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The Ecosystm Voice of the Employee Study reveals that 76% of your employees have a dedicated home office, which they have continually enhanced over the last two years. Now that you are working to bring these employees back to the office, are you focusing on giving them the same technology and environment that they have become used to?
Download the Ecosystm Voice of Employee Study infographic as a PDF
In the last decade, blockchain technology and crypto have been laying the foundations for an alternative reality in which humans interact and organise themselves without the mediation of a third party. Cryptocurrencies are almost a USD 2 trillion asset today and billions of dollars are being traded globally without the need of a bank or intermediary, with transactions secured on blockchains. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – currently valued at over USD 500 million – fuelled the democratisation of the art world and provided a proof-of-concept that crypto enables wider communities to transact pseudonymously.
The discovery, storytelling, evangelism, transfer of ownership in exchange for monetary value, are taking place seamlessly in the decentralised world, without a single dollar being spent on advertising. There is no central owner or authority directing this phenomenon.
Read on to find out more about:
Download The Future of Marketing: Enabled by Crypto as a PDF
The Work from Anywhere Model is forcing a change in mindset in IT and Business leaders to manage employee expectations well.
At the start of the pandemic there were predictions of organisations reducing commercial workspace. Yet, only 22% are considering that as a measure in 2022. The current focus is on building a bulletproof mechanism to ensure that work can take place in any possible location.
In the Work from Anywhere Model, how can technology leaders prepare for an agile and innovative new era of work and what issues are likely to arise, and how can they be avoided?
Download Whitepaper – Building a resilient Work from Anywhere Model in 2022
(Clicking on this link will take you to the IR website where you can download the whitepaper)
Last week, Kyndryl became a Premier Global Alliance Partner for AWS. This follows other recent similar partnerships for Kyndryl with Google and Microsoft. This now gives Kyndryl premier or similar partner status at the big three hyperscalers.
This new partnership was essential for Kyndryl to provide legitimacy to their independent reputation and their global presence. And in many respects, it is a partnership that AWS needs as much as Kyndryl does. As one of the largest global managed services providers, Kyndryl manages a huge amount of infrastructure and thousands of applications. Today, most of these applications sit outside public cloud environments, but at some stage in the future, many of these applications will move to the public cloud. AWS has positioned itself to benefit from this transition – as Kyndryl will be advising clients on which cloud environment best suits their needs, and in many cases Kyndryl will also be running the application migration and managing the application when it resides in the cloud. To that end, the further investment in developing an accelerator for VMware Cloud on AWS will also help to differentiate Kyndryl on AWS. With a high proportion of Kyndryl customers running VMware, this capability will help VMware users to migrate these workloads to the cloud and run core businesses services on AWS.
Beyond the typical partnership activities, Kyndryl will build out its own internal infrastructure in the cloud, leveraging AWS as its preferred cloud provider. This experience will mean that Kyndryl “drinks its own champagne” – many other managed services providers have not yet taken the majority of their infrastructure to the cloud, so this experience will help to set Kyndryl apart from their competitors, along with providing deep learning and best practices.
By the end of 2022, Kyndryl expects to have trained more than 10,000 professionals on AWS. Assuming the company hits these targets, they will be one of AWS’s largest partners. However, experience trumps training, and their relatively recent entry into the broader cloud ecosystem space (after coming out from under IBM’s wing at the end of 2021) means they have some way to go to have the depth and breadth of experience that other Premier Alliance Partners have today.
In my recent interactions with Kyndryl, what sets them apart is the fact that they are completely customer-focused. They start with a client problem and find the best solution for that problem. Yes – some of the “best solutions” will be partner specific (such as SAP on Azure, VMware on AWS), but they aren’t pushing every customer down a specific path. They are not just an AWS partner – where every solution to every problem starts and ends with AWS. The importance of this new partnership is it expands the capabilities of Kyndryl and hence expands the possibilities and opportunities for Kyndryl clients to benefit from the best solutions in the market – regardless of whether they are on-premises or in one of the big three hyperscalers.
At Ecosystm we pride ourselves in keeping a finger on the pulse of the market. There is a lot of buzz around the ‘Digital Workplace’. For the last two years you have focused on technologies that allow employees to work from home – or from anywhere they choose to. Now the focus of the tech investments is on empowering employees to return to the physical office and creating a true hybrid workplace.
As you define the work model that works for your organisation, now is the time to listen to your employees. The newly launched Ecosystm Voice of the Employee Study aims to do just that.
The study aims to explore the emerging global Future of Work trends from an employee’s point-of-view. In an environment of uncertainty, this is designed to be an ongoing, dynamic study that will be able to track the major shifts in preferences, perceptions, and practices over the year.
Here are some key findings from the ongoing study.
Read on to find more about the study findings.
Click here to download the Future of the Digital Workplace as a PDF
COP26 has firmly put environmental consciousness as a leading global priority. While we have made progress in the last 30 odd years since climate change began to be considered as a reality, a lot needs to be done.
No longer is it enough for only governments to lead on green initiatives. Now is the time for non-profit organisations, investors, businesses – corporate and SMEs – and consumers to come together to ensure we leave a safer planet for our children.
February saw examples of how technology providers and large corporates are delivering on their environmental consciousness and implementing meaningful change.
Here are some announcements that show how tech providers and corporates are strengthening the Sustainability cause:
Read on to find more.
