Digital Bulletin - Issue 25 - February 2021

DIGITAL BULLETIN Issue 25 | Feb ’21

STALLED MOMENTUM

The autonomous vehicle sector appears to have slumped. Why?

WORKPLACE FROM FACEBOOK Exclusive interview with Julien Codorniou

FUTURE-PROOFING

INDUSTRY From clean energy to healthcare, Schneider Electric is empowering businesses across the industry spectrum to build towards a more sustainable and efficient future

JAMES HENDERSON Content Director

H

ello and welcome to a brand-new issue of Digital Bulletin, our 25th to date - where has that time gone? As you’ve come to expect, this month’s edition is packed full of exclusive case studies, in-depth interviews and industry analysis that you just won’t find anywhere else.

As you’ll no doubt have seen on our cover - another absolute cracker, even if we do say so ourselves - the lead story this month comes from Schneider Electric, truly one of the giants of industry.

Our case study takes a deep dive into how the company is adopting new technologies and business models to lead the sustainability and efficiency efforts across a vast number of sectors, while at the same time implementing its own digital transformation initiative across many of its sites.

“It’s been a real success,” Nathalie Marcotte, President of Process Automation, tells us. “Moreover, the experience that we’ve gained internally by change management was also a great benefit for us. Now, we’re

looking at implementing it in our clients’ digital transformations.”

Elsewhere, we speak to Workplace from Facebook VP Julien Codorniou about how an internal initiative to keep the social media giant’s team connected has helped companies around the world develop a sense of community during COVID-19.

Driven by much of the world’s workforce pivoting to a remote model, Workplace has seen the demand for its tools - which blends automation and many of the services well-known to Facebook’s billions of users - surge dramatically.

Our analysis this month looks at the autonomous vehicle sector and asks why, after years of hype and apparent progress, momentum has stalled. We speak to three experts about Uber’s recent sale of its autonomous car unit to Amazon-owned Aurora, the role of COVID-19 and whether a rethink on what is possible is required.

For that and much more, read on.

I hope you enjoy this month’s issue.

PUBLISHED BY BULLETIN MEDIA LTD, Norwich, UK Company No: 11454926 TALK TO US editorial@digitalbulletin.com business@digitalbulletin.com

CONTENTS

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22 CASE STUDY

MONTH IN REVIEW

SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC Enabling sustainable industry transformations

NEWS, VIEWS AND ANALYSIS

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PEOPLE WORKPLACE FROM FACEBOOK An exclusive interview with Julien Codorniou, VP

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44 CONNECTIVITY

CELONIS Ridding enterprise of system complexity

70 FUTURE

BAE SYSTEMS Using tech to shut down human trafficking

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DATA INTELLIGENCE EXASOL Will hyperautomation have a breakout 2021?

A LIFE IN TECH

Nokia’s Hilary Mine reflects on a stellar career

60 IT SERVICES

DEBATE Talking cloud trends for the year ahead

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CLOSING BULLETIN An exclusive column from Dr. Andrei Dragomir, founder of Aquark Technologies

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NEWS UPDATE Digital Bulletin rounds up the news that shaped the enterprise technology space over the last month

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NEWS UPDATE

MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS

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itrix Systems confirmed that it has agreed to acquire collaborative work platform Wrike for $2.25bn. Citrix said the deal will drive a business model transition to the cloud and strategy to become a complete SaaS-based work platform addressing the needs of various functional groups within the enterprise. Together, Citrix and Wrike will serve over 400,000 customers across 140 countries.

Google has completed its acquisition of wearable tech company Fitbit. The $2.1bn deal was first announced more than a year ago but drew concerns from watchdogs. After Google made a number of pledges to keep Fitbit device agnostic, the European Union rubber-stamped the deal last month. Rick Osterloh, SVP, Devices & Services, said the deal is about “devices, not data”.

Visa has terminated its $5.3bn acquisition of data-focused fintech API startup Plaid after facing an antitrust lawsuit from the U.S Department of Justice. The deal was announced a year ago but the DOJ blocked it in November, stating that Visa is

a “monopolist in online debit” and would eliminate Plaid’s potential ability to compete in the online debit market.

The DOJ has dropped the lawsuit.

Acacia Communications has terminated its $3bn merger agreement with Cisco. The move comes after approval of the Chinese government’s State Administration for Market Regulation was not received within the timeframe given. Cisco says it intends to contest Acacia’s right to end the agreement. First announced in July 2019,

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Cisco viewed the merger as a boost to its growing networking portfolio.

IBM has acquired 7Summits, a leading Salesforce consultancy with more than a decade of delivering transformative digital experiences across industries. The acquisition extends IBM’s portfolio of Salesforce services and experience design capabilities and further advances IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI strategy. Financial details were not disclosed. IBM is a Global Strategic Partner of Salesforce.

F5 Networks is to acquire Volterra for $500m. Volterra, which only launched in 2019, offers a cloud management platform which gives a single view of security and operations. F5, which secures applications when they’re migrated to the cloud, says the deal gives it an edge platform with “unlimited scale”. “Current edge solutions are simply inadequate for today’s enterprise customers,” said its CEO. Red Hat announced its intent to acquire StackRox, a startup in the container and Kubernetes-native security space. Red Hat said the deal will further its vision to deliver a single, holistic platform that enables users to build, deploy and securely run nearly any application across the entirety of the hybrid cloud. No financial terms have been disclosed.

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FUNDING General Motors Co.’s autonomous vehicle unit Cruise has raised over $2bn in its latest funding round, which included participation from Microsoft Corp. Microsoft’s participation comes as part of a partnership by which the tech giant will become the preferred cloud provider for both Cruise and parent GM. Last year, Cruise presented a self-driving van that has no steering wheel or pedals.

Software consultant ThoughtWorks has raised $720m from investors.

Siemens and GIC are among the companies to have provided backing. ThoughtWorks will use the cash to repurchase equity from other investors and grow internationally. The business started out as a small consultancy in Chicago 25 years ago but now has more than 7,000 employees worldwide.

BlackRock Inc is adding bitcoin futures as an eligible investment

NEWS UPDATE

to two funds: BlackRock Strategic Income Opportunities and BlackRock Global Allocation Fund Inc. The funds will only invest in cash-settled bitcoin futures traded on commodity exchanges registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with $7.81trn under management.

The satellite communications company OneWeb, jointly owned by the UK Government and Bharti Global, has secured $350m in funding from SoftBank. It brings the company’s funding to $1.4bn and positions the company to be fully funded for its first-generation satellite fleet, totaling 648 satellites, by the end of 2022.

SoftBank will gain a seat on the OneWeb Board of directors.

Israeli payments technology start-up Rapyd has raised $300m in a Series D funding round, doubling its valuation to $2.5bn. Rapyd offers payment services enabling the transfer of electronic funds across borders through various means of

payment, including bank transfers, digital wallets, and cash. The app has seen massive growth in the demand for these services prompted by COVID-19.

Enterprise SaaS platform Quantum Metric has announced $200m in Series B financing led by Insight Partners at a valuation exceeding $1bn. The company said it will use the cash injection to build features and functionality on its platform, while also investing in its product and support teams Quantum Metric’s CPD methodology uses realtime customer data to build and rapidly iterate digital products.

Cloud security firm Lacework is now worth over $1bn after a $525m funding round. The company automates cloud security and compliance, and works with the major cloud hyperscalers. After achieving 300%+ revenue growth in 2020, it has now been boosted by this round, which was led by Sutter Hill and Altimeter Capital. “Constant cloud changes require a new approach to security,” said Lacework’s CEO.

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MOVERS AND SHAKERS A blockbuster month in the heady world of technology leadership was led by Intel’s appointment of VMware’s Pat Gelsinger as its new CEO. The 40-year technology veteran will replace outgoing CEO Bob Swan from February 15, when he will also join Intel’s board of directors. Gelsinger has served as the CEO of VMware since 2012, where he significantly transformed the company into a recognised global leader in the cloud infrastructure space.

Elsewhere, Apple’s lead engineer Dan Riccio is to transition to a new role focusing on a new project and reporting 10

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to CEO Tim Cook. Riccio joined Apple in 1998 and has made his name working on the first generation iMac to the more recent 5G iPhone lineup, M1-based Macs, and AirPods Max. John Ternus will now lead Apple’s Hardware Engineering organisation as a member of the executive team.

America’s Department of Defense (DoD) announced deputy CIO John Sherman as acting CIO following Dana Deasy’s departure. Sherman will oversee the DoD’s IT operations until the Senate approves a permanent replacement. Sherman acted as the US Intelligence Community CIO for three

NEWS UPDATE

years. A long-term replacement will be nominated by President Biden.

HP has bolstered its C-Suite with two appointments it says will drive innovation capabilities and support its long-term growth strategy. Tolga Kurtoglu has joined HP as CTO and Global Head of HP Labs. Kurtoglu is the former CEO of Palo Alto Research Center and global head of research at Xerox. Sarabjit Singh Baveja has joined as Chief Strategy and Incubation Officer.

IT infrastructure monitoring and observability platform LogicMonitor announced the appointment of

Christina Kosmowski as President.

She joins LogicMonitor after spearheading global customer success and services at publicly traded Slack, where she was instrumental in scaling the business from $90m in annual revenue to $1bn in annual revenue. Prior to Slack, Kosmowski spent 15 years at Salesforce.

Tom Blomfield is to leave Monzo, the company he founded, because of mental health struggles. Blomfield launched the digital bank in 2015 and it has become one of the main challengers to traditional banks. The pressures brought about by the company’s growth, however, along with COVID-19, mean he has decided to move on. In May 2020 he stepped down as CEO and resigned from Monzo’s board.

