diagnosed. Getting achieve an accuracy a second opinion is in the high 90% range, already a billion-dollar sometimes up to 99.9% market today.” accuracy in certain cases, Second opinions depending on how much typically come from data is available and how other humans. Artificial good quality that data Intelligence provides is. By automating these an objective third party processes, we simply and very neutral second make everything faster.

PATRICK BANGERT or third opinion to any The benefit of this would VP OF AI, diagnostic procedure. significantly lower the SAMSUNG SDS Using AI removes the costs from both the variability of any one physician having a providers and the patient’s care costs, while certain amount of experience, because increasing accuracy of diagnosis and speeding the AI model can process vastly more up the overall time from the initial pain point cases and doesn’t forget things. to the start of the treatment cycle.”

“The medical system worldwide is overloaded.

There are not enough doctors around to fulfill the demand ”

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December 2021

This applies to all areas of medical imaging from MRI and CT scans, over X-ray and ultrasound images to regular photos of skin. Zakia Rahman, clinical professor of dermatology at Stanford University School of Medicine, says “dermatology represents two great frontiers for new business models powered by artificial intelligence. Patients

can take mobile phone pictures of their skin and obtain instant reliable diagnoses of any condition, and people may use pictures of their healthy faces and bodies to compare them against society’s beauty standards for precision cosmetics to look better while not looking abnormal. The biggest obstacle to both is having an expertly annotated large aimagazine.com

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December 2021

SAMSUNG SDS

“Annotation or labeling is the principal obstacle in making AI models, which can be reduced 90% by AI” PATRICK BANGERT

PATRICK BANGERT

VP OF AI, SAMSUNG SDS

TITLE: VP OF AI LOCATION: SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA

dataset of images. We want to create such datasets and models in a partnership with Samsung SDS. The skin, in addition to being the largest organ, is also the most visible. This accessibility has resulted in an exponential increase in the number of images. The skin is, and will likely continue to be, the most imaged organ. While there is potential for democratising diagnosis for the general public, the impact to mental health through image distortion cannot be overstated.”

EXECUTIVE BIO

Patrick heads the AI Division at Samsung SDSA. He is responsible for Brightics AI Accelerator, a distributed ML training and automated ML product, and AutoLabel, an automatic image data annotation and modelling tool primarily targeted at the medical imaging community. Among his other responsibilities is to act as a visionary for the future of AI at Samsung.

Before joining Samsung, Patrick spent 15 years as CEO at algorithmica technologies, a machine learning software company serving the chemicals and oil and gas industries.

Prior to that, he was assistant professor of applied mathematics at Jacobs University in Germany, as well as a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Patrick obtained his machine learning PhD in mathematics and his Masters in theoretical physics from University College London.

Samsung’s ultimate AI toolkit: the Brightics AI Accelerator The jewel in the crown of Samsung’s AI efforts is the AutoLabel facility in the Brightics AI Accelerator platform. Dr. Hankyu Moon, the leader of team behind AutoLabel answers in three parts why this toolkit is so crucial: “Firstly, in the case of imaging, for example, an annotation is typically a manual drawing of an outline around something that's important and assigning the category name to it. We see this in street scenes for autonomous vehicles, where we might draw an outline around people to say ‘okay, this is a person who denotes an obstacle that the car must not hit’.”

These annotations, he explains, are made very quickly by the AutoLabel facility, which aimagazine.com

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SAMSUNG SDS

Samsung AI: Saving lives with AI

“ By automating certain clerical and image analysis tasks, physicians and patients can deal more with the planning of treatment” PATRICK BANGERT VP OF AI, SAMSUNG SDS

effectively sorts the images in the correct order that provide the information. The secret is that only a few, typically 10%, of the images in a dataset contain virtually all the information – but finding them is challenging.

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December 2021

The second part, according to Moon, is related to the Brightics AI Accelerator AutoML platform, which conducts feature engineering, which means pre-processing the data in such a way as to bring out those aspects of the data that are most informative, and selecting the correct model for the situation.

In Moon’s opinion, artificial intelligence is really an umbrella term for many distinct methods and model types, including neural networks, support vector machines, random forest, or decision trees. It’s a case of picking the right one.

Moon explained that the third part that AI can play in healthcare imaging is hyper parameter tuning: “The algorithm that trains one of these models has parameters of its own. They are set typically by a human being, which then leads to a trial-

and-error process of tuning these things correctly. AutoML tunes them for you automatically.”

When it comes down to the AI accelerator, distributed training is another tactic of Samsung’s as Datta explains: “We utilise more than one graphics processing unit (GPU).

To help speed up the process, we may use many hundreds of these GPU processors, simultaneously distributed over many computers to execute a single training task.”

With the AI accelerator as the go-to toolkit for Samsung SDS, the aim is to work on all the areas of efficiency, labelling, tuning of the models and distributed training in parallel, so they can “execute the artificial intelligence workflow a lot more quickly and efficiently

and actually arrive at a much more accurate model in the end.” said Datta.

Challenges in healthcare imaging Nasim Eftekhari, director of applied AI and data science at City of Hope, a worldrenowned cancer research and treatment organisation near Los Angeles, says, “All supervised models that we use today have been trained on labeled data. Regardless of industry, labelling the data for training is always the most expensive part of any AI solution. It is very time-consuming and expensive because doctors and healthcare professionals have to annotate these images, and each image takes hours and hours of time. City of Hope wanted to explore aimagazine.com

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SAMSUNG SDS

38

HANKYU MOON

RICKY DATTA

TITLE: DIRECTOR OF AI SCIENCE

TITLE: DIRECTOR OF AI ENGINEERING

COMPANY: SAMSUNG SDS

COMPANY: SAMSUNG SDS

LOCATION: CALIFORNIA

LOCATION: CALIFORNIA

Dr. Hankyu Moon has been a Director of AI Science as part of the AI Team, Samsung SDS Research America since 2015. He received a B.S. degree in Mathematics Education from Seoul National University and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Maryland College Park. His R&D career in AI started when he joined Center for Automation Research, University of Maryland in 1996 as a graduate student. Prior to joining Samsung, he worked at NEC Research Institute and Hughes Research Laboratories as a research scientist. Throughout his career he has collaborated with worldclass researchers, producing numerous publications and patents in the areas of Computer Vision, Deep Learning, and Data Mining. At Samsung, he and his colleagues have developed Data Efficient AI for several years, resulting in successful launching of the AutoLabel solution that leverages Representation Learning, Active Learning, and Unsupervised Learning.

Ricky has been responsible for the technical direction of Brightics AI Accelerator since day one. He oversees all aspects of design and implementation of AI Accelerator. A seasoned Enterprise Software Leader, Ricky is an expert in Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Big Data and works together with customers to ensure all their specialist technical needs are met.

He started his career in small software startups to specialise in Enterprise Software.

Ricky has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi.

December 2021

EXECUTIVE BIOS

SAMSUNG SDS

ZAKIA RAHMAN

NASIM EFTEKHARI

TITLE: C LINICAL PROF OF DERMATOLOGY

TITLE: DIRECTOR OF APPLIED AI & DATA SCIENCE

COMPANY: STANFORD UNIVERSITY

COMPANY: CITY OF HOPE

LOCATION: CALIFORNIA

LOCATION: LOS ANGELES

Dr. Zakia Rahman, MD, FAAD is a Clinical Professor of Dermatology at Stanford where she is Director of the Resident Laser and Aesthetic Clinic. She is also Assistant Chief and Co-Director of Dermatologic Surgery at the Livermore Division of the PAVAHCS. She serves on the advisory board of multiple medical device companies where her collaborative work as the principal investigator has resulted in FDA clearances for consumer and professional class lasers. She is also a subject matter expert for venture and angel investors in dermatology medical devices.

Dr. Rahman is the Chair of the Stanford School of Medicine Faculty Senate. She is passionate about physician professional fulfillment and is a member of the Wellness Directors Council for Stanford Hospital. She sits on the Diversity Taskforce, Electronic Medical Records Taskforce and the Media Expert Panel for the American Academy of Dermatology. Dr. Rahman is also a member of the Federal Affairs Work Group and Research Workgroup for the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery.

Nasim Eftekhari leads the Applied AI and Data Science Department at City of Hope, aworld-renowned research and treatment organisation for cancer, diabetes and other life-threatening diseases located near Los Angeles. She helps supervise teams responsible for applying machine learning in clinical decision support and patient care, research andprecision medicine, as well as operations and finance.

Before joining City of Hope in 2017, Nasim co-founded an AI company focused on social media data mining and financial markets and political events prediction. She continues to advise startup companies on successful implementation of AI solutions. Nasim holds a master’s degree in computer science from Southern Illinois University and a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Khaje Nasir Toosi University in Tehran, Iran. On a personal level, Nasim enjoys an active lifestyle in sunny Los Angeles and has a passion for fitness and sports. She plays soccer and beach volleyball and goes to the gym every day.

aimagazine.com

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SAMSUNG SDS

DAN WATERS TITLE: DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AND PRODUCT

Dan leads Business Development for the AI Team at Samsung SDS America and is responsible for the go-to-market strategy. As a Senior Business Development leader, Dan’s devoted his career to bringing to market disruptive products, building teams to scale rapidly and quickly growing revenue for companies like xnor.ai, Zebra Technologies, Apple, Siri, and Motorola.

Previously, the VP of Marketing & Business Development for XNOR. ai, Dan validated the commercial product/market fit for XNOR. AI’s research technology spun out of the Paul Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2), built brand awareness and executed proof-of-concept, commercial and government agreements to close deals, recognise revenue, and grow the sales pipeline.

In 2009, Dan introduced Siri to Apple and was retained by Apple following its acquisition of Siri in 2010. Dan is an MBA graduate of the Kellogg Graduate School of Business, has a BSEE from Iowa State University and is conversant in Spanish.

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December 2021

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA

using Samsung’s active learning in autolabeling images. There is no question about the value that deep learning brings to auto-labelling pathology images. We are really excited to explore the idea of a system that can learn little-by-little from pathologists.”A doctor takes 20 to 30 minutes to draw their annotation on top of a single image. And to train an AI algorithm to recognise anything meaningful, thousands of such annotated images are needed. The process is the most timeconsuming and expensive of the entire AI workflow.

It’s the primary obstacle that the AutoLabel facility of the Brightics AI Accelerator is there to overcome, using a technique called active learning to speed that process up by 90%, so it will reduce the amount of human labour from 100%

“ AI has a large role to play in trying to limit the rise of various greenhouse gases.

That has a lot to do with how efficiently we can run things” PATRICK BANGERT VP OF AI, SAMSUNG SDS

down to 10% - a very significant gain, usually in the double-digit millions per model.

A further challenge for Dan Waters, the director of business development and product at Samsung SDS, is related to his home in the United States, where The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must approve any physical device used in the medical industry. Waters states that “because governmental agencies are not as advanced in their treatment of artificial intelligence, getting a physical device approved can take a long time.

The established processes and personnel are simply not familiar with this new technology, as far as they're concerned, AI is relatively new.” aimagazine.com

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SAMSUNG SDS

Medical Diagnostics by Artificial Intelligence

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AI applications beyond healthcare “Climate change is the one great challenge of humanity” says Bangert.

“AI has a large role to play in trying to limit the rise of various greenhouse gases. That has a lot to do with how efficiently we can run things in factories, vehicles, airplanes, and people's homes,” he continued.

Samsung’s consumer electronics and home automation devices can help through their efficient use of energy and in helping to reduce the total carbon footprint of any home or building.

Data centres – especially because of AI workloads – are often blamed for exacerbating the climate impact of the modern world but

this is short sighted. “Other carbon emitting factors of the physical world are circumvented due to AI. Take, for example, the primary use of the internet, which is shopping. You go to a website, buy something, and that is delivered by the postal service. That is a lot more efficient from a greenhouse gas perspective than if you take your SUV by yourself and drive 20 miles to the next mall.”

AI, ethics and earning trust One of the biggest cultural disconnects with AI is trust. Companies such as Samsung SDS take their ethical responsibilities very seriously: “We make sure that not only have we created the model in an ethical manner, but also that we are using it in an ethical manner,” says Bangert.

This leads to explainability, where the AI model should not just deliver the answer, but it should deliver an explanation of why that is the correct - and best - answer. aimagazine.com

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Elevator Pitch: Brightics AI Accelerator

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SAMSUNG SDS

“AI has the potential to revolutionise healthcare in diagnosis, treatment, and clerical processes creating new jobs and allowing existing staff to be more efficient” PATRICK BANGERT VP OF AI, SAMSUNG SDS

“It must present the information in a way that's understandable for the audience. In healthcare, this is of course the doctor and the patient. So, if you're going to tell people that they have cancer – you better say why.” said Bangert.

It’s clear that trust is something that Samsung SDS must generate alongside the global AI community. But beyond just the imaging domain, Samsung is exploring electronic medical records that go beyond the pure image to unify the analysis of natural language processing, which would be relevant to the text that the doctor writes.

“The ‘multimodal’ AI system can take care of image input, text input, numerical input, and unify it to a holistic picture of what might be the case, and what should be done about it.” said Bangert.

Bangert focuses on the good that AI can bring: “By automating certain tasks, physicians and patients can deal more with the planning of the treatment, discussing how treatment might impact the patient's life. Doctors can act as doctors rather than expert data processors.”

Another criticism of AI-enabled automation is that it’s making a lot of people redundant, but that is not true according to Bangert: “AI, in general, is creating new jobs and allowing people to work in very different areas – in medicine specifically. Because of the lack of personnel, this is extremely welcome. And of course, patients expect doctors to be patient-facing rather than be internal facing.”

Discover Brightics AI Accelerator

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AI STRATEGY

GOVERNMENT NATIONAL AI STRATEGY:

What is it and is it any good?

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AI STRATEGY

The UK Government has revealed its national AI Strategy. We talk to businesses and those in the know, about what they could do and what we should be looking at WRITTEN BY: LAURA BERRILL

A

t the end of September the UK Government revealed its National Artificial Intelligence Strategy. It is described as ‘representing the start of a step change for AI, recognising the power of the technology to increase resilience, productivity, growth and innovation across private and public sectors.’

In this feature we talk to businesses about the move and what it could mean for enterprises of all sizes, education and training, ethical and moral consideration and its development going forward.

Three pillars The strategy is made up of three main pillars; investing in the long-term needs of the AI ecosystem, ensuring AI benefits all sectors and regions and governing AI effectively.

AI Magazine asked Harvey Lewis, Associate Partner and Chief Data Scientist in EY’s tax practice, what he thought about them. “Firstly, the new AI strategy assumes that innovation in AI is largely driven by academia and the start-up community, with commercialisation and scale-up via bigger business. But most recent advances have been created by big tech firms,” he commenced. “Boosting the UK’s competitiveness in AI depends not just on investment in academia, but also in incentivising UK-based tech firms to open up their technology and data, via tax credits or grants.” aimagazine.com

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ld u o nt c ing e nm blish y r e ov esta les b st g e “ Th nsider rincip s mu co t of p ystem to a se ch AI s imilar i wh rate, s PR” ope t of GD tha AND S EWI RTNER ST, EY L Y RVE E PA NTI

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Of the second pillar he commented: “The strategy identifies the main barriers to progress as access to data, infrastructure and talent. Recent EY research highlights just how acute these challenges are for SMEs. For example, in the region 90% of large organisations have already adopted AI or plan to do so soon, but this falls to around 48% for SMEs.” In terms of pillar three, Lewis suggests: “The government could consider establishing a set of principles by which AI systems must operate, similar to GDPR. It could also identify key roles and who should

be held accountable for compliance. The focus on regulating the operation, not just development of AI systems is key.” Lewis concluded ensuring outputs and outcomes are fair, transparent, ethical and safe, would help the UK pivot from a ‘risk-first’ approach to that of ‘opportunity first’.

Upskilling to compete NVIDIA, the GPU designer, has contributed to the Government’s AI strategy through its Cambridge-1 supercomputer - the country’s most powerful AI supercomputer dedicated to advancing healthcare research. aimagazine.com

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AI STRATEGY

David Hogan, VP Enterprise, EMEA at the company says he thinks the new strategy is an important step in furthering the UK’s advantage as a global leader and that it is good to see it focusing on computational capabilities, as this was vital to success. He adds: “However, AI researchers and start-ups need access to the right tools. We, like many other countries, face shortages of skilled AI experts. Upskilling is now a key requirement for the strategy’s successful deployment.

NVIDIA has been able to train more than 7,000 developers in the UK via our Deep Learning Institute and we continue to see strong demand for hands-on training, both in industry and academia.”

He also added that supporting and investing in the start-up community was another area where the UK needed to keep up with other Western nations and said the company was now inviting applications from healthcare start-ups for compute time on Cambridge-1.

Dr Ems Lord, Head of Maths Support Programme, NRICH at Cambridge University said the growth in AI means more people will have a stronger need for applying mathematical knowledge and skills, without relying completely on AI, because mistakes are made. He explains: “It’s important that at school we value teaching youngsters number sense through reflecting on answers to mathematical problems, rather than just relying on methodical calculation methods.”

Collaboration and diversity According to Adam Gibson, Co-founder of AI ecosystem builder, Skymind, collaboration between parties and tapping into existing expertise is vital to secure the strategy’s long-term success.

He gives the example of the Eclipse Foundation, which can help the 50

December 2021

The beginnings of modern AI The beginnings of modern AI can be traced to classical philosophers' attempts to describe human thinking as a symbolic system. But the field of AI wasn't formally founded until 1956, at a conference at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, where the term "artificial intelligence" was coined.

AI STRATEGY

“We, like many countries, face shortages of skilled AI experts. Upskilling is a key requirement for the strategy’s successful deployment” DAVID HOGAN

VP ENTERPRISE, NVIDIA

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AI STRATEGY

AI Global Market The global AI market is predicted to snowball in the next few years, reaching a $190.61 billion market value in 2025.

The forecasted AI annual growth rate between 2020 and 2027 is 33.2%.

The global AI chip market revenue is expected to reach $83.25 billion by 2027.

Between 2018 and 2025, the Asia-Pacific region will experience the highest compound annual growth rate.

By 2030, China will be the world leader in AI technology, with 26.1% of the global market share.

Government and businesses transition to AI economies effectively. He added diversity was equally important.

“The best outcomes for enhanced AI services require diversity behind those creating and implementing the technology. That means attracting more women and people from different social and ethnic backgrounds. Getting the right mix of AI creators will also require mandatory STEM education at school and mentoring programmes encouraging AI career paths. We can’t have progress in 52

December 2021

“ We can’t have progress in AI without diversity, we need to design economies which reflect the population it serves” ADAM GIBSON

CO-FOUNDER OF AI ECOSYSTEM BUILDER, SKYMIND

AI STRATEGY

decisions being made by technology, the role of humans approving the decisions and when people are interacting with AI tools.

Finally, disclosure transparency means processes and guidelines for remedying issues of bias, abuse and where things have gone wrong.

This is echoed by Anant Ranganathan, VP Head of Data North America at First Derivative.

“The speed and scale at which machine intelligence is proliferating across all industries requires early identification and planning for new risk types that emerge. The most common concern is one of privacy risk to the individual and algorithmic bias.

Another would be the moral risk of making decisions not in the best interest of an individual or society, while only benefiting the chosen few,” he says.

AI without diversity, we need to design economies which reflect the population it serves,” he says.

Transparency in data, design and disclosure Kasia Borowska, Founder and MD of Brainpool.ai, emphasises the need for transparency on all levels to avoid resistance or fear around the strategy. She says data transparency means knowing what data was used, where it came from, how it was labelled and the features it included. In terms of design, it is knowing the types of

Proof of the pudding Peter van der Putten, Director of Decisioning and AI Solutions, Pegasystems and Assistant Professor, AI and Creative Research at Leiden University says the strategy is a sign that AI use is becoming more pervasive and shows a commitment from the Government that it should benefit all.

