Issue 7 | Aug ’19
REDEFINING DATA CENTRES How GIGA DC aims to disrupt the colocation market with hyperscale performance
COMMANDING CLOUD Inside the AWS juggernaut
DELPHIX Delivering data-centricity
SIMPLIFIED TRANSFORMATION Deutsche Telekom’s change mission
The Bulletin
HIGHLIGHTS
Apple confirms $1 billion buyout of Intel’s smartphone modem unit
Apple is paying $1 billion for Intel’s smartphone chip business. The deal, first reported earlier this week, has now been confirmed by both companies. Apple will absorb 2,200 Intel employees and will increase its number of wireless technology patents to 17,000. Intel, whose shares rose 5.7% after the news, will continue to develop modems for non-smartphone technology. (26/07/19) MORE ON THIS STORY The Bulletin is our stream of the most relevant enterprise technology news, aggregated from highly-respected sources and packaged in a short, digestible format, delivering a simple yet indispensable read. A one-stop shop for all of the newest major developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, The Bulletin, available at digitalbullet.in, is a vital and dependable resource for technology professionals.
It just so happens that a data centre hall doubles up perfectly as an event venue. That’s what GIGA Data Centers discovered when it marked the opening of its inaugural site in North Carolina by welcoming workers, partners and the media inside. We were lucky enough to be invited along on what felt like a momentous day for Jake Ring, President & CEO, and his fellow co-founders. When Ring addressed more than 150 guests at the company’s grand unveiling, his belief in the project and his excitement for the future - shone through. Supported by high-profile technology partners from the data centre space, GIGA DC’s objective is to disrupt the colocation market by matching the performance and efficiency of hyperscalers like Microsoft and Google. You can pick up this story from page eight, where we include interviews with key protagonists and exclusive video from Mooresville. One of those hyperscale giants, Amazon, also features in this month’s issue. We travelled to the AWS Summit Series event in London, meeting its leaders and customers to get under the hood of the world’s leading public cloud provider. Read more from page 38. Digital transformation is ongoing in organisations great and small, and organisations don’t get much greater than Deutsche Telekom. VP Borislav Tadić offer us insights into the back-to-basics change mission of its Data Privacy, Security, Legal Affairs, Compliance, Audit and Risk Management department. That’s not everything, either - elsewhere this month, we cover vital topics such as data optimisation, human capital management and the possible impact of automation on our own futures. As ever, there’s plenty of content to stimulate and inform throughout our pages. We hope you enjoy the newest issue of Digital Bulletin.
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PU B LI S H I N G
M E D I A PRO D U CT I O N
D I G I TA L M A R K E T I N G
Mooresville, North Carolina
Guests mingle at the opening of GIGA DC’s first colocation data centre
INSIDE VIEW
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IMAGINEA
Issue
08 Case Study
GIGA Data Centers
CONTENTS
Hyperscale performance for the colocation market
38 Services
AWS
The route to cloud supremacy
62
Future
AI
6
Autocab
Charles Towers-Clark AI’s role in a changing world
70
Fuelling a new era of mobility
30 Networks
Deutsche Telekom A back-to-basics transformation
46 Data & Security
Delphix
Delivering data at scale
78 Events The biggest and best technology events for your diary
54 People
Ceridian
Tech-driven human capital management
86 The Closing Bulletin An exclusive column from Chargifi’s Dan Bladen
CASE STUDY
A DATA CENTRE REVOLUTION GIGA Data Centers aims to reinvent the colocation data centre market by offering efficient, hyperscale performance at affordable prices. Digital Bulletin attended the opening of its first site in Mooresville, North Carolina, to find out more
PROJECT DIRECTOR: RICHARD DURRANT AUTHOR: BEN MOUNCER PHOTOGRAPHY: AMPARO DELLAMICO, WILLIAM PHILLIPS VIDEOGRAPHY: AARON PUTNAM 8 DIGITAL BULLETIN
GIGA DC
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CASE STUDY
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A
GIGA DC
business owner will always remember early milestones, no matter how large their company grows or how long
the journey lasts. Those milestones might be measurable - the launch of a new strategy or product - or they might be less obvious, a point on the timeline when a small idea, event or quirk of fortune led the business down an unexpected but fruitful path. GIGA Data Centers has just passed a milestone that will one day be reflected on fondly by co-founders Jake Ring, Daniel Robbins and James Longacre. A colocation startup with weighty ambitions to disrupt the market, GIGA recently cut the ribbon on its first location in Mooresville, North Carolina. There was a palpable sense of occasion in June as employees, partners and a variety of guests more than 150 in total - gathered inside the 120,000 sq.ft. data hall. This was a momentous day for three industry veterans; the day Ring, Robbins and Longacre put forward their vision of a transformed future for multi-tenant, colocation data centres. Hyperscale providers are already redefining data centre design but Ring, who spoke exclusively with Digital Bulletin in Mooresville, believes
GIGA is in place to offer the same service but at a local level. “Our mission here has really been how to bring the hyperscale level of performance to our customers,” he outlines. This is a bold undertaking for a company very much in its infancy - but GIGA’s value proposition is compelling. Like the established hyperscale providers, its carrierneutral offering is based on modular technology; specifically, GIGA’s proprietary WindChill® enclosures that deliver power and scalability at low cost and maximum efficiency. That core product has been developed over many years, with the recently-formed GIGA incorporating the seventh generation of the technology. “The hyperscale companies Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others - had the need to build their own data centres,” explains Ring. “With their resources, they were able to determine that a modular approach was actually going to work better for them. “Indeed, that’s what my co-founders James Longacre and Daniel Robbins were doing when they were working with Microsoft. They were deploying modular systems that were reducing the cost of operating a data centre and speeding the time to market. We’re using those techniques that 11 Issue 7
CASE STUDY
There’s going to be a lot of change in the landscape, but my sense is that Lenovo will be a $100 billion company Our mission here that really is going to be on the has really of been cutting-edge technology”
how to bring the hyperscale level of performance to our customers” Jake Ring
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GIGA DC
Jake Ring addresses attendees at the opening of GIGA DC’s first data centre in Mooresville the hyperscalers have been using and changing the way that we’re delivering to the multi-tenant, colocation market. It’s very different from what other data centres are still focusing on.” The combination of product and personnel is what makes GIGA’s three-year target of 15 data centre openings across North America seem achievable. Robbins’ and Longacre’s history with Microsoft - they met as the computing giant began building for a clouddominated future - gives GIGA a deep technical skillset. Ring holds valuable leadership experience from senior roles at GE and as founder of DC Blox, a Tier 3 colocation provider in the United States. It is the WindChill modular system on which GIGA is pinning its hopes for rapid growth and disruption of the sector. While the majority
of providers continue to offer the raised floor design prevalent in data centres for more than 30 years, WindChill delivers the essentials of power and cooling within an innovative, ground-up specification. “Our modular data centre is a private suite; ten racks, 52U high, and what is very unique about WindChill is that every server gets the same amount of air and cooling,” says Robbins. “In a brick-and-mortar data centre, you have air usually coming through the floor and passing through the servers, and this creates hotspots. In ours, you can have a rack or a cabinet at 5kW sitting next to a rack or a cabinet at 35kW, and each will have their heat load removed completely.” WindChill derives its name from that cutting-edge cooling method. Based on the process of adiabatic cooling, a technique that has 13 Issue 7
CASE STUDY
— Smart data needs smart power
— The Best of Both: ABB + GE Industrial Solutions Following the acquisition of GE Industrial Solutions, ABB’s combined portfolio now offers the most comprehensive, one-line construction package available today, ready to meet current and future data center project needs. To learn more about ABB’s complete electrification and digital solutions for data centers, visit: www.abb.com/datacenters
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GIGA DC
ABB is making significant product portfolio investments to deliver a more technologically advanced and digitally connected offering. These investments will allow data center companies to take advantage of ABB’s cloud-based digital offering, ABB Ability™. For example, by leveraging ABB Ekip UP smart units, existing AKD switchgear can be connected directly to the ABB Ability™ Electrical Distribution Control System to deliver digital transformation without impact. Also, by leveraging the best of both portfolios, ABB will introduce the next generation of automatic transfer switch technology. Updated Zenith ZTX and ZTG series’ transfer switches from Industrial Solutions, powered by ABB’s breakthrough TruONE™ technology, have been designed to increase system reliability, connectivity, and ease of use.
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CASE STUDY
been around since the days of Ancient Egypt, the design includes an automated louvre system controlled by proprietary software run by a Siemens programmable logic controller (PLC) - that manages the flow of air. Air enters a three-stage filter before passing through a fibreglass adiabatic media, collecting heat from the servers and then exhausting that heat outside the unit. Extra control over temperature and humidity can be applied with variable speed fans and solenoid valves, which are used to drip water onto the media, creating an additional cooling effect with the passing air. Water usage is considerably reduced when compared to traditional techniques. “The WindChill enclosure itself will operate at 80% less power than a 16 DIGITAL BULLETIN
normal data centre and use over 95% less water than a chilled water system,” Robbins reveals. Trust in this efficiency means GIGA can guarantee a PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness, of 1.15 or lower at its locations. PUE is calculated by dividing the power entering a data centre by the power consumed by the IT servers and equipment, in this instance housed in the WindChill enclosures. With 1.0 being perfect, GIGA’s 1.15 falls well below the industry average of between 1.7 and 2.0. This efficiency doesn’t, however, come at the expense of density. GIGA offers up to 50kW per rack cabinet and a flexible approach to power provision that means customers only pay for what they use. This means it can comfortably support the hyper-converged and high-performance compute workloads of those building highdensity applications. “I believe it is a huge value proposition,” says Longacre. “You have customers that have multiple applications such as Artificial Intelligence or IoT (Internet of Things), as well as high-performance compute and virtual environments. Normally when you combine those things, companies have to break them apart and treat those racks differently. In our solution, you’re able to consolidate those racks and bring them all together.”
