Futurum Tech Webcast

In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast – Interview Series, we address the topic of 5G private networks innovation and why it is vital to advancing enterprise connectivity. By replacing wired connections with wireless and unifying existing wireless connections, 5G private networks are increasingly simplifying and optimizing digital technology deployment at scale throughout industrial sites.

My guests today are Olivier Coutelou, Group Senior Expert, Schneider Electric, Fotis Karonis, Group Leader 5G & Edge Computing, Capgemini, and George Tsirtsis, Senior Director, Technology, Qualcomm Technologies International, Ltd. Olivier, Fotis, and George are new guests to the show, and incisively share their insights and perspectives on how the companies developed an innovative end-to-end 5G Private Network solution that can transform industrial automation systems.

To start our discussion, Olivier described Schneider Electric activities as they relate to the industrial automation of hoisting systems as well as how the current hoisting product runs, how the connectivity is involved and what are the improvement paths. Next George explained how 5G addressed the connectivity challenges in running the Proof of Concept at Schneider Electric premises plus what is Qualcomm's strategy as it relates to 5G for industries. Thereafter Fotis described the milestones of the project, what 5G is bringing to the industrial market and what Capgemini's strategy is in this ecosystem.

Our conversation delved further into the following key topics:

• Why collaboration is so important to propelling 5G private network capabilities forward.
• To support innovations in the Hoisting domain, Schneider Electric set up in Grenoble, France a hoisting lab duplicating full hoisting application and helping to validate new solutions.
• How 5G replacement of cable and optical fiber enables differentiated QoS flows, industrial protocols born on 5G, and the advantages of private disaggregated networks.
• The way 5G is a real game change by delivering low latency and reliability in full alignment with gaining more flexibility, lower costs, and shorter lead times for factory to production reconfiguration and layout changes.
• Through highly advanced virtual connectivity, the combined solution can be deployed across diverse industrial and logistic sites.
• The panel's favorites for key emerging 5G private network use cases including critical communications, augmented operator, remote assistance, and drones.

It's been said that 40% of all businesses will die in the next 10 years… if they don't figure out how to change their entire company to accommodate new technologies. Large language models are driving the next generation of AI with predictions of massive industry disruption. But like any new technology, this new class of generative AI is raising issues of trust along with the need for more data types–especially in highly regulated industries like healthcare. Join Greg and Daniel as they host Dr. Andreea Bodnari from UnitedHealth Group to explore the pervasive use of generative AI across the healthcare ecosystem, and possible impacts across other industries.

It was a great conversation and one you don't want to miss. Like what you've heard? Check out Episode One of The Main Scoop, Episode Two of the Main Scoop, Episode Three of The Main Scoop, Episode Four of The Main Scoop, Episode Five of The Main Scoop, Episode Six of The Main Scoop, Episode Seven of The Main Scoop, Episode Eight of The Main Scoop, Episode Nine of The Main Scoop, and Episode Ten of The Main Scoop, and be sure to subscribe to never miss an episode of The Main Scoop series.

In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast Interview Series, I speak with Ken Exner, the VP of Product at Elastic. We discussed Elastic's role in the open-source community and its connection to the company's wider strategy. Exner explains that Elasticsearch, an open-source search and indexing technology, gained popularity and enabled Elastic to expand into different industries. We then discussed the relationship between open source and commercial interests, highlighting the increasing use of Elasticsearch in the context of AI.

Our conversation covered:

• The market trends and opportunities brought about by AI.
• The advancements in generative AI, that allow for the generation of data and content rather than just analyzing historical data.
• The impact of large language models, such as GPT-3 and GPT-4, in the AI space and how they have accelerated the capabilities of AI by at least a decade.
• How Elastic is focused on helping customers leverage generative AI in various enterprise settings, such as security, observability, and search.
• Elastic's new offering, aims to bring generative AI to a company's proprietary enterprise data.
• Elastic sits between public language models and enterprise data, bridging the gap by providing context to the models using proprietary information.
• The importance of relevance and context shaping the answers from the models.
• The role of Elastic as a 'picks and shovels' type company in the AI Gold Rush.
• How Elastic provides the foundational capabilities and building blocks for developers to create unique solutions on top of their platform.
• Elastic's investments in foundational capabilities, transformer model integration, relevance capabilities, and vector database technology.
• How Elastic has been working on search capabilities for years and is now well-positioned to facilitate the connection between public language models and enterprise data, allowing businesses to harness the power of AI in a relevant and context-aware manner.