IBM has appointed Martin Schroeter to lead its new managed infrastructure services business. NewCo will operate as a standalone company and Schroeter will be CEO. He held a number of leadership roles at IBM before leaving last June. “Martin is a world-class leader and is uniquely qualified to drive the long-term success of the new, independent company,” said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna.

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Stalled momentum Widespread use of autonomous vehicles was supposed to become a reality by 2020, but progress has slowed significantly. Digital Bulletin speaks to three industry experts to find out why the market has stumbled and asks whether fully autonomous vehicles can ever be realised

AUTHOR: James Henderson

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NEWS ANALYSIS

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020 was supposed to be the year that autonomous vehicles became a reality. No more, we were told, would we have to do something as mundane as drive ourselves. A 2015 article from the Guardian trumpetted: “Self-driving cars: from 2020 you will become a permanent backseat driver,” while a 2016 article from Business Insider predicted that 10 million autonomous vehicles would be on the road by 2020, led by the likes of Tesla, BMW and Mercedes.

Less than two years ago, Elon Musk - a man not shy of hyperbole - announced that by the middle of 2020, Tesla’s autonomous system would be so advanced that drivers would no longer have to pay attention to the road. Of course, we now know that none of that has come to pass and from the outside looking in it appears that momentum has very much stalled.

As ever, it is impossible to discount the impact of COVID-19.

“It may be too early for the auto industry to fully assess its impact, but the pandemic has played a role in the lack of momentum for autonomous vehicles,” says Stuart Young, partner and Chair of Automotive Group at international law firm Gowling WLG. “Established car makers and startups solely focused on driving autonomous vehicles forward have had to pause and divert funds that would primarily be used for research and testing back into their core and revenue-producing businesses, especially bearing in mind the slow grind to fully commercialised autonomous vehicles.

“It was always going to take time to get there but the pandemic has really slowed down development. The combination of

From left to right: Daniel Auger, Sean Whitty and Stuart Young

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NEWS ANALYSIS

strained research budgets and less vehicle sharing combined with a sense that the future is still far away has depressed excitement levels.”

The truth is that developing fully autonomous vehicles is a bigger challenge than had been expected and there is absolutely no guarantee that we’ll ever see them become a mass market option. That is not to say that we’ll never benefit from autonomous technologies, but a reeducation of what to expect - far removed from driverless pods ferrying

passengers around seamlessly that we have come to imagine - may be in order.

Sean Whitty, Head of Solutions at Mobica, which works with a number of automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and Tier 1 companies to build software, tells Digital Bulletin: “If we look at the main players, it is important to make the distinction between the six levels of autonomy, from 0 to 5, and to understand that we are only really seeing defunding and deprioritisation of Level 5, defined as ‘full driving automation’.

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“The technical requirements to get there are so complex that it makes the ultimate business value difficult to project, which is why the case for investment today can be a challenge, when compared to other software-based features with more visible short- and mid-term returns, such as connected services.”

The path to profitability for OEMs in the autonomous vehicle space is as complex as the technology itself, Whitty points out, with a lack of regulation

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across the market, as well as regional regulatory differences, adding yet more layers of complexity.

“For some businesses there will be more obvious quick wins, especially if COVID-19 has had a negative business impact. Simpler technologies and features that we have all become accustomed to elsewhere in everyday life, such as reliable device connectivity, secure and frequently updated software, a stable digital infrastructure and other

NEWS ANALYSIS

easy-to-use, familiar convenience-based features, are in higher demand right now than full driving autonomy.”

Dr. Daniel Auger, senior IEEE member and senior lecturer in control and vehicle systems at Cranfield University, believes that progress in 2021 will be incremental, rather than huge leaps forward.

“In terms of production with passenger vehicles, I think we’re likely to see a further increase in the level of Advanced Driver Assist Systems we see on

vehicles. We’re likely to see increasing news about highway systems. I think we’re likely to see the earliest benefits of autonomy in the most ‘controlled’ and predictable environments.”

Whitty says: “In 2021, innovation and development will continue with a renewed focus on evolutionary milestones, supported by ecosystem consolidation on the path to widescale Level 1 and Level 2+ autonomous tech.

We will see the first mass-produced

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Level 3 vehicles on the road, which most experts categorise as autonomous, but still require a driver to take over upon system request. I think there will also be an incremental increase in public Level 4 testing, further validating technical feasibility.”

But while some companies are reassessing their autonomous ambitions, others have exited the market completely. Uber has been one of the biggest investors in autonomous vehicles but announced in late December that it had agreed to sell its 18

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autonomous division to Amazon-owned Aurora in a deal worth about $4 billion.

“Unfortunately for Uber, its autonomous division has faced many issues in the past few years so it may ultimately have come down to costs and the company focusing its capital on the divisions that are working and bringing in more,” says Young. “Unlike Uber, which was started as an affordable taxi service, Aurora’s foundations were in the autonomous and self-driving market so it will have the focus to drive the programme forward and is more likely to succeed.”

NEWS ANALYSIS

Whitty concurs, also citing myriad setbacks and challenges that have ultimately led to the decision to sell up for around half of what the business unit was deemed to be worth in 2019.

“Uber has essentially thrown in the towel in the race to Level 5 autonomy, instead deciding to focus on its core business proposition, profit and day-to-day cashflow. This is a sensible decision in the current climate,” he says.

“The bigger challenge here is for the buyer, Amazon-backed Aurora, to properly integrate any tech they decide

to keep, as well as the workforce and know-how that comes along with the purchase. Aurora’s engineering resources have substantially increased through the deal, which is a good thing, as it has a lot of catching up to do and needs to get its autonomous trucks and passenger vehicles to market more quickly.”

As with any sector going through a downturn, while also navigating a worldwide crisis, there is likely to be more M&A activity as some companies will inevitably look to cut their losses or concentrate their resources on core operations.

Conversely, others will see this apparent lull as an opportunity to either break into a new and still potentially highly lucrative market or strengthen an existing technology offering or platform as has been the case with Aurora.

Whitty believes that further consolidation is “inevitable” in 2021, while Young says: “There is huge potential for growth in M&A activity but there are hurdles that the wider industry may need to collectively tackle. Companies that are proactively looking at expanding through M&A will have to have strong internal mechanisms to govern, guide and grow the innovations they are acquiring so that what comes out at the other end is a strong product.”

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especially when it comes to highly technical and complex matters of future technology. But undeterred, our experts have peered into their crystal balls to tell Digital Bulletin how they believe the autonomous vehicle market will look in 2025.

Whitty forecasts real progress but believes that autonomous utopia will still be out of reach. “By 2025, we will see some paradigm shifts from OEMs and technology companies that will better allow them to more efficiently, and 20

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cheaply, overcome the challenges of autonomous driving,” he says.

“The announcement that Mobileye (the self-driving car company owned by Intel) has put its lidar system on a chip has the potential to significantly drive down costs of sensors and illustrates the types of breakthroughs required to allow for a more rapid rollout of this and similar technologies within the next four years.

“We will also see regulatory activity pick up across the industry, which will

NEWS ANALYSIS

set the stage for a more widescale proliferation of Level 4 tech. Consumer demand, and the commercialisation of autonomous driving as a service, will also increase. Level 5 full driving automation will remain a longer-term goal.”

Dr. Auger also believes the next four years will be fruitful, but anybody looking to hang up their driving gloves for good is likely to be disappointed.

“I expect to see high-end vehicles with significant autonomous capabilities

for on-highway driving. At Cranfield, the work we have done as part of the HumanDrive project showed that an autonomous vehicle can safely drive over a large distance,” he comments.

“Advanced driver assistance systems will become more common, possibly ubiquitous, and adaptive cruise control systems will continue evolution towards platooning. We will see specialist vehicles for automated transit over defined and relatively structured routes.”

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SCHNEIDER’S

CULTURE-FIRST TECHNOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION Edge computing, cloud and AI are disrupting the industrial sector, but change can’t occur without people. Nathalie Marcotte, Helenio Gilabert and their team explain to Digital Bulletin how Schneider Electric is adopting new technologies and business models to lead the market’s sustainability and efficiency efforts

PROJECT DIRECTOR: Richard Durrant AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía VIDEOGRAPHER: Fraser Harrop

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SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

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echnology drives change.

The industrial sector is currently on the verge of a significant transformation, driven by the advent of data analytics and cloud and edge computing.

These technologies significantly increase the complexity of IT systems. As a result, more than 60% of end-user organisations want outside help in managing their edge deployments, according to IDC. In a survey to 786 technical professionals by Deloitte, 94% of them said they use cloud softwareas-a-service (SaaS), and most of them expressed interest in artificial intelligence (AI) SaaS, a market Gartner has predicted to be worth $7 billion by 2023.

Customers no longer want a hardware vendor, but a partner; and this is exactly what Schneider Electric is.

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As a company that focuses on energy and industrial automation, efficiency and innovation are intrinsic to Schneider’s DNA. Since its creation in 1836, Schneider Electric has undergone multiple transformations in order to stay at the forefront of its industry. Its goal is simple: to optimise its clients’ operations to achieve sustainability and efficiency. To achieve this, the company has had to not only upscale its technological solutions but also completely transform its business model and operations. The drive for change is there, and not even a pandemic has been able to stop it.

Nathalie Marcotte stepped into the role of President of Process Automation at Schneider Electric just as 2020 was beginning. During the first few months of the pandemic, she was focused on ensuring

SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

the health of her employees, though the crisis eventually opened up a space for opportunities and process transformation.