“What is also interesting is that the document lists certain immediate actions that should benefit long-term needs such as improving AI skills, increasing private and public R&D funding and pushing publication of open data. However, the proof of the pudding is always in the eating, so it will be interesting to revisit the action plan in 6-12 months and see how many actions have been ticked off. These plans will need to be accompanied by proper levels of investment. Hard commitments on these investments are still lacking.” aimagazine.com

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TPG TELECOM

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TPG TELECOM

TPG Telecom is building a smarter, modern 5G network

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TPG TELECOM

Yago Lopez General Manager, Wireless & Transmission Networks, TPG Telecom

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Yago Lopez, GM of Wireless & Transmission Networks at TPG Telecom, talks mergers, COVID-19, and bringing next-generation 5G to Australia’s biggest metros.

WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

T

he 5G rollout has presented a monumental financial and logistical challenge for telecom operators around the world over the past two years. Some carriers, however, have had to contend with greater challenges than others. TPG Telecom’s 5G rollout has occurred at the same time as it executed one of the biggest mergers in the history of the Australian telecom sector, contended with the loss of Huawei as a key equipment supplier following a ban by the Australian Government - and did it all in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s been a challenging time, but when life hands you lemons you make lemonade,” says Yago Lopez, TPG Telecom’s General Manager Wireless & Transmission Networks.

“Of course, the rollout has had its challenges, chief among them being the Huawei ban, but it has given us the opportunity to end up with a legacy-free, standalone, 5G-native network.”

Now, with the merger complete, and the company on track to outperform its 5G coverage targets for the year, I sat down with Lopez to find out how a skillful integration, a diverse network of talented partners, and a refusal to succumb to the obstacles placed before it has resulted in TPG Telecom bringing a world class, state-of-the-art 5G experience to Australian consumers.

PRODUCED BY: STUART IRVING A “Match Made in Heaven” TPG Telecom is the result of a merger between TPG and Vodafone Hutchison Australia, which itself is a product of the merger between Vodafone Australia and Hutchison - better known in Europe and Asia as Three.

Prior to being united, TPG was the country’s second-largest internet service provider (ISP), and was “very strong in the consumer and enterprise fixed line space” but did not have a mobile network. Vodafone, on the other hand, was a mobile network operator with limited assets in the fixed domain. “It was basically a match made in heaven,” recalls Lopez. “From an asset and market point of view, there wasn't much overlap between the two companies. As a merged company, we now have some of the most loved telco brands in Australia under one roof including Vodafone, iiNet, TPG and Lebara. This creates

“ We had to start our 5G buildout from square one” YAGO LOPEZ

GENERAL MANAGER, WIRELESS & TRANSMISSION NETWORKS, TPG TELECOM aimagazine.com

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TPG TELECOM

a great opportunity to cross-sell one another's products. It was two highly complementary businesses coming together to create a much better business than the sum of its parts.”

Joining the new company from the Vodafone side, Lopez remarks that “when you're going through a merger, the key thing is to understand the cultures of the companies that are coming together.”

Bringing two outlooks, cultures, and “families” together successfully, he continues, is “all about empathy”.

“One thing you absolutely cannot do when you're trying to execute a merger is to try and make one company into the other. You need to take the best elements of both, listen to both sides, and choose the right combination to ensure you get the best of both worlds.”

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One year later, and the integration process is nearly complete. “We needed to ensure that we become - and are seen by our customers as - one functional entity rather than two,” Lopez explains. The next step is to leverage the formidable combined capabilities of the brand new TPG Telecom in order to do something remarkable: take a bite out of the NBN. “In Australia, we have a governmentowned company called the National Broadband Network (NBN) and they're the main provider of fixed broadband services for both consumers and enterprises throughout the country,” says Lopez. “One of our key strategies at TPG Telecom is to leverage our 4G and 5G mobile network to deliver home internet services, as we try to

TPG TELECOM

YAGO LOPEZ TITLE: GENERAL MANAGER, WIRELESS & TRANSMISSION NETWORKS

“ In a 5G world, you have got to have strong partners.

And our partners have been key to finding solutions to the challenges of our 5G rollout” YAGO LOPEZ

GENERAL MANAGER, WIRELESS & TRANSMISSION NETWORKS, TPG TELECOM

EXECUTIVE BIO

COMPANY: TPG TELECOM Spanish-Australian Yago Lopez’s passion for Science led him to pursue an academic path in Physics at the University of Oviedo (North Spain) where he graduated after joining Tubingen University (Germany) for part of his studies.

He started his Telecommunications career in Vodafone Spain as an Engineer. From there, he built and international path which brought him first to Dusseldorf with Vodafone Group providing technical consultancy services to Operators around the world and then to Dublin as Vodafone Ireland Network Performance Manager.

Yago moved to Sydney in 2013, joining Vodafone Australia as Head of Radio Networks. Since then, he has held multiple leadership roles in both technical and commercial sides of the industry. He is currently leading the Wireless & Transmission Networks of TPG telecom.

Yago is a rugby fanatic and while he is not playing with Waverley RC, it’s easy to find him enjoying the beach with his young family.

A true customer-centric approach Michael Riches, CEO of Axicom, talks about how his company’s unique customer-first approach is helping them move from being a supplier to a true partner.

As Australia’s largest independent owner and operator of shared wireless infrastructure, Axicom has undergone a strategy and cultural transformation to place the customer at the heart of everything they do. Their focus to understand their customers’ critical issues, anticipate their changing needs and create innovative infrastructure solutions, continue to help them deliver long-term value to their customers.

predominant focus.

Understanding your customer and stepping into their shoes – looking from the outside in – is imperative in any market but critically important in the telecoms sector where the requirements of the customer are changing and evolving so rapidly” explains Michael Riches, CEO of Axicom.

“The principle I seek to instil in my team, and all our employees, is that creating value for our customers should be the first and

As a long-term player in the market, Axicom’s depth of IP and processes as well as their ongoing investment in digital, enables them to provide speed and transparency in delivery.

“We have a strong focus on digital transformation and automating a lot of our processes which allows us to work with our customers in a collaborative and co-ordinated way and deploy faster and more effectively across our sites.” Riches explains. “Creating meaningful customer experiences, not just good service, continues to drive the way we operate”.

It is Axicom’s customer-centric approach that has seen them develop true partnerships with their customers, including TPG Telecom.

Axicom worked in a highly collaborative and consultative way with TPG Telecom to understand their future network needs and key business objectives and provide solutions that deliver long-term value. Abandoning the traditional dynamic of supplier and vendor, working together, TPG Telecom and Axicom were able to speed up the 5G deployment

process, eliminate procurement delays, and create a better alignment of outcomes oriented towards the overall enhancement of the network.

“TPG Telecom’s 5G deployment has gone ahead at a speed that has not been seen in this market and as a key partner we’re proud to be part of that success” says Riches.

And there’s every sign that TPG Telecom and Axicom will continue to move forward together as true partners, with the recent extension of the lease term of existing network sites for an initial period of 19 years.

For more information, contact Axicom at salesaus@axicom.com.au or visit axicom.com.au

TPG TELECOM

2020

Year Founded

6,000 Number of Employees

A$4.35bn Revenue (2020)

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TPG TELECOM

“5G is going to be really important when it comes to letting people have a seamless, work from anywhere experience” YAGO LOPEZ

GENERAL MANAGER, WIRELESS & TRANSMISSION NETWORKS, TPG TELECOM

keep our customers within our own network rather than give up ground to the NBN.” Taking on the state-sponsored ISP is no small thing. However, Lopez is confident that Australian consumers deserve to be offered more choice and better value than a single government-run infrastructure body can provide. “At the end of the day, we are providing choice and value to Australian consumers and enterprises,” he says. “The NBN is kind of a monopoly in that a lot of Australians only have one choice when it comes to their home connectivity, and we want to change that.”

Of course, in order to offer the worldclass service that might stand a chance of holding up in direct competition with the NBN for Australia’s home internet market, a successful 5G rollout is critical.

5G, Huawei, and Making Lemonade When the Australian government announced that it would ban Chinese tech firm Huawei from its 5G buildout back in 2018, Vodafone found itself faced with a serious issue. “Before the ban, we were planning to use Huawei as the natural vendor to upgrade our 4G network to non-standalone 5G, because we'd already been working with them for a long time,” recalls Lopez. “When Huawei was banned from supplying Australia's 5G equipment, all of Vodafone's existing radio and transmission network infrastructure was Huawei, which presented a big challenge for us.” aimagazine.com

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Changing the Future of Network Rollouts

Through the development of the innovative Sector Assembly method, Vecta is empowering TPG Telecom’s nationwide 5G rollout.

Vecta is a specialist assembly and testing service provider for telecommunications equipment owners and operators. As a key partner of one of Australia’s leading telecom operators, TPG Telecom, Vecta has torn up the rulebook for cell site assembly, testing, and installation, delivering an innovative, proprietary new method that is set to change the process of network rollouts forever.

“Through the Sector Assembly concept, we are driving innovation in the construction of 5G networks,” says John Bonello, Executive Director of Vecta.

“Radio systems can now be assembled and tested in a factory and, for the first time in the industry’s history, system level testing is being carried out in a precision laboratory.”

The results, Bonello explains, are profound.

“We’re delivering radio sites that work first time after installation, backed by reduced cost, improved network performance, reliability, health and safety and environmental impact.”

Prefabrication of cell site equipment also allows for more effective

testing in controlled factory settings - especially with regard to detecting and eliminating passive intermodulation. “Passive intermodulation is a problem for many telecom networks. It’s an effect that basically creates self-interference, which reduces network capacity and quality of service. It’s something that you don’t want in your mobile network,” Bonello explains. By testing the cell site equipment in controlled conditions using Vecta’s fully shielded anechoic chamber, “We’re currently the only business worldwide that’s able to offer passive intermodulation, or PIM, testing for cellular products to the ISO 17025 accredited laboratory standard.”

Vecta was chosen by TPG Telecom to develop and deploy its Sector Assembly method in order to support and speed TPG Telecom’s rollout of a standalone, future-proofed 5G network, contributing to the successful delivery of 5G to 85% of Australia’s largest metros ahead of schedule.

“Vecta is adding significant value to TPG Telecom as they fast track the 5G rollout using this innovative process,” Bonello says. “In modern networks, mobile operators face performance, value, safety and environmental challenges that must be overcome. In partnership with TPG Telecom, the sector assembly method was developed to help remove these obstacles, resulting in an incredibly strong solution that meets the TPG Telecom KPIs for their 5G rollout.”

He added that “Working in close collaboration with Yago’s team has resulted in a highly successful product with a level of factory assembly, testing and inspection never seen before in a network deployment.”

Learn More

TPG TELECOM

TPG Telecom is building a smarter, modern 5G network

The majority of 5G rollouts around the world - including in 5G ‘leader’ countries like South Korea - eased the transition from 4G to 5G using non-standalone 5G networks. By piggybacking on existing 4G infrastructure, the process of rolling out a 5G network becomes more gradual, reducing costs and potential disruption. However, with 4G infrastructure built using Huawei equipment, a complete network build was required.

“Without Huawei's equipment to build on, we had to start our 5G buildout from square one,” says Lopez. “TPG Telecom is probably the only operator in the world where the move from 4G to 5G meant completely ripping apart our mobile network, because all our 4G infrastructure was built by Huawei. Instead of being an incremental expense, building from nonstandalone 5G and slowly rolling it out across the network, we needed to build the entire network from the ground up.” It’s a testament to the dedication and skill of TPG 66

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TPG TELECOM

“ One thing you absolutely cannot do when you're trying to execute on a merger is to try and make one company into the other” YAGO LOPEZ

GENERAL MANAGER, WIRELESS & TRANSMISSION NETWORKS, TPG TELECOM

PARTNERING FOR SUCCESS “In a 5G world, you have got to have strong partners. And our partners have been key to finding solutions to the challenges of our 5G rollout,” explains Lopez.

“TPG Telecom has partnered with Nokia for our radio access and mobile transmission networks and Ericsson for our standalone core. For the optical components on the fixed side we've partnered with Ciena, and we've also been collaborating with Samsung on emerging technologies like V_RAN and Axicom - which is a tower company. We've been working with all of them to help support a 5G rollout with a ‘no legacy’ mentality.”

He adds that TPG Telecom has also “relied heavily on a partnership with steel fabricators Site Pro 1 and radio frequency experts Vecta Labs to assemble our new 5G sites in controlled warehouse environments, which is safer, more reliable, and faster – and an Australian first.”

Lopez reflects that, in the 5G era, “partner relationships are also changing.

You can't just have one-to-one conversations anymore; we want all our partners to be able to collaborate with one another to really create this ecosystem where ideas and skills are shared without TPG Telecom necessarily having to be at the centre of every conversation.”

To that end, TPG Telecom recently opened its new Innovation Lab in Sydney.

“Together with our partners, the lab allows us to test innovations in 5G network technologies. The lab is driving innovation in our 5G network and allows us to develop and showcase use cases that will enable the digitisation of more industries across Australia,” says Lopez.

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Reäl end-to-end.

Delivering Endto-End Expertise

the build, deployment, and planning, all the way through to optimisation, engineering, and operation. We’re also offering our services across the fibre and fixed wireless network sector, as well as cloud and cybersecurity.”

umlaut continues a decade-long partnership with TPG Telecom, offering specialised, in-depth expertise to support TPG’s 5G rollout.

In Australia, umlaut has been a core partner of TPG Telecom for more than a decade. “Prior to the Vodafone-TPG merger, we were a longstanding partner of Vodafone at a group level where we worked with them on numerous projects over the years,” Ekmen explains. “We had a strong history with Vodafone Hutchison Australia, working with them on infrastructure and security projects, as well as 5G.”

.dne-ot-dne läeR

umlaut is a globally recognised, technologydriven and future-oriented company providing end-to-end consulting, engineering, and testing services to companies across the automotive, aviation, energy, rail, telecommunications industries and beyond. Founded 24 years ago in Germany, umlaut has grown into a multinational, globally active company - recently acquired by consultancy giant Accenture - with more than 4,500 employees delivering specialised consulting, engineering, and network testing services to the world’s largest enterprises.

“We are defined by the added value we create for our clients, their companies, products, and their end customers as well,” says Hakan Ekmen, global CEO for umlaut’s telecommunication unit.

“Our credo is to always add something on top, like the umlaut from which we get our name.”

In the telecommunications industry - where Ekmen has been overseeing umlaut’s operations for the past 14 years - umlaut delivers “services and expertise from end-to-end, starting with

“As the telecom sector continues to innovate and develop new technologies and services, we’re going to see 5G deliver real-time connectivity and faster data speeds. And we’ve been closely engaged with TPG on their own deployment of 5G, as well as the development of new products and services to capitalise on this next generation of telecommunications technology,” says Ekmen.

“With our specialised set of skills and in-depth, detailed knowledge of the verticals where TPG is focusing its efforts, I think we can continue to strengthen our partnership, help them adopt and capitalise on new technologies, and drive winwin outcomes for both umlaut and TPG for many years to come.”

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TPG TELECOM

Telecom’s network engineering department that the company has managed to not only build and spin up an entirely new standalone 5G network in such a short space of time, but this success will also build towards future wins for TPG Telecom.

“Every piece of equipment we're putting into our network is 5G ready, and that's something that we're going to be able to continue to leverage for years to come.

We're very proud of what we've built in such a short amount of time,” Lopez says, adding that the merger between Vodafone and TPG “came at a great time, because it combined all the expertise and assets of Vodafone with some of the strategic spectrum purchases made previously by TPG - as well as their fibre and fixed assets.

When you put the capabilities of our two companies together, and remove all that legacy infrastructure from our network, you end up with something really special.”

TPG Telecom’s 5G rollout has been gathering pace. “We're exceeding our rollout targets. We originally intended to cover 85% of Australia's top six metros - Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Canberra - by the end of the year,” Lopez says. “Right now, we're on track to also hit that goal in four of the most populated regions in the country - the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, New South Wales Central Coast, and Wollongong - by the close of 2021.”

As TPG Telecom’s 5G services reach more of the Australian population, the lower latencies and higher throughput connectivity it delivers is supporting improved video streaming, gaming, and enterprise applications. “The technology is really helping us deliver the kinds of services our customers are going to be requiring in the near future. And we want to be able to offer to Australians the best of those 70

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“ It’s been a challenging time, but when life hands you lemons you make lemonade” YAGO LOPEZ

GENERAL MANAGER, WIRELESS & TRANSMISSION NETWORKS, TPG TELECOM

TPG TELECOM

possible services which 5G is already making a reality,” Lopez explains. “I'm not talking about distant advancements like driverless cars; cloud native, 5G-driven applications for 5G are here already.”

Particularly in light of the COVID19 pandemic’s effect on the growth of remote work, cloud migrations, and the consumption of digital services, Lopez argues that “5G is going to be really important when it comes to letting people have a seamless, work from anywhere

experience.” “Our spectrum portfolio is the strongest it has ever been, and was boosted further with recent 5G spectrum acquisitions which will allow us to provide an excellent 5G experience for our mobile and home wireless customers.”

In order to expand upon its 5G applications, TPG Telecom is continuing to work with its key partners, including Nokia and the University of Technology Sydney.

Recently, TPG Telecom was selected by the Australian Government

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Unleash the full Power of 5G with Samsung networks As a long time innovation powerhouse, Samsung has been inspiring the industry and unleashing the full power of 5G. With our advanced end-to-end solutions, we keep pushing the industry forward for a better tomorrow.

Compact Macro Massive MIMO Radio/Radio Link Cell for roadsides

for rooftops and towers

for indoors

Samsung and TPG: Building the Network of Tomorrow Samsung is enabling TPG Telecom to transcend the limits of conventional mobile connectivity.

As the society transitions into the New Normal era after COVID-19, digital technology will continue to play an essential role in our homes, workplaces and beyond. The pandemic highlighted the importance of connectivity and it will become more prominent in our daily lives. The increasing reliance on and usage of digital technology will bring forward a dynamic transformation, reshaping businesses and industries – unleashing new use cases and services. With the emergence of more complex and diverse use cases, network infrastructure will also become more sophisticated. This means that conventional hardware-based network architecture needs to evolve into a more agile and flexible network to support these use cases swiftly and effectively.

Samsung believes virtualisation and openness will be fundamental to this network transformation.

These next-generation networks will be equipped to power new services with more efficiency and flexibility, while also ensuring network reliability and quality.

“The network of tomorrow will be a platform going beyond the limits of conventional mobile connectivity for future use cases, such as smart factories, smart offices, and smart cities,” says Jonathan Ang, Head of Networks for Samsung

Australia. The key to this era of more flexible, powerful, versatile networks, Ang explains, is network virtualisation. Samsung’s cloud native, fully virtualised Radio Access Network (vRAN) solutions effectively liberate network operators from the static, hardware-bound networks that defined telecom infrastructure in the past. “By using Samsung’s vRAN solutions, operators are able to flexibly allocate network resources based on service patterns, and manage networks more effectively by bringing automated operation one step closer, making the entire network life cycle much easier from design and deployment to operation and optimisation,” he adds.

Samsung has been working closely with TPG Telecom to bring virtualisation in Australia.

According to Ang, “the virtualisation of TPG’s 5G network is a key step on TPG’s journey towards creating the network of tomorrow.”

As TPG Telecom’s 5G network continues to grow and evolve, Samsung’s vRAN will support and enhance that network expansion. “Together with TPG, Samsung looks forward to bringing immersive mobile experiences for users in Australia and to reshape the value of 5G for enterprises,” says Ang. “We are ready. TPG is ready. Let’s virtualise the network today.”