In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast Interview Series, I had the opportunity to speak with Ash Kulkarni, the CEO of Elastic, about the company's upcoming sales kickoff and the challenges faced by its customers. During our conversation, Ash highlighted the positive momentum they have experienced at Elastic over the past year. The company has successfully released new products and formed partnerships with hyper-scaler partners, resulting in significant progress.

Elastic's customers have expressed their desire to achieve more with less, leveraging insights from both structured and unstructured data in real-time. As enterprises seek a platform that enables efficient data analysis and drives business growth, Elastic have listened closely to their needs. In our discussion Ash emphasized the importance of Elastic's relevance engine in making sense of data while ensuring privacy and security.

We discussed the following topics:

• Elastic's evolution from being primarily a search analytics platform to offering observability and security solutions.
• The impact of large language models and AI, highlighting the opportunities they present.
• The immense potential for Elastic to connect private enterprise data with large language models, enabling the development of generative AI applications.
• The alignment between Elastic existing user base, its popularity, and the company's developer appeal positions Elastic favorably to seize this opportunity.
• Elastics' ongoing innovations, including platform capabilities, AIOps, and security analytics.
• The establishment of Elastic's Security Threat Research Labs, that aims to research open attacks and enhance protection for customers.
• The company's collaborations with hyper-scaler partners like AWS, GCP, and Azure, as they play a crucial role in building momentum for the company's offerings.
• How Elastic is committed to addressing its customers' challenges, such as the skills gap and the increasing volume of data. Elastic helps enterprises overcome these obstacles by providing real-time insights from all types of data, including both human-generated and machine-generated data, such as logs.

In this episode of The 5G Factor, our series that focuses on all things 5G, the IoT, and the ecosystem as a whole, I'm joined by my colleague and fellow analyst, Ron Westfall for a look at 5G news and what's going on that caught our attention this week.

Our conversation touched on:

Nokia and Future Tech Partner for Private 5G. The announcement by Nokia and Future Technologies of their collaboration on private 5G in the U.S. Federal market. The companies have been awarded several multi-year, multi-million dollar contracts to provide private 5G solutions for lab, deployable, and large networks in the U.S. Federal market. Of note, Nokia was an early entrant into the private 5G space and claims to have 52% market share in the space, with over 560 customers to date. In the coming decade, Nokia has identified the potential need for 14 million industrial sites to be equipped with private 5G, so it's a lucrative market and one with many opportunities ahead.

The FCC sides with Starlink on 12 GHz Spectrum. Siding with Starlink over Dish on what has been a long, drawn-out debate, the FCC has approved a proposal to preserve frequencies for satellite services between the 12 GHz spectrum (12.2 and 12.7 GHz), denying Dish's request to use the spectrum for a high-power, two-way mobile network

Ericsson's hybrid for 5G core proposition. Ericsson's hybrid for 5G core proposition is all about accelerating hybrid cloud for 5G core, which is a collaborative undertaking involving Ericisson, the hyperscalers, and CSPs to create a telco-grade hybrid cloud that is secure, TCO optimized, and globally available.

Partnership Between NTT and Cisco targeting the manufacturing, transportation, and healthcare segments. We explored the partnership between Cisco and NTT, which is designed to serve customers by using NTT's Edge as a Service portfolio and Cisco's IoT capabilities, helping organizations advance their sustainability goals.

In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast Interview Series, Steven Dickens is joined by Eddy Ciliendo, Chief Strategy Officer for Model9 for a conversation about the magic behind Model9's technology and how that translates to solving customer challenges.

