Futurum Tech Webcast

In this episode of The Futurum Tech Webcast, Saso Ivanovski, CTO of Semos Cloud joins host Keith Kirkpatrick, Research Director, Enterprise Applications at The Futurum Group to discuss the technological advances in HR Tech and the evolution of employee experience. The pair also cover issues around HR tech integration, data security, and privacy, and unravel the significance of Culture Intelligence in shaping the future of HR landscapes.

In this episode of The 5G Factor, our series that focuses on all things 5G, the IoT, and the 5G ecosystem as a whole, we review indicators of improving 5G prospects in 2024 across key areas such as Samsung's surging Q1 2024 financial results amid AI's rising tide, growing worldwide 5G connections plus eSIM expansion, the FCC proposing revival of the $9 billion 5G Fund for Rural America, and T-Mobile's creative new Blink Smart Home bundle package.

Our analytical review spotlighted:

Samsung Surging: Indicating Bumper Q1 2024 Results. Samsung is reporting that its operating profit would reach about 6.6 trillion Korean won ($4.9 billion) in Q1 2024, up from 64 billion won ($473 million) a year earlier, following a challenging 2023 pockmarked by diminished demand for consumer electronics. This represents nearly a tenfold increase year-over-year and appreciably above consensus estimates of 5.4 trillion won ($3.9 billion), according to FactSet. It would also be Samsung's highest operating profit since Q3 2022. We examine why this is good news for the mobile ecosystem, especially 5G, aligning with the AI-fueled surge in the financial performance of key players such as NVIDIA, Super Micro, SK Hynix, and Micron amid key drivers such as 5G accounting for as many as 1.2 billion connections by 2025 and around 1 billion eSIM smartphone connections globally by the end of 2025 (according to GSMA Intelligence).

FCC Proposing $9 Billion 5G Fund Revival. The FCC is proposing rules that would revive the 5G Fund for Rural America, allocating up to $9 billion for its initial phase. Funding sources for the program typically come from a combination of government appropriations, revenue generated from spectrum license auctions, and contributions from telecommunications companies participating in the program. We explore how relaunching a program originally adopted in 2020, makes more sense not that the FCC has better mapping to get 5G to areas it believes won't receive the service without subsidization as well as inputs from the CTIA and the Rural Wireless Association (RWA) that can help optimize the potential 5G funding allocations.

T-Mobile's Creative New Blink Smart Home Package. T-Mobile is offering a new bundle that enables customers to switch to 5G Home Internet or Small Business Internet and get a free Blink smart home package, including the Blink Outdoor 4 two-camera system and Blink Mini Pan-Tilt camera (a $229.97 value) for a limited time. We address the key selling point of simplified installation where people can go from unboxing to browsing in 15 minutes or less, no professional installation or wasting hours waiting for an appointment window required and how these types of creative bundling packages can help stimulate 5G service adoption.

In this episode of Infrastructure Matters, hosts Steven Dickens with Krista Macomber and Camberley Bates cover the a peak at the 60th birthday party for the Mainframe, Rubrik's IPO and AI tech from AWS to memory and CXL technology.

Key moments from the conversation include:

• The Mainframe turns sixty, and Steve and Camberley look back and forward on the amazing endurance plus the new adoption of the mainframe.

• The Infrastructure Matters team lends a view into the recent Amazon's Just Walk Out technology, and what is evolving within AI and computer vision technology and where to expect Amazon to go next.

• AI was the top conversation at MemCon 2024 where the importance of memory technologies like HBM and CXL are addressing performance bottlenecks in high-performance computing and AI.

• How we will see data storage and other technologies gain traction as the new AI gains hold in everyday life.

• Rubrik's IPO announcement prompts discussion on its financials, its acquisitions, and the broader trend of data protection companies pivoting towards cybersecurity amidst growing cyber threats.

In this episode of Enterprising Insights, The Futurum Group's Enterprise Applications Research Director Keith Kirkpatrick discusses the news coming out of NetSuite's SuiteConnectNY event, focusing on new product enhancements around AI, and a new connector used to link multiple instances of the product. He also discusses several retail case studies, and then closes out the show with the Rant or Rave segment, where he picks one item in the market, and either champions or criticizes it.

On this episode of DevOps Dialogues: Insights & Innovations, I am joined by Plainsight's CEO, Kit Merker, for discussion of the impacts of AI and Generative AI on application modernization, and innovative development methodologies for overall business goals.