“I like to say that 2020 was the year of agility, where plans would change pretty much every day, and we had to adapt and think differently,” Marcotte says.

During this time, the company has introduced new services, like remote factory-testing, and strengthened existing ones, such as cybersecurity protocols.

However, its long-term goals are much more ambitious. “We want to empower

companies to make the most of their energy and resources. We want to be our customers’ digital partner for sustainability and efficiency,” she adds.

Schneider’s customers have also undergone a significant mindset shift over the course of the pandemic, accelerating their digital transformation initiatives and changing their priorities. Oil and gas companies have turned their focus from production volumes to cash flow, a shift that was prompted and facilitated by new technologies.

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We want to empower companies to make the most of their energy and resources. We want to be our customers’ digital partner for sustainability and efficiency” Nathalie Marcotte

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However, although clients want to deploy these technologies, they don’t want to build them.

“Many companies have outsourced their IT infrastructure because it isn’t core to their businesses,” says Helenio Gilabert, Schneider’s Senior Director for Edge Solutions. “They don’t need to manage an email server to be successful in making cars, distributing water or producing oil and gas.”

Gilabert’s role focuses on leveraging the new technologies that are creating this disruption, such as cloud, edge computing, and AI, to optimise the operations of Schneider’s customers. The goal is to solve its clients’ OT problems and remove the IT complexity from their businesses to help them not only survive the current crisis but “thrive’’ in it.

“We want to make technology invisible to them,” Gilabert says. “We want to allow them to focus on their core business, and we want to make sure that we unlock value that was not accessible to them before.”

To achieve this, Schneider is shifting its whole business model to a subscription-based service that not only provides technological solutions to clients but is also responsible for its maintenance and development. Customers gain access to 24/7 remote monitoring and troubleshooting from Schneider’s engineers and next-business-day, on-site support when

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needed. Moreover, Schneider’s use of data analytics to make recommendations and its monitoring of the machines save clients up to 40% in IT management costs.

Schneider’s new asset-centric pay-asyou-go subscription-based model rests on the principle of flexibility. Only through flexible services companies can Schneider ensure that it continues to meet its customers’ needs, particularly during such changing times. Schneider’s model adapts to the customer, rather than forcing the customer to adapt to the product.

“Really, the main component there is to ensure that we help transform people, culture and processes. To do that, we deploy some technologies. But if you don’t change people, culture and processes, no amount of technology is going to be successful in allowing you to become a digital enterprise,” Gilabert comments.

Schneider is not only helping companies on their digital transformation journeys; it’s also undergoing one itself. Marcotte stresses how, in Schneider’s transition, technology has been “an enabler” to “drive cultural change”.

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Schneider began by automating six factories out of the company’s 400. The results were astonishing. For example, its factory in Lexington, Kentucky, has reduced its energy consumption by 3.4% year-overyear, saving $6.6 million and decreasing its CO2 emissions by 78% since it joined the programme back in 2012. The initiative was included in the World Economic Forum’s Lighthouse Programme, which stressed Schneider’s success in adopting Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies at scale.

The company now wants to expand this 28

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programme to the rest of its factories, which span over 40 countries, employing 86,000 people.

“It’s been a real success,” Marcotte says.

“Moreover, the experience that we’ve gained internally by change management was also a great benefit for us. Now, we’re looking at implementing it in our clients’ digital transformations.”

The success of Schneider’s Smart Factory programme would not have been possible without edge computing, which was key to reducing costs and energy

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Advisor, a software solution which monitors industrial machines and makes predictions and suggestions to improve its efficiency.

These recommendations are connected to control decisions, which enables the Autonomous Production Advisor to drive performance results and learn over time.

“In collaboration with customers we came up with the best mix of cloud, AI and data analytics, and we put it all together in the Autonomous Production Advisor,” explains Fahd Saghir, Schneider’s Digital Solutions Manager. “It’s not just an out-ofa-box solution, it is a solution that adapts to the customer’s needs.”

The Autonomous Production Advisor runs machine learning solutions directly on the edge, allowing customers to disconnect the solution from big data centres close to their asset. This allows the reduction consumption. Edge computing allows companies to bring computation and data storage closer to the devices where it’s being gathered, reducing latency issues.

Although the industry already heavily relies on this technology for remote controllers and terminal units, the new generation of edge controllers and gateways have higher processing capabilities, memory ability and storage, while being much more affordable and allowing its integration with the cloud.

Schneider has integrated these capabilities into the Autonomous Production

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of engineering costs by up to 80% and improves maintenance costs by up to 75%, all whilst cutting carbon emissions by half.

“The best part about the Autonomous Production Advisor is that it’s able to capture how customers use the system on a day-to-day basis, and the data analytics and the AI adapt,” Saghir adds.

According to Saghir, the best usecase for the Autonomous Production Advisor is in augmented intelligence.

For example, one of Schneider’s clients in the upstream oil and gas industry used it to train its models and, as a result, it was able to not only improve the efficiency of its production but also reduce its energy consumption.

According to Saghir, a key aspect of the Autonomous Production Advisor is precisely its knowledge capture abilities.

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By being an open system, the Autonomous Production Advisor allows Schneider’s clients to add their own solutions or update the ones from Schneider’s marketplace.

“Giving that power to the end-users, our industrial customers, has helped us change mindsets,” Saghir says. “The best part is that they trust our technology.”

Trust and collaboration are the two main pillars of Schneider’s new business model, and they have been the key drivers of Schneider’s development of an ecosystem or partners for innovation.

“We see innovation is happening, and even more so right now at, at a lightning speed. And we cannot do everything by ourselves,” Marcotte says.

Schneider Electric Exchange is a platform where industry partners can work together to develop platforms and

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applications that accelerate and scale innovation to drive sustainability and efficiency. With this goal in mind, the platform provides APIs, data science/ datasets, and SDKs, access to private and public communities, as well as a Digital Marketplace. Companies can use Exchange to showcase different solutions, exchange and upload them to products such as the Autonomous Production Advisor.

This ecosystem brings together huge names such as Accenture and Claroty and smaller technology startups that are now entering the game. For example, Schneider has begun a very successful collaboration with Kelvin, a startup that builds control applications to safely optimise companies’ operations. Kelvin has built the Kelvin Intelligent Control Software Platform to improve the Autonomous Production Advisor’s control systems and be able to deploy them in cloud and edge environments.

“We partnered because Schneider is an expert in the industrial control space,” says Peter Harding, Kelvin’s CEO. “Our goal is to help create learning applications that can be able to move into this control world. To do that, we needed a partner that understood the world today and how it’s changing.

“Schneider is a driving force in the digital transformation today that we are seeing across the industrial control markets,”

If you don’t change people, culture and processes, no amount of technology is going to be successful in allowing you to become a digital enterprise” Helenio Gilabert

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Schneider is a driving force in the digital transformation today that we are seeing across the industrial control markets” Peter Harding

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he adds. “It understands that change needs to happen and is willingly putting resources behind driving that change. This is an evolution, not a revolution.”

Kelvin is only one of the many startups that Schneider is engaging with through its Innovation at the Edge program. With dedicated teams across the globe and practices ranging from Investment and Incubation to Partnerships and Joint Ventures, Innovation at the Edge is building an ecosystem of entrepreneurs across the main innovation ecosystems. Its dedicated 500 million Euro venture capital fund has already invested in over 20 companies that focus on the transition to renewable energy, energy management, electric mobility, cybersecurity, Al, and Industry 4.0. To this day, they have also incubated 7 businesses, partnered with 40 startups and created 2 joint ventures.

“The cost of entry for innovation in industrial automation is coming down very quickly,” Gilabert says. “And there is an incredible amount of very innovative solutions out there that happen to be developed by small startups in multiple different places in the world. We need to work with companies that can run and create these solutions much faster and in a more agile way than Schneider can and take advantage of that.”

Harding agrees with Gilabert and stresses the many benefits that being part of Schneider’s ecosystem brings

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to Kelvin, from being able to co-sell to existing customers and collaborate in shared projects, to exposure to a whole new set of potential clients. “The integrator network and partnerships that Schneider has developed allow Kelvin to be able to exponentially accelerate the deployment and development of cuttingedge applications, and we view that as a significant win for Schneider and for all of the ecosystem partners that we’re looking to engage with,” Harding stresses.

Together, Schneider and its partners have a new target: sustainability.

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neutral by 2030. The company still stands by it. To achieve this, Schneider is moving towards a circular economy and the use of renewables to maximise the lifetime of its assets. Moreover, several of its solutions, from consulting services to technological products, are aimed at helping clients become more energy efficient and reduce emissions.

In fact, Schneider has recently signed a partnership with McDermott International to design a carbon-neutral facility for the upstream oil and gas industry, and it has created joint venture with The Carlyle Group, AlphaStruxure, to deliver energy-as-a-service and

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sustainable infrastructure to highly energy intensive users.

“It’s part of our purpose and our mission to provide more sustainability to our customers,” Marcotte says. “In any of our solutions, we look at the integration of power and process and how it supports sustainability.”

From minimising environmental impact and energy consumption to maximising throughput, optimisation is at the core of all of Schneider’s solutions. And, although the company is still on the journey to creating new applications which bring together advanced technologies, it’s not taking on the challenge alone.

“The only way to move forward and make sure we succeed is to partner with our customers, rather than to just be a vendor to them,” Gilabert says. “That’s the significant transformation we’re facing and we’re embarking on.”

It’s not a mission for machines, but individuals. For the industry to successfully transform, new processes and types of organisations need to be defined.

Company cultures need to change.