Learn more

TPG TELECOM

“When you're going through a merger, the key thing is to understand the cultures of the companies that are coming together” YAGO LOPEZ

GENERAL MANAGER, WIRELESS & TRANSMISSION NETWORKS, TPG TELECOM

to use its 5G technology in order to develop a better method of counting sheep - a labour-intensive, mission critical job for farmers throughout the country’s massive agricultural sector.

As 2021 draws to a close and companies turn their sights towards 2022 and beyond, Lopez is excited for the next phase in TPG Telecom’s 5G journey. “We're focusing on those top 10 most-populated cities and

regions first, and then plan to move forward with our 5G rollout across other areas of the country in the years to come,” he says.

“We’ll continue focusing on our key priorities including going hard on 5G home wireless and other products to migrate customers from the NBN.”

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TECHNOLOGY

COMPUTER VISION:

How Computers See and Understand the World Computer vision is a must-have for many organisations because it provides a new way for computers to ‘see’ and understand the world, we look at how and why WRITTEN BY: LAURA BERRILL

C

omputer vision in simple terms is the science of how computers can be programmed to understand what they visually identify. The technology is implemented in applications where you want to make sense of the pixels in a certain image.

The AI algorithm automatically analyses images and produces metadata based on it, such as date, time, camera type and geographical location, among other things. It is also possible for these algorithms to detect objects like people, animals, cars or buildings.

It differs from AI-based image recognition because computer vision essentially ‘talks’ to the camera with the help of an interface, whereas in image recognition, it just identifies objects within a digital image.

Deep learning is what enables computer vision technology. It is an approach to artificial intelligence that employs algorithms inspired by the structure and function of neurons in animal brains. Where deep learning comes in is that it employs multiple processing layers that are capable of using artificial intelligence that processes information more quickly than traditional computer programmes. aimagazine.com

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TECHNOLOGY

“ Computer vision technology has a role to play in nearly every imaginable walk of life” APPU SHAJI

CEO AND CHIEF SCIENTIST, MOBIUS LABS

It is the continuous evolution of deep learning for computer vision that has made it a must-have for many organisations today, because it has been able to provide a new way for computers to ‘see’ and understand the world around them.

Industry use cases Berlin-based Mobius Labs says it is developing a new generation of AI-powered computer vision which can be deployed on an organisation’s own servers, as well as apps on mobile devices. This, the company believes, will disrupt how the world works with visual content by enabling users to turn it into immediate insight and value.

Its computer vision technology is already being used by the European press agency, ANP and stock photography community, EyeEm. We asked Mobius’ CEO and Chief Scientist, Appu Shaji, to share his thoughts on computer vision and how it can be employed by businesses to their advantage.

“Computer vision tries to understand from a physiological sense how our brains are able to perceive our visual world. And aimagazine.com

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as mentioned, one of the most popular and effective glues allowing us to connect these two fields are machine learning techniques, which encode the act of learning - and eventually understanding - computer algorithms,” he explains.

“Computer vision technology has a role to play in nearly every imaginable walk of life. In the media sector, the technology can not only detect the content of an image, but grade the style and quality of the visuals.

The aesthetic score can be determined in a couple of seconds, assisting marketing, advertising or editorial departments to 80

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“ If the data is not representative of the total population they analyse, we are likely to get a biased outcome” KASIA BOROWSKA FOUNDER AND MD, BRAINPOOL.AI

TECHNOLOGY

It is commonly accepted that the father of Computer Vision is Larry Roberts, who in his Ph.D. thesis (cir. 1960) at MIT discussed the possibilities of extracting 3D geometrical information from 2D perspective views of blocks (polyhedra) [1]. Many researchers, at MIT and elsewhere, in Artificial Intelligence, followed this work and studied computer vision in the context of the ‘blocks world’.

In some narrow use cases, computer vision is more effective than human vision. Google's CV team developed a machine that can diagnose diabetic retinopathy better than a human ophthalmologist. Diabetic retinopathy is a complication that can cause blindness in diabetic patients, but it is treatable with an early diagnosis.

select the most pleasing photographs. It can also scrutinise thousands of video clips to provide relevant recommendations, plus flag and or block inappropriate content. It can also be trained to match influencers with brands to grow new client bases.”

Shaji also gave the example of the geospatial industry. Lightweight solutions can be installed directly on-board orbiting satellites to enable satellite imageryprocessing and analysis in space. Only the usable imagery is downloaded back to Earth. The result of this, he says, is a massive reduction in downlinking costs. He adds the

same method can be used in identifying infestations in crops and monitoring critical events, like the expansion of riverfronts and detecting waterborne shipping containers.

Kasia Borowska, Founder and MD at Brainpool.ai said other use cases include healthcare, where it is becoming popular in early diagnosis, such as early signs of cancer. It is also used in construction as it can be used to continuously monitor progress on construction sites and identify associated risks.

She says: “Many of us also have computer facial recognition unlocking our phones and aimagazine.com

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every time we tag a picture of someone on Facebook, for example, or on Instagram, we also use computer vision - it is applied everywhere around us.”

The main adopters and the challenges they face Borowska cites IBM Watson, which has built one of the most widely-known computer vision software available called Power AI. In healthcare, the software beats records in skin cancer detection. She adds that the Big Tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are leading the development and application of computer vision research.

Shaji adds Clarifai to the above list, but says that newer companies in the market are set to disrupt the space by making computer vision understandable and usable by anyone, regardless of position and/or job title. He adds they can offer on-premise solutions so they run locally on client systems, with no data being sent back to vendors, giving them total data privacy.

When it comes to associated challenges of adopting any new technology, Borowska says that systems are only as good as the data fed into them, similar to AI. “If the data is not representative of the total population they analyse, we are likely to get a biased outcome. If you train a system to recognise a shoe, but only feed it pictures of trainers and boots, when a pair of heels comes along, it is unlikely to recognise it as a shoe. That’s why Apple’s facial recognition famously failed to work on black faces.

Statistical analysis of the data is required to ensure all relevant cases are represented in the data input,” she states.

According to Shaji there is also the issue of ‘bottlenecks’ and the need for expert AI scientists and technical support teams 82

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Early experiments in computer vision started in the 1950s and it was first put to use commercially to distinguish between typed and handwritten text by the 1970s. Today the applications for computer vision have grown exponentially.

By 2022, the computer vision and hardware market is expected to reach $48.6 billion.

to both train and install solutions: “Mass adoption of computer vision technology hasn't happened yet because most solutions still require expert AI scientists and technical support teams. Furthermore, huge amounts of data sets and heavy computation are required to train most machine learning models. Most of these are not user-friendly and incomprehensible to users beyond the technical field.”

Democratising the technology Shaji went on to say that vendors are now looking to democratise the technology so people can build their own applications.

TECHNOLOGY

“ Mass adoption hasn't happened yet because most solutions still require expert AI scientists and technical support teams” APPU SHAJI

CEO AND CHIEF SCIENTIST, MOBIUS LABS

“Such technologies employ a technique called ‘few shot learning’, allowing the training of very specific concepts using small amounts of data sets. The training is no-code which allows everyone to easily navigate through the machine learning process. These solutions are lightweight and easy to install on-premises in mobile phones, laptops and even satellites,” explained Shaji.

He concludes that once more companies pick up on the ‘few shot learning’ approach, the more widely adopted and used computer vision would become. Therefore its use cases would spread wider for the benefit of more businesses and industries. aimagazine.com

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SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS

DRIVES AI INTO NEW COMPUTING ERA FOR THE ENERGY INDUSTRY

WRITTEN BY: DOMINIC ELLIS PRODUCED BY: MARK CAWSTON aimagazine.com

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Marshall Choy, VP Product, and Director Vijay Tatkar outline SambaNova’s sharp growth, Dataflowas-a-service offering and broad range of industry AI opportunities

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t’s been quite a journey for SambaNova Systems since it was founded by a group of industry luminaries and tech experts in Palo Alto, California, in November 2017.

From humble beginnings at Stanford University, the company has grown to employ over 400 staff worldwide, which should increase by another 100 by the end of this year.

SambaNova secured $678 million in Series D funding, led by Softbank Group’s Vision Fund 2, in April, and has already picked up several prestigious awards, including recognition as a Gartner “Cool Vendor,” “Best AI Product for Next Generation Infrastructure” from CogX, and the VentureBeat “AI Innovation for Edge AI” award, among others.

Marshall Choy and Vijay Tatkar – respectively Vice President of Product and Director, Product and Partner Engagements– talk through the company’s meteoric rise and broad potential of industry opportunities.

Choy explains how two of its co-founders, Professor Kunle Olukotun and Chris Ré, were serving at EE and CS departments, working on AI and ML algorithms and techniques, domain-specific languages, compilers and run-time technologies.

“They were specifically preparing for this transition of computing we’re going through right now – some refer to it as ‘Software 2.0’, and transition from the old world of transactional processing to AI computing, from ERP to deterministic written software,” said Choy, who worked previously at Sun Microsystems and Oracle, together with Tatkar.

“It became clear there was a need for a different type of infrastructure

SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS

“Our goals are to extend our leadership position with AI and ML, and to continue putting a great deal of investment and resource toward growing our presence globally, beyond North America” MARSHALL CHOY

VICE PRESIDENT OF PRODUCT, SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS

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“We are at the cusp of the biggest computing transition that we’ve seen in decades”

that provided “Our goals are to greater flexibility extend our leadership and performance, position with AI and and so SambaNova ML, and to continue purpose-built a full putting a great deal stack of hardware of investment and and software, to run resource toward AI and ML workloads growing our presence more effectively than globally, beyond North conventional solutions.”

America.” Choy said.

It took a couple of “As well as expanding MARSHALL CHOY years to develop and our customer base, VICE PRESIDENT OF PRODUCT, prioritize the advanced and efforts around SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS research and implement market awareness, it into an industrialised, enterprise-ready we continue to invest heavily in growing solution. Today, it has been in market our R&D capabilities to deliver worldfor around a year, with product shipping class products.” to revenue customers across multiple Tatkar believes the AI domain is now industries and continents. SambaNova bigger than the internet in terms of recently accelerated its go-to-market revenue and cultural aspects. “I dabbled in and category creation strategy with the AI before, in the 80s and I’m super excited appointment of its first Chief Marketing to get back – it now has an unstoppable Officer, Amy D. Love. momentum,” he said.

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MARSHALL CHOY TITLE: VP OF PRODUCT INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY; AI LOCATION: SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA

EXECUTIVE BIO

“I came in with a developers’ tools background and have seen architectural inflection points – how the industry changed from CISC to RISC and from single core to multi-core, and now I believe we are at a new point, from general purpose architectures to DSAs, and compilers lead the way in terms of architecture and how the applications are going to be seen. I believe in ‘own the developer, own the market’; this breakthrough is also because of developers researching and developing incredible models.”

In the often-complex world of AI, SambaNova’s model is built on simplicity. “The world around us is innovating like crazy, and our job is to ensure that there is easy adoption to enable acceleration while breaking existing barriers,” added Tatkar.

SambaNova’s flagship Dataflowas-a-Service offering, an extensible AI services platform, enabling organisations to jump-start AI initiatives overnight by augmenting existing capabilities and staffing, revolutionising accessibility and empowering organisations in every industry to unleash AI’s vast potential with a simple subscription.

The platform is powered by DataScale, an integrated software and hardware platform delivering unrivaled performance and accuracy, scale, and ease of use built on SambaNova’s Reconfigurable Dataflow Architecture (RDA).

Choy said the market is fairly well bifurcated between leading edge innovators, fast followers, and even laggards – one of the real differences are levels of resource.

Leading innovators in the Fortune 20 companies, who have a great deal of financial backing and tend to be design

Marshall Choy is the Vice President of Product and has overseen the go-to-market of dozens of industry-leading enterprise hardware and software products.

Previously he was Vice President of Systems Product Management and Solutions Development at Oracle.

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SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS

VIJAY TATKAR TITLE: DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY; AI

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA

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Vijay Tatkar is the Director of Product and Partner Engagements and has more than 30 years’ industry experience, producing leading edge products like Systems Management and Security Monitoring Cloud. Tatkar’s background also includes Developer Cloud Services, Performance and Code Security Analyzers, Compilers with World Record performance and ISV engineering services.

December 2021

shops in and of themselves; then everybody else is really looking towards more complete solutions.

“As a result, we’ve come out with a set of different products and services,” added Choy.

“For the Fortune 20s, we have DataScale, which is a complete platform for innovation.

The interface point for that system, at a developer level around writing python code, and integrating into open source ML frameworks, enables people to experiment with their own models. That’s a great starting point, because it allows them to focus on their own domains of expertise, rather than spending resources on optimising for a hardware platform “But there’s a broader set of folks who don’t have 3,000 data scientists – they have three, and may grow to six. So for them, we raise the level of abstraction of the stack to the highest levels at the application layer, so that their interface and our technology stack is merely making API

SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS

NOTHING BEATS A PARTNER’S VALIDATION Tatkar said as a start-up, it’s all about partnerships, and at the beginning the line between partners and customers is very blurred. It started with companies providing technology to build their own platform, including key established storage partners as well as new nimble entrants.

calls from their application, and abstracting all the complexities of model development – everything else becomes seamless and invisible to the user, and they simply interact with SambaNova as an ML services provider.”

He said it has to satisfy the needs of different types of customers so they can deploy it at enterprise scale.

“The market is very mature on the enterprise side, but it’s still developing on the AI side, and that’s the exciting

VIJAY TATKAR

DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT, SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS

DID YOU KNOW...

“ The world around us is innovating like crazy, and our job is to ensure there is easy adoption, and to enable acceleration while breaking existing barriers”

“We have partners who are technology and storage providers, and we are also working with partners who can take it to the next level, such as value added resellers (VAR), and system integrators (SI),” he said.

“With some of our early customers, like the Department of Energy (DoE), their delight at using our platform is extremely infectious, so when they talk about what gains they’re getting, that has a much larger effect on bringing others into the ecosystem – there’s nothing like a validation from a partner.”

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“ The energy industry is facing extreme pressure to modernize and become more operationally efficient – and that’s going to require transformational technologies, not incremental ones” MARSHALL CHOY

VICE PRESIDENT OF PRODUCT, SAMBANOVA SYSTEMS

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AWARDS FOR INNOVATION AND THE WORKPLACE

DID YOU KNOW...

What has been most heartening has been the steady stream of awards from a number of respected third party sources. Gartner named SambaNova in its Cool Vendors in AI Semiconductors report and has included the company in 7 “Hype Cycle” reports that track technology maturity and impact. SambaNova was also awarded Best AI Product in NextGeneration Infrastructure by CogX, included in CRN’s 10 Hottest AI Chip Makers in 2021, adjudged one of CRN’s 20 Coolest Tech Startups Of 2020, and the cherry on top was that it became Great Place to Work certified in 2021.

“It’s a great reflection from the industry,” said Choy. “It’s particularly satisfying to get the ones around innovation, such as ‘Great Place to Work’, which certifies businesses on an annual basis. Similarly while semi-conductors are part of our overall solution, we don’t actually sell them, and that recognition is hard earned and well received.”

part, growing that ecosystem to all our customers,” said Choy, who added it will be focusing on a number of industry verticals, from manufacturing and life sciences to energy, oil and gas, financial services, and the public sector.

“The energy industry is facing extreme pressure to modernise and become more operationally efficient – and that’s going to require transformational technologies, not incremental, so AI absolutely brings that potential into the lens for the energy sector.

“We have a lot of work in oil, gas and the renewables sectors,” Choy said. “There are a number of great opportunities across the sector. If you look at the energy sector, there is a forward-thinking mindset, and some of the facilities are among the most advanced IoT facilities in the world, so there is a strong fit with AI.” “We have noticed a lot of operators wanting something that’s more specific to the assets they own,” Choy continues.

“They have this conundrum of wanting to be efficient but often ‘doing it themselves’ – there is an appetite for more operatorspecific solutions. However, we’re in the early days of AI, and adoption depends on the digital maturity of organizations.”

Choy sees that the longer term view is that this technology transition in AI computing will be just as big, if not bigger, than the internet transition was a couple of decades ago. AI will be the main change agent for business and technology. He believes this is just the beginning, the likes of which we haven’t seen before, and the impact will be profound. “We are at the cusp of the biggest computing transition that we’ve seen in decades,” he says.

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UNLOCKING the POWER of AI in MANUFACTURING We explore what AI-powered technology can bring to the manufacturing industry and how data is key to unlocking its potential WRITTEN BY: CATHERINE GRAY

A

rtificial Intelligence (AI) is starting shared his insights into the benefits of AI in to be implemented in almost manufacturing, he said: “A successful project every aspect of everyday life and must have a positive Return on Investment is becoming increasingly important in (ROI). The creation of artificial intelligence industry operations. As the world continues to drive automation allows projects to to digitally transform, AI is remove slow and tedious evolving and becoming a processes by moving key driver in digitalisation. from experimentation to With the ability to automate production. As a result, the what would otherwise be a high cost of resources such costly process, AI can be a as people and infrastructure game-changer at all levels can be minimised by making of the value chain - this is them more productive particularly significant in the and efficient.” manufacturing industry.

Ultimately, AI gives AI-powered technologies, businesses more control for manufacturers, can over their manufacturing allow for direct automation, process. As it delivers predictive maintenance, insights on capabilities and reduced downtime, 24/7 capacities, manufacturers production, improved are able to more easily safety, reduced operational identify the best way to costs and greater efficiency. obtain the maximum JOHN SPOONER John Spooner, Head performance from HEAD OF AI, of AI, EMEA at H2O.ai their assets.

EMEA AT H2O.AI

“The creation of artificial intelligence to drive automation allows projects to remove slow and tedious processes by moving from experimentation to production”

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AI APPLICATIONS

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AI APPLICATIONS

As with all technologies, there is a caveat to this. Many organisations and manufacturers, particularly those who have smaller operations, cannot afford the high implementation and maintenance costs that come with these complex technologies.

“With the additional wealth of data generated by the digital twin, systems can be created that self-diagnose and self-correct” JOHN SPOONER HEAD OF AI, EMEA AT H2O.AI

Adding to this, the introduction of new, AI-powered technologies removes the human element to processes that have typically been carried out manually.

Humans can offer reasoning to support their conclusions, AI and machine learning is a ‘black box’ that typically cannot explain or defend its answers.

However many leaders believe that the benefits outweigh these costs, Ramon Antelo, VP, Digital Manufacturing & Operations Business Development, Capgemini Engineering highlighting this, he said: “Many organisations are at the cusp of digital transformation and the pandemic has fast-tracked the need to digitise their current infrastructure and this is high on their priority list.”

“Once the digital transformation is complete, AI will play a critical role in creating a robust manufacturing environment that can be remotely enabled and monitored,” he continued. aimagazine.com

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Understanding AI to successfully improve manufacturing operations Undoubtedly, the uptake and implementation of AI have accelerated in recent years.

According to Antelo, this acceleration has come from the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) as there is a push to edge computing in the industry. He adds: “This [edge computing] allows AI algorithms to run very close to the machines without a significant investment in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) or cloud infrastructure.”

The abundance that data manufacturers can obtain has also allowed for the increased adoption of this technology, which relies on data to create efficient algorithms. Spooners explains: “Due to the advancements in machine learning, all of this data can now be utilised to create intelligence about what is and isn’t working in the end to end manufacturing process. Ease of accessibility and the rapid decrease of cost of the “computational power” needed to run the machine learning algorithms on this amount of data has helped increase the adoption of this technology.”

“Data is the main ingredient that helps manufacturers utilise AI’s power – whether that be sensor data, vibration data, audio data or image data,” added Spooner.

It is key, however, that when looking to implement AI technologies manufacturers understand how to effectively scale this technology, to do this there needs to be a level of expertise and knowledge around the best practices when implementing AI. Expanding on this, Antelo said: “Many companies have tried unsuccessfully to incorporate AI in their manufacturing process and get stuck in “pilot purgatory” where they are unable to scale their projects.