Our conversation covers:

• How Plainsight's integration of visual AI and data science distinguish its approach in the competitive Computer Vision market

• In what specific ways Plainsight addresses the challenges posed by the rapidly evolving landscape of Computer Vision technology

• How Plainsight prioritize customers' end-to-end business processes to ensure the success of their Computer Vision initiatives

• The evidence or examples demonstrate Plainsight's commitment to customer satisfaction and how has it contributed to the company's achievements in the field of Computer Vision

These topics reflect ongoing discussions, challenges, and innovations within the DevOps community.

The integrity of both the mainframe platform and the people within the ecosystem have kept the world's economy humming for 60 years. But don't just take it from our hosts Greg Lotko and Daniel Newman! This special anniversary episode spotlights the mainframe community, what they love about the platform, their favorite technological advancements, and why the mainframe is critical to our everyday lives.

In this episode of Enterprising Insights, The Futurum Group's Enterprise Applications Research Director Keith Kirkpatrick is joined by Robert Kramer, vice president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, to discuss the announcements from Adobe Summit. The pair discusses the news coming out of the show, the state of SaaS applications, data management and governance, and the challenges faced by Adobe and others with incorporating and managing AI. The pair then close out the show with the Rant or Rave segment, where they each champion and criticize something from the enterprise software and CX market.

In this episode of The 5G Factor, our series that focuses on all things 5G, the IoT, and the 5G ecosystem as a whole, we look at the recent key AI RAN and telco AI moves, especially alliance formations unveiled before and during Mobile World Congress 2024. The major AI RAN and Telco AI developments include the near-term and long-term ecosystem impact of the AI-RAN Alliance launch, HEAVY.AI's progress in the key GenAI areas of accuracy and speed, the official debut of the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA), and the AI Alliance's focus on responsible AI.

Our analytical review focused on:

AI-RAN Alliance Debuts: How Substantive? The AI-RAN Alliance debuted at MWC 2024, a new collaborative initiative aimed at integrating AI into cellular technology to further advance RAN technology and mobile networks. The alliance's founding members include AWS, Arm, DeepSig, Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, Northeastern University, NVIDIA, Samsung Electronics, SoftBank and T-Mobile. The group's mission is to enhance mobile network efficiency, reduce power consumption, and retrofit existing infrastructure, setting the stage for potentially unlocking new economic opportunities for telecommunications companies with AI, facilitated by 5G and further out 6G. We examine how network operators in the alliance are set to spearhead the testing and implementation of these evolving technologies developed through the collective research efforts of the member companies and universities and ecosystem prospects for AI RAN for both near-term and long-term.

HEAVY.AI Showing Accuracy and Speed Breakthroughs. HEAVY.AI announced HeavyIQ designed to bring LLM capabilities to the GPU-accelerated HEAVY.AI analytics platform, with the goal of enabling organizations to interact with their data through conversational analytics. Users can explore their data with natural language questions and generate advanced visualizations of that data. This streamlined process could reduce the friction of traditional business analytics, allowing more users to swiftly uncover insights. With HeavyIQ, HEAVY.AI has taken an open-source LLM foundation model and extensively trained it to perform core analytics tasks, including analyzing massive geospatial and temporal data sets. The technology employs LLM in conjunction with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) capabilities to take a user's text input, automatically convert it into a SQL query, and can both visualize and return natural language summaries of results. We review why HEAVY.AI is providing benefits in areas such as accuracy. Trained with over 60,000 custom training pairs, benchmarks show HeavyIQ to be more accurate than GPT-4, with 90%+ accuracy on common text-to-SQL benchmarks, compared to 85% with GPT-4. For speed, HeavyIQ leverages optimized and fine-tuned smaller models that take advantage of the latest NVIDIA GPU hardware innovations to deliver responses up to 10x faster than GPT-4.

Global Telco AI Alliance Officially Takes Off. Deutsche Telekom, e& Group, Singtel, SoftBank and SK Telecom officially launched the Global Telco AI Alliance (GTAA), following its pre-announcement in July 2023. The telcos also announced plans to establish a joint venture, through which the companies plan to develop LLMs specifically tailored for the requirements of telecommunications companies. The LLMs will be designed to help telcos improve their customer interactions through digital assistants and chatbots. We explore why it is important to the mobile ecosystem for the JV to develop multilingual LLMs optimized for languages including Korean, English, German, Arabic and Japanese, with plans for additional languages to be agreed among the founding members and advancing telco specific LLMs that align to the telecommunications domain and can prove better at understanding user intent.