Schneider wants to support customers during this transition and show them the possibilities of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: a greener and more efficient future.

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CONNECTING THE UNCONNECTED Julien Codorniou tells Digital Bulletin how Workplace from Facebook is helping companies develop a sense of community during COVID-19, and why automation has the power to make collaboration tools even more effective for businesses and users

AUTHOR: Ben Mouncer

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ince its foundation in 2004, Facebook’s aim has been to connect the world.

It has largely succeeded - the social media network has nearly three billion monthly active users. Today, despite huge expansion and some high-profile controversies, the company’s mission statement remains the same: “To give the power to build community and bring people closer together”.

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world last year, business leaders faced their own challenges around “community”. Workforces that were so embedded in offices and established methods of collaboration 36

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had to adapt to being permanently apart. Months on, it’s fair to say that many organisations are still adjusting to remote working at scale.

How do you ensure teams work well together when they are physically apart?

How do you make individual employees feel valued and fulfilled when they’re isolated in their home offices? Well, Facebook has its own solution in the sea of workplace collaboration tools currently on the market. Could this giant of Silicon Valley make serious inroads in this space, and go head-to-head with the likes of Slack and Microsoft Teams?

Julien Codorniou certainly thinks so, but then he would. As Vice President for

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“Workplace from Facebook” - the full name of Facebook’s offering - Codorniou is one of the faces of the product and is responsible for its business and partnership teams. Workplace launched in 2016 and had steady success before the remote working surge in 2020.

“In October 2019, we announced that we had three million paid subscribers. By the end of March 2020, we had five million,” Codorniou tells Digital Bulletin. “There has been an appetite for a solution like Workplace, which can help companies to make sure everybody can be successful wherever they have to work from.”

That factor is what Codorniou says is Workplace’s strength: that it can be used by any employee, at any sized company and in any industry. Collaboration software is often tailored for office-based workers but what Codorniou calls the “magic of Workplace” is its versatility, especially when it comes to employees on the frontline of businesses.

“It works for everybody in the company, from the CEO to the frontline, including people who have never had email, who have never had a desk, and people who work in hospitals or factories. There aren’t a lot of products like that in the market. IT has become very expensive and can leave a lot of people behind - Workplace is very democratised.”

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Workplace utilises familiar Facebook features like Groups, Chats and Rooms to get people working together. It even offers users their own personalised “work” news feeds, which deploy artificial intelligence to deliver relevant updates whether you’re the CEO of the organisation or a worker on the factory floor. It also integrates with the likes of Office 365, G-Suite and Salesforce.

Codorniou says pushing such services out to every employee offers big advantages for companies. He believes

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IT has become very expensive and can leave a lot of people behind - Workplace is very democratised”

business leaders are only now beginning to recognise the true value its workers can deliver for them if armed with the right tools - and how building a community through effective communication can also encourage people to stick around.

“Engaging properly with your employees means they’re happier and they will stay longer,” he says. “If you think about employee retention and satisfaction, engagement with a SaaS application can have a direct impact on your bottom line. If you engage with

people, they feel they have a voice, and you keep them longer and save money.

“There is a big shift in the mindset of executives and CEOs. They are starting to understand that the most valuable assets of their companies are their employees. And the employees on the frontline know about the customers and they know about the market. So the next frontier of IT is connecting the frontline.”

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dollar companies with workforces all over the world. But the story of Workplace’s emergence is not dissimilar to Facebook’s own - just as Facebook was first built for students at one university, Workplace was only initially conceived as a tool for Facebook’s own staff.

That first-gen version of Workplace launched in 2010, with its success as a means of collaboration picked up on

by Facebook’s customers, who asked if it was something which they could embed in their own organisations.

Another revenue stream was born.

“Customers were saying that they had people who were using WhatsApp or Messenger but they were not a proper 40

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part of the IT stack, so why couldn’t we give them something like Facebook but adapted to the needs of companies and the IT department?” says Codorniou.

“Hearing these signals, we decided to give Workplace a try outside of Facebook, and then we saw that the exact same thing that happened inside Facebook happened outside. People were more engaged, people were suddenly feeling that the distance between them had been reduced.

People felt part of the community and like they belonged to a larger organisation; they understood who they worked for and who they worked with, and they felt connected.”

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When COVID-19 struck, Workplace - like its competitors - knew that it had to pivot its strategy. Codorniou says in the first wave of the pandemic, he and his team spent a lot more time engaging directly with its customers to ensure their transition to remote working was a smooth one. The company also accelerated development around video conferencing, launched an intranet solution on top of Workplace and grew its ecosystem of partners.

One of the biggest lessons for companies from COVID-19, according to Codorniou, is that day-to-day operations cannot simply be run over a chat app.

There is a big shift in the mindset of executives and CEOs. They are starting to understand that the most valuable assets of their companies are their employees�

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Customers want to go from communication to automation. How do you help get the job done faster or better? How can you help people get trained faster?”

“For employees this can create the fear of missing out, it puts pressure on people, you fear that if you leave your mobile phone off for a few hours, you will come back and be overwhelmed.

I think the world deserves better than that, and COVID-19 highlighted that two-speed communications tools are needed,” he says.

“What we have on Workplace is the ability to work in real-time with a chat app, but also asynchronous with Groups and news feeds. So if I need an answer in five seconds, we can use chat, but if 42

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I need more time to digest information, or to manage an organisation in different timezones and in different languages, async is better suited.”

For those organisations now fully up to speed with remote collaboration, one of the next steps forward will be the introduction of more automation into the tools themselves in order to drive greater business efficiency. Codorniou says Workplace is on top of this trend, as evidenced by some of the company’s recent activity.

In November, it announced a deeper collaboration with ServiceNow around

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“virtual” agents, a technology that allows users to get instant support and receive updates on in-progress requests, all within the Workplace platform. A chatbot was also recently built in partnership with DocuSign to send, track, and manage electronic agreements.

“Customers want to go from communication to automation,” says Codorniou.

“How do you help get the job done faster or better? How can you help people get trained faster? How can you do things like inventory management, shift management or expenses manage-

ment, on your communication platform using bots and chatbots? This, for me, is where we are going.

“They don’t just want to talk about the job, they also want to get the job done faster and augment people with technology.”

What else might Workplace users explore in the future? Codorniou believes there will be increased demand for virtual and augmented reality solutions, again brought about by the pandemic.

“At one company we work with, they train their employees with an Oculus device, so they don’t have to bring people to their training centre every day. It’s one of those things that we said would take 10 years to happen, but because of COVID-19 it took six months,” he says.

“I think AR/VR is something that we will see more and more - and not just for research scientists, but for everyone. It will be democratised. It will help save money and to provide different experiences in a post-COVID world. Why would you ask 500 people to come to training at the training centre, when you can train them at home? In the pre-COVID world it sounded like science fiction, but in the post-COVID world it sounds like a good way to save time and to give great experiences to people.”

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ELIMINATING SYSTEM COMPLEXITY Boosted by the acquisition of online automation platform Integromat, Celonis has rolled out its Execution Management System that it says will eliminate system complexity - one of the biggest capacity killers in business. Digital Bulletin gets the intel from Alexander Rinke, co-CEO and co-founder

INTERVIEW: James Henderson

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efore we begin with the Execution Management System (EMS) announcement, let’s have a quick chat about the Celonis story - how have you managed to grow at such a rate in just nine years?

Celonis started as a company that replaced manual process mining with digital process mining. It was really as simple as that. No longer did executives need to gather in large conference rooms and manually chart out their existing processes, most of which was based on guesswork and conjecture.

We were able to quickly map out all existing processes digitally and accurately, and that has helped us constantly roll out best-in-class deployments across industries and geographies.

You took six years to look to external funding and have been profitable since the get-go, how do you reflect on that achievement?

There is no doubt that I am very proud of everything we have achieved over the last 10 years, but I don’t spend too much time pondering over our achievements. When the three of us started this, we came to work every day to think of new ways we could help our customers and our people succeed. Now, valued at $2.5 billion with offices around the world and a large 46

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workforce, we still come to work with the same approach. You can never be too satisfied with what you have already achieved – or you will stop innovating.

You’ve just launched the EMS, tell us about its capabilities and how it is going to empower your clients?

All enterprises, large and small, run their core processes and operations through a complex mix of hundreds, and sometimes thousands of individual systems. The complexity of this rigid

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and fragmented system environment traps execution capacity, which hampers business performance.

The Celonis Execution Management System (EMS) sits on top of processes and systems and unlocks capacity in real time. It leverages our process mining core to draw data from underlying systems and identifies and measures capacity barriers. The Celonis EMS then provides the best-in-class knowledge, actions, and automations to systematically remove these constraints.

It’s been designed to eliminate system complexity - how big an issue is that for enterprise in your opinion?

We are experiencing our generation’s version of the industrial revolution, where every process and business function is being refactored to compete and execute in this new world. However, executives in even the best-run businesses still struggle with removing system barriers, and that’s why we developed our new EMS. For the last 10 years, Celonis’ leading process mining ISSUE 25

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core has enabled customers to find and fix process problems. Equipped with this decade of experience and knowledge, Celonis EMS enables customers to take the next step to unlock execution capacity in every facet of their business.

Customers and partners can then also create their own execution apps. These act by automating routine decisions and, when necessary, activating the right people to take action — so each department can execute at its full potential.

We are blown away that Celonis customers are regularly seeing performance gains that result in a 5x return on investment in less than 90 days. We believe the Celonis EMS will redefine

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how all of our customers manage their business execution.