GIGA DC
ABB supplies GIGA DC with its TLE Series of UPS products 17 Issue 7
CASE STUDY
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GIGA DC
Early data center collaboration improves design efficiency and reduces cost. Creating perfect places for data. That's Ingenuity for Life. Our data center experts are with you every step of the way to help you plan, implement, and service your facility to ensure optimal performance. We begin by working with you in the pre-construction phase, creating a technology road map that takes a holistic view of specifying building technologies. This approach allows new technologies to integrate seamlessly and reduces complexity and capital costs. We can also support you with continuous commissioning, documentation, training, and planning for future expansions. • • • • • •
Compress commissioning timelines Increase scalability and deployment speed Lower CAPEX and OPEX costs Maintain uptime and reliability Reduce project risk Open on time usa.siemens.com/datacenters
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CASE STUDY
Add in the LEGO-like capacity to duplicate WindChill modules to meet client demand - Ring says GIGA can provide additional enclosures within two weeks and it quickly becomes apparent why the company feels that it is orchestrating significant change in the colocation space. GIGA’s four strategic partners have and will continue to play a crucial role, with a group of high-profile industrial specialists backing its proposition. Lenovo’s TruScale Infrastructure Services help GIGA deliver compute on-demand to customers, while Nutanix supplies its overlay to that solution, enabling GIGA’s hyperconverged capability delivered as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (or IaaS). The relationship with Siemens allows GIGA to leverage a standardised design and have true
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automation and visibility inside its data centres. It achieves this with Desigo™ CC, Siemens’ fully modular and scalable building automation system, and its WinPM. Net complete energy information management solution. Ring praised the speed of Siemens’ deployment and believes the systems will be invaluable as GIGA grows. He comments: “It was able to do that [deployment] quickly and comprehensively, giving us access to all of the equipment in the [Mooresville] facility, not only from being able to manage and operate but also to control and modify so that we can have true automation. As we’re going forward, being able to have that kind of networked capability will allow us to see the operation of all the different data centres that we’re building through one system.”
GIGA DC
GIGA DC’s leadership team with Siemens’ Peter Lukomski (far left) and Dante Alex Maranan (centre) 21 Issue 7
CASE STUDY
GIGA DC planted a ceremonial tree at the unveiling of its new site ABB is another key partner for GIGA, supplying its TLE Series of UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) products to back up GIGA’s power supply. It has also integrated DPA 500, its legacy UPS, in GIGA’s network room, where it required a smaller but scalable solution. Ring is already familiar with ABB’s portfolio - he was an original sponsor for the TLE Series while at GE, which saw its Industrial Solutions division acquired by ABB in 2018. “I knew what the performance of those products was going to be,” he says. “Its UPS runs at 97% efficiency; it’s one of the highestperforming and efficient on the market. Coupled with the LG lithium ion batteries that we’re using, it meant that we had, really from a total cost of ownership, the best cost and most efficient power support system that we could get.” The high-level specification 22 DIGITAL BULLETIN
on offer from GIGA has seen its Mooresville site achieve significant recognition: it is the first data centre in North America to obtain ‘OCP Ready’ status from the Open Compute Project. The OCP publically shares modern data centre product designs to hasten the development of hardware in line with accelerating computing demands. A communityfocused project, the OCP counts the likes of Microsoft, Google and Facebook among its members and it lays out a number of power and efficiency requirements for data centres to receive approval. Mooresville has ticked all the boxes, as Ring expands upon: “Through the OCP, we’ve had access to the equipment that’s being used in Google, Facebook, and Microsoft data centres, and now we’re able to use those same switches and benefit from the lower cost. We can
GIGA DC
GIGA DC’S FOUR-PART VALUE PROPOSITION COST
50% cheaper than a traditional data centre build
FLEXIBILITY
Power configuration from 5kW to 50kW per rack
EFFICIENCY
Guaranteed PUE rating of 1.15 or lower
SCALABILITY
On-site assembly of new WindChill enclosures within two weeks
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CASE STUDY
have racks delivered and put into use and performance immediately, with the confidence of knowing that it’s operating to those standards.” A historical look at GIGA’s Mooresville location will reveal a fascinating backstory. Situated in the country’s ‘heart of motorsports’, the 21-acre facility was previously a base for Dale Earnhardt Inc., a NASCAR organisation founded by the legendary racing driver. Auto products were built and tested on site before it was sold to Ginn Racing in 2006, with the area vacated for three years prior to GIGA moving in. “A friend of mine pointed out to me that this location was something I needed to check out,” Ring reveals. “He was helping a new NASCAR race team find a location in Mooresville when he came across the facility.” As it happened, GIGA had stumbled upon the perfect spot for a data centre. It is connected directly to two Duke Energy power generation plants next to Lake Norman and is also supported by its own on-premise substation. Additionally, it is served by five major carriers whose MPLS networks are accessible from the facility. Authorities in North Carolina have worked closely with GIGA and sanctioned sales and use 24 DIGITAL BULLETIN
tax exemption on purchased equipment until 2029, including on electricity - with these savings being passed on to customers. Nearby Davidson College, along with services such as the local fire and police departments, have also contributed in a concerted effort from GIGA and the people of Mooresville. “We have been able to make a difference to Mooresville,” Robbins adds. “We’ve hired everybody locally and this has an impact on this economy. This data centre will put Mooresville on the map as having one of the most energy efficient data centres in the world.” GIGA now plans to replicate its Mooresville setup throughout North America. Its aggressive growth strategy targets Tier 2 markets where its low-cost offering will be compelling in expensive areas like Massachusetts or California. Specifically, GIGA is exploring sites near major metropolitan areas in order to deliver low-latency performance close to its clients. David Shepard, recently appointed as GIGA’s Chief Revenue Officer, is one driver behind this expansion plan and he believes the company is primed to scale. “The beauty of what we have is that it is designed to be reproducible over and over and over again,” Shepard says. “We’re
GIGA DC
What is very unique about WindChill is that every server gets the same amount of air and cooling� Daniel Robbins
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CASE STUDY
You have customers
There’s going to be a lot of change in that have but multiple the landscape, my sense is that Lenovo will be a $100such billion as company applications that really is going to be on the Artificial Intelligence cutting-edge of technology”
or IoT”
James Longacre
not trying to be just a local provider. We’re looking to expand very aggressively over the next three to five years. As we do that, we know having the ability to reproduce exactly what we have done in Mooresville, and control our costs, makes a big difference. If you’re bespoke every time you need to build another data centre, you’re going to run into problems. You can solve those by what we do with the WindChill.” 26 DIGITAL BULLETIN
Service delivery is the outstanding priority for GIGA. With Gartner estimating that between 70-90% of all companies are now using the cloud, standing out in a data centre market projected to experience incremental growth of $142 billion inside the next two years is ever more challenging. Ring truly believes that GIGA’s cost efficient, customer-centric proposal will move the needle. “It’s a different approach to take,
GIGA DC
but if you’re a really focused service organisation, shouldn’t your focus be on how you can help your customer do better and improve their costs?” he summarises. “We see that as a mission that is kind of noble, because we’re trying to help reduce the amount of resources that are having to be deployed. “There’s a lot of concern about the data centre industry, using so much power that it does. A lot of that power is still not being
developed in a sustainable way, so how can we help in that fashion? But also in helping companies in reducing the costs that they have? Because data is the new oil, as we like to say. Content and data never sleeps.”
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NETWORKS
SIMPLIFYING TRANSFORMATION Deutsche Telekom has gone back to basics with its transformation programme, achieving some eye-opening results. Its VP, Borislav Tadić, tells us how... AUTHOR: JAMES HENDERSON
T
he rhetoric around digital and technology transformations is usually grandiose; companies and executives are keen to tell the world about their large-scale programmes and initiatives driven by multi-million dollar technologies and group-wide culture shifts. It is understandable; to transform anything, let alone a business, takes no little planning, effort and skill to execute. But with somewhere between 60-80% of transformations failing to bear fruit, and just five percent meeting or exceeding expectations, a rethink is perhaps needed. It is a conundrum that was faced
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by Deutsche Telekom’s VP, Borislav Tadić, in 2016, when he was tasked with devising a roadmap to transform the company’s Data Privacy, Security, Legal Affairs, Compliance, Audit and Risk Management (DRC) department. Eschewing the common approach, Tadić went back to basics. “When people do digitalisation and transformation programmes, they often start with tools, but from my experience you should start with simplification and acceleration of processes and policies. That means firstly looking at your internal policies, and we found that the DRC board was in charge of more than 20 of them,” he tells Digital Bulletin.
