Displaying items by tag: Analytics

CommScope has announced RUCKUS Analytics, a new cloud service that delivers network intelligence and simplifies service assurance, enabling organizations with complex networks to proactively improve their users’ experience.

"T-Mobile have made very bold promises that can only come to fruition with the vast wireless spectrum holdings, the combined T-Mobile and Sprint will have. State attorneys general who oppose the merger on antitrust grounds are concerned about its potential impact on competition and wireless service prices. However, the promises T-Mobile made today make it difficult for any regulator to continue contesting the merger.

“T-Mobile is promising unprecedented moves for any wireless carrier, which begs the question: Can the New T-Mobile pull this off? The answer is yes. We’ve said all along that the New T-Mobile will result in one of the first and most comprehensive 5G networks in the world given the spectrum assets of both T-Mobile and Sprint. Unlike 4G, emerging 5G networks require carriers to have access to several different frequency bands, in order to meet all 5G’s promises around ultra-high-speed data transmission and latency. T-Mobile has a large swathe of 600 MHz spectrum and will have access to Sprint’s highly coveted 2.5 GHz spectrum, provided the merger closes.

“Among the specific promises made by T-Mobile today, is a 10-year commitment for free 5G access for first responders at every public and non-profit agency, such as police, fire and emergency medical services (EMS). The company also declared that the New T-Mobile will close the ‘homework gap', with a $10bn commitment to offer free online access and hardware to some 10 million homes with children that are without service.

“On the pricing front, the New T-Mobile threw a bombshell at competitors by promising a prepaid service plan at $15 per month for 2GB of high-speed data, 4G or 5G, and 5GB of high-speed data at $25 per month. That heavily undercuts all prepaid service plans, where competition for budget-constrained customers is at its greatest.

“T-Mobile executing on all of these promises will heavily impact AT&T and Verizon, both competitively and in terms of corporate goodwill. These carriers cannot sit back without a response.”

MYCOM OSI, an independent provider of assurance, automation and analytics solutions to the world’s largest Communications Service Providers (CSPs), announced that telecom provider Three UK has selected MYCOM OSI to assure its next generation core network which deploys NFV (Network Functions Virtualization), SDN (Software Defined Networks) and will be part of the world’s first Telco Cloud.

“MYCOM OSI was the best fit for our strategy of delivering a quality and reliable network experience for all of our customers,” said Bryn Jones, Chief Technical Officer of Three UK.

Three UK is deploying the world’s first fully integrated cloud native core network that will enable massive scalability, elasticity, and better reliability, so as to provide the highest quality and service experience possible for Three’s customers, as demand for VoLTE, high definition video and other digital services continue to grow. In addition, it will provide improved agility to rapidly respond to customers’ dynamic service demands while preparing for IoT and 5G.

MYCOM OSI’s Experience Assurance and Analytics™ (EAA) product suite will be deployed to monitor Three UK’s all-new Telco Cloud which is based on the ETSI NFV MANO framework, incorporates open-source technologies, such as Red Hat® OpenStack Platform, and spans several new state-of-the-art datacentres architected for full geo-redundant high-availability.

EAA will assure both new virtualized and existing physical networks, and provide closed-loop assurance-driven orchestration based on end-to-end network and service quality. Three UK selected MYCOM OSI’s Experience Assurance and Analytics™ (EAA) after a detailed investigation of the market and ranked MYCOM OSI’s capabilities and roadmap as the best solution to meet their requirements.

The MYCOM OSI Experience Assurance and Analytics™ solution provides Three UK with:

• Single, integrated assurance suite that manages end-to-end network and service quality across all hybrid (virtual and physical) Telco (3G/4G RAN, Backhaul/transmission, Core, Messaging) and IT (Cloud/Datacenter/Application) network domains
• Proactive and real-time surveillance with automated bottom-up service impact and top-down root cause analyses
• Dynamic on-boarding and lifecycle management through catalog-driven service modeling with automated discovery, monitoring, visualization, alerting and analysis for virtual and physical infrastructure components
• Closed-loop assurance, with policy- and analytics-driven auto-recovery and self-healing support integrating to Orchestration engines (Service and Domain), Inventory/Configuration Management and IT Service Management
• Ecosystem and framework-agnostic interoperability to NFV, SDN, virtualization and Telco Cloud vendors and open source technologies through industry standard open APIs (such as TMF Open APIs)
• Cloud-native and self-orchestrated assurance suite that is based on micro-services architecture principles, containerization, big data storage, elastic auto-scaling and agile DevOps development / deployment

