Getty Images (Supplied) James Kavanagh (left), Microsoft Azure Engineering Lead for Australia, and Greg Boorer (right) Co-Founder and CEO of Canberra Data Centres. Microsoft has announced that it is going to open two new highly-secure Azure regions in Canberra, Australia to support the needs of the Australian government and its suppliers. The regions will be available in the first half of 2018. Microsoft is partnering with local datacenter firm Canberra Data Centre…

Speech recognition is a software that allows you to convert video into text. This means, you can speak into your phone and the same will be converted into a text that you share with others through email or social media. Cool, right? Many tech companies, especially owners of mobile operating systems have been working extensively to improve the quality of this cloud recognition software. One of the pioneers of speech recognition software is Google as its Cloud Speech API is one of the most advance…

Courtesy Al Pizarro Members of IBEW Local #3 pose during a Spectrum strike gathering in Brooklyn. (Credit: Al Pizarro) In the past year, executive wages have broken new records while labor struggles and uncertainty soldiered on, creating some interesting juxtapositions in the numbers. According to a Los Angeles Times report earlier this summer, American CEOs achieved their highest ever growth in compensation in 2016. During the same year, wages for U.S. workers als…

As a result, delivering an amazing digital experience starts with putting the right effort in the design of new applications. This is critical for the success of individual digital initiatives and the organization as a whole. According to the Forrester report, Lead With A Scaled Design Thinking Mindset, published in May 2017, the UK’s Design Council found that “design-led companies were … outperforming the S&P 500 by 211%.” Design as a catalyst of process innovation …

Few trends in information technology (IT) have had a greater impact than the rise of cloud computing. In 2016, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the leading public cloud provider, brought in $12.2 billion in net sales, a 55% increase over the previous year. Today’s startup companies are practically required to have a cloud strategy or risk losing funding. Not to mention, just about every enterprise CIO has cloud migration and security in their top strategic mandates, and about 70% of organ…

2017 is the year that NVMe interfaces running on the PCIe bus become mainstream. All the flash memory component and systems companies at the Flash Memory Summit were focused on NVMe products and systems along with the networking extension, NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF). NVMe is the first standardized storage interface designed from the ground up for solid state storage, rather than HDDs. A strong and active industry group supports the NVMe efforts. They organized a number of sessions at the FMS 201…

A lot has changed since SAP SuccessFactors launched its Customer Advisory Board to address workplace bias last year. For one thing, the workplace has emerged as an oasis for employees concerned about diversity and bias prevention. “Folks are coming to work and talking about diversity,” said Patti Fletcher, Leadership Futurist & Solution Management at SAP SuccessFactors. “Work is becoming the place where we can talk with our colleagues and our boss. We all know what’s going on in the world, an…

Tableau Simpler to use than database query language (and easier to look at too). Data visualization company Tableau Software has has acquired ClearGraph, a Palo Alto startup that produces what it calls 'data discovery' and analysis technology that works though spoken 'natural language' queries. There's an almost mirror-like balance to what is going on here, so what do these two firms actually make? Data: easier out, easier in? Tableau's technology allows users …

Back office tasks are often seen as routine ones, but have you ever realized how much more streamlined these operations will be when you move them to the cloud? Let’s look at some reasons why cloud is critical for your back office operations. Embracing change What we did 10 years ago is hardly relevant today. Many enterprises continue to have legacy systems that put tremendous load on the infrastructure and consume way more resources than they should. We had to use legacy systems then because th…

At Samsung’s Tech Day in their San Jose, CA headquarters and at the 2017 Flash Memory Summit, the company laid out a number of new products and initiatives.  These products spanned from the world’s largest announced SSD (128 TB) using its 5th generation V-NAND chips, to a new small form factor SSD, to its Z-NAND products geared to high performance storage class memory and a Key Value SSD.  Samsung says that “These solutions will be at the forefront of enabling today’s most data-intensive tasks s…