DEUTSCHE TELEKOM
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What we were able to do is improve our service and customer experience, while reducing costs, which some people will tell you is not possible”
“Of that number, some 40% were not necessary at all; they are not expected by lawmakers, stakeholders or our internal demands, which was really a legacy you might expect from a company of this size. We swiftly eliminated hundreds of pages of policies and controls that were not necessary anymore. “We then looked at which of our policies were truly adding value and either helping us on the customer side, our revenues, or helping us be more efficient with our processes within the business. The result is the remaining policies are leaner, easier to understand and far more business focused.” Tadić sums the approach up as “simplification”, which is characterised
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by how it has changed the way it categorises external apps and platforms. Whereas previously it had blacklisted programmes such WhatsApp by default until review, they are now – with a few small exceptions, such as highly-classified technologies – whitelisted, and then only blacklisted if there is a business or security reason to do so. It is, says Tadić, an example of agility in action. It is a step change that Deutsche Telekom has combined with a period of consultation with its employees to change the mindset from one of passive support to one of proactive engagements. “It’s not good enough to just say things can’t be done because of data privacy regulations, for example, but
DEUTSCHE TELEKOM
to say: ‘look, there is a solution, and this is the way to do it successfully’,” he explains. “It is about going a step further, and making additional effort to help customers, and this really speaks to driving cultural change to go the extra mile.” The approach has garnered some pretty extraordinary results, not least a 25% operations expenditure reduction (OpEx). Often, companies shout about such figures while neglecting to mention the raft of staff cuts that have contributed to the saving. Not so at Deutsche Telekom, says Tadić. “It is something really tangible, and there are a number of factors that have contributed to it. One thing we focused on was leveraging our shared services across our operational and
governance functions. Now we want to go further and establish a leaner company approach and a tighter business support, as well as addressing the topics of digital responsibility and the monetisation of certain practices and services that we use internally to support our revenue lines.” Tadić gives an example of “hidden gems” that Deutsche Telekom has uncovered as part of its root and branch simplification effort, which included reviewing all of its major cost levers. The initiative uncovered a number of hidden costs. “A good example is there were numerous people that had VIP support, so IT support where technicians come on site to help with troubleshooting,” he says. “We found that many people
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The Bulletin
HIGHLIGHTS
Vodafone given go ahead to buy Liberty Global cable assets for $20.7 billion
Vodafone has been given the go ahead to acquire Liberty Global cable assets in Germany and eastern Europe for $20.7 billion. Vodafone announced the deal last year, but the European Commission has been investigating the deal over competition concerns. But Vodafone has given assurances to the EU that it will give Telefonica Deutschland access to its high-speed broadband network. (18/07/19) MORE ON THIS STORY The Bulletin is our stream of the most relevant enterprise technology news, aggregated from highly-respected sources and packaged in a short, digestible format, delivering a simple yet indispensable read. A one-stop shop for all of the newest major developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, The Bulletin, available at digitalbullet.in, is a vital and dependable resource for technology professionals.
DEUTSCHE TELEKOM
When people do digitalisation and transformation programmes, they often start with tools, but from my experience you should start with simplification and acceleration of processes and policies” Borislav Tadić
didn’t know that they had it, most of them didn’t need it, and it was 10 or 15 times more expensive to do than the normal support. “When we changed it people lost nothing, but it was more suitable for us and easily managed. There were multiple examples that I call ‘hidden gems’ that we found when we carried out detailed analysis. The first instinct is always to think that you’ve already looked everywhere and there’s nothing else to find. But in reality, nobody has looked for a couple of years and there are new things to find that can be improved.” In addition, the division held detailed discussions with internal and external customers and stakeholders to pinpoint areas of its service that were not adding value, or were no longer relevant. “What we were able to do is improve our service and customer experience, while reducing costs, which some
people will tell you is not possible because they are somehow correlated,” Tadić comments. “But take this example: we spoke with our customers and they told us about some unnecessary steps that we take in our interactions or about some features they really don’t need, or used in years gone by but aren’t really needed anymore. “When we went through these customer discussions to improve the customer experience, we realised there were numerous things we were doing or offering that we thought were necessary as part of our infrastructure or projects. So when we took them out it eliminated something that wasn’t adding value and it saved us money. I think we showed you can simultaneously work on the customer experience while also reducing cost.” Having begun the transformation programme two and a half years ago,
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NETWORKS
a number of the DRC’s 14 core initiatives are entering their final phase. But having achieved so much, Tadić and Deutsche Telekom are focused on how it can build on its progress. “A transformation is a never-ending process, you can always optimise, you can always improve something. What we are currently focussing on is reducing the number of unnecessary fields, paper and steps across the business. So, we’re proceeding with that,” he says. “We are also continuing to press on with our self-service plans, both
internally and externally. We’ve developed many tools that enable you to do that with a couple of clicks and without expert knowledge that can build documents that are just as good as you’d get if you dealt with us directly, including NDAs or standardised contracts. It makes things much easier for our internal people and our external customers, so we really want to continue to focus on that.” And while the beginnings of the transformation programme could be characterised as a ‘nuts and bolts’ exercise, Deutsche Telekom is fully
A transformation is a never-ending process, you can always optimise, you can always improve something”
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DEUTSCHE TELEKOM
invested in the potential of future technologies such as AI, machine learning, IoT and AR. “We are using and want to improve the use of AI tools for automated analysis of certain processes, which can give us feedback about which steps need more work, or more security,” Tadić adds. “In addition, we’re utilising AR, which we think can be of use in terms of compliance or transformation. We want to think about how we can better motivate our employees to participate and better understand our training
materials and awareness measures. And we have been using AR – which we found to be very affordable – and found the engagement with our employees has really increased. “We are also experimenting with blockchain in the context of internal power of attorney and it is connected with many HR and IT systems. What we need to do is determine after that testing whether blockchain is something that we can leverage, and we have fantastic partners around the company who can help us with that.” On the strength of transformation built on simplicity, the next phase will likely be driven by the technologies that are changing the face of business. But in summarising the key factors in the success of the initiatives to date, Tadić reserves the last word for his employees. “In every transformation, you need to put the people in the centre and not in some flag waving kind of sense,” he says. “I’ve spoken a lot about how we interact with our customers both internal and external, but it’s also important to focus on your own employees and it has been critical to travel to various sites and speak to them about what is really important. “The time we have spent speaking with them has been so valuable and it is essential they realise how important they are in this and how proud we are of them. They’ve made a real difference.”
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SERVICES
COMMAND The AWS Summit Series offers a peek inside cloud computing’s dominant force. Digital Bulletin visited the London event to discover the secrets of AWS’s era-defining success
AUTHOR: BEN MOUNCER
T
he lights dimmed and smoke enveloped the 7,000-capacity ICC Auditorium. London ExCel’s hall - the biggest of its kind in the United Kingdom - might just have been hosting a concert or a boxing match. But this was the dramatic opening to 2019’s AWS Summit, London’s turn to host the Amazon Web Services travelling
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exhibition that is the AWS Summit Series. As thousands of employees, customers and visitors gathered inside the auditorium for an opening keynote, the scale of AWS’ reach quickly hit home. Scale is always prevalent at any AWS event. Not just the scale of the exhibition itself, but also the sheer size of what is now firmly established as the world’s foremost public cloud provider. Learning about the density of services available
AWS
DING CLOUD
to customers might astonish those who have only surface knowledge of the cloud computing industry. The growth of AWS - ever since its official launch in 2006 - has been relentless. Today it offers products that aid clients with compute, databases, IoT, machine learning, networking, security and much more. How did it happen? Ian Massingham, who works as Director of AWS
Evangelism, says the business always begins by focusing on customers’ needs before developing the product. “We’ve been able to build something that’s been really impactful, but we’ve done it in an organic way,” he tells Digital Bulletin. “It’s a very simple process of just listening carefully to the needs of customers and either solving those needs directly, or inventing solutions that are in the middle of a cluster of
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SERVICES
One of the big themes of our company is experimentation and the importance of experimentation in building successful products”
needs that a lot of customers have.” This is a strategy that has served AWS perfectly as it’s expanded alongside the technology demands of customers. At the beginning of its journey - when Amazon required a simple but robust on-premise environment to support its flourishing e-commerce business - not even those in charge foresaw what was to come. “I wasn’t there at the beginning but I’ve spent a lot of time with executives in the company that were there, and the main thing that you hear from them is that they didn’t know whether or not AWS was going to be a success,” explains Massingham. “One of the big themes of our company is experimentation and the importance of experimentation in building successful products. Well,
CUSTOMER STORY - ADSTREAM Adstream’s innovative advertising platform uses advanced technology to help leading brands manage the creation, storage and delivery of content. It has been an AWS customer for nearly 10 years but has deepened that collaboration under the guidance of Chief Technology Officer Katie Nykanen, becoming an advanced technology partner. “We now have the benefit of a great relationship,” says Nykanen. “We’ve been talking to 40 DIGITAL BULLETIN
it about what we do around data warehousing and ML, for example so what we do in the future. “I’ve got to increase my data team quite significantly. One option is that I can go and hire more people, or one option is that I can go and talk to AWS about architect consultants who can help us, using services that it has already built and used elsewhere.” This approach could be crucial for Adstream going forward, especially as the skills gap in
AWS
Amazon Web Services itself was an experiment. We had an idea. Our own teams thought the way in which we were creating and expressing different services was valuable to them, but we didn’t know definitively that it would be a big hit with developers and later with IT professionals and enterprises.”
technology grows. Nykanen adds: “With things like natural language processing, content recognition - I could go out and try and hire four or five people, but I would struggle so much. “It’s hugely competitive and salaries are ridiculously high. You know you’re not going to get somebody who will work with you for five years, so you’re almost better to work with a partner who has got access to capabilities. “When I first joined, we hadn’t
Listen to customers at the AWS Summit and this capacity for experimentation, along with its velocity of development, is one of the main reasons why businesses of all types find themselves turning to AWS. It currently operates nearly 150 services under 23 separate product
Katie Nykanen, Adstream CTO
really embraced cloud. All we had done was bought some servers off AWS instead of buying them off the data centre down the road. Now we’re in a different situation and it’s a very nice place to be.” 41 Issue 7
The Bulletin
HIGHLIGHTS
Equinix strengthens AWS ties to enable digital transformations
Equinix is to straighten its relationship with AWS to offer enhanced cloud connectivity that helps enterprises accelerate their journey to AWS via a private cloud network onramp. Equinix is participating in the launch of the new AWS Direct Connect Service Delivery Programme, which allows customers to use Hosted Connections with 1G, 2G, 5G and 10G capacities on Equinix Cloud. (26/07/19) MORE ON THIS STORY The Bulletin is our stream of the most relevant enterprise technology news, aggregated from highly-respected sources and packaged in a short, digestible format, delivering a simple yet indispensable read. A one-stop shop for all of the newest major developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, The Bulletin, available at digitalbullet.in, is a vital and dependable resource for technology professionals.