Click here to download a copy of The Future of Sustainability as a PDF.
Most organisations across various sectors have already adopted a private cloud, or a public cloud environment for their applications. However, not every application belongs to a solely private or public cloud architecture. Shifting to a hybrid cloud model provides a means of straddling both public and private environments.
To define the building blocks for a virtualised infrastructure, VMware hybrid cloud offers a portfolio of services:
To learn more about Transforming with VMware Cloud, download the free whitepaper below.
(Clicking on this link will take you to a separate page where you can download the free whitepaper)
There have been some long-term shifts in market dynamics in the telecom industry. Network traffic growth rates have accelerated; new business models emerged; and cloud services matured and spread to new verticals, applications and customer sizes. Networks are more important than ever. Revenue growth rates and profitability in the three segments – telecom, webscale, and carrier-neutral – have been stronger in recent quarters than anticipated.
Looking ahead, networks will increasingly revolve around data centres, which will continue to proliferate both at the core and edge.
Data centre innovation will be rapid, as webscalers push the envelope on network design and function, and telecom operators seek cheaper ways of running their networks. The telecom operator’s need for cost efficiency will increase as overhyped 5G-based opportunities fail to materialise in any big way. Carrier-neutral operators (CNNOs) will benefit from an ongoing wave of new capital which will help them transform to more integrated providers of “digital infrastructure” assets.
Read on to find out about
Click here to download The Future of Telecom: Industry Outlook for 2022 and Beyond slides as a PDF.
Since officially separating from IBM in November last year, Kyndryl has been busy cementing some heavyweight partnerships. The alliances with Microsoft, Google, and VMware demonstrate its intention to build hybrid cloud solutions with whoever it needs to, rather than favouring the Big Blue or Red Hat. The SAP tie-up hints at a future of migrating ERP workloads to the cloud and even an eye on moving up the application stack. Last week Kyndryl announced it is working with Nokia to provide private 5G and LTE networks to enable Industry 4.0 solutions. The first customer reference for the partnership is Dow, deploying both real-world and proof-of-concept applications for worker safety and collaboration and asset tracking.
Kyndryl has a competitive networking services unit, particularly in partnership with Cisco. Its focus has been on SD-WAN, campus networks, and network management as part of broader cloud services deals. This 5G partnership with Nokia is its first serious effort to work with one of the major carrier-grade vendors using cellular technology. It creates an opportunity for Kyndryl to position itself as a provider of services that underpin IoT and edge applications, rather than only cloud, which has until now been its main strength.
Prior to the Kyndryl announcement, Nokia was already developing private 5G solutions under the moniker Digital Automation Cloud (DAC). A key customer is Volkswagen, using the network to connect robots and wireless assembly tools. Over-the-air vehicle updates are also tested over the private network. Volkswagen operates in a dedicated 3.7-3.8 GHz band, which was allocated by the Federal Network Agency in Germany. This illustrates a third option for accessing spectrum, which will become an important consideration in private 5G rollouts.
Private 5G has several benefits such as low latency, long-range, support for many users per access point, and provision for devices that are mobile due to handover. It is unlikely that it will completely replace other technologies, like wireless LAN, but it is very compelling for certain use cases.
Private 5G is useful on large sites, like mines, ports, farms, and warehouses where connected machines are moving about or some devices – like perimeter security cameras – are just out of reach. Utilities, like power, gas, and water, with infrastructure that needs to be monitored over long distances, will also start looking at it as a part of their predictive maintenance and resiliency systems. Low latency will become increasingly important as we see more and more customer-facing digital services delivered on-site and autonomous robots in the production environment.
Another major benefit of private 5G compared to operating on public service is that data can remain within the organisation’s own network for as long as possible, providing more security and control.
There has been a lot of activity over the last year in this space, with the hyperscalers, telecom providers and network equipment vendors developing private 5G offerings.
Last year, the AWS Private 5G was announced, a managed service that includes core network hardware, small-cell radio units, SIM cards, servers, and software. The service operates over a shared spectrum, like the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) in the US, where the initial preview will be available. CBRS is considered a lightly licenced band. This builds on AWS’s private multi-access edge compute (MEC) solution, released in conjunction with Verizon to integrate AWS Outposts with private 5G operating in licenced spectrum. A customer reference highlighted was low latency, high throughput analysis of video feeds from manufacturing robots at Corning.
Similarly, Microsoft launched a private MEC offering last year, a cloud and software stack designed for operators, systems integrators, and ISVs to deploy private 5G solutions. The system is built up of components from Azure and its acquisition of Metaswitch. AT&T is an early partner bringing a solution to the market built on Microsoft’s technology and the operator’s licenced spectrum. Microsoft highlighted use cases such as asset tracking in logistics, factory operations in manufacturing, and experiments with AI-infused video analytics to improve worker safety.
Organisations are likely to begin testing private 5G this year for Industry 4.0 applications, either at single sites in the case of factories or in select geographic areas for Utilities. Early applications will mostly focus on simple connectivity for mobile machines or remote equipment. In the longer term, however, the benefits of private 5G will become more apparent as AI applications, such as video analysis and autonomous machines become more prevalent. This will require the full ecosystem of players, including telecom providers, network vendors, cloud hyperscalers, systems integrators, and IoT providers.