Some early AI adopters have managed to deploy machine learning algorithms, but many are stymied by scaling them.”

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Capgemini Engineering Capgemini Engineering has more than 52,000 engineer and scientist team members in over 30 countries across sectors including aeronautics, automotive, railways, communications, energy, life sciences, semiconductors, software & internet, space & defence, and consumer products.

AI APPLICATIONS

“Once the digital transformation is complete, AI will play a critical role in creating a robust manufacturing environment” RAMON ANTELO

VP, DIGITAL MANUFACTURING & OPERATIONS BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, CAPGEMINI ENGINEERING

Data as a key enabler for AI-powered technologies in manufacturing With data being such a key enabler of AI in manufacturing, it comes as no surprise that digital twins can support manufacturers as they look to adopt AI technology.

Digital twins, a virtual representation that serves as the real-time digital counterpart of a physical object or process, originated from NASA who used it as a practical definition to improve physical model simulation of spacecraft in 2010. The US government agency used basic twinning ideas for space programming by creating physically duplicated systems at ground level to match the systems in space.

Now, digital twins can support manufacturers as they can provide more information to the data scientists and IT teams in manufacturing organisations.

These experts can use the digital twins for trial and error. By applying AI to the simulation data that is generated from these virtual replicas manufacturers can aimagazine.com

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H2O.ai H2O.ai is the trusted AI partner to more than 20,000 global organisations, including AT&T, Bon Secours Mercy Health, Capital One, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, GlaxoSmithKline, Hitachi, PayPal, P&G, PWC, Reckitt, Unilever and Walgreens, over half of the Fortune 500 and one million data scientists.

identify problems before they occur.

Additionally, if manufacturers integrate this data with their physical counterparts they can gain further insight into their AI systems.

As already mentioned, to implement AI successfully, there needs to be an understanding of AI technologies as well as the ability to understand how to leverage the vast amounts of data an AI-enabled manufacturing process generates. This challenge remains when manufacturers look to create digital twins to support their operations. Highlighting this issue, Antelo said: “Building a digital 100

December 2021

“Many companies have tried unsuccessfully to incorporate AI in their manufacturing process and get stuck in pilot purgatory” RAMON ANTELO

VP, DIGITAL MANUFACTURING & OPERATIONS BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, CAPGEMINI ENGINEERING

AI APPLICATIONS

twin ecosystem is complex and requires the expertise to manage and interpret vast amounts of data from an AI-enabled manufacturing process.”

“Implementing digital twins without an understanding can significantly slow down your manufacturing process. It is critical for the organisation to understand its requirements and what it hopes to achieve with the implementation of digital twins before it embarks on its strategy. AI in manufacturing can deliver a wealth of benefits and digital twins is one of many tools organisations can reap the benefits from,” he added.

If these challenges are tackled and the manufacturers have obtained a sufficient understanding of AI processes and digital twin management, Spooner explained how the benefits are significant: “The advantage that digital twins bring is that we can optimally create these processes, in the first instance, based on the combination of AI and the simulated data. With the additional wealth of data generated by the digital twin, systems can be created that self-diagnose and self-correct with very little intervention from a human. AI, in conjunction with digital twins, will allow manufacturing to take the next step in automation.” aimagazine.com

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TABLEAU

Visualise to monetise WRITTEN BY: JANET BRICE PRODUCED BY: CRAIG KILLINGBACK

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TABLEAU

View data clearly with Tableau’s simple, self-service analytics platform which empowers customers to make gamechanging, data-driven decisions

V

Peter Chizlett

isualise to monetise with Tableau,” is the message from Peter Chizlett, Regional Vice President of Embedded Analytics at Tableau EMEA, who is helping organisations transform the way they use data.

The post-covid business landscape will see the ‘survival of the data fittest’ with those that win adopting both a data transformation and harnessing the monetisation of that data. Tableau is working with organisations to share data clearly using its intuitive selfservice analytics platform which empowers users of any skill level to make game-changing data-driven decisions, solve problems and leverage insights.

“The race is on. Companies need to evolve fast to survive and thrive,” said Chizlett, speaking from his home office near London.

“All organisations, large or small, have data and all of them are doing, or thinking about doing something, with that data externally. So the race is on – it's a form of digital Darwinism.”

Tens of thousands of organisations around the world, such as Charles Schwab, Verizon, Schneider Electric, Southwest Airlines and Netflix, rely on Tableau to help them, and their customers, see and understand data.

Tableau was founded in 2003 in Mountain View, California, and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. In 2019 the company was acquired by Salesforce for US$15.7 billion and continues to scale its mission to help its customers see and understand data – while also focusing on R&D. aimagazine.com

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“Salesforce realised the analytics platform could give them the edge in their offerings to customers. We're already starting to see the benefits of ownership by Salesforce with Einstein Discovery being added to the Tableau platform and even more horsepower behind innovation and R&D.”

PETER CHIZLETT TITLE: R EGIONAL VICE PRESIDENT OF SALES, EMEA LOCATION: UNITED KINGDOM INDUSTRY: COMPUTER SOFTWARE Pete Chizlett has had various roles in the technology sector for more than 25 years. Embarking on his career at Hewlett-Packard he quickly moved from internal to field sales roles before starting with the Microsoft Services division in 2008.

Chizlett started leading teams at Microsoft in 2012 where he focused on Business Application sales and went on to lead teams in both Enterprise and Commercial segments.

In April 2019 he joined Tableau to lead sales teams covering Northern EMEA before leading the Embedded Analytics and OEM Solutions Business.

He lives in Binfield with his wife and two children.

Mission to see and understand data Tableau’s mission is to enable people to see and understand data and make decisions based on these findings.

“If you think about what came before business intelligence tools, it was typically rows and columns of numbers so it was hard to identify anomalies or opportunities,” said Chizlett who cites working with an airline that was mystified why they had an absenteeism problem.

“We worked with the airline who didn't know the problem was with scheduling until they put their data into Tableau. It revealed that the absenteeism was always on a Tuesday because the staff couldn't be rostered again until several days later if they’d phoned in sick on the Tuesday.

2003 EXECUTIVE BIO

Year founded

50,000+ Number of employees

US$15.7bn The amount Salesforce paid for Tableau

86,000+

Organisations around the world, rely on Tableau

TABLEAU

Tableau : Visualise to monetise

“This is not something they would find in a spreadsheet. They could only see this when the data was visualised – through a heat map or a graph – so that's how we help organisations. In this case it helped improve employee satisfaction by changing rostering policies, and we know employee satisfaction drives revenue and customer loyalty – which is one of many ways of monetising data, albeit indirectly.”

Another example of monetising data is used by a major online retailer in the UK that charges suppliers to access information on what items are best-sellers. “This allows suppliers to tailor their promotions, pricing and supply to all of their retailers,” said Chizlett. “This customer helps external organisations find their own insights and act upon those.”

“ Visualise to monetise with Tableau” PETER CHIZLETT

REGIONAL VICE PRESIDENT OF EMBEDDED ANALYTICS, TABLEAU EMEA

Tivian as a customer and partner “At Salesforce and Tableau, our number one value is trust. Together, we use our currency of trust to earn the privilege of being our customers’ guide to success in their strategic transformations,” said Chizlett. “We are only successful if they are successful. When a customer uses our products, internally our customer success experts are brilliant aimagazine.com

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TIVIAN: EXPERIENCE DATA THAT DRIVES SOLUTIONS

UNDERSTANDING

EXPERIENCE DATA

“At Tivian, we continually try to improve the employee and customer experience, and we partner with a lot of large companies like Ipsos, Kantar PwC, and, of course, Tableau Software,” says Austin.

“Survey data is some of the most complex data, and it is the job of me and my team to make it understandable.” Commenting on future plans, Austin says they are focused on delving deeper into AI and more text analytics.

EXPERIENCE DATA THAT DRIVES SOLUTIONS Tivian - described as “open and creative” by partner Tableau Software - drives solutions with their experience data by always asking: Why?

Asking the simple question “Why?” helps Tivian enrich data for its global partners and improve the customer and employee experience.

Tivian is a leader in experience intelligence management. The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company, which has been operating across 35 countries for more than 20 years, partners with Tableau Software to drive solutions by analysing internal and external data.

“Under the hood, Tivian is a Ferrari for uncovering business challenges,” says Rob Austin, Director of Business Intelligence at Tivian. “We collect experience data, analyse and interpret it using Artificial Intelligence (AI), and turn it into actionable solutions.

“I think of data and business intelligence as a sat nav, which helps you make decisions. But when you add experience data, it’s like having live traffic information,” says Austin.

EXTERNAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE Tivian focuses on external business intelligence.

“We look at our customers and our customers’ customers and share those dashboards out to them. We look at the ‘Why?’ question. We can get this by asking the right people, by doing market research. We try to enrich that ‘what’ data with the ‘why’ to give us a fuller picture.”

Austin notes that Tivian’s team of experts in customer and employee experience data sets the company apart from its competitors. “We tend to have millions of data points, and we use cutting edge AI and text analytics to drive this.

Intelligent experience management tivian.com

TABLEAU

“ All organisations, large or small, have data, and all of them are doing, or thinking about doing something with that data. So the race is on – it's a form of digital Darwinism” PETER CHIZLETT

REGIONAL VICE PRESIDENT OF EMBEDDED ANALYTICS, TABLEAU EMEA

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TABLEAU

at helping them deploy and adopt so they get maximum value. When the user is one step away from us, we have to truly partner with our customer to ensure they are successful and their customers are successful too. One company that has been a great customer and partner since 2014 is Tivian who are very open and creative.

“We've recently started working much more proactively together as part of our

Embedded Partnership Programme. This entails closer insights into the Tableau product group for Tivian, but also Tivian feeding back to our product group. They're the ones that are closest to our customers.

This helps us take insights and develop our products to meet customer needs.

“Our Embedded Partner Programme also means we are agreed on business goals, things that Tivian wants to achieve.

We approach those goals together to see aimagazine.com

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TABLEAU

how Tableau and Salesforce can help Tivian be successful in their markets.

“We know that by working with Tivian, we're helping an innovative partner in the world of analytics. When you consider your own product as the gold standard in analytics, as we do, that makes for a pretty good partnership.”

Competitive differentiation Chizlett pointed out that one of the benefits of embedding analytics into either B2B portals, websites or software for customers or governments is creating competitive differentiation.

“As consumers and citizens demand more information, competitive differentiation is an essential trait. If you think back over the last 18 months, the demand for information among citizens in uncertain times was really high and it was all about being engaged, transparent and delivering value. So, not just giving citizens information, it's about giving them insights by which they can make decisions to make their lives better,” he said. “The same applies in business.

“If we look at B2B organisations, it is not just about competitive differentiation, but you also have to be able to expose or share analytics and insights with customers because that is what they are looking for no more than ever.

“For Independent Software Vendors (ISV) it's competitive differentiation again.

You no longer log into an application without expecting to see some insights from the application, otherwise, many of these applications are just information repositories. Unless you get insights out of them, they're sometimes nothing more than a good place to file information. In their own right, information repositories are helpful 112

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“ We know that by working with Tivian, we're helping an innovative partner in the world of analytics. When you consider your own product as the gold standard in analytics, as we do, that makes you a pretty good partnership” PETER CHIZLETT

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DID YOU KNOW...

TIMELINE OF TABLEAU SOFTWARE

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Tableau was founded by Chris Stolte, Pat Hanrahan and Christian Chabot when the Department of US Defence approached the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University for a project to look at people’s ability to analyse data.

According to Peter Chizlett, Regional Vice President of Embedded Analytics , for Tableau EMEA, Stolte searched the market for tools but was disappointed. “The rest, as they say, is history… Tableau, and VizQL, the underlying engine that drives the platform, was born.

“Over the next 10 years, Stolte, Chabot and Hanrahan built out a multimillion dollar business, which IPO’d in 2013. The reason it was so successful is because there was nothing else really out there that was so

December 2021

user-friendly, and Tableau has always been innovating to meet the evolving needs of their users.”

In 2019 Tableau was acquired by Salesforce for $15.7 billion which has allowed for more R&D and potential for growth.

Marc Benioff, Chairman and co-CEO, Salesforce said: "We are bringing together the world's #1 CRM with the #1 analytics platform.

“Tableau helps people see and understand data, and Salesforce helps people engage and understand customers.

It's truly the best of both worlds for our customers--bringing together two critical platforms that every customer needs to understand their world.”

TABLEAU

“ Salesforce realised that the analytics platform could give them the edge in their engagement with customers.

We're already starting to see the benefits of ownership by Salesforce with the Einstein Discovery being added to the Tableau platform and more focus on R&D” PETER CHIZLETT

REGIONAL VICE PRESIDENT OF EMBEDDED ANALYTICS, TABLEAU EMEA

but delivering insights from that information can be transformative for their customers.”

What is Einstein Discovery?

Powered by machine learning (ML), Einstein Discovery delivers predictions and recommendations within Tableau workflows for smarter decision-making.

“Einstein Discovery is incredibly intuitive and it's helping Tableau deliver analytics to everybody. So analytics as part of this mission will be ubiquitous. It also means that from an embedded standpoint, our customer’s customers can ask questions about the data.”

The platform allows data scientists, analysts, and business users across an organisation to create powerful predictive models without needing to write algorithms.

It is a no-code environment that empowers anyone to quickly and confidently make decisions guided by ethical, transparent AI in Tableau.

It allows users to bring tomorrow into today’s decisions with just a few clicks by embedding custom predictions anywhere people can view or use Tableau. Einstein Discovery insights are integrated into your Tableau workflow, to ensure it does not disrupt analysis.

Future forecast Chizlett said the future of embedded analytics is looking strong with a compound annual growth rate of 14% up until 2027.

TABLEAU

“ At Salesforce and Tableau, our number one value is trust. Together, we use our currency of trust to earn the privilege of being our customers’ guide to success in their strategic transformations. We are only successful if they are successful” PETER CHIZLETT

REGIONAL VICE PRESIDENT OF EMBEDDED ANALYTICS, TABLEAU EMEA

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“In uncertain times, people, citizens, customers and businesses are looking for data more and more to give them certainty. The pandemic has meant that many organisations have accelerated their digital transformation but this also means there has to be a data transformation.

“Every single customer has data and that data is growing. Monetising that data doesn't necessarily have to be building new products, but it can be giving yourselves competitive differentiation or business advantage through leveraging that data.

“I think solving problems and curiosity is human nature. We have more than a

million members in the Tableau community who are passionate about seeing and understanding data. If you ask a question of the community around Tableau, you'll get the answer, I wouldn't say it's an Olympic sport yet, but watch out…”

Discover more with Tableau Whitepapers: Power of Data Analytics in Fintech Solutions Data Monetisation

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TOP 10

AI-POWERED Smart City Technologies Smart City technology can be greatly supported by AI technologies, we take a look at the top companies utilising AI in their Smart City applications 118

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WRITTEN BY: CATHERINE GRAY

TOP 10

To build economic growth and improve the quality of life in many cities across the world, governments are transforming their urban areas with the help of technology. Known as a ‘smart city, these areas rely on information and communication technologies.

In order to function, the technologies used in these cities need to process big data. Heavily interlinked with artificial intelligence (AI), big data can be utilised

by AI processes to generate data predictions and costeffective solutions to fuel smart city technologies. By efficiently sifting through large quantities of big data, AI can generate data predictions and cost-effective solutions to fuel smart city technologies.

Here, we look at innovative companies utilising AI-powered technology within their smart city solutions.

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IntelliVision IntelliVision is a market leader in AI and deep learning-based video analytics and video cloud software. Its solutions provide actionable insights and intelligence for security monitoring in smart cities. The company is a subsidiary of Nortek Security & Control and its AI and deep learning video analytics products add intelligence to video cameras. IntelliVision’s technology does this by analysing the video content, extracting metadata, sending out real-time alerts and providing intelligence to security personnel and other security systems.

09 StreetLight Data To show governments and smart city partners how streets operate, StreetLight Data combines machine learning with deep transportation.

Founded in 2011, StreetLight provides on-demand data to help shape transportation in smart cities. The StreetLight InSight cloud platform gives customers 24/7 access to their most critical transportation analytics, for any road and any mode, without deploying surveys or sensors. Working with big data, StreetLight processes 40 billion anonymised location records from smartphones and navigation devices in connected cars and trucks.

08 Sensus Sensus, a Xylem brand, provides remotely-managed products and solutions that deliver the right data at the right time for investorowned utilities, cooperatives and municipalities. As part of Xylem’s digital portfolio, Sensus’ smart devices and advanced applications connect with a variety of communication technologies to help customers make timely decisions that optimise electric, gas and water systems. The company was acquired by Xylem for around $1.7 billion and offers a wide range of services, many of which analyse data and provide automatic readings.

07 Mr. Fill

Mr. Fill, manufacturers of smart systems for both above ground and underground, aim to be the solution for every smart city in fighting against litter worldwide.

As a provider of smart bin solutions, which process five times more waste than an ordinary bin, Mr. Fill’s sensors and Smart City Manager platform can advise cities on where more or less waste bins are necessary, or when the bins need to be emptied. aimagazine.com

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Kuul Evolution FirePro® Evaporative Cooling Media Keeping data centers at optimal temperatures using U.S. sourced, inorganic materials with innovative technology. Durable and sustainable evaporative media designed to keep the cloud going.

POWERED BY

™

TOP 10

05 Arrival

06 Waycare Since its founding in 2016, Waycare has been looking at ways to utilise AI to prevent road traffic fatalities.

By drawing from vast amounts of data points to provide actionable insights, Waycare can provide crash prediction, irregular traffic detection and quick incident identification.

The platform integrates data from existing transportation networks and sources like city infrastructure, in-vehicle data, navigation apps, and weather forecasts. Considering the World Health Organisation said roughly 1.35 million people are killed globally in car accidents per year, this platform provides a vital AI-powered solution to this significant issue.

Committed to improving parking within smart cities, Arrive provides an intelligent parking solution that gives smart city partners access to cutting edge technology. The company was founded in 2006 and is an Amazon Alexa Fund portfolio company. Arrive is on the cutting edge of voice technologies and is building innovative solutions for the in-car experience for its partners and consumer brand ParkWhiz. As a result, customers can use Amazon’s AI virtual assistant, Alexa, to help them find parking.

TOP 10

04 Optibus

With its cloud-native AI platform, Optibus brings innovation to public transport in smart cities. By leveraging a robust combination of artificial intelligence, advanced optimisation algorithms and distributed cloud computing, Optibus looks to improve the planning and running of public transport. Founded in 2014, the software as a service company powers complex transit operations in over 500 cities around the world and has been recognised by the World Economic Forum as one of its Technology Pioneers.

03 Vivacity Labs Vivacity Labs offer an AIpowered urban infrastructure technology to provide accurate and up-to-the-minute data on urban movement and usage.

Founded in 2015, the company’s AI sensors gather detailed and anonymous data 24/7 on transport modes, traffic flow and travel patterns. By using advanced machine learning techniques, along with state-of-the-art edge processes, Vivacity labs enable anonymous, accurate detection and classification of transport modes and urban movement, all from the same sensor.

TOP 10

Telensa Provider of smart street lighting, Telensa helps cities, utilities and local government organisations around the world reduce their energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Founded in 2005, Telensa smart street light solutions is the most deployed system of its kind globally. With this street light solution, cities can collect, protect and apply data to enhance city life. Telensa’s new generation of light pole sensor devices features

smartphone AI technology. Its multi-sensor pods harness new developments in camera and radar imaging from the automotive industry, combined with AI technology from the latest smartphones. The company also drives the Urban Data Project, a consortium solution that will build upon the changing economics of data collection, to give cities the tools to own and use their data responsibly, with full citizen oversight.