AWS
We don’t overload existing teams with more and more responsibility. When we want to create a new service, we essentially spin up a new team to create that new service”
Ian Massingham, AWS Technical Evangelist
categories, numbers that have increased at a rapid rate in recent years. Massingham says the key to this pace of development has been the agile deployment of its own staff. “The secret ingredient is that we don’t overload existing teams with more and more responsibility. When we want to create a new service, we essentially spin up a new team to create that new service,” he reveals. “We write what we call a ‘Working Backwards Document’, which is a press release that describes how the service will be explained to customers to the external world when we launch it. From that press release, we then work backwards to create the product. So that’s really how our model works. “The second component is service reuse; if we’re building a new highperformance compute service, for
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SERVICES
You need far less resources with cloud but those resources, those people, need a different mix of skills” CUSTOMER STORY - DUNELM Dunelm is a leading British home retailer. It has transitioned from a fully-outsourced IT capability to managing an internal team and a growing relationship with AWS. Tonino Greco is the company’s Head of Infrastructure and DevOps. Greco joined Dunelm when it acquired his previous employer, Worldstores. The acquisition marked the beginning of Dunelm’s digital transformation after it pinpointed Worldstores’ technology portfolio. It has since restructured its development teams to focus on building serverless architectures with AWS Lambda. “It’s been an interesting journey, mainly from how we get from where we were, which was very nondevelopment focused, to being extremely tech-focused,” he says. “AWS has supported us really well in helping us get to where we want to be. “With serverless, we don’t have to pay for compute that we’re not
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using, and that passes on to our customers as well. We have tonnes of automation that makes sure that when we have environments that we no longer use or are no longer needed in AWS, we accommodate that. But we also make sure that we keep up to date with what AWS is giving out and what’s new. “We’ve got engineers who want to live on the bleeding edge all the time. Every now and then, we get an email from AWS which has new features that we want to play with! We definitely keep our eye on their development.”
AWS
example, we build it on top of our existing EC2 computing platform.” Most ambitious enterprise players turn to these products because of an incapacity to incubate their own solutions. AWS has timed its run perfectly to capitalise on the lack of skills available to companies but even AWS struggles to fill the roles it requires, especially in software engineering and development. Research indicates more than one million software engineering jobs will be available in the United States alone in 2020. For AWS, this issue spreads globally but Massingham believes that innovation can still be achieved without deep technical expertise. “It’s a great environment at AWS but I would be lying if I told you that we have every software engineer and every developer that we needed to do everything we want to do,” he admits. “We wouldn’t have thousands of vacancies all over the world if that was the case. “In aggregate, you need far less resources with cloud but those resources, those people, need a different mix of skills. We must
motivate more people to go into these professions, particularly those people that are underrepresented in the workforce; it might be women, it might be other minorities. We need to do a better job on that.” The AWS Summit Series acts as a vehicle for AWS to broadcast its services and vision to the world. But often the most convincing endorsements come from customers themselves, which is why the principle purpose of the Series is to facilitate peer-to-peer networking for users at various stages of cloud deployment. Major clients from the likes of Sainsbury’s and Faculty were invited to tell their own stories during the keynote and this is where Massingham sees the real value. “We spend a lot of time trying to figure out what we should have on the agenda and how we should structure these events,” he concludes. “Of course we spend a huge amount of effort to try to get customer speakers to participate. “There are customers here who are a lot earlier in their journeys, so for them to see other customers who have already overcome obstacles that they may face, I find that really inspiring. It’s probably even more relevant if you’re the customer - you can learn from what your peers in the industry have done. I think that’s a really underappreciated and valuable component of this event.”
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DATA & SECURITY
PLOTTING DATA JOURNEYS
In a world where every company bills itself as being datacentric, the vast majority are still falling well short, says Delphix’s VP of data transformation, Sanjeev Sharma
AUTHOR: JAMES HENDERSON
W
e live in a data driven economy, where it seems every company wants to position itself as a leading data business and leverage its data as a strategic asset to enable innovation and build a reputation as a market leader. But the data explosion seen in recent years leaves many companies in a difficult position, unable to deliver the necessary datasets or volumes to satisfy the
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industry’s real innovators. To truly lead, companies are faced with balancing the need to manage and secure a wide array of data, while also making that data readily available to those who need it. Most companies realise that they need to make their data a strategic asset, but the majority are struggling to see that effort through to execution. Delphix’s VP of data transformation, Sanjeev Sharma, is all too aware of this issue. The company prides itself
DELPHIX
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DATA & SECURITY
Code has a functionality we should be striving for in that it can be shared, coded, pulled back to previous versions and cloned in a collaborative environment”
Sanjeev Sharma
on its ability to deliver data quickly and securely to fuel critical digital transformation initiatives for many of the world’s leading companies, and is acutely aware of the pitfalls and errors businesses are making when it comes to data. “It is clear that applications are becoming increasingly data intensive; IoT, data science, AI and machine learning are all making data agility a major problem,” says Sharma. “More than half AI and data science projects fail because of data issues, so either the data is not available, the data is not cleansed, or the data is not agile. What we 48 DIGITAL BULLETIN
are trying to do is help address all of these challenges.” It was this desire to adapt and improve how companies collect and use their data that initially led Sharma to Delphix. Internationally renowned in the cloud and DevOps community, Sharma spent 15 years with IBM, helping clients with their transformations. He says that clients were increasingly saying their data was a block to adopting DevOps and pushing forward transformation efforts. “Clients kept asking me what they should be doing with their data; they were finding that their data was the slowest part of the life cycle. I was coming up against the same problems, where it was taking five days to get refreshed data or I was working with synthetic data, which doesn’t always behave in the right way,” Sharma comments. “It made me want to go on a journey to find companies that were addressing these issues, and that is the reason I discovered Delphix. Some friends of mine pointed me in this direction and I quickly saw that it was working to resolve the problems clients were regularly speaking to me about.” Sharma cites computer code as an element of technology that enterprise has effectively democratised, making it easy for stakeholders to share, collaborate
DELPHIX
and test in an agile manner. It is a benchmark that could be used to measure how well businesses are working en masses on their datasets. “What Delphix is doing is providing the tools as a platform to enable engineers, practitioners - from developers to QA practitioners to E1s - and data scientists to access, manage, govern, share and collaborate around data the very same way they can do around code. Code has a functionality we should be striving for in that it can be shared, coded, pulled back to previous versions and cloned in a
collaborative environment,” he says. “These are capabilities that haven’t existed for data, so that’s really key to what we are trying to provide. We are helping companies to ingest production datasets, continuously keep them updated and make that visualised data available whenever it is needed to whomever wants it. “They can also get service capabilities via API and command lines to integrate it into their delivery pipeline, manipulate it, share it, collaborate with the data, as well as carrying out all kinds of testing that can be saved or rolled back. 49 Issue 7
The Bulletin
HIGHLIGHTS
Facebook to create board committee on privacy
Facebook is to establish a privacy panel as part of its settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. It is also set to pay the $5 billion fine widely reported earlier this month. The board panel will agree to new executive certifications that users’ privacy is being properly protected. Mark Zuckerberg also will have to certify safeguarding processes every three months. (24/07/19) MORE ON THIS STORY The Bulletin is our stream of the most relevant enterprise technology news, aggregated from highly-respected sources and packaged in a short, digestible format, delivering a simple yet indispensable read. A one-stop shop for all of the newest major developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, The Bulletin, available at digitalbullet.in, is a vital and dependable resource for technology professionals.