 “We are excited and privileged to be selected by Three UK for the world’s foremost network virtualization project. While others are debating various approaches and standards, Three has designed a leading architecture, selected leading partners and is now leading its peer group in deploying Telco Cloud,” commented MYCOM OSI President and CTO, Mounir Ladki. 
“MYCOM OSI’s Assurance suite will enable Three to deliver market-leading customer experience, agility, scale and reliability whilst embracing exciting new opportunities with digital services, IoT and 5G,” Ladki added.

Accenture and Apple have partnered to help businesses transform how their people engage with customers through innovative business solutions for iOS. The partnership will take full advantage of the iOS platform, and Accenture’s capabilities as a leader in industry and digital transformation, to help companies unlock new revenue streams, increase productivity, improved customer experience and reduce costs.

Accenture will create a dedicated iOS practice within Accenture Digital Studios in select locations around the world. Experts from Apple will be co-located with this team. Working together, the two companies will launch a new set of tools and services that help enterprise clients transform how they engage with customers using iPhone and iPad. The experts will include visual and experience designers, programmers, data architects and scientists, and hardware and software designers.
 
“Starting 10 years ago with iPhone, and then with iPad, Apple has been transforming how work gets done, yet we believe that businesses have only just begun to scratch the surface of what they can do with our products,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Both Apple and Accenture are leaders in building incredible user experiences and together we can continue to truly modernize how businesses work through amazing solutions that take advantage of the incredible capabilities of Apple’s technologies.”
 
Pierre Nanterme, Accenture’s chairman and CEO, said, “Based on our experience in developing mobile apps, we believe that iOS is the superior mobile platform for businesses and are excited to be partnering with Apple. By combining Accenture’s vast digital capabilities and industry expertise with Apple’s market leadership in creating products that delight customers, we are in a perfect position to help our clients transform the way they work.”

The new iOS tools and services will take full advantage of the latest Apple technologies and tap into Accenture’s digital and analytics capabilities, including new ecosystem services to help clients address the full range of iOS integration requirements to connect to back-end systems, leveraging Accenture’s systems integration expertise and the unique iOS advantages built by Apple with key partners like SAP and Cisco.

It will also include Internet-of-Things (IoT) services featuring new tools templates and predesigned code to help clients take greater advantage of the data from IoT platforms in their iOS apps, putting more power into the hands of workers.

While 84 percent of global companies say that digital transformation is critical to their survival in the next five years, only three percent have completed company-wide transformation efforts, shows a new study from SAP. The study, supported by Oxford Economics, was released at SAP Leonardo Live, held July 11–12 in Frankfurt, Germany.

Significantly, the results could spell possible peril for companies lagging in digital transformation: those that have embraced mass digital changes reported significantly higher levels of market share (85 percent vs. 41 percent) and profitability (80 percent vs. 53 percent).

Companies named as the leaders in the survey expect to see roughly 23 percent more revenue growth over the next two years than the rest of the organizations surveyed. The study also found that digital transformation was cited as a top-three driver of future revenue, across all industries and among companies of all sizes.

“SAP Digital Transformation Executive Study: 4 Ways Leaders Set Themselves Apart” is the most comprehensive of its kind. Based on survey results from more than 3,000 senior executives across 17 countries and regions, it identifies the challenges, opportunities, value and key technologies driving digital transformation. The results also identify the Top 100 companies — called Digital Leaders — who are best at connecting people, things and businesses.

Digital Leaders hold four key traits, according to the study. They see digital transformation as truly transformational: 96 percent of Leaders say digital transformation is a core business goal, compared to 61 percent of all others. The transformation extends through their company, to how they interact with customers, suppliers and partners.

Digital Leaders also focus on customer-facing functions first: 70 percent of Leaders say digital transformation is already delivering increased customer satisfaction vs. 22 percent of all others. The customer experience is the gateway to a successful digital transformation. They also prioritize talent: 71 percent of Leaders say that digital transformation efforts make it easier to attract and retain talent vs. 54 percent of all others. They also spend more on retraining the existing workforce than their peers.