You’ve got a number of blue-chip clients, could you pick a couple out for us and tell us how you’ve helped them achieve savings and/or derive valuable insights?

Companies using the Celonis EMS are constantly identifying and unlocking more capacity in their business. In finance and administration, the average touchless invoice rate is only 27%, where Celonis EMS customers often achieve 90%. In the supply chain, the average on-time delivery rate is only at 43% while Celonis EMS customers can achieve

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more than 95%. In customer service, the average Net Promoter Score is 32, compared to a score that is more than double for Celonis EMS customers who regularly achieve scores of more than 70.

Some examples of the work we’ve done includes: helping Ascend to improve its on-time delivery by 27%, while increasing automation by 43% in just four months; helping L’Oréal increase touchless orders by 800% while shipping more products on-time than ever before; supporting BT to achieve a 59% reduction in overall customer service cycle times; and working with Comcast to capture an $85 million improvement in asset utilisation.

Talk to us about process mining if you would - what is it, why is it important and what proportion of enterprises are getting it right?

Process mining is an analytical discipline for discovering, monitoring, and improving processes as they actually are (not as you think they might be), by extracting knowledge from event logs readily available in the existing IT systems. It offers objective, fact-based insights, derived from actual data, that help companies audit, analyse, and improve their existing business processes by answering both compliance-related and performance-related questions.

Global research we ran last year found that the majority of companies are still not using process mining in their operations. It is most widely used by order management departments, with nearly half (48.5%) already deploying the technology, but this falls significantly among finance departments, where it can be particularly useful – just a fifth (21.5%) of accounts payable and a sixth (17.6%) of accounts receivable departments use it. As a result, execution gaps remain widespread among many enterprises.

Process mining technology is at the core of the Celonis EMS, enabling users to measure their execution capacity by fully understanding how their processes run before taking automated action to remove any execution gaps.

Tell us about the challenges of developing a system that is compatible with all of the IT/software platforms that are utilised by enterprise?

We spent a long time looking for a different way to automate processes across applications. It needed to be a modern, cloud-based approach that is easy to use and scalable in order to address the challenges customers currently have with traditional RPA and enterprise integration tools. We also wanted an agile and easy way to be able to pull and analyse data sets across platforms and ISSUE 25

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applications to truly create an end-toend and real-time solution.

The answer became clear watching so many thousands of business users rapidly adopting new online automation systems.

That’s where we found Integromat, the perfect addition to our Celonis EMS. You’ve also announced the acquisition of Integromat, could you tell us what it will bring to the table and benefit Celonis as a whole?

Integromat is a leader in the new class of online automation systems. These new systems are reinventing the automation market by making it extremely easy for business users to automate connections between all of the applications and systems they use to execute their business operations. Integromat has more than 375,000 users, is growing at more than 400% year on year, and has more than 500 out-of-the-box system and application connectors.

In simple terms, Integromat automates processes that you currently handle manually. It is not only capable of connecting apps but can also transfer and transform data. It works 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and does not require your intervention. It not only offers direct support for the most popular apps and services, but you can also easily connect to almost any web service, allowing you

to virtually automate your entire world. All without writing a single line of code.

This acquisition strengthens Celonis’ ability to unlock execution capacity trapped by customers’ rigid and complex systems by intelligently automating actions across hundreds of systems in a scalable and intuitive way.

The addition of Integromat to the Celonis EMS deepens its automation capabilities and further enables customers to eliminate complexity from all levels of system, application, and task automations. The Integromat automation system will be tightly integrated into the Celonis EMS and deepen the capabilities of Celonis’ core automation engine, while empowering anyone to create scalable automations using an intuitive and easy user interface. Of course, we will constantly keep benchmarking and evolving, keeping ahead of the game as datasets evolve.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

What we’re doing with our EMS is something that has never been done before. Even through this pandemic, where we have found ourselves in a position we never thought we would be in, we are already seeing our customers achieve significant business outcomes with the EMS. It has become more relevant and essential than we ever imagined it would be.

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HYPERAUTOMATION

HYPE OR REAL DEAL?

Hyperautomation has been tipped to be one of the breakthrough technologies of 2021. We speak to Exasol CTO Mathias Golombek to find out whether hyperautomation is more than just a buzzword AUTHOR: James Henderson

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t the start of each year, technology experts and commentators queue up to tell the world which technologies will define the next 12 months, enabling enterprises to innovate and add value. Ultimately, some will fail, consigned to the annals of tech history alongside Apple’s Butterfly keyboard, Magic Leap AR glasses and pretty much every social media platform ever launched by Google. Others will prove their worth in niche areas without ever having a lasting impact on the world.

But there are other technologies that will emerge in 2021 that will go on to 52

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become defining technologies of their time - one of which is tipped to be hyperautomation. Picked out by Gartner in its ‘Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021’ hyperautomation is “the idea that anything that can be automated in an organisation should be automated.

“Hyperautomation is driven by organisations having legacy business processes that are not streamlined, creating immensely expensive and extensive issues for organisations. Many organisations are supported by a ‘patchwork’ of technologies that are not lean, optimised, connected, clean or explicit,” said Gartner.

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With hyperautomation, you’re looking at the next level where you are trying to replicate the whole of an organisation digitally, taking in all of your processes and functions” Mathias Golombek

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“At the same time, the acceleration of digital business requires efficiency, speed and democratisation. Organisations that don’t focus on efficiency, efficacy and business agility will be left behind.”

Automation has been around for some time, with enterprises increasingly leveraging technologies such as Robotic Process Automation to manage repetitive and predictable tasks and free employees up to work on more challenging and higher value programmes of work. So how much of a leap is hyperautomation compared with the automation that is widely used today?

Mathias Golombek, Chief Technology Officer at analytics database management software company Exasol, says: “Automation has been a trend across multiple industries for a number of years now. But with hyperautomation, you’re looking at the next level where you are trying to replicate the whole of an organisation digitally, taking in all of your processes and functions in the form of a digital clone or digital twin.

“That is a completely different vision to just optimising a few little things.

You’re now attempting to integrate all of these various aspects, which is a heavy undertaking.”

The hype around hyperautomation is very real, but as with any technology it will not prove to be a silver bullet and

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any effective implementation will take time to achieve. Golombek says that organisations that are serious about introducing hyperautomation should look at it as a multi-year journey, while also ensuring that they have top tier data to draw on.

“It will be interesting to see just how much progress is made this year, but I think it is more likely that it is a process that will take companies a number of years to realise, maybe even a decade in some cases. One of the reasons it has come to prominence as a trend for 2021 is the maturity of digitalisation and

also of the maturity of data management tools,” he comments.

“Just a few years ago, it was difficult to work with legacy systems but with modern database systems it is simpler to create these integrated platforms and data flows. Data science also has a large role to play here - it has become much more advanced within companies and you really do need that level of skill and expertise in-house if you want to successfully create these levels of automation.”

That advancement of data science and its applications has enhanced its reputation in the C-Suite, with

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Data science really started off as kids in a sandbox, but there is now a level of maturity and companies have dedicated data science resources that can be applied to hyperautomation”

companies seeing automation having a positive impact on their bottom lines. That standing is likely to help technology teams make the case for hyperautomation programmes within enterprise, building on the progress made by data science and advanced technology initiatives.

“Data science really started off as kids in a sandbox, but there is now a level of maturity and companies have dedicated data science resources that can be 56

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applied to hyperautomation. Having this kind of expertise and this mindset within companies represents a really important change,” says Golombek.

“Management knows about data science and what it is able to achieve, which was just not the case a few years ago for the most part. Now people can apply that thinking to the broader business, because that’s exactly what hyperautomation is all about. It’s rethinking what you can do

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to find patterns in your company, using data science to find patterns in data and create predictions and automated decisions on top of that. Data science is having a really big influence.”

Golombek says hyperautomation is key to solving the ‘80/20 trap’, where 80% of the data delivery effort is spent on organising and preparing the data, while only 20% is committed to analysing and maximising its use. It will, he believes, empower data teams

with the agility they need to improve the ROI related to data delivery, eliminating mundane activities and leaving higher value work to humans.

In a time when the demand for talented data scientists and data engineers is only going one way, empowering them to work on exciting and stimulating projects will go a long way to ensuring companies can retain their best people.

“If you talk with data data management guys or data scientists, more than 80% of their time is struggling with data quality, data loading, ingestion, cleansing and curating and data governance and all that stuff around, which you are not interested in as a data scientist. You want to analyse the data and interact with the data, but not really handle all that boring stuff around it,” he says.

“I believe hyperautomation and data science can really help with that because through machine learning algorithms you can identify inaccurate data, for example. Using human knowledge you can create a kind of brain which might not be able to be 100% accurate, but there’s no reason it won’t be able to identify inaccurate data in 99% of cases.

I believe the data management teams will benefit from that trend extremely.”

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applying data science algorithms on top of its database to enable highly automated business functions. One of which is global sportswear brand Adidas, which is leveraging Exasol to dynamically price its products.

“Today, Adidas is a very digitally minded company, but that hasn’t always been the case. Until five or six years ago, it only sold its clothes and shoes indirectly but it took the decision to open its own ecommerce shop which has driven it to become far more digital than they’ve ever been before,” says Golombek.

“What Adidas is currently doing is applying data science algorithms on top of Exasol to enable dynamic pricing in its online stores. The prices are completely

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automated, hyperautomated, and nobody is taking human decisions anymore. It’s all based on data and algorithms in the background. It is a really interesting use case, although it is quite a narrow example.”

A broader example of hyperautomation that is being carried out on Exasol’s database platform is being showcased

by UK fintech Revolut, a business that Golombek says is going through a period of “hypergrowth”.