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Hayden AI Founded in 2019 by Bo Chen, Chris Carson, Michael Byrne and Vaibhav Ghadiok, Hayden AI is the developer of the world’s first autonomous traffic management platform. The company was founded on the belief that by combining mobile sensors with artificial intelligence (AI), Hayden AI can help governments bridge the innovation gap while making traffic flow more efficient and less dangerous.

Through its platform, Hayden AI automates

complex processes and improves public services with its patented suite of perception systems for city fleets. The technology can help a number of different public service vehicles including transit buses, school buses, street sweepers, airport security and police vehicles. Since its founding three years ago, Hayden AI has been recognised for its pioneering work with AI and was recognised as GovTech 100 Company for 2021. aimagazine.com

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TR ANSFORMING

DATA-LED BUSINESSES

THROUGH COLLABORATION WRITTEN BY: CATHERINE GRAY PRODUCED BY: TOM VENTURO

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EXL

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Saurabh Mittal, VP of, EXL

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EXL

EXL supports its clients as they digitally transform their operations and as new technologies emerge, we explore how the company has adapted

A

s a digital partner, EXL is to scale up the use of artificial intelligence dedicated to continuous (AI), help redesign operating models to be collaboration with clients. fit for the future and drive faster business Understanding the rapidly decisions through the use of technology. changing nature of the “Our expertise in the domain, digital technology industry, transformation, data science, and change EXL constantly builds capabilities and management helps make our client’s leverages new technologies as they business more efficient and effective, support customers. improve customer relationships and Saurabh Mittal, enhance revenue Vice President growth,” Mittal and Digital explained.

Transformation He continued: leader for EXL “Instead of focusing Digital discussed on multi-year, the company and resource and explained: “At EXL, time-intensive we are very platform designs passionate about or migrations, we making sense look deeper at the SAURABH MITTAL VICE PRESIDENT, EXL of data and driving entire business our client’s value chain and use business forward.” our deep industry To ensure all of its clients receive expertise to deliver the right transformation suitable support, based on what they solutions that help our clients outperform need, Mittal said: “EXL tailor the solutions the competition.” that make most of the data for the client.

By looking through the entire business We then show how the data enables them value chain, EXL is focused on the outcomes to make business decisions and drive in order to drive businesses forward. To more intelligence into their increasingly do this effectively, Mittal explained how digitised operations.” the company urges its clients to “share With expertise in numerous industries, their goals with EXL” so together they can EXL can support organisations as they look leverage the data effectively.

“EXL tailor the solutions that make most of the data for the client”

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EXL

EXL: Transforming data-led businesses through collaboration

The company offers a range of services to drive its clients business forward. With EXL’s deep domain expertise led operations management, Mittal said, “EXL caters to the unique challenges and opportunities of the industries in which we work.”

These industries can be anything from insurance and healthcare to utilities, banking and travel and logistics.

With its extensive work in data and analytics, it comes as no surprise that EXL understands how data can be an integral part of business growth. Mittal explained: “Data is the lynchpin of better business performance and we can provide end to end data extraction, organisation, and analytics services.”

“EXL caters to the unique challenges and opportunities of the industries in which we work” SAURABH MITTAL

VICE PRESIDENT, EXL

Driving businesses forward with a range of personalised services Founded on the core values of innovation, collaboration, excellence, integrity and respect, EXL ensures these values are present with every client they work with. By aligning themselves with the values the company was founded on, Mittal explained they are able to successfully “work together with clients to improve business outcomes, operations, and customer experience.”

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EXL

SAURABH MITTAL TITLE: VICE PRESIDENT COMPANY: EXL INDUSTRY: GLOBAL ANALYTICS AND

“Whether you are migrating to cloudbased systems or implementing digital technologies, we help businesses modernise their information architecture and navigate immense amounts of data in complex systems, with a focus on doing advanced analytics to generate insights for business outcomes,” he added.

Along with its deep domain and data expertise, EXL also supports its customers as they look to adopt AI solutions into their business models. By infusing AI and digital solutions across customer journeys, EXL is becoming a digital transformation partner of choice for its clients.

Adding to this, Mittal said: “We look and go deeper to create a personalised set of solutions to increase speed to value with digital operations at scale.”

EXECUTIVE BIO

DIGITAL SOLUTIONS Saurabh Mittal is a global digital transformation leader, responsible for building and scaling framework for innovation and technology led transformation and help businesses achieve their strategic objectives and customer experience outcomes.

Currently, he is responsible to scale AI led solutions to transform delivery models for data-driven enterprises. Over the last 16 years, Saurabh has worked with multiple large corporates in areas of enterprise innovation, business consulting, operational transformation, customer experience management, service designing and business analytics.

Saurabh is a certified six sigma professional and has done his MBA in International Business after a Bachelors in Technology.

EXL

Achieving hyperautomation with EXL To adapt to new concepts and technologies, particularly in the AI space, EXL has developed a hyperautomation approach to accelerate its clients’ digital adoption. Its enterprisewide intelligent automation strategy helps its clients scale their existing automation programme to make it even smarter.

Discussing the approach, Mittal said: “EXL’s Hyperautomation focuses on shifting business from people-intensive legacy OS to a future-ready, thin human-AI Operating System (AI:OS). Our approach combines the power of automation, AI and analytics, and orchestrates these levers on the cloud to accelerate digital transformation. It is a cohesive automation suite that marries different digital transformation tools with highly modular, cloud-enabled, prebuilt accelerators and solutions. It helps organisations execute with speed for optimum business and customer outcomes.”

There are numerous benefits to the adoption of EXL’s hyperautomation approach, this includes: • AI-infused streamline of end-to-end data flows and business processes • The ability to orchestrate multiple technologies to design and deliver end-toend business solutions • Delivery of 50%-100% higher returns when compared to traditional automation • The shift from infused-based commercial models to ROI-led modes • Enables clients to achieve scale and flexibility rather than relying on a single technology for automation purposes • Hyperautomation equips employees to focus on more value-added tasks • It improves collaboration through better access to data and seamless communication 136

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“We go deeper to create a personalised set of solutions to increase speed to value with digital operations at scale” SAURABH MITTAL

VICE PRESIDENT, EXL

EXL

Ultimately for its clients, EXL’s hyperautomation approach delivers significantly higher business outcomes. It shows a 20-30% higher year on year impact; a 3-4 times higher return on investment; provides 10-20 times more data available for advanced analytics and shows a 30-40% benefit on operations spent in a steady state.

Collaborating to effectively meet the needs of EXL’s clients Digital transformation and the introduction of new technologies is happening at a rapid pace. To ensure the company is meeting its

clients’ needs effectively, EXL introduced its Connected Intelligence Partner Program.

The program ensures specialised expertise, deep industry knowledge and leadingedge technology is harnessed and integrated seamlessly to push forward business transformation.

Discussing the program, Mittal said: “We join forces with industry leaders and innovators to bring the best solutions and expertise needed EXL has 54 global to solve our client’s most complex delivery centres and supports challenges.”

25+ languages.

Expanding on the different ways innovators have supported EXL in its mission to digitally transform EXL has over businesses, Mittal explained: “Our 720 clients.

54

720

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Accelerating Digital Transformation with EXL

As competition intensifies and customer demands for a digital experience grow, finding new ways to deliver a seamless, connected insurance experience is critical.

Video Jake Sloan of Appian explains their new partnership with EXL and how they help insurers deliver digital, connected insurance fast.

Appian is dedicated to helping insurance companies

In addition, both companies place a strong emphasis

around the world modernize and accelerate their

on supporting their clients with hyperautomation,

digital transformation initiatives. Whether by enabling

which is all about automation at speed and

more connected underwriting, streamlining agent and

combining automation technologies (e.g., robotic

broker processes, or accelerating claims management,

process automation, AI, machine learning) with other

Appian helps insurers extend their legacy systems

technologies that speed application development

and delight their customers with a more connected

(e.g., low-code). Sloan went on to note that “the

value chain. Jake Sloan, Appian Global Industry

EXL/Appian partnership enables organizations to

Manager for Insurance, explains how the 22-year-old

scale their digital transformation and cloud adoption

company helps insurance organizations build apps

journey driving digital transformation with future fit

and workflows rapidly, using a low-code platform.

redesigned processes.”

“We help insurers combine people, technologies, and

He continued, “Appian has a strong delivery team and

data in a single workflow so they can maximize their

ecosystem of trusted delivery partners like EXL. We

resources and improve business results, all while

also provide EXL with expert architecture guidance,

reducing the technical debt often incurred by legacy

training courses, and center of enablement experience

and core systems,” said Sloan.

to maximize Appian platform adoption and business and IT delivery.”

Together with EXL, Appian is helping insurance firms accelerate their digitalization journeys and

“Our partnership with EXL accelerates the pace of

move at the speed today’s world demands. With its

cloud adoption, leveraging our deep experience in

Low-Code Platform, Sloan explained, “Appian gives

claims, collections, and AI solutions. It enables insurers

insurers unprecedented agility to rapidly transform the

to be successful and drive market differentiation. It

customer experience and seize new opportunities to

gives them ready-built solutions that they can deploy

grow revenue.”

rapidly and see results in a matter of weeks, not months or years. We’re very excited to continue to

With these aligned goals and values, Sloan

leverage this partnership.”

says Appian is a natural partner that will further complement EXL’s offerings. Since EXL is an expert in insurance, enabling carriers to tap into the power of digital, it seemed like a logical next step for the two to join forces.

Learn more

EXL

“ Together with our partners, we believe we can collaborate on a differentiated and winning approach to deliver innovative solutions and services” SAURABH MITTAL

VICE PRESIDENT, EXL

collaboration with AWS (Amazon Web Services) is helping us operationalise and scale AI, analytics and automation within enterprise business processes to achieve the promise of the data-driven enterprise.”

“Similarly, our joint partnership with Amelia, an IPsoft company, is helping infuse 140

December 2021

AI into every customer interaction at scale. Our conversational AI-led CX can be deployed across industries, hence building resiliency and solving customer problems while maintaining a human-like interaction experience,” he added.

EXL is currently looking to build faster and more reliable methods to drive forward business growth and increase value. To do this, the company is leveraging Appian’s enterprise software to build

EXL

enterprise apps and workflows ten times faster than traditional methods. This is to ensure seamless dataflows which will, in turn, improve customer experience and operational excellence.

Mittal expanded: “With Appian, we’re building enterprise-grade apps and workflows using process re-design by code approach.

We’re combining our domain experts, data and technology to build scalable cloud receiving centres that are fundamentally changing the operating model for our clients.

From building a global common backbone for streamlining data flows from unstructured

data sources to creating custom utilities for data-driven processing, Appian is helping EXL in transforming delivery even with legacy client infrastructure.

“For one example, EXL is designing an AI-powered cloud “receiving centre” for a leading title insurance company to de-risk its technology transformation.

EXL simultaneously took on the dual responsibility of running the operation as well which enabled our client’s operations to respond to their customers faster with a more cost-efficient and scalable operating model,” he added. aimagazine.com

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EXL

This work with Appian and other partners aligns with the company’s core value of collaboration and Mittal believes this is the driving force behind EXL’s success.

He said: “Together with our partners, we believe we can collaborate on a differentiated and winning approach to deliver innovative solutions and services that outperform our clients’ expectations, beat the competition and transform the marketplace.”

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Bold moves for the future As with the companies EXL supports with their digital transformation, the company also has had to adapt to the ever-changing technology environment. Discussing this, Mittal said: “It’s already been seen that different technologies are changing the way we operate ourselves.

The biggest change we’re seeing is with the newer generation that we employ, who are quite apt in using this technology themselves and have a good appreciation of them too.”

EXL

“Collaboration between a human and a piece of technology is going to be a key game-changer in the future” SAURABH MITTAL

VICE PRESIDENT, EXL

“Essentially, what’s happening is that this technology proficiency has elevated their role and customer outcomes. This is the biggest change that I’m seeing, as previously the majority of effort would have been on the bottom of the pyramid, low-value transactions. Today, by leveraging these technologies, my team is able to get a lot of proactive insights and do more complex work at an astonishing speed that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.”

Mittal explained the company, despite being a driver for technological expansion, is keen to keep the human element when it comes to digitally transforming a business.

He explained: “The key thing is that it is not just technology that plays a part. We always top that with the human element to bring emotional acumen and spatial experience to drive subjective decision making, thus keeping customer experience at the centre of focus since everything cannot be rule based. This is because the company feels that collaboration between a human and a piece of technology is going to be a key game-changer in the future.”

Looking at the company’s goals for the future, Mittal shared what can be expected from EXL in the coming years, saying: “We’re on an exciting journey and looking forward to playing a significant role in this decade of digital. You can expect us to be making bold moves in outcome delivery by leveraging our expertise in data analytics, AI and digital technologies coupled with human ingenuity.”

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OCTO

SMARTER WARRIORS: OCTO'S BATTLESPACE READY AI SOLUTIONS ARE MAKING WARFIGHTERS SAFER WRITTEN BY: JOHN PINCHING PRODUCED BY: GREG ST QUINTIN

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OCTO

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Rob Albritton Senior Director, oLabs AI Center of Excellence, Octo

OCTO

Octo is committed to developing sophisticated military technology for use from mission planning to execution to make soldiers safer and more effective

“ MAKING MILITARY PERSONNEL MORE LETHAL IS VERY COOL, BUT MAKING THEM MORE SURVIVABLE IS JUST AS COOL, IF NOT COOLER” ROB ALBRITTON

SENIOR DIRECTOR, OLABS AI CENTER OF EXCELLENCE, OCTO

A

lthough Rob Albritton has had an exceptionally varied journey which has taken him all over the world, it appears his path was preordained, leading to his current role as a Senior Director at digital modernisation and tech innovators, Octo.

And what a journey it has been.

Having left high school with limited options, he started his career in the US Air Force in 2000, working at a base in Nebraska for four years, and gaining an exceptional knowledge of the military’s highly complex infrastructure in the process.

Needing a departure from the military’s unrelenting rules and stifling structure, however, he then attended the University of Maryland, earning a degree in geography and GIS. He followed that up by embarking on an internship which introduced him to the intelligence community at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) in Springfield, Virginia.

“That is where my interest in defence technology was truly sparked,” remembers Rob. “I was working with special operations forces on the African continent and became really interested in the sophisticated technologies they were using.”

Inspired by his findings, he went to work for the army and spent eight years building geospatially-enabled and machine learningenabled mission planning tools for US Army Special Forces and other special mission units.

Although he was inspired to make things happen in this arena, Rob became aimagazine.com

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OCTO

MISSION PLAN An in Virginia can see the same mission plan and 3D data in their heads-up display than someone in Europe, Afghanistan or Iraq simultaneously.

“ WE COME TO WORK AND INNOVATE IN THE GREY. WE FOLLOW THE RULES, BUT WE ARE NOT BOUND BY THEM. WHERE WE CAN, WE PUSH THE BOUNDARIES TO DELIVER TECHNOLOGY TO THE WAR FIGHTER. THAT'S WHAT DRIVES US” ROB ALBRITTON

SENIOR DIRECTOR, OLABS AI CENTER OF EXCELLENCE, OCTO

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disillusioned by government bureaucracy – irritating blocks that were preventing eminently usable life-saving tech from getting to the frontline. Rob reflects: “There was too much red tape to get through and too many hurdles to jump over. I was trying to get technology – which myself and other engineers had developed – into the hands of the women and men defending this nation and our allies, but we simply couldn't get it to the battlefield quickly enough.”

Consequently, Rob left the federal government to work at Nvidia – the world’s biggest artificial intelligence company – where he embarked on a crash course in artificial intelligence (AI). He quickly realised that this brand of silicon valley tech should be used in war zones.

OCTO

ROB ALBRITTON TITLE: SENIOR DIRECTOR, OLABS AI CENTER OF EXCELLENCE LOCATION: VIRGINIA

Shades of grey They have a curious saying at Octo – ‘innovate in the grey’. It's part of who they are and it’s ingrained throughout their culture.

“That's a term that our SOF brethren at Fort

EXECUTIVE BIO

Following a further excursion to MITRE, where he worked on tactical AI emerging from the Pentagon, Rob joined Octo, inspired by its galvanising vision. “Here was a company with almost no strings attached,” Rob enthuses. “I was invited to combine state-ofthe-art AI technologies, with my extensive knowledge of the war fighter, and use them as a force for good in the world. They wanted to develop and field some of these technologies as rapidly as possible and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is the place I have to be.’"

Award-winning artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) authority Rob Albritton is Senior Director, AI Practice Lead at Octo. A former U.S. Army Geospatial Research Lab Scientist and ML Engineer at MITRE, Rob spent several years growing NVIDIA’s public sector team alongside the world’s foremost thought leaders on highperformance computing, AI, and deep learning. Rob now leads Octo’s oLabs AI Center of Excellence, where he guides and shapes Octo’s AI capability, strategy, and vision.

Rob holds an MBA from the UVA Darden School of Business, an MS from the National Intelligence University, and a BS in from the University of Maryland.

BURN THROUGH THE FOG OF WAR

Distributed units operating in unknown environments require situational awareness without reliance on slow, labor-intensive analysis. More informed, faster tactical decisions can be made through artificial intelligence (AI) software, reducing the time and labor needed to make effective use of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets.

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Through AI analytics, Farsight provides actionable ISR to operators in real-time. Users are able to access high-fidelity 2D & 3D mapping, line of sight analysis, route planning and helicopter landing zone surveying at the tactical edge. Farsight operates directly on devices operators already carry and doesn’t monopolize bandwidth. It’s both platform and operating system agnostic and fully integrated with ATAK. Developed alongside DoD’s special operators, Farsight is easy to learn and integrate, affordable, and customizable. Farsight delivers true human-machine teaming capabilities, by intelligently cueing users with actionable intelligence at the edge.

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OCTO

“ IT MEANS AN INDIVIDUAL IN VIRGINIA CAN SEE THE SAME MISSION PLAN AND 3D DATA IN THEIR HEADS-UP DISPLAY THAN SOMEONE IN EUROPE, AFGHANISTAN OR IRAQ SIMULTANEOUSLY” ROB ALBRITTON

SENIOR DIRECTOR, OLABS AI CENTER OF EXCELLENCE, OCTO

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Bragg, and in San Diego would understand,” insists Rob. “It means to ‘walk that line’. To do things legally, ethically, and morally, but be willing to push the system as far as possible to make things happen for the right reasons.

It’s an accelerant mindset.”

“We come to work and innovate in the grey. We follow the rules, but we aren’t bound by them. Where we can, we push the boundaries to deliver technology to the war fighter. That's what drives us.”

In order to completely subscribe to this extraordinary philosophy, Octo has formed a world class team of operators and technical personnel that work within its oLabs facility, an R&D hub that is home to Octo’s five Centres of Excellence of which Rob’s AI CoE is one. Many of them are veterans that have been on multiple tours of duty and know, more than most, how vital it

OCTO

Smarter Warriors: Octo's battlespace ready AI solutions are making warfighters safer Smarter Warriors: Octo's battlespace ready AI solutions are making warfighters safer

is to have the very best technologies on the battlefield and saving lives.

These ex-military employees work with an ensemble of AI luminaries and technology pioneers to form a formidable foundation of expertise. They, in turn, collectively partner with current military personnel to devise and build the beneficial real-world technologies America’s elite military units need and benefit from.

Octo builds its technologies during intense periods of research and development in its groundbreaking oLabs before striving to get them out in the field, acquired by the Department of Defence or taken up by the wider intelligence community.

Established targets Octo’s ‘Hatteras project’ is a Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) platform.

Machine Learning models aren’t static.

Their performance degrades in inference mode at various rates and for various reasons.

Rob explains: “Hatteras is designed not only to make data preparation and model training simple but also to monitor model performance in operational environments.

On the battlefield, it’s critical that troops have the ability to monitor performance of the ML models they’re using to enhance in-mission situational awareness. A poorly performing model could mean life or death on the battlefield.”