DELPHIX
“All these kinds of manipulations are done so using virtual instances, as doing so with physical data is both expensive and technically difficult. At the same time, we can make the data secure and compliant with our masking and policy based controls, making it, reducing the exposure in the nonproduction environments.” Companies failing to properly manage and treat their data will find themselves falling behind those with leading data processes and procedures, says Sanjeev, potentially leading to a two-tier system made up by data haves and data have-nots. And, in an industry that is as competitive as ever, using highly skilled administrative experts to reverse a failing data approach represents an expensive and likely wasteful course of action. “The biggest pitfall for companies not making their data agile is that they can only move as fast as the slowest layer in the technology stack. Even those who address all the other layers in the stack cannot go faster than their data. If, as a business, you’re doing two-week sprints but it’s taking five days to test the data, that’s a lot of waiting around,” Sanjeev states. “I was talking to an organisation very recently and it has a particular project that is suffering from a
major backlog of requests from engineers, developers, testers, and data scientists. All of those requests are essentially menial labour work; they are asking for database clones or refresh of copies from a few months ago. These are not tasks data administrators should be hired for. They’re an expensive commodity, so why would you use them for low level tasks like pruning databases? “The answer to those organisations is that if you don’t want to be left behind in this innovation race, they need to provide self-service access to non-production data. My advice 51 Issue 7
DATA & SECURITY
The biggest pitfall for companies not making their data agile is that they can only move as fast as the slowest layer in the technology stack�
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DELPHIX
would be to allow the ability to provision, manage and refresh nonproduction data to your engineers, in the same way they’re giving them the ability to do that with continuous integration, continuous delivery.” However, in reality many companies are struggling to put such processes in place, says Sanjeev. In an era where companies like to define themselves as data companies first and foremost, actually being one remains a mere aspiration for the vast majority. “I often ask companies how clean their data is, and usually I see smirking and laughing,” he says. “I recently had one tell me that a company they had divested three years prior was still showing up in data reports. Similarly, I was talking to an insurance company yesterday and they discovered a customer whose age according to the system is over a thousand years old. “That’s the challenge that is being had with cleansing data, it can be really messy. Having a welldefined data governance and data management approach is what organisations need to focus on. And as an industry we are not doing a good job.” Against the backdrop of GDPR fines and probes into how the likes of Facebook and Amazon are using data, that could spell trouble for a number of businesses.
Companies should view this new era of regulation as a jumping off point for vast improvement and lasting change when it comes to data management and processes, says Sanjeev. “There is certainly a balance to be struck between innovation with the regulatory pressures, and we know a number of startups simply folded because there was no way their model could comply with GDPR,” he observes. “At the same time, I can walk into any compliance team and see that fixes to issues were made years ago that are still being used but where there has been a sea change in the years since, these policies need to be revisited. We are creating technical debts because nobody is revisiting policies or carrying out governance. “All that happens is new policies and new governance rules get created, which are layered on top of what is already there. I was talking to a company just last month and every change made to the data model has to be approved by a change control board. That is ridiculous, and stifles innovation. “Data modellers end up trying to game the system to bundle up changes or hide them from the board, which is clearly too. That’s the kind of compliance which organisations need to focus on aggressively.” 53 Issue 7
PEOPLE
PUTTING EMPLOYEES FIRST Ceridian’s Ross Tracey on the tech-driven human capital management market, why employees are more valued than ever and how AI is revolutionising the workplace
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CERIDIAN
C
ould you provide an overview of what Ceridian does? Ceridian is a global human capital management, or HCM, technology company. We’re one of the fastest-growing in the marketplace and we’re really focused on bringing innovation to that market.
Dayforce, our flagship product, is a comprehensive human capital management platform. We work across all industry sectors within the global space and we’ve got over 3,800 customers live on the platform. In December last year, we saw over one million daily sessions on our mobile app, which was a great milestone for us. 55 Issue 7
PEOPLE
In recent years, the concept of employee experience has steadily moved up the list of company priorities” Ross Tracey What are the newest capabilities to have been added to the Dayforce platform? One of the key things with Dayforce is the fact that it’s a single platform. It has a single rules engine and database and that enables deeper insights for organisations and a much better employee experience. We continue to innovate. If you look just in the payroll space last year we rolled out UK payroll, this year we’re adding Australia, and in January 2020 we’re adding the Republic of Ireland. We expect to roll out two new countries per year after that. On the talent side, we’ve added compensation management, 56 DIGITAL BULLETIN
succession planning and learning capabilities. This year, just a few of the things we’re adding include Dayforce Assistant, on-demand pay, salary benchmarking and engagement surveys. We continue to innovate on a very regular basis, building on the track record we’re got. Let’s discuss some of the trends in your industry. Talent management is a much-discussed topic - what are the advancements that Ceridian is making in this area? Our approach to talent management has been to drive employee engagement by providing a holistic experience centred on the individual, not individual modules. To cater to a modern workforce, organisations need to adapt their people strategy, to meet their everchanging expectations, and to be able to attract and retain people in a competitive and dynamic talent market. As I mentioned earlier, we’ve expanded Dayforce’s talent management capabilities to encompass the employee lifecycle. For instance, with Dayforce Compensation Management, particularly with Gender Pay reporting mandatory in the UK, companies can make decisions based on meaningful data-driven insights including performance
CERIDIAN
Ceridian’s Dayforce platform
and compensation history, tenure and salary range. We can provide support tools like a gender pay equity graph and an auto-allocate tool that recommends suggested compensation changes to management and leadership. How prevalent is the ‘consumerisation’ of the employee experience from your own dealings with companies? Employees today expect their experience at work to be comparable to that of their experience as consumers – one that’s personal, tailored to their needs, and is synced at every touchpoint. Best-in-class companies will attract – and keep – their top talent based in part on how well they differentiate themselves
with employee-centric experiences. This expectation is top of mind when we design Dayforce and it’s having positive results. One of our customers - a large manufacturing company with plants based globally - found that during the implementation phase of Dayforce, plants who had gone live with our technology had experienced an uplift in employee engagement versus those who had yet to launch. In recent years, the concept of employee experience has steadily moved up the list of company priorities. This greater focus on the employee experience also aligns with HR’s changing role of becoming a more strategic business partner, with HR leaders saying that employee experience is either important or very important 57 Issue 7
The Bulletin
HIGHLIGHTS
Accenture appoints Julie Sweet as new CEO
Accenture’s board of directors have announced Julie Sweet as its new CEO. David Rowland, currently interim CEO, has been appointed executive chairman. Sweet is currently CEO of Accenture’s business in North America, the company’s largest geographic market with revenues of approximately $18 billion for 2018. Previously, Sweet was Accenture’s general counsel, secretary and chief compliance officer. (12/07/09) MORE ON THIS STORY The Bulletin is our stream of the most relevant enterprise technology news, aggregated from highly-respected sources and packaged in a short, digestible format, delivering a simple yet indispensable read. A one-stop shop for all of the newest major developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, The Bulletin, available at digitalbullet.in, is a vital and dependable resource for technology professionals.
CERIDIAN
HR leaders will play a key role in enabling and improving team collaboration by understanding how workplace factors shape team processes. Organisations will need to focus on establishing a quick and easy on-boarding of permanent as well as contingent workers onto new project teams, managing new learning requirements, project team disassembly and so on.
for their organisation’s success. What’s more, research shows that companies who place an emphasis on employee experience encounter more than four times the average profit and more than two times the average revenue. Teams are now replacing traditional hierarchical structures within business - how do you see this trend developing? The way businesses operate today is highly different to how they operated five or 10 years ago. In the political and business climate we operate in, many companies are increasingly feeling the need to support and enable team dynamics and improve collaboration – so using technology with these functionalities is critical at this point.
How is artificial intelligence (AI) changing how companies manage their workforces? Automation and AI are becoming commonplace in the modern workforce, and contrary to the once commonly held view that technology will make jobs redundant, the greatest near-term impact appears to be that AI is used to augment the actions of humans, rather than to replace them. We see AI having the potential to dramatically improve HR effectiveness, helping employees do their jobs easier and faster, helping managers make smarter decisions, and predicting and recommending future courses of action. What work is Ceridian doing with AI and automation? Within Dayforce there are a number of ways we apply AI and automation. For example, AI can support HR in preventing employees from 59 Issue 7
PEOPLE
THE FUTURE OF WORK
Holistic HCM – For companies operating on an international scale, visibility into the big picture of HCM practices will drive long-term value.
Diversity, inclusion, equity, and privacy – Employees expect companies to take their data privacy, stewardship, and security commitments seriously.
Access to innovation – Enterprises will look for a single source of HR truth that also provides access to innovation.
The rise of teams – HR leaders will play a key role in enabling and improving team collaboration, by redesigning their structures to be built around teams.
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Talent matching – The process of matching candidates to jobs will become smarter, backed by innovative technologies such as chatbots and predictive analytics to assess fit.
Employee learning – A new category of learning software for employees is emerging to cater to content consumption preferences based on experiences with services like YouTube or Netflix.
‘Consumerised’ platforms – In the period of instant gratification, HR teams will be expected to provide employees with an experience at work that is comparable to their experience as consumers.
People analytics – Organisations have passed the pilot phase of people analytics, and are planning new and more powerful uses for these programs at scale.
Employee engagement, wellness, and productivity – Employers will seek to understand the ROI of engagement and wellness, and its connection to productivity by establishing clear definitions and measurable metrics.
Artificial intelligence – The applications of AI across HCM are nearing maturity, and HR practitioners will continue to draw upon its potential to improve their department’s effectiveness; while addressing challenges around bias or inaccurate data.
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CERIDIAN
We see AI having the potential to dramatically improve HR effectiveness”
leaving for another job. Today’s most strategic companies are leveraging machine learning and predictive analytics to help retain top performers, and to identify and address the factors that have the biggest influence on employee flight risk before they become unmanageable and create regrettable turnover. From an efficiency perspective, our workforce management suite offers a number of tools which help leaders to easily schedule people with the right skill sets to meet the requirements of their business. As a result, those leaders can spend more time thinking strategically about how to manage and get the best from their teams.