“Revolut had to hyperautomate all of its internal processes and it applied data and data science across all departments, even the HR team. When Revolut hires people there, they have to know SQL for databases because it analysed the interview process from questions

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I think one of the most interesting applications will be for organisations that really want to get a better understanding of how their businesses operate. By creating digital twins, you can really look to understand and rethink every process” being asked to the correlation of the success of a role and really looked to optimise that. That’s a very good example of where a company starts as a digital native and is looking to create a hyperautomated environment to manage huge growth across all of its departments and processes.”

Looking ahead, hyperautomation will certainly have to prove itself at scale across enterprise if it is to live up to the hype. There are a number of technologies, says Golombek, that go through the “cycle of hype” - “you hear about these trends and buzzwords, but some get lost in the dark, nobody talks about them anymore.

“But hyperautomation is really interesting. It is going to take many years for companies to really use the technology to fulfill their visions and it will certainly

start with early adopters who can begin by applying it on a small scale, which can then be scaled up, as is the case with Adidas.

“Companies should really think about what they want to get from hyperautomation. Is it about just cost reduction or about becoming more competitive?

I think one of the most interesting applications will be for organisations that really want to get a better understanding of how their businesses operate. By creating digital twins, you can really look to understand and rethink every process “Even if you don’t opt to automate everything afterwards, that is a journey that is really going to help people better understand their businesses and get to a point where they have a better idea of what can or needs to become digitalised.”

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CLOUD FORECAST In every issue, Digital Bulletin picks the brains of experts in a particular sector of the technology world. This month, we ask: “Which trend will lead the way in cloud computing over the next 12 months?”

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DEBATE

“ Hybrid cloud offers ongoing opportunities” Rob Lamb, Client Principal and CTO, Dell Technologies Organisations may be at differing stages of their cloud journey, but nearly all deploy workloads across two or more clouds. So, if the deployment of applications across on-premises, the public cloud and edge environments are here to stay - what comes next?

Looking ahead, CXOs may well find themselves constricted by multiple clouds, wrestling with layers of organisational complexity and incompatibility they perhaps didn’t plan for early on. As a result, those same CXOs will increasingly rely on vendors to provide them with a seamless, comprehensive solution across their cloud and on-premises infrastructure.

Multi-cloud’s recent ubiquity proves that it’s the way forward, but there is still much work to be done. Some 80% of senior technology decision-makers at mid-size and large companies in a recent Dell survey said they see hybrid’s substantial value. But only 5% say that they’ve achieved their goal of having a consistent

hybrid cloud. The reason for this gap lies again in how organisations let their cloud solution build piecemeal rather than through deliberate strategy. Retrospectively applying logic to an organically built system is the definition of putting the cart before the horse. Bridging this gap is what comes next.

In our 2020 bi-annual Global Transformation Index, we asked what innovations businesses are looking to invest most in over the next one to three-year period. 35% of respondents

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said they would be investing in arranging their multi-cloud environment so that each application is deployed in the most appropriate cloud. In short – businesses are looking to ensure their cloud environment is modern, performant and consistent.

Transitioning to a consistent hybrid-cloud approach offers businesses increased security and greater flexibility, transparency and scalability.

It is also important to remember that hybrid-cloud is not a destination but an operating model supporting longterm modernisation and business needs. The cloud needs to exist everywhere that applications reside – from edge locations to on-premises and public clouds. And that model needs an easily managed, consistent solution.

We see an increased demand for ‘-as-a-service’ consumption across the industry, and the cloud is no different. Businesses expect to consume their whole IT architecture in the same way they consume public cloud services: orderable and scalable with a few clicks. This new and developing model is as exciting for vendors as it is business. The flexibility it will bring will allow organisations to react rapidly to whatever surprises 2021 brings. After the year we’ve had, let’s hope that there aren’t too many.

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“ Data will drive enterprise” Christian Kleinerman, Senior VP of Product, Snowflake Data analytics will be critical for organisations this year as they continue to navigate uncertainty caused by the pandemic. Making the most of an organisation’s available data will be crucial to understanding customer trends and demands, personalising offerings, and ensuring companies remain competitive in a COVID-19 landscape. Those that capitalise on their data insights can pounce on opportunities, or pivot to avoid issues that the pandemic may cause businesses in the coming months.

The data cloud is spurring this demand, allowing businesses to create their own network to share data across their business ecosystem of supply chain partners, business partners and customers. By doing so, organisations can eliminate data silos and replace their costly, risky, and cumbersome data sharing methods by instantly sharing live data. It also offers both elasticity to manage customer demands, and enhanced data governance so that

DEBATE

Having an acute awareness of data from the entire business ecosystem including partners, customers, and the wider industry will be key this year�

organisations have a clear inventory of where their data assets reside. It has become increasingly important to improve visibility and understanding of data accessibility, and having systems that are designed for business continuity and disaster recovery to protect organisations against any unpredictability in the year ahead.

This new working environment will also fuel a growing demand for data

external to an organisation through a wider connected network of data sharing systems. Having an acute awareness of data from the entire business ecosystem including partners, customers, and the wider industry will be key this year.

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have existed. For example, a clothing retailer may have a sophisticated team of analysts who know everything there is to know about what happens within the four walls of its retail locations and understand every click on its website.

Imagine what they could do with data that breaks down how people travel around a city, changes in household spending on clothing, foot traffic to specific locations and preferred payment methods.

As organisations continue to advance their cloud strategies this year, an increasing number of businesses will realise the tangible benefits of data sharing capabilities. We’ve already seen the early signs of a shift towards people no longer just searching for data, but also curating it for others to access. It’s a well established truth now that data is an organisation’s most valuable commodity, and in many cases more valuable than the technology that generated it.

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“ Amazon’s loss will be Azure’s gain” Fiona Hobbs, CTO of Opencast Technology is changing more rapidly than ever, and consequently, providers are falling in and out of favour with clients as they seek to follow the latest market trends. As a result, one trend we predict we’re going to see in the cloud space this year is Microsoft Azure’s shares rocketing, and consequently, Amazon losing their dominant market share in the cloud space.

While this may be a bold claim, and not necessarily the ‘right’ choice, there are two key trends in the cloud space this year which will play to Azure’s advantage, and will most likely mean that they beat off competition from Amazon to become the dominant market player.

Firstly, there has recently been an increased interest from big firms in AI and machine learning. The firms interested in this technology span across multiple sectors, including government and financial services, so their preferences carry a lot of weight. Luckily for Azure, they have just secured their exclusive license for the OpenAI GPT-3

DEBATE

One trend we predict we’re going to see in the cloud space this year is Microsoft Azure’s shares rocketing, and consequently, Amazon losing their dominant market share in the cloud space” algorithm, which is a deep learning model for natural language processing.

For anyone who knows their tech, this is huge. This algorithm plays a massive part in the way AI computes, which means it is unlikely that anyone else will be able to compete with Azure in this space in the near future.

Secondly, more businesses this year are looking to address their legacy on-premise platforms and move them onto the cloud. These old platforms are often based in Java and VB6 applications, which are traditionally run on in-house Microsoft stacks. Now businesses are taking the opportunity to revisit, redesign and rearchitect these services that have been running on old Microsoft technology for 20 years, it is likely that they will choose Azure as their new provider of choice when moving over to the cloud.

These businesses we refer to are again often large enterprises, including well known High Street banks and government departments. With partner approvals often being time consuming, the logical move for these organisations is to choose an existing, trusted partner to make the move into the cloud, which once again plays to Azure’s strengths.

While both Amazon and Azure have their benefits, it is clear to see that Azure has some advantages over their competitors as we start the year. These advantages are really strong points, which should mean that it’s highly difficult for Amazon and other providers to compete. Unless there’s a sudden change – which we won’t rule out - we predict Azure will be taking the market share of cloud this year, but as ever it will be all to play for in 2022.

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“ Data governance mating third-party risk management and controls will simplifying due diligence assessments of move to the cloud” cloud providers based on the data they Neil Thacker, DPO and CISO for Netskope

Organisations today are using technical data protection controls, such as Data Loss Prevention (DLP), to manage and protect data in their cloud applications and infrastructure. Over the next 12 months, these controls will mature beyond ’just’ DLP to include data governance best practices.

This alignment of DLP and data governance will include the building and automation of centralised inventories of cloud managed applications and/or infrastructure, as well as visibility into the categories of data stored in each application or infrastructure instance. Auto-

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hold and process is a more effective and efficient approach than attempting to apply the same rules and controls to all cloud providers.

Aligning each application or instance to Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) further supports the fundamentals of data governance and can help information security and data governance teams understand their priorities in ensuring both cloud applications and infrastructure instances are secured appropriately whilst also applying the most appropriate data protection controls required for the data they are protecting.

A key driver for this focus on maturing data governance in the cloud comes from organisations needing greater automation to both manage

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an accurate system of record and to support a record of processing activities under the requirements of many data protection regulations such as the GDPR. When extended to the cloud these requirements require a significant amount of resource to maintain.

The average large enterprise today uses over 1,000 cloud applications, according to the latest Netskope Cloud & Threat Report. This includes both authorised applications and Shadow IT, for which an organisation may still be responsible if it allows employees to use their own cloud tools to store, process and share corporate data.

With data protection regulations continuing to be passed into law, these best practices will help automate data protection and privacy requirements that support future data protection regulation changes. A common requirement is for organisations to perform regular data flow mapping exercises to understand where data is located and if a valid data transfer agreement exists for this data to cross borders. By applying data governance controls that help automate this task, organisations get an accurate and up-to-date mapping of these data flows and can report on these activities whilst also enforcing and blocking these data flows when a valid data transfer agreement does not exist.