Finally, Digital Leaders invest in next-generation technologies: 50 percent of Leaders are already working with artificial intelligence and machine learning, compared to 7 percent of all others. They are also investing more heavily in Big Data and analytics (94 percent vs. 60 percent) and the Internet of Things (76 percent vs. 52 percent). Using a bimodal IT architecture lets them run legacy systems efficiently while rapidly integrating new technologies.

“Digital transformation is no longer a choice, it’s an essential driver of revenue, profit and growth,” said Vivek Bapat, senior vice president, global head of Marketing Strategy and Thought Leadership, SAP SE. “Executives need to move from simply understanding the high stakes to activating complete end-to-end execution across their business. This requires innovative breakthrough technologies, investing in digital skills, and retraining the existing workforce. The next two years will be a key inflection point, which will separate the digital winners from those left behind.”

Procera Networks revealed a multi-year, multi-million dollar partnership with Vodafone Egypt to enhance the subscriber experience for its fixed and mobile subscribers. Procera was selected for the deployment after a competitive evaluation due to the strength of their virtualized solution offering for subscriber experience analytics, even as encryption becomes prevalent on the internet. Vodafone Egypt is the largest mobile operator in Egypt with a customer base exceeding 39 million.

“Procera’s virtual solutions delivered on the promise of Network Functions Virtualization for Vodafone Egypt today, enabling us to accelerate our NFV deployment timelines,” said Osama Siad, Vodafone Egypt’s Technology Director.

Osama added: “Procera’s PacketLogic solutions, especially ScoreCard, enable us to dynamically deploy analytics capacity to ensure our customers are receiving a high quality broadband experience across our entire network footprint, to be the number one network in Egypt, and reach our main goal which is securing the best service quality for our customers’ satisfaction.”

Lyn Cantor, President and CEO at Procera Networks, said: “Procera is pleased to provide solutions that enable Vodafone Egypt to deliver a high quality broadband experience to their subscribers. We believe that our strategic focus on virtualization use cases for fixed and mobile network will enable both operators and subscribers to benefit from their broadband networks.”

“Virtualization of analytics is a key initiative for the Middle East region,” said Hashem Eid, Procera’s Managing Director of Sales for Middle East. “With regional operators competing on network quality, reducing the cost and increasing the deployment flexibility of analytics through virtualization is a business imperative.”

Procera’s subscriber and network intelligence technology is the choice for hundreds of fixed, mobile, and Wi-Fi operators around the world.

The public cloud is a network, not just a collection of data centers. Google’s global network has allowed them to build products that billions of users around the world can depend on. Whether you’re in Taipei or Tijuana, you can get Gmail, Search, Maps or your Google Cloud Platform services with Google speed and reliability.

They are adding to this global network for Cloud Platform customers by expanding their roster of existing Cloud Platform regions with two more — both operational later this year:

• US Western region in Oregon
• East Asia region in (Tokyo) Japan

As always, each region has multiple availability zones, so that they can offer high-availability computing to their customers in each locale. Google has four regions today. By quadrupling its digital reach, the company can serve more businesses faster while conforming to local regulations, many of which demand that certain types of data never leave a country. Amazon operates 12 regions today, with a further five planned.

These are the first two of more than 10 additional GCP regions they will be adding to their network through 2017. This follows the opening last year of a US east coast region in South Carolina for all major GCP services.

Google Cloud Platform services are available in locations across North America, Europe, and Asia. These locations are divided into regions and zones. You can choose where to locate your applications to meet your latency, availability and durability requirements.

At the helm of Google’s cloud is Diane Greene, former chief executive of VMware and an enterprise technology veteran. Greene is already exerting pressure on Google’s sales force, according to a report today from Bloomberg. Setting aside the upcoming data center regions, Greene’s push from the top can’t be ignored when you think about how Google is currently trying to take on 10-year-old AWS. In the long term, it could very well make a difference.