Octo is also playing an important role in the development of IVAS – Integrated Visual Augmentation System – which is being rolled out at Fort Belvoir, Virginia for the US Army.

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capabilities and microsensors, turning it into a goggle that can be used for training, mission rehearsal and fighting. It’s a typical piece of oLabs customisation – taking existing tech and rebooting it for military action.

“We build tracking algorithms for targets of interest in nano drones and tactical drone video,” says Rob. “Then we're able to feed that information into the IVAS goggles and the heads-up display that the soldier is wearing, thereby giving them 360 degree situational awareness; making them not only more lethal, but more survivable, ultimately bringing more of them home safely. This is a concept we call the ‘omniscient soldier.’”

Algorithm of life The company has several other primary tactical AI projects which are at a critical stage of development. One is CX Surge, Octo’s AI, ML, and mixed reality (MR) fusion solution for locating targets of interest and rendering the targets in an intuitive mixed reality interface that limits cognitive load on the operator.

CX Surge leverages computer vision to deliver nearly 360 situational awareness, offers a unique approach to monitoring events on the ground, and enables users to virtually “see through” buildings, walls, and solid structures by displaying critical detections to Android Team Awareness Kit, IVAS, or HoloLens, and night vision goggles.

Another focuses on ensemble modelling methods. Octo can currently run machine learning models or AI algorithms on multiple modalities off a single platform. “That enables us to get better results and superior accuracy in our models,” notes Rob. “When we're doing target detection, for example, and we're looking for a specific military target of interest, we can run our model on RGB data or other thermal modalities at the same time.”

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The third project is CX Edge – a tactical AI brain. CX Edge is an AI platform designed to run on low size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) hardware. It enables tactical teams to collect, analyse, and distribute mission critical data in real time on handheld devices. CX Edge enhances situational awareness and shortens targeting timelines increasing mission effectiveness and safety in the most challenging conditions. Designed for tactical units and teams without access to robust networks or enterprise cloud resources, CX Edge uses the power of AI to employ innovative compute and data management capabilities at the tactical edge.

OCTO

“ THEY WANTED TO DEVELOP AND FIELD SOME OF THESE TECHNOLOGIES AS RAPIDLY AS POSSIBLE AND I THOUGHT, ‘OH MY GOD, THIS IS THE PLACE I HAVE TO BE” ROB ALBRITTON

SENIOR DIRECTOR, OLABS AI CENTER OF EXCELLENCE, OCTO

“CX Edge is also about managing the massive amount of data that will be generated by AI and ML as it proliferates the battlefield. The US Department of Defense is not prepared to manage the onslaught of AI generated data they will encounter over the next few years. This is especially true at the tactical edge – that’s why we build CX Edge. Small, disconnected teams need the ability to manage massive AI generated data and intelligently push it out to the right end user device. They also need the ability to federate data back to the enterprise when they regain connectivity. That’s CX Edge!”

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2006

Year Founded

MILITARY TECHNOLOGY Industry

1,100

Number of Employees

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Changing landscape Partnerships are critical to the success of Octo and its oLabs operation. Indeed, the rapid prototyping innovation centre it’s building in Reston, Virginia will be dependent on yielding many successful partnerships. oLabs enabled us to prototype AI and ML enabled tactical applications on our 15 petaFLOP supercomputer and walk down the hall where we can test them in our own close quarters battle (CQB) facility. There aren’t many, if any, places in the defence ecosystem that can provide our government customers and partners all of these technologies and capabilities under one roof.”

Octo has already teamed up with big hitters such as Dataiku, Dell, Reveal Technology, and Tomahawk Robotics to produce its pioneering military tech. “We've really created a coalition like-minded organisations who are completely focused on pushing boundaries, innovating in the grey, to deliver mission capability,” says Rob. Another product which has emerged from the industrious oLabs is CX Terrain – used to visualise 3D data and carry out 3D mission planning in an augmented reality. “It allows mission planning to unfold anywhere in the world,” explains Rob. “It means an individual in Virginia can see the same mission plan and 3D data in their heads-up display than someone in Europe, Afghanistan or Iraq simultaneously.”

Meanwhile, climate change is also having an impact on the way in which Octo and oLabs deploy technologies. Clusters of GPUs that make up a supercomputer, or high performance computing capability, require a lot of energy. This has prompted Octo to consider how its technologies are powered and to run fewer servers rather than thousands, without losing computational prowess. It’s another example of the company’s continual focus on future-proofing.

Living on the edge Ultimately, Octo, lives and breathes its mission on a daily basis and Rob knows many military men and women operating on the ground, and this provides an additional incentive to keep pushing the boundaries and keep exploring the grey areas of innovation.

“We still have really close ties,” he says.

“Knowing that tech like CX Edge, computer vision capabilities and our AI models are being used to bring troops home safe is immensely rewarding. Making military personnel more lethal is very cool, but making them more survivable is just as cool, if not cooler.”

“Knowing that we're impacting those people, the actual boots on the ground, every single day, is certainly the most rewarding aspect of working at Octo. We work at a company that encourages a close working relationship with our government and military counterparts, because it's all about building long-term relationships, impacting the mission and bringing the war fighter home safely. That will always be our priority.”

And that is what sets Octo apart – the ability to place humanity over revenue. It’s all about the numbers of lives they help save rather than the number of dollars the company is worth.

This is the stark symbiosis that defines oLabs – an enduring relationship between the creators of technology and the armies, generals and foot soldiers using them. It is a bond built on trust and a bond which is reinforced every time Octo develops its latest military tech; it’s latest lifepreserving solution.

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INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION:

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO CARE FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS, YOUR EMPLOYEES, AND YOUR BUSINESS

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WRITTEN BY: TOM SWALLOW PRODUCED BY: TOM VENTURO

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Hiren Kotak R-Systems

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A

Hiren Kotak, Global Head of Automation Intelligence, explains how businesses can leverage well-designed and wellexecuted process automation services

s a global digital and automation service provider, R Systems is committed to generating value for its clients through technological innovation and collaboration with leading platform providers.

Bringing advisory services and offering implementation support to industries, the company prides itself on enabling client success with a prominent focus on strong planning and execution, utilising industry best practices, and leveraging accelerators.

Founded in 1993, R Systems manages operations spanning 25 different offices and 16 delivery centres across the globe. Since its establishment, the firm has witnessed some of the key stages in the lead up to digital transformation—from the introduction of Java, Facebook, and Google mail to the beginning of the digital transformation era.

The latest business model sees the company leveraging the leading artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) platforms from world-renowned leaders, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

“We don’t develop a new product, we work with Google, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and many other AI/ML and robotic process automation (RPA) tools and platforms and develop custom-built solutions to solve for business opportunities and problems that our customers have,” says Hiren Kotak, Vice President and Global Head of Intelligent Automation Practice.

R Systems has benefitted significantly from Kotak’s position, which primarily involves the development of full-spectrum intelligent

automation practice along with his efforts in planning the firm’s go-to-market strategy.

Kotak also works with clients to establish their goals, develop automation strategies, and design suitable solutions that “leverage the best tools in the market” while tailoring those solutions to the individual needs of its clients. Another critical part of his role at the company is to ensure the successful delivery of its advisory engagements and implementation projects and manage the firm’s global network of delivery centres and talent within them.

“We figure out which tools would provide maximum ROI for the customer through the newly constructed digital workforce,” explains Kotak. “We configure and train those digital workers using the low-code, no-code tools that mimic human actions and enable them to execute processes much faster, and without any human errors.”

Industry applications of intelligent automation While discussing the application of intelligent automation, Kotak’s passion for providing solutions and his industry experience shines through his explanation of the company’s customer-centric outlook. He also provides examples of how AI and machine learning have become more versatile in their applications, as he explains some of R Systems’ supporting roles in industry transitions to intelligent automation.

“We work in all industries but the majority of it is for the healthcare industry and financial services,” says Kotak. “In the healthcare aimagazine.com

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Dr. Samiksha Mishra speaks about R Systems’ visionary AI technologies and progressive work culture

“In the healthcare industry, a simple thing like billing has become a huge monster”

industry, a simple thing claim is submitted, it’s not like billing has become a a simple process to obtain very complex process— the payment. There are especially in the US. It often questions, denials was estimated that we and appeals. There are spend almost 10% of various things that a the overall amount of provider needs to do to healthcare dollars in the receive the payment,” administrative processes, he explains. “All of this HIREN KOTAK and the majority of involves interdependent VICE PRESIDENT AND GLOBAL HEAD OF that is associated with tasks that we have now INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION PRACTICE, the billing process, successfully automated R-SYSTEMS and related insurance for our clients.” verification and claims.”

Meanwhile, in the financial sector, He also explains that many critical the same business model applies. In any procedures—such as patient insurance regulation intensive industry, like banking, eligibility checks, advanced authorisation there is a high number of menial tasks that of treatments, identifying post-treatment consume a significant amount of time. billing codes, denial management, and claim Alleviating the manual input—or at least settlements are currently fulfilled manually most of it—can provide significant efficiency in many healthcare provider organisations. gains and cost savings.

“60 to 80% of that is done manually today Kotak says that “in the traditional with most healthcare providers. After the banking environment, the account opening 162

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processes, account servicing processes, and many of the front-end processes, as well as the back end or back-office processes, are manual because the way the banking services are grouped—for each different product like credit cards or checking accounts and savings accounts, or investment accounts or loan accounts— there are different systems, and different operational groups. To provide a seamless customer experience, you need to integrate all of them, which becomes a tremendously difficult task.”

The solution to optimising day-to-day tasks lies in the development of AI-powered digital workers—effectively virtual employees—that manage the repetitive tasks that would otherwise be carried out by personnel. The ability to pass on these tasks to an automated digital worker creates productivity and cost savings while freeing up members of staff for other critical business activities.

“With this new technology, we can provide them with solutions where there is less of the manual work, less of the repetitive, data entry type of work. It provides more accuracy and stronger regulatory compliance for our banking customers,” he says.

TITLE: VICE PRESIDENT AND GLOBAL HEAD OF INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION PRACTICE INDUSTRY: AI & INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION LOCATION: UNITED STATES Hiren leads R Systems’ Global Intelligent Automation practice. He is a versatile leader with a proven track record of delivering substantial business value for over 25 years through information-based strategy and structured execution of technology initiatives. As a resultdriven business leader and a catalyst for change, he has delivered global-scale digital transformation for some of the Fortune 500 companies. Hiren has worked with multiple client executives to develop and implement their automation strategies and drive efficient growth in their organisations.

EXECUTIVE BIO

Strengthening the transition to autonomy The adoption of technology for business practices is becoming commonplace across many industries, however, as expected with any technology innovation, many businesses remain uncertain about implementing new tools before witnessing the benefits. After all, manual processes have been utilised since the beginning of time, making it somewhat unnerving for leaders to entrust their business practices to a digital solution, in which they possess minimal knowledge and experience. R Systems supports its clients

HIREN KOTAK

R SYSTEMS

Keep the future and your business on the same page.

Transform your business with seamless, customized turnkey solutions on Process Intelligence, Automation and Conversational AI. From creating process visualization to driving operational efficiencies, Ennuviz will give your business the edge. Be future-ready the Ennuviz way.

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R SYSTEMS

throughout the entire process – starting with education, and then identifying automation opportunities, developing strategy and roadmap, setting up governance and operating model, developing software robots, training the staff—followed by continuous analysis and improvement to further optimise the benefits of intelligent automation.

“Obviously with any new technology and any new tools that come into the market, initially there is a lot of scepticism and anxiety around data security and the risk associated

“ With any new technology and any new tools that come into the market, initially there is a lot of scepticism and anxiety around standard security and the risk associated with that” HIREN KOTAK

VICE PRESIDENT AND GLOBAL HEAD OF INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION PRACTICE, R-SYSTEMS

with that. So, we spend a lot of time explaining to our clients, especially their info security, risk management and compliance departments, talking about what the technology does, how it works, how it processes data, where the data is stored, how audit logs are created—in the on-prem solution, as well as with the cloud solution,” Kotak adds.

R Systems’ customer-centric approach ensures client satisfaction and enables repeat business. “We not only provide advisory services or consulting services, but we are also implementation partners. To deliver what we promise, and we promise, what we can deliver,” says Kotak.

“Most of our clients are long-term clients and we have been very fortunate with the kind of quality and delivery that our team has been able to provide. We continue to expand our business with existing clients, not only for maintenance and support services, but we continuously work with various departments enterprise-wide to help them automate different parts of the business,” says Kotak.

Expanding upon great technological triumphs R Systems does not attempt to ‘reinvent the wheel’. The company leverages the technology provided by the companies like AWS, Google, Salesforce, Dell, and Microsoft, as well as other industry-leading providers of process mining, conversational AI, and other low-code, no-code tools. Kotak expresses the benefits of its strong relationships with these tech giants, and how R Systems leverages its research and development capabilities to create a foundation for its offering.

“They bring tons of value. With their deep pockets and the access to the amount of information and data that they have, they’re able to do a lot of the R&D utilising great talents across many continents. In recent aimagazine.com

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years, they have made tremendous progress in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning algorithms, speech-to-text and text-to-speech, OCR and computer vision, natural language processing, as well as natural language understanding and generation. These tools and these foundational pieces that they are building are instrumental to our success.”

He specifically highlights some of the benefits of working with its key strategic partners, Ennuviz—another intelligence innovator that specialises in intelligent process automation—and Covalense— certified by some of the top development companies in the industry. One of the most important messages in this discussion is that there is no single company that can provide all business solutions, and collaborative

Covalense Collaborate. Innovate. Accelerate

in Artificial Intelligence & Intelligent Automation

­ ­

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Enable end-to-end automation with RPA, Process Mining and AI

“ All of this interdependent complexity requires a lot of manual effort and we have successfully automated this for our clients” HIREN KOTAK

VICE PRESIDENT AND GLOBAL HEAD OF INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION PRACTICE, R-SYSTEMS

efforts with companies like Covalense and Ennuviz open up doors to new digital transformation capabilities. In the digital world, it is very critical to have the right type of digital eco-system built around you, because you can’t do everything by yourself and you can’t be the best at doing everything by yourself,” says Kotak.

“So, in partnership with Ennuviz, we have been able to extend our services for process mining, task mining and automation opportunity discovery. They are experts in Celonis and Signavio and many other tools related to process mining, and we leverage their services often in the North American market,” Kotak explains.

The strategic partnership with Covalense has provided further technical support that has encouraged access to markets in the Asia Pacific region. “With Covelanse, again, we have leveraged their services in robotic process automation and Conversational AI, primarily in the Asian market. They have a strong presence in APAC—Australia, New Zealand, etc. So, as we expand our footprint in those areas, we are leveraging their capacity and partnering with them to meet the needs of local clients.”

The overarching aim of R Systems’ customer-centric strategy is to educate aimagazine.com

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business clients on the benefits of digital transformation and encourage the adoption of automated systems.

Promoting the importance of the valuebased framework, the company can focus on automation-as-a-service and build long-term client relationships.

“We have a very robust value delivery framework that helps us identify the needs of our clients and understand their implicit and explicit needs. Through our knowledge of the clients’ industries, we help our clients stay more competitive in their respective industry by providing differentiated, value-added services to their end-users,” says Kotak.

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Continued success in unprecedented circumstances The onset of the coronavirus pandemic has further emphasised the case for digital transformation and automation.

With continued demand for technology services, R Systems has sustained its growth throughout the pandemic and is targeting to maintain or even accelerate the growth post-COVID. Kotak says, “We continue to grow pretty fast. During COVID we saw a lot of need for automation services, and we have benefitted from that continuous demand. For my practice specifically, we have achieved a lot this year for setting a stronger foundation for the practice. It included kicking off our

“We have a very robust value delivery framework that helps us identify the needs of our clients and understand their implicit and explicit needs” HIREN KOTAK

VICE PRESIDENT AND GLOBAL HEAD OF INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION PRACTICE, R-SYSTEMS

automation delivery centres in Europe and Asia, establishing a stronger presence in North America, as well adding offerings like process mining, conversational AI and other cognitive automation capabilities.”

“We have seen almost eight times growth this year, compared to last year, and we are tracking exponential growth going forward,” says Kotak.

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AI-DRIVEN,

CREDITTECH WRITTEN BY: JANET BRICE

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PRODUCED BY: MICHAEL BANYARD

LENDINGPOINT

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How LendingPoint is using AI and smart data models to drive fair credit decisions - within only four seconds - for UScitizens who need it most

W

hat can you do in four seconds? Make a contactless payment for your latte, take a snapshot with your smartphone and get credit approval from LendingPoint. Four seconds is the time it takes for this US-based “nontraditional lender” to offer its customers credit, according to KN Kasibhatla, Chief Technology Officer of LendingPoint.

The customer-first approach used by LendingPoint harnesses the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data models to offer credit to those who are tackling a home improvement project, consolidating debt, or paying for an unexpected medical expense (and much more), and moves away from the Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO) evaluation model to approve credit. A FICO Score is a three-digit number based on the information from credit reports and traditionally used by lenders across the US. “Based on your credit profile and information on your application form, it only takes four seconds to get an approval on the LendingPoint platform,” said Kasibhatla, who has experience in both technology and finance.

“We believe in using AI and data models to deliver money to people whenever and wherever they may need it. We use technology to drive these decisions. To do this, we have collected more than 60 billion data points on our consumers. aimagazine.com

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LendingPoint: AI-driven, CreditTech

“Our algorithms give us access to credit that other people don’t have access to and we are able to do this profitably. This is big news in the FinTech industry where most of the players are not profitable. We are able to serve our customers and make money while we are doing it,” said Kasibhatla speaking from his office in metro Atlanta, Georgia.

Founded in 2015, LendingPoint recently surpassed US$4bn in loan originations this year. It was built on the principle of providing fair credit to people who had fallen through the FICO net but were deserving of credit to help with medical bills or home improvements. Since then, LendingPoint has broadened their customer base to serve FICO ranges between 575 – 850, and added working capital financing options to small businesses.

“At LendingPoint we provide unsecured personal loans for consumers across the credit spectrum, many of whom are people the more traditional banks don't pay attention to.

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KN KASIBHATLA TITLE: CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER INDUSTRY: FINANCE LOCATION: KENNESAW, USA The ability to always ask questions helped KN Kasibhatla, Chief Technology Officer at US-based LendingPoint to drive their digital transformation. “When I came to LendingPoint it enabled me to ask the dumb questions that lead to better solutions,” said Kasibhatla whose role covers all aspects of technology from data science, analytics, and cybersecurity. Kasibhatla came from a diverse career background having worked in telecoms and marketing.

Although he had studied finance - with an MBA in Finance and Strategy from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business - he had always stayed on the technology side of the industry.

The Next-Gen Software Partner To FinTech Leaders Over the past decade, leading FinTech companies have scaled successfully and rapidly by partnering with Trantor. We build, deploy and maintain software solutions for Fintech companies and innovative enterprises. Our CaptiveCoE™ (Center of Excellence) engagement model empowers companies scale their product development efficiently and at a lower cost.

While you focus on strategy, design, and product; let us do the heavy development lifting.

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LENDINGPOINT

“ AT LENDINGPOINT WE PROVIDE UNSECURED PERSONAL LOANS FOR CONSUMERS ACROSS THE CREDIT SPECTRUM, MANY OF WHOM ARE PEOPLE THE MORE TRADITIONAL BANKS DON'T PAY ATTENTION TO. BANKS ARE VERY GOOD AT GIVING MONEY TO THOSE WHO HAVE MONEY - WE FOCUS ON SERVING THE PEOPLE WHO NEED MONEY” KN KASIBHATLA

CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, LENDING POINT

Banks are very good at giving money to those who have money - we focus on serving the people who need money,” commented Kasibhatla.