“ Integration holds the key�

Max Ertl, President, DocuWare Not being able to pivot to a mobile workforce overnight left many companies scrambling to continue business as usual during the COVID-19 pandemic. This has, however, presented organisations with an opportunity to revise their workplace policies to better manage a remote workforce. Many organisations are looking to implement cloud-based document management solutions as the costs are scalable and they do not require lengthy planning.

These software packages can be implemented in just days, empowering organisations to digitise and automate

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Many organisations are looking to implement cloud-based document management solutions as the costs are scalable and they do not require lengthy planning�

all types of business processes and workflows. However, to ensure their successful adoption by the staff, seamless integration between old and new applications is vital, and this is going to be a key trend in the year ahead.

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disruption for employees, allowing them to focus on knowledge-driven work and critical decision-making.

With the COVID-19 pandemic still impacting organisations around the globe, it’s never been more important to empower remote and distributed workforces with integrated document management and automation tools that provide secure, anywhere-anytime access to data. With many organisations

DEBATE

looking to the cloud to support this way of working, it will be a key factor for them that any new application fully integrates with existing systems to deliver maximum value.

While organisations want to automate processes to increase productivity and profitability, their employees (the users) are not always onboard with the tools needed to make these changes.

Teams and individuals get used to

working in a certain way and will not welcome workflow disruptions from new applications.

Therefore, any new solution that integrates seamlessly with current applications will get employee buy-in. This is especially true for small to medium sized businesses, who are working hard to get through these times and must ensure that any system change has immediate benefits.

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FOLLOWING HUMAN TRAFFICKERS’ MONEY TRAIL Human trafficking is one of the most prevalent money laundering-related crimes in the world. Digital Bulletin speaks to Harriet Shaw, Venture Lead at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence, about the FinCrime Testing Service, a tool that simulates human trafficking behaviour to help financial institutions test and improve their monitoring systems

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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P

eople can vanish into thin air, but money almost always leaves some trace behind.

Right now, 25 million people in the world are victims of human trafficking and being sold into sexual exploitation, forced labour, organ removal and forced marriage, as per the United Nations’ research. Victims are often coerced or convinced to go with traffickers, making it extremely hard for law enforcement authorities to follow their footsteps. However, financial services institutions have access to a different trail: money movements.

The buying and selling of people is a business that generates profits of over $150 billion a year, making it one of the most prevalent money laundering offences in the world, but also one that often goes unnoticed. Only 1% of all global money laundering is detected. BAE Systems Applied Intelligence’s most recent research found that financial institutions spend $180.9 billion a year in anti money-laundering (AML) systems. Despite this huge investment, 40% of the surveyed institutions admitted to not being confident in their ability to identify human trafficking signs among financial transactions.

But, why is money laundering so hard to detect?

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that a bank should be detecting, so it’s really difficult for banks to scan all of the threats that are out there and actually understand the specific transactional behaviours that are indicative of crime,” says Harriet Shaw, Venture Lead at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence.

In her role, Shaw oversees BAE Systems Applied Intelligence’s Futures team, created two years ago. In this time, two startups have already been sprung from the venture capital fund.

The third one, called the FinCrime Testing Service, is Shaw’s response to

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There’s no clear articulation right now of the criminal or victim activities that a bank should be detecting, so it’s really difficult for banks to scan all of the threats that are out there and actually understand the specific transactional behaviours that are indicative of crime” financial institutions’ need to improve their AML detection systems.

“What we are bringing to the table is a different way to articulate these crimes,” Shaw says. “They haven’t been documented in the step-by-step process, and that’s what we have done.”

The FinCrime Testing Service is a tool that simulates human trafficking behaviour, allowing banks and other customers to test the effectiveness of their AML systems. Its goal is to support financial institutions in reducing operating costs by making their AML

Harriet Shaw

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efforts more efficient, while also fighting a crime as heinous as human trafficking. At the same time, Shaw also hopes to bridge the historic gap between financial institutions and law enforcement authorities in regards to AML efforts.

“Traditionally, financial centres have just wanted money flowing through their cities, so their AML controls have been quite lax,” Shaw explains. “The focus hasn’t been on money laundering from a strategic perspective, and that’s allowed a lot of really difficult technical problems on the banking side to fester over the years that we are now trying to undo.”

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One of the motors of this drive towards better AML controls is the rising popularity of ethical banking. BAE Systems’ research showed that two thirds of British citizens would leave their bank if it failed to demonstrate a proactive approach to money laundering, and 86% of those surveyed want banks to demonstrate good ethical practices.

However, it’s not just the general public that want banks to improve their AML efforts; governments and financial regulators are demanding it.

“Regulators are transitioning their expectations from just asking banks to have an AML control system to asking

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It’s almost like pen testing in the cybersecurity space, but for financial crime” them to have one that is actually effective,” Shaw explains. “It’s no longer a ‘ticking the box’ approach.”

There are two fundamental aspects that go into having effective AML controls, according to Shaw: understanding the financial behaviour of victims and criminals, and making sure that that behaviour is getting picked up by the bank’s systems. Or, in fact, making sure that innocent behaviour is not being picked up by these systems and saving resources that could be used elsewhere.

“Financial institutions have translation monitoring systems that create millions of flags every day,” Shaw stresses.

“Employees have to spend huge amounts of money triaging through those flags, when they don’t actually know how many of them are actually catching crime.”

The FinCrime Testing service’s main benefit to banks is precisely the ability to prove that their AML systems are inefficient, and help them improve them, making them more targeted and

cost-effective. Without a tool like this, financial institutions are trapped within a paradox. They can’t prove that their AML detection approaches are inefficient but also can’t make the business case to change them. It’s an endless cycle that Shaw is determined to break.

In order to accurately detect human trafficking-related money laundering, Shaw’s team spend considerable time studying the behaviours and financial transactions of both victims and perpetrators of this crime. They also consulted with NGOs and law enforcement to hear real-life testimonies of people who have been involved with human trafficking. The goal was to identify financial patterns that can be picked up and simulated by algorithms.

“Victims of human trafficking, when they’re used for sexual exploitation, have a certain transactional profile that’s generally quite unusual,” Shaw explains.

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from customers that come to see them at night and deposit that cash in the morning into their bank account. Then, all of that money gets either transferred or withdrawn to hand over to the perpetrator or the organised criminal group that controls them.”

Once the FinCrime Testing Service tool understands these behavioural patterns, it uses agent-based simulation to produce similar synthetic customer and transactional data. The dataset is then mixed with information from normal transactions and run through a financial entity’s monitoring system, to test its ability to detect the hidden criminal behaviours.

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“It’s almost like pen testing in the cybersecurity space, but for financial crime,” Shaw says.

“We run our dataset through their system and then some alerts are produced. Then we match that back to our datasets, and say: ‘Okay, we filed through 20 different scenarios of human trafficking, you actually alerted against these ones but you missed these ones, and even the ones that you did alert against, you could do that more efficiently’.”

The most effective way of improving AML systems is to programme it with very specific criteria. Instead of making the system flag every time a person

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does three large cash transactions in a month, Shaw’s team recommends focusing on trends such as the time when the transactions are being made, as well as the age and nationality of the customer. However, behavioral analytics are very complex, as Shaw found out when her team began developing a proof of concept in a country different from the one they had begun researching in.

“The transactional profiles of victims or perpetrators of human trafficking in a European are very different to the those in the UK,” Shaw stresses. “They vary in things like how much they use cash, whether they go to ATMs or other cash services, whether they use the informal value transfer system and the currency.

We had to translate all of our data and the behavioural patterns for a new country, and that was such a learning experience.”

To achieve this successfully, Shaw’s team worked alongside Acuminor, a Swedish fintech startup, to obtain information about human trafficking in Northern Europe and build a proof of

concept of the FinCrime Testing Service for a bank in the region.

“The bank was able to say whether or not it detected human trafficking and which scenarios it might be missing,” she explains. “However, the really efficient findings for them were about rules that are overfiring, and picking up absolutely everything, including background innocent activity. If it is able to turn those off it will save huge amounts of money.”

The proof of concept also demonstrated that the data used by the FinCrime Testing Service is in the right format to be ingested into a bank’s transaction monitoring system. Although this would be key for any other fintech startup, Shaw’s team had been able to test their system in BAE’s transaction monitoring system, NetReveal. “It’s a key strategic advantage that we wouldn’t have if we were on our own,” Shaw says.

The success of this proof of concept helped the FinCrime Testing Service to obtain external funding for a full-scale development and expand within the UK

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My vision is closing the gap between law enforcement agencies and banks, and synthetic data might be the answer to that”

and other countries. As institutions use the FinCrime Testing Service, it will become smarter and smarter, and eventually, will even be able to develop a benchmarking system by which banks can compare the effectiveness of their AML systems against those of rival institutions and understand their strengths and weaknesses within the market.

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marking services,” Shaw says. “But also, the more customers use it, the more they can feed in ideas, and build functionalities into the typology stores.

That way, not only are we as BAE uploading interesting criminal up-todate activity data, but also the banks are commenting what they want to see next, and that sort of consortium would be helpful for the fight against financial crime.”

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Shaw’s goal is for this service to become a point of contact, where institutions can join forces and share resources in the fight against financial crime, and particularly, human trafficking. Her team is currently working on adding the 22 money laundering offenses identified by the European Union to the system, including labour exploitation, tax evasion and counter-terror financing.“My vision is closing the gap between law enforce-

ment agencies and banks, and synthetic data might be the answer to that,” Shaw says. “By helping banks make efficiency savings, they will actually file much more quality intelligence into law enforcement, that it can then use to investigate human trafficking cases. The real problem is the gap between those entities, which is quite a gaping hole in my opinion.”