You’ll reach 10 years at Ceridian in September - talk us through your journey with the company. It’s gone very quickly! I started as program director and then became Chief Technology Officer for the UK. Then three years ago, I became Managing Director for Ceridian in Europe. My work with Ceridian over the last three years has been focused on two things primarily; the employee culture, which has always been fantastic, and then secondly I’ve really enjoyed working with lots of different organisations and helping them meet their business goals by being really passionate about the technology we deliver and making sure we’re successful. 61 Issue 7
AI
AUTOMATION AND HUMANITY’S FUTURE In an attempt to cut through the headlines, Digital Bulletin speaks with author and technology business leader Charles Towers-Clark about a future that will simply have to unite human beings with artificial intelligence
AUTHOR: BEN MOUNCER
J “
ust to be a bit provocative, I put this problem on the same level as climate change.” This is a striking verdict on artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on humanity, specifically the future of work. It comes from Charles Towers-Clark: author, Forbes contributor, CEO of Pod Group,
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and a commentator on how AI and related technologies will affect our everyday lives. Similar proclamations on AI, from across the spectrum of views, are common. In reality, AI is a clunky umbrella term for many intelligent technology forms - but the perception can be different. A shortage of deep understanding has seen AI
CHARLES TOWERS-CLARK
misrepresented as a label for any technology that rivals our own existence, making it immediately divisive as a topic. All of this leaves it a daunting and controversial subject to tackle. Towers-Clark has spent the last four years doing just that. Fascinated by AI’s scope to change the world, he has dedicated part of his professional life to challenging these perceptions, learning
the facts and publishing his thoughts as a Forbes contributor and author of the book ‘The W.E.I.R.D CEO: How to Lead in a World Dominated by Artificial Intelligence’. His view can be distilled into one statement: unless we take significant steps right now, AI will have an irreversible impact on jobs, businesses and society - but perhaps not in the
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AI
way people might assume. “When I started looking at AI, I realised that from a societal point of view, we’re going to have a big issue. I couldn’t see how we can be in a situation where, with the advent of AI, we’re not going to be losing a lot of jobs,” Towers-Clark tells Digital Bulletin. AI will likely lead to job losses: this won’t be news to any readers. But Towers-Clark narrows in on one particular strand of AI - automation - that is already becoming the new cornerstone of business operations. Distinct from the machine automation often associated with AI, automation by this definition is software built to perform mundane tasks. For Towers-Clark, ‘tasks’ is the keyword, not ‘jobs’. Robotic process automation (RPA), as this type of automation is defined, does not displace jobs completely but is a cheap, efficient and fast option for certain tasks within certain roles. Many businesses are deploying RPA solutions today, as outlined in recent data from Gartner that proved it is the fastest-growing enterprise software with 63% market growth. “Eventually, anything that can be put into a process will be automated, and anything that can be automated will be done by a computer or a robot,” adds Towers-Clark. “So once you’ve started on that premise, you start looking at the jobs that we all do, and there are certain parts of every job that we do
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that include processes. “I believe it will actually impact office jobs more than manual jobs. There will be parts of a lawyer’s job, for example, that will be far better done by a computer, but there will always be parts that could only be done by humans. Once you get to lots and lots of parts of that job getting done by a computer, however, you inevitably are going to get to a stage where you’re not going to need so many people in those jobs.” This is a softer prediction around the future of AI in the workplace than the harsher ‘robots replacing humans’ narrative. The notion of employers adjusting or adding roles to function
CHARLES TOWERS-CLARK
When I started looking at AI , I realised that from a societal point of view, we’re going to have a big issue”
alongside technology, rather than replacing them, is supported by many analysts. In fact, projections of job numbers actually increasing because of AI are relatively common. While Gartner doesn’t hide its forecast that 1.8 million roles could be lost to automation in 2020, it counters that by saying 2.3 million new jobs will be created. But Towers-Clark remains sceptical about the ease of that transition against the backdrop of an expanding technology skills gap. “The problem I have with it is the timing,” he explains. “The jobs which we’re creating are fundamentally a different type of job to what we’ve ever
done before. They will require people to take initiative and join bits together which they haven’t previously done. “If you look at the last ‘industrial revolution’, we went from farmers being out in the field doing manual work to then going into the factory - but again they were doing manual work. Whereas what we’re doing here is fundamentally different. We’re taking a process-led society into one where humans need to be joining the dots and be highly skilled and creative, and these are all the things we’re not taught to do.” Such uncertainty around the future jobs market leads to the question of whether many current roles could be successfully augmented with AI, and
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The Bulletin
HIGHLIGHTS
Microsoft backs OpenAI with partnership and $1 billion investment
OpenAI is to work exclusively with Microsoft to build supercomputing and AI capabilities on Azure. The two companies have agreed a multi-year partnership and Microsoft has invested $1 billion to kickstart initiatives. OpenAI - co-founded by Elon Musk - wants to deliver artificial general intelligence: algorithms that mimic the human brain. Satya Nadella says Microsoft aims to ‘democratise AI’. (22/07/19) MORE ON THIS STORY The Bulletin is our stream of the most relevant enterprise technology news, aggregated from highly-respected sources and packaged in a short, digestible format, delivering a simple yet indispensable read. A one-stop shop for all of the newest major developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, The Bulletin, available at digitalbullet.in, is a vital and dependable resource for technology professionals.
CHARLES TOWERS-CLARK
it is this idea which forms the basis of Towers-Clark’s book. In it, he claims that the future of humanity will depend on educators and employers finding the right balance between people and AI. He argues that business leaders must narrow in on the human qualities that cannot be replicated by software or machines, and accept their responsibility to engage employees in a different way as technology threatens their roles. “AI works deep and narrow, whereas humans actually can work wider,” he says. “This means we can see the bigger picture, we can tie things in, we can work out why this process worked better than that one, or how we need to change another process. Artificial General Intelligence is a long way away, so computers don’t have that skill. We do and those are the skills we need to be using.” In Towers-Clark’s book title, W.E.I.R.D is an acronym incorporating such skills: Wisdom, Emotional Intelligence, Initiative, Responsibility and Development. He believes these are the essential characteristics that separate man from machine, so should form the focus of job roles in a future where simple processes are performed by computers. The basic premise is that empowering workers to use their human skills in the right environment will ultimately, along with AI-based technologies, drive a business forward and make
Charles Towers-Clark has been working in the M2M, IoT, and data space since founding Pod Group (a provider of IoT connectivity & billing software) in 1999, and has become greatly interested in how new technologies affect our working lives. Seeing the changes brought by automation, sensor technology, and artificial intelligence first-hand has given him insight into the everyday effects of technological progress. His book ‘The WEIRD CEO’ discusses the impact of AI on the future of work.
those workers indispensable. TowersClark has adopted such a framework at Pod Group, where he encourages ownership from his employees, devolving his responsibilities as CEO and creating a workplace of unusual transparency. Pod Group has since achieved between 50-100% growth year-on-year. This strategy could well be the secret to unlocking human potential in an AI-dominated world, but to work at
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AI
We’re taking a process-led society into one where humans need to be joining the dots and be highly skilled and creative”
scale it would require a fundamental shift in wider policy, according to the author - and now must be the time for action. Education currently places too much emphasis on process-driven learning rather than responsibility and creativity, says Towers-Clark. “This is the reason I’ve started working with schools, because fundamentally it comes back to the fact that we need to be dealing with this at an early age,” he says. “So firstly we need to change education. But secondly we need to change environments. In a lot of companies, managers and CEOs spend their lives working out how to tell people what to do. The environment is not suited to letting people take initiative. If you create the environment, I believe
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that people can do a lot more.” Improving levels of employee engagement isn’t a new imperative for forward-thinking companies. Humans, not technology, are still widely recognised as an organisation’s most valuable asset. With employee engagement at the centre of business strategy, profitability rises by 21% according to Gallup, the US analytics and advisory firm. A recent Oracle study, conducted with Future Workplace, saw 93% of respondents also engage positively with the prospect of embracing AI. Is it possible that enterprise is already on top of these challenges, as it drives forward with the dual-priority of people and technology?
CHARLES TOWERS-CLARK
“There is a bright side,” admits TowersClark. “Part of the reason I wrote the book is because of these debates around AI, but part of it is just in terms of actually just having better businesses. There’s lots of evidence out there - and businesses are moving this way - where the more you empower staff, the better service you’re going to give to your customers.” The honest truth is that it is still near-on impossible to foresee AI’s definite impact, how it will influence us in the workplace and beyond. Right now, leading organisations and governments are grappling with a topic that remains tantalising because of its potential for both positive and negative disruption. Towers-Clark says the
crucial period will come over the next 15 years. “If you look at the things in the history of man that have changed the way we are; you’ve got the steam engine and you’ve got electricity - those two things, for example, changed all aspects of life. I believe the third one is AI,” he concludes. “The interesting thing about AI is that we don’t know where it’s going. People say the Internet was a big changer, and the Internet has improved communication, but AI has the opportunity to completely change society. It has far greater reach and will have a far greater impact in terms of the way we live and work.”