By combining technology and proprietary algorithms, they are driving a better lending and borrowing experience by finding more reasons to say ‘yes’ to their customers and are now serving hundreds of thousands of people. LendingPoint also works with small business and merchant point-of-sale lending solutions to further unlock access to affordable loans.

Digitisation with a human touch Kasibhatla, who focuses on all aspects of technology from development, support, data science, and analytics, pointed out that as a relatively new company, LendingPoint has the added advantage of being cloudbased from the beginning so there has been no legacy architecture to wade through.

“We were founded by people who believed in big data and using nontraditional data to determine people's creditworthiness and we have always been a cloud-based company which has been an advantage for us,” said Kasibhatla.

“We have never had any infrastructure on the ground and started out as a purely digital experience. But one of our interesting twists is that we also talk to consumers over the phone and listen to their challenges and try to solve them. I like to think of this aimagazine.com

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2015

year LendingPoint was founded

US$4+bn in loan originations

60bn

data points have been collected by LendingPoint on their consumers

99%

of credit applications to LendingPoint are digital

63%

of credit applications are mobile-first

“ BASED ON YOUR CREDIT PICTURE AND INFORMATION ON YOUR APPLICATION FORM, IT ONLY TAKES FOUR SECONDS TO GET LOAN OPTIONS ON THE LENDINGPOINT PLATFORM” KN KASIBHATLA

CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, LENDING POINT

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as digitisation with a human touch. The FICO score is now less than 5% weight in our models as we work in non-traditional ways to measure somebody's ability to pay back.

“The point-of-sale and e-commerce have evolved over time. It started directly with the consumer, then they came through a website, where they could apply for their loans and get money. But as our consumers' needs started evolving we expanded into the areas popular with our consumers. We're very focused on providing access when they

LENDINGPOINT IN FOCUS LendingPoint is a provider of unsecured personal loans for consumers and small business owners across the credit spectrum. By combining technology and proprietary algorithms, they work to drive better lending experiences and financial freedom for their customers.

Borrowing range Personal loans range from US$2,000 to US$36,500. The loan amount approved can depend upon an individual credit profile and the information provided during the application process.

Lending Point takes several factors into consideration including a customer’s current DTI (debt-to-income ratio) and PTI (payment-to-income ratio).

DID YOU KNOW...

need it most, that is why we entered the point-of-sale and e-commerce spaces.

“During the pandemic, buying via e-commerce became a necessity and has remained a high-demand preference . We followed customers online and increased our offerings to include a working capital solution to online sellers.”

Kasibhatla pointed out that 99% of the total credit applications are digital with 63% of those now starting on mobile. “We have seen this transition from a website-

What states do LendingPoint offer loans in?

LendingPoint offers loans to consumers in 48 states and the District of Columbia.

Currently we do not offer loans to consumers in Nevada and West Virginia.

How does LendingPoint keep personal bank information safe?

LendingPoint takes extensive precautions to protect personal information using robust industryleading procedures and safeguards, including encryption, to secure and protect your personal information.

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DID YOU KNOW...

WHAT IS A FICO SCORE?

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Thirty years ago, the Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO) debuted FICO Scores to provide an industry-standard for scoring creditworthiness that was fair to both lenders and consumers.

A FICO Score is a three-digit number based on the information in your credit reports. It helps lenders determine how likely you are to repay a loan. This, in turn, affects how much you can borrow, how many months you have to repay, and how much it will cost (the interest rate). This traditional score is used by 90% of banks in the US LendingPoint is now using data and technology to drive decisions on offering credit to many citizens who have been refused credit using this score. “We believe in using data and technology to deliver money to people who need it which is not necessarily reflected in their FICO scores or any of their credit scores.

We use technology to drive these decisions,” said KN Kasibhatla, Chief Technology Officer at LendingPoint.

December 2021

driven to a mobile-driven digitalisation and that requires a more specialised way of presenting our brand and how we engage with and deliver for our customers.

How loyalty pays off for LendingPoint LendingPoint takes pride in its customer experience, and it shows, 26% of their platform originations in Q2 came from their current customer base. The company has a focus on AI and data on their e-commerce and point-of-sale to retain and attract customers across the US.

LENDINGPOINT

“ OUR ALGORITHMS GIVE US ACCESS TO CREDIT THAT OTHER PEOPLE DON’T HAVE ACCESS TO AND WE ARE ABLE TO DO THIS PROFITABLY. THIS IS BIG NEWS IN THE FINTECH INDUSTRY WHERE MOST OF THE PLAYERS ARE NOT PROFITABLE” KN KASIBHATLA

CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, LENDING POINT

“That trust becomes a two way street. So our customers want to stay with us longer, and trust us enough to have multiple financial products,” said Kasibhalta who pointed LendingPoint is on an aggressive growth trajectory doubling originations this year.”

“We focus heavily on how we talk to our consumers, how we treat our consumers, what their experiences are that they want to come back and do business with us. We treat our customers in a way in which we would like to be treated ourselves. That’s an important part of our core work ethic.”

Commenting on how their credit rating varies from FICO, Kasibhatla said: “FICO is a look back, while we look forward and ask – ability versus intent to pay back. Our goal is to make sure we set up our customers for success, we don’t want them to overextend.

Long-term partnership with Trantor Kasibhatla commented on the value of their long-term partnership with Trantor - an IT consulting company that focuses on digital transformation - the company has been with LendingPoint since day one.

“They have been an important part of our success and have worked across the company and built strong relationships throughout - they almost feel like an extension of LendingPoint. They work across marketing, legal, customer experience, product, and risk which allows them to understand our business goals. By being embedded in our processes they are able to become part of the extended ecosystem that we have here and help us solve the business problem.” aimagazine.com

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“ FINTECH IS A VERY DISRUPTIVE INDUSTRY, SO IT'S ALWAYS GOOD TO ASK THE QUESTIONS, THERE ARE NO DUMB QUESTIONS - THE ANSWERS WILL ALWAYS SURPRISE YOU” KN KASIBHATLA

CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, LENDING POINT

When its smart to be dumb Kasibhatla believes asking simple questions always results in smarter solutions for a company which has benefited LendingPoint as they have embarked on their digital journey to make financial freedom easier for their customers.

“When I came to LendingPoint it enabled me to ask the dumb questions as I am not from this industry. It allowed me to ask questions and get down to the answers that lead to better solutions, not just for our customers, but also for our employees,” said Kasibhatla whose role covers all aspects of technology from development, support, data science, analytics, and cybersecurity.

“In business sometimes people do things just because that's how they've always done them. FinTech is a very disruptive industry, so it's always good to ask the questions, there are no dumb questions - the answers will always surprise you. That's the only way you learn,” said Kasibhatla.

Kasibhatla joined LendingPoint 10 months before the pandemic and came from a diverse career background having worked in telecoms and marketing.

Although he had studied finance he had always stayed on the technology side of the industry.

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“This industry is an amazingly fast moving and innovative industry - that’s what attracted me to this particular vertical. The old ways of doing business are being torn down every day. We are constantly seeing new ways of servicing our customers and using technology to deliver what they need at that point in their journey is pretty amazing.”

Planning proved key to navigating pandemic Despite starting with LendingPoint a few months before the pandemic, this challenge

LENDINGPOINT

did not side-step Kasibhatla as he had learnt to plan and prepare for the unexpected thanks to the inspiring leadership of his former CEO. “In my early days I had a CEO, Leo Cyr, who had been a marine. He always had us plan and prepare and be ready for unexpected contingencies. I worked for a telephone company at the time and this helped us to survive when a direct hurricane hit the data centre. We managed to keep our network running throughout that time and that helped me when the pandemic hit.

“In early January, 2020, nobody would have thought the whole world would be working remotely. Now, everybody's living on Zoom calls and technology enables those things. Sometimes, it takes a catalyst like the pandemic to drive these changes.

“My role is to make sure the tools are there for my colleagues to do their job and the customers to access fair credit.

When we had to go remote, we had all the tooling already in place for the call centre to operate normally. aimagazine.com

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LENDINGPOINT

“ WE BELIEVE IN USING AI AND DATA MODELS TO DELIVER MONEY TO PEOPLE WHO NEED IT MOST WHICH IS NOT NECESSARILY REFLECTED IN THEIR FICO SCORES. WE USE TECHNOLOGY TO DRIVE THESE DECISIONS” KN KASIBHATLA

CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, LENDING POINT

“The main job of technology is to enable people to do their jobs. From our consumer's perspective, it's not just the cool looking screen, you've got to make sure that they experience the workflow, processes, everything else behind the screens is aligned to give them a good experience.

“We take real-time feedback from our customers on a bill log, we track everything so we know what's going on, where the friction points are, and we address those things on a continuous basis. Our goal is to provide a fully automated approval process, that's where AI comes into place, not just on the approval side, but also on the backend side to make sure we are able to remove friction points and make it a more pleasant journey for our customers using AI and data.

We try to make it flexible and fast for them.”

As Kasibhatla effortlessly drives the technology behind the algorithms at LendingPoint, it won’t be long before they are offering credit options within three seconds of logging on - watch this space.

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NAUTILUS DATA TECHNOLOGIES

WRITTEN BY: LAURA BERRILL PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

NATURALLY COLD WATER COOLING FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE SUSTAINABLE DATA CENTRES aimagazine.com

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Using naturally cold water for cooling global data centres is sustainable, environmentally friendly, and it enables high-performance compute for a greater future use of technology

N

autilus Data Technologies prides itself on its technology that is able to cool data centres with naturally cold water, instead of using water which has been mechanically chilled. Owing to the abundance of naturally cold water in locations across the world, data centres can also be placed in a wide variety of locations globally.

Company CEO, James Connaughton explains: “Our preferred sites for data centres are brownfields because they’re perfect for large industrial watercooling systems. They also help create new jobs, as well as digital infrastructure for those communities which are left behind in terms of digital transformation. And at the same time this means we can be closely located in the environments the sector needs to serve.”

The current issue is that infrastructure needs to support hotter, faster servers and use naturally cold water to cool data centres in a more sustainable way of doing so.

Connaughton added that in order to roll this out, Nautilus works with regional and global partners on the capability to deliver these systems and empower them to work with the company to deliver these systems.

“Our goal is not to keep the technology just close to us, but help build facilities that are successful and find a way to get the entire sector to transform into a much more sustainable method of operations and engagement with the local community,” he stresses.

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Company CEO, James Connaughton

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Focus on sustainability and renewables Connaughton adds that by combining their water-cooling technology with renewable energy sources, that means zero emissions in the sector with an extra 70-80% of cooling efficiency – further driving the value of renewables.

He explains: “Unlike most conventionally chilled data centres, we consume no water, whereas mechanically-chilled systems consume a lot. Conventional systems use drinking water, which uses energy to deliver the drinking water to the data centre. Then the data centre retreats the water. In mechanical chilling, water also evaporates, and a big chunk also ends up in the wastewater system. But if you chill data centres with naturally cold water, you don’t have to do any of that.”

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“ Unlike most conventionally chilled data centres, we consume no water, whereas mechanicallychilled systems consume a lot. Conventional systems use drinking water, which uses energy to deliver the drinking water to the data centre” JAMES CONNAUGHTON

CEO, NAUTILUS DATA TECHNOLOGIES

NAUTILUS DATA TECHNOLOGIES

25+

Number of Staff

Connaughton adds the Nautilus approach also means the removal of refrigerants from the cooling process, which are ozonedepleting substances and states such chemicals are not needed any more. Another advantage to the Nautilus system, he says, is the removal of noise owing to not having big chilling systems running. “All of this is a huge leap forward in terms of environmental benefit,” he states.

Most notable aspects of Nautilus technology One of the reasons the company is unique in its outlook is the fact that it delivered its first data centre project on a barge. And this was because, the company wanted to demonstrate that it not only could cool with water, but that it could also prefabricate an entire data centre and deliver it to anywhere in the world – and they could locate to the water beside the shore, or on land near a water source.

“The computers don’t exactly care, do they?” jokes Connaughton. “So we can find these optimal solutions for rapid deployment into both developed countries, but also to bring digital infrastructure into emerging markets where access to digital transformation is lacking and that is very important to us,” he adds.

Scaling up the benefits Its data centres are prefabricated, as mentioned, and tested and the components

DATA CENTRE WATER CONSUMPTION

DID YOU KNOW...

2013

Year Founded

commissioned, then delivered either on floating platforms or on land. When it comes to land-based centres, Connaughton says all they need is the concrete pad. He added that meant greater density, being able to handle two to 20 times the computational power for the same footprint.

“We are able to plug in quite sizable computing capacity into very small geographies, which in turn enables us to fit into the edge, as edge computing continues to grow. And the edge is core to what we do. It means we can continue to grow these big regional and global hubs that are more remote and repurpose infrastructure in locations where there are massive exchanges and everything in between,” explained Connaughton. He added that the technology’s scalability comes with the ability to have a global supply chain, which is what Nautilus has. “We have been able to identify capable and competitive

Data centres consume water directly for cooling, in some cases 57% sourced from potable water, and indirectly through the water requirements of non-renewable electricity generation.

Although in the USA, data centre water consumption (1.7 billion litres/ day) is small compared to total water consumption (1218 billion litres/day), there are issues of transparency with less than a third of data centre operators measuring water consumption. nature.com

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“ It was very clear Nautilus’ holds the potential to drive an exponential leap forwards in global sustainability. It also became clear that existing data centre operations aren’t sustainable” JAMES CONNAUGHTON

CEO, NAUTILUS DATA TECHNOLOGIES

supporters that can help us deliver the technology in any place on earth. For example, we can pick up the phone to a developer in Indonesia who wants to do a project and be ready to deliver the entire package in partnership with them,” he says.

The challenges and differences in land versus water-based projects Connaughton explains that currently, most mission-critical infrastructure sits at the water’s edge. He offers examples of water treatment facilities, power plants, chemical facilities and major manufacturing facilities.

However, he says, this was a new thing when it comes to data centres.

“We are the simplest plugin to those locations and can tie into, for example, any existing desalination infrastructures, drinking water treatment or wastewater treatment aimagazine.com

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and repurpose their water. Our data centres are still 100% the same as other data centres, the same electrical systems, same rack, same networking capabilities, and same security, so people can be comfortable that they are getting the full data centre, but with a much better cooling system,” explain Connaughton.

The promise and deliverance of sustainability In order to deliver on sustainability goals, Nautilus suggests more of the sector looks at moving to using water cooling technologies.

This is because there have been issues with water supply all over the world, whereby drinking water is being taken by data centres which is needed for people. But now that is not necessary. Connaughton thinks this transition is starting, but believes it will take two to five years to get everyone on board.

“Covid cost us a year in time to do this but we already have big global hubs and we’re seeing increasingly

“Our data centres are still 100% the same as other data centres, the same electrical systems, same rack, same networking capabilities, same security, so people can be comfortable that they are getting the full data centre, but with a much better cooling system” JAMES CONNAUGHTON

CEO, NAUTILUS DATA TECHNOLOGIES

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JAMES CONNAUGHTON TITLE: CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER INDUSTRY: D ATA CENTRES AND COOLING TECHNOLOGY LOCATION: FLORIDA, UNITED STATES

EXECUTIVE BIO

James Connaughton is a globally distinguished energy, environment and, technology expert, as both corporate leader and White House policymaker. Mr. Connaughton is the CEO of Nautilus Data Technologies, a high-performance, ultra-efficient, and sustainable data centre infrastructure company powered by its proprietary water-cooling system. Before joining Nautilus Data Technologies, he served as Executive Vice President of C3.ai, a leading enterprise AI software provider for accelerating digital transformation.

energy, environment, natural resource, and climate change policies. An avid ocean conservationist, Mr. Connaughton helped establish four of the largest and most ecologically diverse marine resource conservation areas in the world.

Mr. Connaughton is a member of the Advisory Board of the ClearPath Foundation and serves as an Advisor to X (Google’s Moonshot Factory) and Shine Technologies, a medical and commercial isotope company. He is also a member of the Board of Directors at the Resources for the Future and a member of the Advisory Boards at Yale’s Center on Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia’s Global Center on Energy Policy.

From 2009-2013, Mr. Connaughton was Executive Vice President and a member of the Management Committee of Exelon and Constellation Energy, two of America’s cleanest, competitive suppliers of electricity, natural gas, and energy services. In 2001, Mr. Connaughton was unanimously confirmed by the US Senate to serve as Chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. He served as President George W. Bush’s senior advisor on energy, environment, and natural resources, and as Director of the White House Office of Environmental Policy. During his eight-year service, Mr. Connaughton worked closely with the President, the Cabinet, and the Congress to develop and implement

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distributed power, smart cities, smart grids and smart transportation already. So this kind of digital transformation and adoption of new technologies such as water cooling will happen very quickly once it’s taken up by everyone. I think that could be within the next ten years,” he said.

Connaughton said the tipping point for the technology’s adoption will come from the customer and compared the uptake to the surge of electric vehicle usage, as well as the rapid leap from standard call and text mobile phones to the full-on smartphones we all use today.

“Going from the regular phone to the cell phone was a case in point. Cell phones 196

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started to creep in in the 1980s and into the 1990s and then after a few years, boom, smartphones were everywhere almost overnight and everyone had got rid of their perfectly functioning, what were, cell phones,” he recalls.

Partners and collaborations Nautilus lists its main partners as Schneider, Bechtel, USystems, and Vertiv and says it is establishing more global vendor relationships, plus partners for new data centres, skilling them up and training them in how to operate the systems.

Connaughton says: “We like to work with creative and innovative partners

NAUTILUS DATA TECHNOLOGIES

“ I am feeling confident because collectively the leadership team has in the region of 200 years’ experience so they know what they’re doing” JAMES CONNAUGHTON

CEO, NAUTILUS DATA TECHNOLOGIES

who understand what we’re doing and the leap forward benefits of what we do.

We like at the moment to start with local developers and then the bigger players as they implement their own development.

We’ll see what happens in the enterprise and hyperscale world and how much our partners want to build their own offerings versus them leasing from others, but we are looking forward to them integrating what we are doing with what they are doing themselves. Currently we are having good, constructive conversations with many partners and collaborators about that.”

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“Nautilus focuses on supporting the highest level of performance with the lowest environmental impact and the best social and economic benefit, this is the definition of sustainability” JAMES CONNAUGHTON

CEO, NAUTILUS DATA TECHNOLOGIES

structure and team members, they are all made up of previous major data centre suppliers who collectively have built hundreds of data centres across the world.

“They all made the jump over to us and our data centre systems and are some of the most accomplished people in the data centre sector. Hopefully that will tell you something about what we do here and our vision for the future of this technology,” he stated.

The immediate future and planning goals Connaughton describes his business as a “very thoughtful start-up” but added that he didn’t want it to “get ahead of itself.”

He thinks the main aim right now for the business is to raise and maintain visibility, which has been the case with rolling out their first project and has prompted interest in what Nautilus does.

“So right now we are working on fitting out the first facility in Stockton, California and then working on two new locations, one in Maine in the northeast of the US and one in western Ireland, which we think are both good as global hubs for the technology as they are on both sides of the Atlantic.

Then next year we are looking at city centre locations which will have the ability to deliver large-scale infrastructure.”

He added that half of the new locations are in fully developed markets and half in leading emerging markets. “We’re being quite thoughtful of what our customer class is and at the same time geographic diversity so we can create some acceleration in the adoption of the technology. Then it’s a case of firming up the engineering packages we can offer, along with the licensing program,” he goes on: “The idea is then partners can come to us and we already have the engineering , manufacturing and vendor processes and we can provide the licensing and procurement schedules.

We want to make the whole process really easy for the data centre developers, offering a complete package.

“Having the prefabricated modular design enables business to move quickly and provides the highest level of computing, the lowest environmental footprint and the greatest social gain at the same time,” Connaughton concludes.