After all, dirty money doesn’t disappear unless it’s cleaned up.

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A LIFE IN TECH

Our pearls of wisdom this month come from Hilary Mine, Nokia’s VP and Market Unit Leader for Nordics, Baltics & Benelux. Based in the Netherlands, Mine leads Customer Operations for Nokia in eleven countries, overseeing sales, business management, delivery and operations across the region. In addition, Mine serves on the Executive Board of Digital Europe as President. Previously Mine was based in Silicon Valley and ran Nokia’s Global Network Transformation practice

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I

programmed for the first time in college while taking a physics class - I was an economics major - and was immediately mesmerised by the potential impact automation could have.

So as editor of the school newspaper I took the opportunity to ‘computerise’ the production process.

In 1985 an economics professor at UC Berkeley explained fibre optics to me - I had been volunteering at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy supporting research on competitiveness of economies in semiconductors – and the potential of fibre combined with software was overwhelmingly exciting and motivating.

My first roles in tech ranged from being an administrator at UC Berkeley in a multi-

disciplinary research institute at the Engineering School - where I surprised the professors by catching errors in equations because I was not only a girl but also a glorified secretary - to selling PCs to small businesses, to forecasting demand and production requirements in the first video chipset company, and finally becoming a tech industry analyst. These varying roles gave me a lot of perspective.

I have always been passionate about the magic of connection and what happens when we connect people and ideas and disciplines.

My career has been a complete surprise to me – unplanned but truly a gift. I am one of those people who has a strong sense of accountability and responsibility, and I work insanely

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hard. So, opportunities came because line managers could rely on me and I was acceptably bright. I jumped on them not for the purpose of having a career, but because the work itself fascinated me. I’ve demoted myself several times for personal or learning reasons and never regretted it.

I was fortunate to work for a few super smart men with daughters who were inspirational and influential: Victor Schnee was my boss and the CEO of an analyst and consulting company who sharpened my analytic skills substantially and stretched me into a leader.

Mike Quigley was head of Alcatel North America when I joined and has since been global President of Alcatel and CEO of NBN in Australia (the national broadband network), and both he and Ron Spithill – the CMO at Alcatel when I joined – stretched me and pushed me to places I had never imagined myself going.

At one point I finally quit working to make a real change in that, and then when I went back to work I took a 40% pay cut and a much smaller role to ensure I could give the right time and energy at home for critical years in my daughter’s life. But I have made many mistakes in the personal domain. Life is a learning journey.

It’s a terrible cliché but no doubt the toughest challenge for a person who is deeply motivated by and interested in their work is to balance with a personal and family life. I was not the parent I wanted to be.

AI is probably the technology that excites me most. I worked on some expert systems when I was doing my MBA 30 years ago. It is terrifying as well, and one of the most urgent topics for the 21st century is to find

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ways to safeguard humanity as AI advances from ML to something much more powerful but also potentially dangerous.

Supporting and encouraging hundreds of amazing people to progress in their careers, and helping customers achieve some challenging and even unexpected results, are my biggest achievements.

I think working around the world has happened by chance but perhaps my subconscious or my second brain (gut) would say it was by design.

The one piece of advice I would give to aspiring technologists would be to master more than one domain and multiple skills, and above all never stop asking questions and learning!

I believe we have an opportunity to unleash substantial brainpower and we have a responsibility to each other and to future generations to ensure we bring the effectiveness of diversity to the development of technologies across the board.

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outcomes and decisions are achieved by diverse teams. So, for me as a pragmatist it’s about diversity more broadly as well. I also do feel that minorities – whether it’s women in tech or men as homemakers or any non-white male in a CXO position – we all have an obligation to support one another because by definition we are in somewhat hostile environments, and community matters.

We need both push and pull when it comes to encouraging more women into tech. On the one hand we need to ensure tech careers are appealing to more diverse thinkers – AI will be by default flawed otherwise, for example.

So, we need to work on making a career in our industries sexy and compelling to a broader audience.

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But also, we need push – continue to educate managers on unconscious bias for example. And when we do get women in our teams, nurture them and give them stretch assignments.

And of course, we need to ensure that all genders can raise families and have personal lives without it being some sort of stigma.

Rather than a single technology, I believe it will be the combination of multiple technologies that will be most powerful and impactful.

The industry talks about 4IR technologies including AI, ML, IoT and robotics, but I would add biological interfaces, materials and intelligence to that list. As these technologies mature,

HILARY MINE

and multidisciplinary minds better grasp the combinations, we will see both enormous opportunity and threat.

Gartner observed many years ago what they call the Hype Cycle - we always over-forecast the near term which results in what they call the peak of inflated expectations, and under forecast the longer term of tech which is where real productivity takes off. So I do not believe people realise how significant 5G will be.

We have seen faster uptake of 5G than any former wireless generation, and in this Covid time we are seeing acceleration of digitalisation plans by companies across the board.

In addition, governments are realising that affordable proper broadband is now critical for all of society, and that long talked about use cases in e-healthcare and online education for example are now not only urgent but also viable.

Technology is our tool not our master – I switch devices off, mute them etc, and I generally (but not perfectly) maintain a regular physical regime – whether yoga or running or the gym. I also love to cook which engages all the senses in a way the digital world does not - yet.

Lastly, I would describe myself as: engaged, pragmatic, curious, transparent, analytical.

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Writing exclusively for Digital Bulletin, Dr. Andrei Dragomir, founder of Aquark Technologies, charts quantum revolutions, past, present and future

T

here is a lot of hype around the term “Quantum technology”, with a rapidly growing anticipation of the transformational impact that new developments will have on our lives.

The large media attention means that when people think of quantum their mind often jumps immediately to computers (or to any unexplainable technology in most of the recent movies). However, while the current hype is well deserved, the impact of quantum based technology is nothing new.

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have revolutionised our world several times already. It is impossible to imagine life today without semiconductors, such is their centrality to our very existence.

The laser, also a quantum discovery, enables our daily activity from shopping to taking photos to the sensors in the cars we drive. As much as these technologies advanced and changed the way we interact with the world, so they created tools enabling scientists to further advance our knowledge of quantum physics, giving us new knowledge of the rules governing reality. This knowledge is regarded as the first quantum revolution.

Today’s hype is driven by the tantalising prospect that we stand on the brink of a second quantum revolution. Our new

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knowledge of these rules is enabling us to develop new technologies, which go far beyond the current standards and allow us to use the characteristics of particles to our own advantage.

The highest profile focus of the current hype rests on the promise shown by the quantum computer, which brings a new way of performing computations at a speed that is orders of magnitude faster than the current state of the art.

All computers work on the basis of manipulating and storing information.

While conventional computers work with binary information (using 1 and 0 states), quantum computers go beyond binary states to use qubits by leveraging quantum mechanical properties. This

From the point at which a quantum physics understanding of material behaviour first yielded the emergence of semiconductors, technologies developed from effects discovered by quantum physics have revolutionised our world several times already� way of controlling data allows a single quantum computer to eclipse the performance of even the best supercomputer.

Because of quantum technology’s unprecedented performance characteristics we anticipate it to usher in and accelerate the possibilities of new medications, scientific discoveries and new materials that were previously unimaginable.

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attention today, we still have years to wait until we will see it in action in daily life. Fortunately, that is not the only show in town. Current quantum technology can be categorised in three well-defined areas: technology based on simulations of particles, technology based on light particles (photons), and technology that uses actual particles.

The first category, using simulations of particle behaviour, has proven to be an extremely efficient way to make quantum computations. That is why the most popular design of the quantum computer is to create qubits using a superconductor set to simulate the behaviour of a particle.

The second category, based on light particles, is a popular method of manipulating single photons of light for quantum applications. This method has high applications in cryptography and communications as we can send photons through optical fibres and use their quantum properties to our advantage.

The final category, using actual particles for applications, currently gains far less attention and yet it shows the most potential for a wide section of applications. The challenge, however, is the dependence on more complex systems, such as a magneto-optical trap. This is a system that uses magnetic and optical fields to cool atoms down to temperatures close to absolute zero, to achieve a particular state of matter 88

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called a Bose-Einstein Condensate, at which point the atoms act as if they were a single atom. No cryogenics involved.

In this state the atoms can be controlled with ease and used for extremely precise measurements of almost any environmental parameter. We can use this system to measure time, rotation, gravity, acceleration and even to create a quantum computer. While the other technologies are still in their development stage, following a wave of investments from many government initiatives over recent years there are many labs around the world that host functional cold atom devices, sitting ready to change the world.

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These instruments can read time to unprecedented accuracy, which means we can achieve data transmission speeds that until now seemed like just a dream. The same instruments can also create new global positioning systems with previously unimaginable performance, capable of circumnavigating the globe with millimetric precision and no need for a satellite connection, thereby enabling new breakthroughs in autonomous vehicle applications. The possibilities are indeed unlimited.

In summary, the devices work well, really well, but they are bulky, power

intensive, complex and require qualified personnel to run. Much like semiconductor technology in the 1960s, these challenges mean they are not yet ready for user applications. The next essential step is to miniaturise this technology to enable its wider adoption, which is where the key focus lies today.

So, when will the next quantum revolution come? While many are quietly waiting for the quantum computer to arrive, the wheels of promise are perhaps already turning through the many other possibilities this technology has to offer, which may come to fruition far more quickly.

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