AI Alliance Prioritizes Responsible AI. In December 2023, IBM and Meta launched the AI Alliance in collaboration with over 50 founding members and collaborators. The AI Alliance is focused on cultivating an open community and enabling developers and researchers to accelerate responsible innovation in AI while ensuring scientific rigor, trust, safety, and economic competitiveness. By bringing together developers, academics, scientists, and other innovators, the alliance looks to pool resources and knowledge to address safety issues. We assess why the AI Alliance is integral to fulfilling ecosystem-wide objectives including deploying benchmarks and evaluation tools and standards to enable the responsible development and use of AI systems (i.e., Responsible AI). This includes supporting AI skills building and exploratory research.

On this episode of DevOps Dialogues: Insights & Innovations, I am joined by Kalyan Veeramachaneni, Co-founder and CEO of DataCebo to discuss access to synthetic data for generative AI models.

Our conversation also covered:

• Beyond LLMs: Generative AI models for data locked up in the enterprise warehouses

• Synthetic data use cases that can bring productivity gains

• Scalable approach to adopting synthetic data within an enterprise

• Synthetic data use cases that can alleviate data availability problems

These topics reflect ongoing discussions, challenges, and innovations within the DevOps community.

In this episode of The 5G Factor, our series that focuses on all things 5G, the IoT, and the 5G ecosystem as a whole, we review the early market inroads and impact that Telco GenAI is delivering. The major takeaways consist of BT Group using Amazon Q's coding companion, Amazon Code Whisperer, to provide GenAI coding assistance to its software engineers, Amazon and Microsoft combining Amdocs amAIz platform and Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to bring verticalized GenAI to telcos, and the debut of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X80 5G Modem-RF system that integrates a dedicated 5G AI Processor and 5G-Advanced-ready architecture to achieve key breakthroughs across NB-NTN satellite communications, 6-antenna architecture for smartphones, 6X carrier aggregation, and AI-based mmWave range extension for FWA CPE.

Our analytical review spotlighted:

Amazon CodeWhisperer Shows BT Group Early Benefits. At MWC24, BT Group announced that it deployed Amazon Q's coding companion (Amazon CodeWhisperer) to provide generative AI coding assistance to its software engineers. Specifically, Amazon CodeWhisperer generates code suggestions ranging from snippets to full functions in real time in the customer Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The solution is already providing 15-20 suggestions of code per active user per day for BT Group, with an acceptance rate of 37% by its software engineers who are using the platform. We see this as an encouraging example of the value, efficiency, and support generative AI can offer to a communication service provider (CSP) organization.

Amdocs and Microsoft Ready GenAI Specifically for CSPs. Amdocs expanded its strategic alliance with Microsoft to further bring verticalized GenAI capabilities to the telecommunications industry, combining Amdocs amAIz platform and Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. The duo has established a dedicated lab and center of excellence to further productize GenAI capabilities with the goal of accelerating adoption of GenAI technologies for CSPs. The collaboration is designed to bolster business outcomes by combining deep expertise in the communications industry with GenAI technology and industry verticalization that can produce carrier-grade business outcomes. Amdocs has built Customer Engagement Platform, which includes multiple copilot products, including sales, order enrichment, care, proposals, and other key functions, like configure price quote (CPQ), which we view as integral to providing an interconnected GenAI-infused experience across the entire CSP organization.

Qualcomm Snapdragon X80 Ties Together AI and 5G Progress. During MWC24, Qualcomm unveiled its new Snapdragon X80 5G Modem-RF System. The offering features new AI innovations based on a dedicated tensor accelerator to improve data speeds, latency, quality of service (QoS), coverage, location accuracy, spectrum efficiency, power efficiency, and multi-antenna management. it integrates a dedicated 5G AI Processor and 5G-Advanced-ready architecture to achieve what we see as several important industry milestones, including the first 5G modem with fully integrated NB-NTN satellite communications support, 6-antenna architecture for smartphones, 6X carrier aggregation, and AI-based mmWave range extension for fixed wireless access CPE.