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FUTURE
DISRUPTIN FUTURE-
The transport and mobility sector is being disrupted like never before, an who don’t adapt will be left behind, according to Autocab’s CEO Safa Alk AUTHOR: JAMES HENDERSON
T
echnology is progressing at breakneck speed; the majority of the world’s most valuable companies play in the technology space, with more raising billions on the world’s stock markets with IPOs each month. The pace of change has been ruthless
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in recent years, with the annals of recent history littered with companies too slow to react to the era of innovation and disruption. A sector that can lay claim to being one of the most disrupted industries is transport and mobility, having been turned on its head by the likes of Uber, Lyft and Tesla. It is no exaggeration to
AUTOCAB
NG MOBILITY R E ADY
nd those kateb
say that these companies and their fellow band of disruptors have changed the game. One such business is Autocab, a company that has pivoted its service offering to reflect the changes in technology and thrive in a digital-first world. The UK-based company has operated successfully in the transport
and mobility space for more than a quarter of a decade. Until four years ago it specialised in supplying hardware to the taxi and private hire industries, but having correctly judged the direction of enterprise technology, it has reinvented itself as a software specialist. The company’s CEO, Safa Alkateb,
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talks Digital Bulletin through the decision, saying: “We could see that technology was changing, and that cloud-based infrastructure was becoming affordable with the growth of Azure and AWS. Then there was the proliferation of smartphones with 3G and 4G that incorporate a touchscreen, speaker and GPS, which mean you don’t really need radio anymore. They are all factors that have led to the rise of Uber and the reason we changed our business model to pay-as-you-go Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). “We completed the transition nine months ago, by which I mean that was the point where our recurring revenue became more than our expenses, personnel and infrastructure. We think the company is now twice as valuable as it was when we embarked on the journey – it has been a complete transformation.” The company now offers a suite of digital products that are used by 50% of the UK’s private taxi firms. Solutions range from dispatch systems, accounting packages, invoicing
Safa Alkateb, Autocab CEO
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technology and passenger apps that it white labels to clients. That offering is bolstered by an analytics package that Alkateb says can quickly help companies to improve service and retain customers. Essentially, Autocab offers the complete package that allows taxi firms to run smoothly. Reflecting on how the business has carved out such a significant market share in the UK, Alkateb comments: “You have to want to innovate; if you just sit back and watch you can forget it, the world changes too fast. You have to have that desire to be innovative. Another really important factor is customer centricity. The biggest mistake that technologists make is thinking they understand the problem and developing solutions to solve that problem, rather than listening to customers. You might get 90% right by doing that but that last 10% is the difference between succeeding and failing in the market. “We’ve developed a way of working which means we engage with key smart customers, and we ask them what the problem is rather than telling them. That is the focus, and trust me they’ll tell you their problems. That’s when you work with them and develop solutions, and inspect the problem properly. When you launch the product or solution you work with the customer to deploy it on their site, and you modify it. Only then can you roll out to other customers. Being customer and
AUTOCAB Autocab’s chatbot messenger technology
Young people are all on messaging applications so what we thought is that those platforms are where a lot of future growth will be�
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The Bulletin
HIGHLIGHTS
Toyota to invest $600 million in Chinese ride hailing firm Didi
Toyota has pledged to invest $600 million in Chinese ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing, in an agreement that will see the two companies launch a JV to develop EV technology. Toyota and DiDi plan to shift to full-scale implementation of services that they have been developing in China. Didi and Toyota said last year that it would work together on services that use technology developed by Toyota. (25/07/19) MORE ON THIS STORY The Bulletin is our stream of the most relevant enterprise technology news, aggregated from highly-respected sources and packaged in a short, digestible format, delivering a simple yet indispensable read. A one-stop shop for all of the newest major developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, The Bulletin, available at digitalbullet.in, is a vital and dependable resource for technology professionals.
AUTOCAB
You have to want to innovate; if you just sit back and watch you can forget it, the world changes too fast” problem focused is how you develop market share.” In that spirit of innovation, Alkateb and Autocab are piloting the use of chatbots that integrate with social media messenger platforms to reflect the way younger people are increasingly using technology. “When you ask younger people – and I’m talking about 16/17 year olds – to download an app, they don’t want to do it because they think it is too much work,” he says. “Young people are all on messaging applications so what we thought is that those platforms are where a lot of future growth will be. We developed a concept with some customers and it’s working really well. One customer is already doing 20,000 bookings a month with this and we’re rolling it out to more customers. We expect a lot of adoption.” Keen to leverage its more than 1,000-strong client base in the UK, Autocab launched the iGo Everywhere platform 18 months ago; today, it is the UK’s largest network of taxi and private hire operators – and
now includes operators from over 30 countries. When companies join the iGo network, they are able to send and receive jobs across the UK and the world, which Autocab says helps them compete with the likes of Uber, MyTaxi and Lyft. “We asked our customers if they were interested and today we have 550 of them on the platform,” says Alkateb. “At the same time, you have aggregators who have bookings but not necessarily cars everywhere, and so they have signed up as well. It’s a great place to get transportation, and it uses a single API to book everywhere. We also do all of the due diligence on the companies and monitor performance, so arrival and cancellation rates are acceptable. “I’ll give you some examples of how the marketplace is being used today. Rail disruption happens up and down the country and customers can be displaced. A lot of the time taxis are used to transport people where they need to go, and iGo is being used for that purpose. Another is corporate bookings, and we have a contract
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Most experts believe it will become a subscription model where you or I might pay £500 a month and get all the trips we need”
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with the BBC that uses the network to get people around – we get their employees from point A to point B.” Alkateb says that other corporate clients such as Co-op, RAC and a number of banks are using the service, and it has enabled millions of journeys in the short time it has been in operation. There is, he says, “huge potential” for the platform to develop further, both at home and abroad. As with any conversation about mobility and transport, the spectre of autonomous vehicles is never far away. Alkateb believes predictions of selfdriving cars in the next couple of years are fanciful, but concedes that in time they will become ubiquitous – and bring about one of the biggest step changes ever seen across industry.
AUTOCAB
Autocab’s analytics platform
“In my opinion, we are between 11 and 13 years away from driverless vehicles. Most experts believe that at that point it will become a subscription model where you or I might pay £500 a month and get all the trips we need. The reason it is possible at that price point is that you don’t have a driver involved – most of the cost today is the driver. “Car manufacturers are going from 4% utilisation of a car – because you and I use it 4% of the time – to 50 or 60%, so they are going to sell fewer cars. At the same time, they’re not selling one to me and you and making nice margins; they are going to sell a million to certain service providers, so margins would be under pressure. “They can’t survive at that level but we need them, we need somebody to
make the cars. So, what will happen is that they will start selling cars one trip at a time. They’ll develop apps to take bookings and provide APIs to mobility providers that will allow payments on a per trip basis.” Many companies might see that as a threat, but Alkateb says it represents a huge opportunity; Autocab will be ready to pivot once more. “There are currently two million trips a day through the taxi industry in the UK but if you also take all the other journeys that are being made, that’s about 100 million trips a day. If in the future nobody owns a car anymore, all of these trips will have to be dispatched and so our market will grow hugely. It’s a massive opportunity. Our technology is what is needed for the future.”
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EVENTS EVENTS
DIGITAL BULLETIN ROUNDS UP THE INDUSTRY EVENTS THAT ARE WORTH CLEARING YOUR DIARY FOR…
03-08 AUG BLACK HAT USA 2019 03-08 AUGUST, 2019 MANDALAY BAY, LAS VEGAS Now in its 22nd year, Black Hat USA is the world’s leading information security event, providing attendees with the very latest in research, development and trends. Black Hat USA 2019 opens with four days of technical Trainings (August 3-6). The training provides hands-on offensive and defensive skill-building opportunities. It is followed by the two-day main conference (August 7-8). The final two days will include Black Hat Briefings, presenting cutting-edge research on information security risks & trends. Security experts from around the world will share their latest findings, open-source tools, zero day exploits, and more.
WWW.BLACKHAT.COM/US-19 78 DIGITAL BULLETIN
AUGUST -SEPTEMBER
19 -21 AUG CIO100 SYMPOSIUM AND AWARDS 19-21 AUGUST, 2019 THE BROADMOOR, COLORADO SPRINGS, CO The CIO 100 Symposium is the most powerful gathering of CIOs and senior IT and business executives. This two and a half day executive-level symposium focuses on how to develop, implement and capitalise on innovation through keynotes, sessions, roundtables and briefings facilitated by IT and business experts and from the 2019 CIO 100 and Hall of Fame award winners. In addition, the CIO 100 Symposium takes time to recognise and celebrate the top 100 innovative companies of the year, as well as a new class of Hall of Fame CIOs whose vision, commitment and adaptability stand out as examples of practical leadership in IT.
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EVENTS
21-23 AUG OPEN SOURCE SUMMIT 21-23 AUGUST, 2019 HILTON SAN DIEGO BAYFRONT LinuxCon, ContainerCon, and CloudOpen have combined under one umbrella Open Source Summit. Three events in one, Open Source Summit is a technical conference where 2,000+ developers, operators, and community leadership professionals convene to collaborate, share information and learn about the latest in open technologies, including Linux, containers, cloud computing and more. The event will delve into the newest technologies and latest trends touching open source, including networking, cloud-native, edge computing, AI and much more. EVENTS.LINUXFOUNDATION.ORG/EVENTS/OPEN-SOURCE-SUMMIT-NORTH-AMERICA-2019
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AUGUST -SEPTEMBER
25-29 AUG VMWORLD 25-29 AUGUST, 2019 SAN FRANCISCO VMworld 2019 captures the momentum of today’s rapidly changing IT environment and puts it within attendees grasp so they can accelerate cloud journeys to support their business. VMworld breakout sessions, hands-on labs, workshops, theatre sessions and many more learning opportunities are organised into specific tracks spanning a range of timely topics. They include: hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, modern apps, networking and security, digital workspaces and emerging trends. VMworld says its event is just another IT events, but rather a “discovery powerhouse”.