Taking Cloud Machine Learning Service Mainstream

Hundreds of different big data and analytics products and services fight for your attention as it's one of the most fertile areas of innovation in our industry. And it’s no wonder; the most amazing consumer experiences are driven by insights derived from information. This is an area where Google Cloud Platform has invested almost two decades of engineering, and today at GCP NEXT they’re announcing some of the latest results of that work. This next round of innovation builds on our portfolio of data management and analytics capabilities by adding new products and services in multiples key areas:

Machine Learning:

Google is on a journey to create applications that can see, hear and understand the world around them. Today they have taken a major stride forward with the announcement of a new product family: Cloud Machine Learning. Cloud Machine Learning will take machine learning mainstream, giving data scientists and developers a way to build a new class of intelligent applications. It provides access to the same technologies that power Google Now, Google Photos and voice recognition in Google Search as easy to use REST APIs. It enables you to build powerful Machine Learning models on your data using the open-source TensorFlow machine learning library:

• Cloud Machine Learning makes it easy for you to build sophisticated, large scale machine learning models in a short amount of time. It’s portable, fully managed and scalable. Cloud Machine Learning works with data in many formats and is well integrated with other Cloud Platform products such as Google Cloud Dataflow, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Dataproc, Google Cloud Storage, and Google Cloud Datalab. You can easily build predictive analytics models using your own training data. For example, a financial services app that predicts values using regression models, or a classification service for images. Cloud Machine Learning will take care of everything from data ingestion through to prediction. The result: now any application can take advantage of the same deep learning techniques that power many of Google’s services.
• Pre-trained Machine Learning models like Google Translate API and Cloud Vision API are being joined today by Google Cloud Speech API. They're very excited to now offer a full set of APIs that help your applications see, hear and translate. Cloud Speech API brings the same advanced neural network technology that powers voice search in the Google app and voice typing in Google Keyboard. It demonstrates speech-to-text conversion in 80+ languages with unparalleled accuracy, especially in noisy environments, and is blazingly fast. The technology that has already empowered developers to add speech to their Chrome and Android is now available for any application in real-time streaming or batch mode.

Big Data and Analytics:

Doing big data the cloud way means being more productive when building applications, with faster and better insights, without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. To further this mission, they recently announced the general availability of Cloud Dataproc, their managed Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark service, and they’re adding new services and capabilities today:

• BigQuery continues to push the limits of what it means to be a fully managed Analytics Data Warehouse. Today they're announcing lots of exciting new features that make analytics faster, cheaper and easier to use:
• Long Term Storage automatically drops the price of your storage by 50% after 90 days.
• Automatic Table Partitions (coming soon) simplifies the way you store and query data by partitioning your table by date and querying the date ranges you want.
• The new Capacitor storage engine, which accelerates many queries by up to 10x, and Poseidon, a new mechanism that improves data ingest and export speed by 5x.
• Direct query and import of Apache AVRO files, simplifying data interoperability
• Automatic schema detection of JSON and CSV files.
• The new Public Datasets Program to help our community host, share and analyze public datasets.

All these features will come to you automagically, without any upgrades or downtime — the way fully managed is meant to be.

They recently announced Google Data Studio 360, a new reporting and data visualization product that allows you to unify all analytics workflows into one tool. Data Studio allows you to access, transform and share datasets from several different sources such as Google Analytics, BigQuery, and Google Sheets. You can then visualize all of the different sources in the same report and collaborate with your peers to build beautiful and flexible reports. Google Data Studio is available in private Beta (i.e., invite only) for Google Analytics Premium customers.

Open Source:

Their Cloud Machine Learning offering leverages Google’s cutting edge machine learning and data processing technologies, some of which they have recently open sourced:

• TensorFlow, Google’s latest machine learning system, is the #1 Machine Learning project on GitHub today. They’re continuing to develop this ecosystem. For example, you can now use TensorFlow Serving with another of our open-source projects, Kubernetes, to scale and serve ML models. The Cloud Machine Learning product extends these capabilities, enabling you to build powerful Machine Learning models with your data on Cloud Platform.
• Earlier this year, they partnered with a number of organizations, including data Artisans, Cloudera, Talend and others to submit the Dataflow model, SDKs and runners for popular OSS distributed systems to the Apache Incubator. This new incubating project, known as Apache Beam, allows you to define portable, and simple data processing pipelines that can execute in either streaming or batch mode