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DEMOCRATISING DATA STORAGE WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

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CEPH

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CEPH

Meet Ceph: the open source data storage solution helping decision makers find the flexibility, reliability, and scale to navigate a changing IT landscape

I

t should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who hasn’t spent the past decade living under a rock that data has become the backbone, the body, the soul (the metaphor of your choice) of the modern world. Data storage, analysis, recovery, and management are mission critical capabilities for any enterprise - and the core value proposition for more than a few.

The data centre industry is experiencing an explosion of capacity throughout both mature and emerging markets, datasets are growing exponentially like some 1950s sci-fi special effect, and emerging tech trends like 5G, the IoT, artificial intelligence, machine learning, HPC, cold storage, and edge computing all conspire to pour gasoline on an already raging fire. Yet, the more critical that an effective data storage solution becomes to organisations and enterprises of all shapes and sizes, the more apparent it is that the solutions dominating the market today aren’t necessarily the right tools for the job.

“In retrospect especially, but even at the time there was a glaring hole in the market.

There was a clear need: everybody needed storage, it needed to be scalable, and there was no open source option; you had to buy expensive proprietary solutions,” reflects Sage Weil, Principal Ceph architect at Red Hat, and the founder and chief architect of Ceph. “There needed to be an open source alternative that was good, and that's the niche we've tried to fill.”

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Massively scalable storage for demanding applications Red Hat® Ceph® Storage, an open, massively scalable, simplified storage solution for modern data pipelines. Engineered for data analytics, AI/ML, and emerging workloads, Red Hat Ceph Storage delivers software-defined storage on your choice of industry-standard hardware.

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CEPH

Ceph: open source data storage delivered flexibly at scale

The Ceph Foundation Since the first prototype of Ceph was launched back in 2007, the community of enterprises, organisations, and users that use it has grown to touch a huge number of spaces, from small businesses to large scale enterprises; from the scientific community to regional telecom carriers.

In November 2018, a cluster of organisations actively involved in the development, support, and commercialisation of Ceph formed the Ceph Foundation, launching the new initiative under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation.

The founding members included Amihan, Canonical, China Mobile, DigitalOcean, Intel, OVH, ProphetStor Data Services, Red Hat, SoftIron, SUSE, Western Digital, XSKY Data Technology, and ZTE.

“I was pretty naive back then. I thought you just built something, open sourced it, and people would just start appearing to develop it, fix bugs, etc. and that's not how it works,” laughs Weil. “We had spent several years trying to add all the features that we thought Ceph had to have before people would be willing to use it,” before the launch of the Foundation in 2018.

“There are a lot of industry stakeholders that are selling or using Ceph as part of their business. So the Ceph Foundation became a way for those organisations to contribute funds that could be managed and spent to further Ceph's development and the community. Prior to the Foundation, it felt a lot more like begging going around asking 'who wants to pay for X or Y',” he adds. aimagazine.com

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“ Ceph is designed to provide a reliable storage service out of unreliable components” SAGE WEIL

CEPH PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT, RED HAT

“The Ceph Foundation is essential to the Ceph community and our customers because its members are all invested in the development and progression of Ceph,” says Aaron Joue, founder and CEO of Ambedded Technology - which combines Ceph technology with its own line of decentralised Arm servers.

The power of the Foundation, continues Kyle Bader, a Data Foundation Architect at Red Hat, lies in its ability to drive the industry to “deliver on the promise of democratising software defined storage through open source in a way that’s very similar in the way that Linux led to the democratisation of the operating system.”

That democratisation, adds Craig Chadwell, VP of Product at SoftIron, creates the necessary competition (centred around the foundation itself) to push the Ceph commercial ecosystem 206

December 2021

to even greater heights. “The Ceph community is very large and robust.

The Ceph Foundation helps to enliven and support that community, which in turn ensures that there will always be other options out there so that we can maintain that no vendor lock-in value proposition,” he explains. “It really forces us to continually challenge ourselves to deliver solutions that are uniquely solving customer problems, because the reality is, if a customer can move away and there's something providing more value out there, they will. It keeps us honest and on our toes.”

Philip Williams, Product Lead at Canonical, reflects that “a funny thing about the open source world is that essentially we’re all competitors, but we're also all working together to make something that is available for free even better.”

CEPH

Meet Ceph: Reliable, scalable, affordable. open source Developed by Weil - in collaboration with data storage researchers at the University of California: Santa Cruz, as well as at researchers from the country’s leading laboratories in Los Alamos and beyond Ceph is a distributed, open source data storage solution that grew to fill that glaring hole in the market Weil and his colleagues saw back in the 2000s.

“Ceph is designed to provide a reliable storage service out of unreliable components.

You take a bunch of individual hard drives that can fail, a bunch of networks that can fail, switches, servers that all individually are very fallible, you put them all together with Ceph and the net result is something that's highly reliable that tolerates any single point of failure - or in many cases many points of failure. It's highly available and highly scalable as well,” Weil explains, adding that Ceph is

also capable of providing object, block, and file storage all in one system on the same hardware.

Ceph’s distributed approach to data storage is hugely fault tolerant. Like a commercial airliner that can continue to fly with all but one engine out of commission, Ceph is robust enough to handle all but the most catastrophic of outages.

As a storage solution, Ceph’s appeal also lies in its open source, software defined design that - in addition to delivering reliability and flexibility at scale - excels at adding up to far more than the sum of any somewhat meagre parts you might happen to have lying around. “Ceph is open source, software defined, and meant to be run on any commodity hardware you want to buy or already have,” Weil says. “It doesn't matter which vendor you're buying your hardware from, whether you're using hard drives or SSDs, what kind of switches are in your network; it's fully software defined,” aimagazine.com

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CEPH

CANONICAL THE FULL SPECTRUM OF ENTERPRISE COMPUTE

and therefore a legitimate and long-awaited answer to market demand for alternatives to restrictive, proprietary storage solutions.

“Storage is quite an interesting industry.

It's kind of hidden; people don't really think about storage until it's either too expensive or it's not available and, worst case, all your data has been lost,” says Philip Williams, a Product Leader at Canonical. “So, it's this funny little world that's dominated by a number of very large players. The whole aim of the Ceph Foundation is not just to shepherd the upstream projects and this collaborative development work on Ceph itself, but also to demonstrate to enterprise users that there is this viable alternative to the big players, and that their organisations don't have to be developer centric to make use of Ceph.”

Open source is the core of everything that happens inside Canonical. “All of our work is out in the open; it’s free to use, which I think is super important for storage technology, because you can understand what is actually going on inside the system.

That’s impossible when you’re using closed source or proprietary technologies,” says Philip Williams, Product Leader at Canonical.

“One thing that you see with traditional storage systems from the big players is that their growth is usually around scale up.

They'll have arbitrary limits on the number of disks you can add to a system.”

With datasets inside every organisation growing larger every day, Williams notes that “for people with quite significant amounts of data, public cloud and those traditional proprietary storage options typically aren't cost effective or feasible.”

As a result, Canonical - along with the rest of the Ceph community - is embracing the infinite scalability of Ceph to “demonstrate to enterprise users that there is this viable alternative to the big players, and that their organisations don't have to be developer centric to make use of Ceph.”

Ceph’s open source, software defined nature means that organisations looking to deploy it can “choose any hardware you like, choose any vendor you like - or even no vendor at all - but if you build a Ceph system and you want to switch vendors or run things on your own, you can do that very easily.” aimagazine.com

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CEPH

SOFTIRON - DELIVERING 21ST CENTURY INFRASTRUCTURE THE RIGHT WAY At its core, SoftIron asks the question of how to deliver 21st century infrastructure to meet the evolving demands centred around factors like resilience, performance, accessibility, and environmental impact. “We want to meet customers where they are. And we do that through building a set of task specific appliances that solve a variety of problems inside the data centre,” explains SoftIron’s VP of Product, Craig Chadwell. SoftIron’s solutions range from software defined infrastructure solutions that touch the computing and networking spaces to specific solutions for media encoding.

“If you take a holistic view of solving a problem, you can deliver a solution that is resilient, but with performance that’s way beyond what a traditional commodity based solution could provide,” says Chadwell.

SoftIron’s suite of storage solutions are powered by Ceph, but the entire company’s ethos is firmly aligned with the open source community as well. “One of the core premises of SoftIron’s value proposition is this notion of no vendor lock-in. We provide solutions that enable our customers to effectively swap us out if they choose,” Chadwell continues.

“Because of the way Ceph works and because organisations that comply with Ceph’s operating model can have products that work together seamlessly, it means that you can swap out a particular vendor's hardware without ever having to swap out Ceph, which means that everything above the Ceph layer from a service delivery perspective is unaffected by the lower level technology changes.

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“ Everybody needed storage, it needed to be scalable, and there was no open source option; you had to buy expensive enterprise solutions” SAGE WEIL

CEPH PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT, RED HAT

In addition to offering the unparalleled freedom to start from scratch, move freely within its ecosystem, and avoid both the vendor lock in agreements and cumbersome, expensive upgrade cycles that define managed, proprietary storage solutions, Weil adds that the beauty of Ceph is that “Because it's so flexible and built to scale, Ceph doesn't require a lot of foreknowledge about where your organisation's going to be in a couple of years time. You can just expand your hardware footprint in whatever direction you end up growing.”

Large storage systems - the kinds that are increasingly coming to define the cloud and data centre industries - are fundamentally dynamic. They grow and change in new and unexpected directions in response to the market and, with Ceph, organisations can grow and change with as little friction as possible. “You might start out with 10 servers from one vendor, and then five years later you're storing 12 times

CEPH

KEY PARTNERSHIPS SAGE WEIL TITLE: CEPH PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT, RED HAT Sage Weil is the lead architect and co-creator of the Ceph open source distributed storage system. Sage helped design Ceph as part of his PhD research at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since finishing in 2007, he has continued to refine the system with the goal of providing a stable next generation distributed storage system for Linux. Sage co-founded Inktank in 2012 to bring enterprise-quality open source storage to the enterprise. After Red Hat acquired Inktank in 2014, Sage has worked in Red Hat's Office of the CTO to improve Ceph and help shape Red Hat's overall storage strategy.

PHILIP WILLIAMS TITLE: PRODUCT LEADER, CANONICAL Philip is a Product Leader at Canonical responsible for Ceph and other storage solutions. He has over 15 years experience in the storage industry, having previously been responsible for storage infrastructure and products at a number of leading technology companies.

AARON JOUE TITLE: CEO, AMBEDDED Aaron Joue is the founder of Ambedded Technology. He is responsible for the business strategy and ensures the product development and support satisfy customers' needs. He accumulated experience when he worked for the defense and information technology industry.

His experience spans product design, hardware, software, storage, computing, and Manufacturing.

Aaron founded Ambedded in 2012 to create an innovative platform for software-defined storage to improve energy efficiency, availability, and performance. Before this, he was ever an outstanding engineer, factory manager, and VP of product.

KYLE BADER TITLE: DATA FOUNDATION ARCHITECT, RED HAT Kyle is the Data Foundation Architect covering both OpenShift Data Foundation and Red Hat Ceph Storage products at Red Hat. His focus is at the intersection of open source, distributed storage systems, data engineering, and machine learning.

CRAIG CHADWELL TITLE: VP OF PRODUCT, SOFTIRON Craig has spent over a decade engineering, marketing, and leading product management of cloud and softwaredefined data center solutions. Craig has held positions at Lenovo, NetApp, and High Point University where he gained first-hand buyer and administration experience across the lifecycle of data center operations.

Craig has degrees in computer science, history, political science, and business administration.

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CEPH

as much data and you've been through three different hardware revisions all from different vendors, you've had to migrate data, change policy, and now you're storing a different type of data than you were before - it's all a total mess,” Weil laughs. “Often, your net system is going to be a mixture of all sorts of different stuff, and open source lends itself to solving those problems really well because you have the neutrality to be flexible and adaptable. If you're buying a proprietary solution from a particular vendor, you're going to have to buy more of the X solution that they allow you to interoperate with. You're locked into a particular path.” Ceph, he adds, not only frees organisations from those restrictive, vendor-defined upgrade paths, but opens up a huge, mature ecosystem of enterprises and community members to its user base.

Harnessing the Ceph community When it comes to harnessing the true value of Ceph, its commercial ecosystem and user community are pivotal. From companies like Red Hat that deliver Ceph solutions to Fortune 500 companies, to SoftIron which simplifies the Ceph adoption process through curated, in-house designed

RED HAT - CEPH AT PETABYTE SCALE Kyle Bader, Red Hat’s Data Foundation Architect, comes from an operations background. As such, he’s no stranger to the headaches that can accompany endeavours to be flexible in a large IT environment. “If you have a handful of proprietary appliances, that's probably fine and quite manageable, but at Red Hat we have several customers that are managing north of a hundred petabytes of data,” he explains. The growth in the amount of data being stored and managed, he continues, “is not stopping by any means. So, it becomes challenging once you get to larger scales.”

Red Hat’s business brings the power of open source ecosystems to large scale enterprises, leveraging everything from OpenShift to Kubernetes in order to take its customers’ IT infrastructure to the next level. Engineered for data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, Red Hat’s Ceph Storage delivers software-defined storage on industry-standard hardware to organisations at any scale.

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AMBEDDED - ROBUST AND LOW POWER CEPH APPLIANCE "We think reliability, scalability, and simplicity are keys to our offering to the enterprise storage market," explains Aaron Joue, founder and CEO of Ambedded Technology. " Ambedded integrates Ceph software, the Arm microservers, and its tailorbuilt ceph manager GUI (UVS manager).

With the nature of arm microservers, enterprise storage customers could start deploying ceph from a tiny cluster to a petabyte-scale without an entry barrier.

Also, this ARM-based appliance results in an easy to operate, ultra -robust, minimum failure domain and low-power offering that enables customers to operate their desired cluster in a cost efficient way without complications.

"We had a project in Hong Kong where a customer wanted a very high availability storage system for CCTV applications," Joue continues. "The storage system needed to keep working, even if up to four storage servers failed at the same time. It will be costly by using a traditional storage solution and hard to achieve to keep the cluster running with 4 servers failing at the same time.” However, leveraging the ceph storage and the Ambedded microserver architecture, this HK customer easily achieved their goal even with a relatively small scale cluster.

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hardware that’s tailor made to support its deployment, Ambedded, Canonical, and beyond, the Ceph commercial ecosystem provides support and services that allow companies of any scale, maturity, or specialisation to deploy and benefit from distributed storage - all built on Ceph.

“When it comes to getting started with Ceph, it can be an issue knowing which servers to buy, which hard drives and how many,” Weil acknowledges. “That's where companies in the commercial ecosystem really add a lot of value, not to mention the open source community at large.”

CEPH

you're going to want something with a nice GUI that just works,” Weil notes. “So, over the last three to four years, there's been a huge investment of time and resources in the Ceph community on the usability front.

We've created a whole new, integrated GUI dashboard for Ceph for management.

We've also developed an orchestrator layer for Ceph that can call out to whatever tools you use to deploy it, so that you can do just about anything you need to do from the new GUI. I think we've made huge progress.”

Ceph for everyone Since the dawn of the open-source approach to software design, open source solutions have often garnered “a reputation for being really complicated to use,” Weil admits - adding that he and the Ceph team have spent the past few years painfully aware of that fact. Now, however, “A lot of the stigma surrounding open source in general has gone away in recent years,” he explains, something that perfectly aligns with the latest evolution of Ceph’s General User Interface (GUI).

“These days, if you're a small business and you need 100 terabytes of storage,

Challenges Enterprise storage is full of challenges.

Apart from the obvious spiralling quantity of data being generated, the applications that create and use that data are also increasingly diverse and changing almost daily. Storage, of course, is also not immune to the broader IT skills crisis that enterprises find themselves dealing with every day. Add to that the constant revolving door of mergers and acquisitions in the storage industry and it's hard not to find a storage manager that hasn't been burned by obsoleted or sidelined proprietary solutions that have fallen out of favour. It's little wonder then that a platform like Ceph - able to flex and grow to meet ever changing demands across a huge variety of use cases - and do all that from within a vibrant open source community eliminating the lock-in problem, becomes deeply compelling.

The Ceph decade Looking to the future, the intersection of market trends with Ceph’s constantly developing capabilities (Weil stresses that a sizable portion of the Foundation’s role is keeping up with cutting edge hardware developments to ensure Ceph continues to run smoothly, no matter what you plug it aimagazine.com

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CEPH USER TESTIMONIALS FUTURE PLC NAME: TOBY JACKSON, TITLE: GLOBAL SRE LEAD “Future PLC has grown in recent years through acquisition of over a dozen media brands and technology companies, bringing a complex and diverse data ecosystem. Future operates services on both cloud and on-premises infrastructure, leveraging technologies that need to balance value and flexibility. Future's technology team has also grown and diversified to meet these demands, requiring their SRE team to provide ever more robust and flexible solutions without compromising on stability or performance. As a content publisher, data is integral to Future's operation, and Ceph was the clear choice to ensure its technology teams had the tools at their disposal to manage data at scale.

Ceph allows Future to deploy storage across its datacenters, trusting that its data is distributed and available while enabling its development teams to self-manage storage requirements from Kubernetes with ease.

Future requires a storage solution that can not only grow in volume, but can handle diversity of locality, performance, distribution and access models; Ceph affords this flexibility under a common platform, reducing deployment complexity and simplifying its operational costs.”

DATACOMM CLOUD BUSINESS NAME: M R. LUK PHIN TIRTOKUNTJORO, TITLE: CTO “We have deployed, run and tested Ceph storage in our development environment for 2 years.

Once confident with the solution, we decided

to build Openstack Cloud using Ceph storage to provide IaaS, PaaS and SaaS to SMEs in Indonesia.

We have considered several storage solutions to work with our OpenStack cloud, including legacy storage and software-defined storage. As our cloud service targets SMEs, we need a solution that is cost-efficient, cloud-native ready, scalable, reliable, resilient, and with good performance.

We found Ceph storage to be a perfect fit after 2+ year trial experience. Furthermore, as we have three data centers located in 3 different sites, the RBD mirroring and simplicity to backup data from one data center to another in the Ceph cluster enhances our belief in choosing Ceph storage.

BLOOMBERG NAME: MATTHEW LEONARD, TITLE: E NGINEERING MANAGER, STORAGE Data is at the heart of Bloomberg’s technologies, which produce and distribute some of the most critical and valuable data in global business.

Maintaining the systems which store and process this data requires a unique mix of commodity hardware, open source software-defined storage, and vendor-agnostic appliance-based storage solutions.

In our diverse storage ecosystem, Bloomberg utilizes Ceph’s enterprise-level scalability and durability to support different applications and varied workloads across our organization. Ceph plays a significant role in Bloomberg's OpenStackpowered private cloud computing infrastructure, as well as underpins Bloomberg’s private S3-based object stores. As Bloomberg works toward contributing back to the Ceph project, we feel it is the right distributed storage technology for us -- both now and into the foreseeable future.

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“ Because it's so flexible and built to scale, Ceph doesn't require a lot of foreknowledge about where your organisation's going to be in a couple of years time. You can just expand your hardware footprint in whatever direction you end up growing”

into), as well as an ever-expanding ecosystem of vendors, users, and developers positions it ideally for a decade of meteoric growth. “Ceph is a pretty mature piece of software at this point,” Weil reflects. “All of the important stuff is there and, in addition to building it out further, we’re starting to add a lot of polish.”

Craig Chadwell, VP of Product at SoftIron, reflects that “open-source infrastructure has rapidly evolved and matured over the last decade and is in all likelihood going to be the way that most organisations deploy their IT footprint going forward.”

“People like to call Ceph the Linux of storage, which I think is appropriate,” adds Weil.

“Nobody thinks about which Unix they should buy because the open source one is the best, everyone's using it, and everyone is constantly improving it. Ceph is moving into that position in the storage space.”

SAGE WEIL

CEPH PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT, RED HAT aimagazine.com

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Healthcare

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