WWW.VMWORLD.COM/EN/US/INDEX.HTML
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05-06 SEP AI IN FINANCE SUMMIT 05-06 SEPTEMBER, 2019 THE CONVENE, NEW YORK The AI in Finance Summit New York provides the attendees with the opportunity to discover advances in machine learning tools and techniques from the world’s leading innovators across industry, academia and the financial sector. Attendees will learn about machine learning applications in the financial sector from algorithms to forecast financial data, to tools used for data mining and pattern recognition in financial time series, to scaling predictive models, to stock market prediction, to using blockchain technology.
WWW.RE-WORK.CO/EVENTS/ AI-IN-FINANCE-SUMMIT-NEWYORK-2019
11-13 SEP GLOBAL CIO EXECUTIVE SUMMIT 11-13 SEPTEMBER, 2019 FOUR SEASONS WESTLAKE VILLAGE, CALIFORNIA The Global CIO Executive Summit is a forum for enterprise heads of IT from the world’s largest multinational organisations. The annual summit dives deep into critical issues encountered by CIOs who lead large, international teams, operate in complex business environments, and make decisions that carry significant implications to their companies, industries and profession. The agenda has been carefully crafted by our Governing Body, active CIOs of global organisations, to deliver the most timely and relevant information in a true peer-to-peer environment.
WWW.EVANTA.COM/CIO/ SUMMITS/GLOBAL#OVERVIEW
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AUGUST -SEPTEMBER
16-17 SEP 12 SEP TECH LEADERS SUMMIT 12 SEPTEMBER, 2019 ROYAL LANCASTER LONDON
INDUSTRY OF THINGS WORLD 16-17 SEPTEMBER, 2019 BERLIN CONGRESS CENTRE
Tech Leaders Summit is the UK’s largest conference for technology leaders and decision makers, with a focus on strategy – how can companies use tech to innovate, become more agile, reduce costs, transform departments and support employees? Tech Leaders Summit provides a 360° high-level view of the technologies and trends most impacting organisations and set to drive innovation in 2019 and beyond. Its 25+ renowned speakers lead the way in the IT world when it comes to demonstrating real business value from deploying technology in organisations both large and small.
Industry of Things World is an international knowledge exchange platform bringing together the largest European community of highlevel cross-industry executives who play an active role in the Industrial Internet of Things scene. Attendees will be encouraged to rethink their technology and business strategy for scalable, secure and efficient IoT: artificial intelligence, automation, standards, interoperability, cloud, new business models and digital transformation. Prof. Neil Gershenfeld will deliver the opening keynote, highlighting how the third digital revolution brings programmability of the digital world out into the physical world.
WWW.TECHLEADERSSUMMIT.CO.UK
WWW.INDUSTRYOFTHINGSWORLD.COM
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25 SEP BLOCKCHAIN LIVE 25 SEPTEMBER, 2019 OLYMPIA, LONDON The organisers of Blockchain Live say the event is a ground-breaking festival of content and collaboration that connects the fragmented ecosystem to drive meaningful discussion and debate on how best to accelerate global adoption of blockchain. This one day event is packed with engaging, thought-provoking and quality content, this year Blockchain Live will be moving away from the traditional exhibition model, in to a ground-breaking festival of content and collaboration.
BLOCKCHAINLIVE.COM
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AUGUST -SEPTEMBER
30 SEP02 OCT
SMART CITIES WEEK 30 SEPTEMBER-02 OCTOBER, 2019 MGM NATIONAL HARBOR, WASHINGTON D.C. The East Coast’s gathering of smart cities changemakers is back in Washington, D.C., in 2019, with innovative programming created for city leaders who want to create more liveable, workable and sustainable communities. You’ll network with peers and smart cities experts, uncover solutions to common challenges, be among the first to see new technologies and approaches from solution providers, and tour some of Washington, D.C., smart infrastructure projects that are delivering meaningful results.
WASHINGTON2019.SMARTCITIESWEEK.COM
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THE CLOSING BULLETIN
THE CLOSING BULLETIN In an exclusive column for Digital Bulletin, Chargifi’s CEO Dan Bladen explains how smart technology is enabling businesses to meet the demands of today’s workforce
W
ith the launch of the Apple iPhone in 2007 came a new appetite for connectivity. In the 12 years since, consumers have developed an insatiable desire to stay connected 24/7 with the average smartphone user today interacting with their device - taps, types, swipes and clicks - nearly 3,000 times a day. But this digital dependency has created a problem: thousands of
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interactions with our devices and multiple apps running simultaneously is draining power. It’s for this reason that two-thirds of smartphone users run out of battery before 5pm. That 5pm battery anxiety should soon be a thing of the past. With one billion devices with wireless charging capabilities predicted to be in circulation by 2020, it’s safe to say that wireless power provision is going to skyrocket. By deploying smart wireless
DAN BLADEN
charging and other smart technology at scale, businesses can not only satisfy their app-thirsty employees, but they can create a more engaged, productive and efficient workforce. Smart technology - devices which talk to each other in real-time and make data-based predictions - is creating a seamless digital experience in our homes, and as the workplace becomes more domestic, employees demand the same levels of connectivity.
ENGAGEMENT
With the rise of flexible working, office spaces are transforming and employees are shunning the traditional confines of their desks - opting to move freely from desk to meeting room to breakout area. The rise of the third place - social spaces that bridge the gap between the traditional home and work environments - highlights that this preference for fluid, co-working space is here to stay. A recent report found that 71% of workers described feeling more creative since joining a co-working space, and 62% said their work had improved. Because of this on-the-move culture, employees are snacking on power to
stay connected - but sustaining this access to power can be a pain point. To accommodate this demand there is an opportunity for employers to make power - the critical foundation to connectivity - as convenient and accessible as possible in as many spaces as possible. By embracing smart technology such as wireless power, employers also see a spike in employee engagement and staff retention. Traditionally engagement was boosted through benefits and perks such as company cars, but today’s workforce have different priorities - they simply want to work in an environment where they feel valued and stimulated. Smart workplaces that can predict employees’ every need can engender loyalty and mean that employees feel personally and virtually connected to the business. Smart wireless charging drives engagement by acting as a trigger point for seamless and personalised experiences like meeting booking, hotdesk check-in which automatically enables facilities and will kick-start a meeting, conference call or work session without the need to manually
Smart technology is creating a seamless digital experience in our homes, and as the workplace becomes more domestic, employees demand the same levels of connectivity� 87 Issue 7
THE CLOSING BULLETIN
Businesses can take advantage of smart technology to make their environments more attractive to potential employees� login and load apps. Such smart technology will not only help employers to retain talent, but will also help with recruitment. Studies show that over 87% of employees who don’t feel engaged at work are looking for a job elsewhere, and businesses can take advantage of smart technology to make their environments more attractive to potential employees.
EFFICIENCY
Another aspect of the workplace experience which smart technology is revolutionising is building efficiency. Your average office building is running at a noticeably low 30-40% capacity. The increase in remote and flexible working is undoubtedly impacting how much - or how little - commercial properties are being used. As part of an IoT connected technology stack, smart technology can give companies a clear picture of what spaces are being used and
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when, allowing them to make informed decisions on space utilisation, reducing wastage and cost per square foot. With smart wireless charging, multiple digital charge-points throughout an office in meeting rooms or on desks - enable employees to check in and out as they move, giving employers the data to make smarter, more efficient decisions. Facilities managers can see real-time reports on which rooms and desks are available and can direct staff towards under-utilised facilities via push notifications and virtual wayfinding. Businesses will also benefit from invaluable insights on employee behaviour; smart technologies capture data which enables employers to understand their staff and their experiences at work. When it comes to smart wireless charging, charging spots connect via WiFi to the Internet of Things and they are managed remotely at scale. Employee behaviour data, including charging sessions,
DAN BLADEN
hyper-location and insight on dwell time are then provided through a dashboard in the cloud platform. Such robust information will transform the employee experience and enable a data-driven culture based on fact rather than assumption, and this new level of business intelligence will be key to driving efficiency.
PRODUCTIVITY
Through embracing smart workplaces, businesses will see an improvement in productivity too. Integrated IoT management platforms give businesses full control of their network, allowing them to see real-time updates on connectivity. In the case of wireless charging, employers can manage individual smart charging spots remotely including connectivity and power delivered. Real-time alerts inform on diagnostics detected, with many issues resolved over-the-air using remote tools for debugging and diagnostics management. This type of cloud-
based platform reduces operational and maintenance costs and prevents faults from hindering the productivity of employees. Having a fully connected workforce at your fingertips will give you the opportunity to shape the world around your needs and demands; increasing productivity and making the working day as seamless as possible.
PRIORITISE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
The connected wireless world presents a whole range of opportunities to streamline processes and engage staff. The onus is on businesses to create flexible, smart workspaces which meet staff expectations and in doing so, they can shape an engaged, productive and efficient workforce. Crucial to this transformation of the workplace is access to power. If you can influence how and when employees get access to power, then you have a chance to influence their connected journey and workplace experience.
Dan Bladen is the co-founder and CEO of Chargifi. He is passionate about using technology to solve everyday problems; creating intelligent systems that help us achieve more faster. Prior to Chargifi he oversaw a team of 50 and designed and implemented network and AV infrastructure for a ÂŁ6.5 million building project in West London. Bladen is quick to spot and embrace innovation and is an early adopter of anything to do with the Internet of Things. Bladen is a patent holder and has served on the leadership teams of wireless charging standards bodies.
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