So what is the "secret sauce" behind Model 9's solutions? That's exactly what they covered in this conversation. Here are some of the highlights:

• Eddy opens the conversation by telling us about his role with Model9 and the company itself.
• They discuss Model9's core technology and its three main products, offering flexible solutions for customers.
• They explore how the threat landscape is driving demand for the solutions Model9 offers, and how Model9 Shield addresses the critical security needs of their customers.
• They also discuss how Model9 Manager simplifies infrastructure, yet offers flexibility between cloud and on-prem object storage.
• Eddy shares the benefits of Model9 Gravity, a product that transforms siloed mainframe data for use in open-system formats.
• And finally, they discuss how the modular nature of Model9's products allow customers a variety of entry-points, customized to the needs of their organization.

Learn more at model9.io.

In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast Interview Series, analyst Steven Dickens is joined by Eddy Ciliendo, Chief Strategy Officer for Model9 for a about the performance of Model9's cloud solution.

So how fast is fast? That's exactly what they covered in this conversation. Here are some of the highlights:

Eddy opens the conversation by explaining the physics behind Model9's powerful performance.

• They discuss how cloud storage can be faster than FICON.
• They explore how Model9 is approaching increased efficiency with their product.
• They discuss Model9's architecture and how it leverages the speed of parallelized deployment.
• Eddy shares a significant customer success story where Model9's solution brought increased efficiency to operations.

Learn more at model9.io.

In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast – Interview Series, we address the topic of cloud optics innovation and why it is critical to fulfilling the emerging demands in next generation AI/ML systems. Marvell's new Nova offering, a 1.6T PAM4 DSP optimized for high-performance fabrics in AI/ML environments, focuses on delivering breakthroughs in optical connectivity by enabling the highest speed of data movement in cloud AI/ML and data center networks. Powered by a groundbreaking 200 Gbps/lambda optical DSP, Nova doubles the optical bandwidth of current solutions to enable 1.6 Tbps pluggable modules for scaling AI clusters. Nova extends the multi-source pluggable optics ecosystem and provides the advanced technology needed to alleviate data center network bottlenecks as the industry transitions to 51.2 Tbps networking architectures.

Host Ron Westfall welcomes Nigel Alvares, VP of Global Marketing and Business Planning at Marvell Technologies, a top-tier semiconductor company. Nigel is a returning guest on this show, and astutely shares his insights and perspective on the direction of the cloud optics market segment and its vital role across AI/ML and data center environments.

To start their discussion, they focused on the Nova PAM4 DSP product and how the PAM4 DSPs sit inside of an optical module that plugs into the back of a switch. Nigel demonstrated how one works and deftly explained they essentially transfer data from the switch to optical modules so that data can be moved anywhere in the world.

Today, Marvell's Nova product is ready to meet the bandwidth boom clouds are facing as data traffic is forecasted to grow at over 40% per year. Notably, it's growing even faster inside the data center, where PAM4s are mostly used. Some estimate that East-West traffic between racks in data centers is now 70% of traffic. As a result, clouds are investing heavily in switched and optical interconnects powered by DSPs such as Nova.

Their conversation drilled down on the following key topics:

• What kind of impact will the Marvell Nova solution have on AI, especially in handling and scaling the required cloud workloads.
• Why Nova is the first chip with 200G per lambda or wavelength and how Marvell accomplished this breakthrough.
• The benefits Nova can deliver such as the doubling of data capacity, getting the same amount of bandwidth with half the equipment, and saving valuable real estate in data centers.
• We examined the latest developments in co-packaged silicon and direct drive designs including their pros and cons. Using linear direct (LD) or co-packaged optics (CPO) approaches comes down to customer preferences, although it can be two more years before they become mainstream.
• An assessment of active electrical cable (AEC) technology and how they can help enable server to server bandwidth can start to double every few years akin to rack interconnects as well as optical arriving inside servers due to PAM4 commodifying optical bandwidth.
• Why modules have a long life ahead of them, especially throughout AI clusters, and how Marvell's 3nm innovations play a key role.

In this episode of The 5G Factor, Shelly Kramer and fellow analyst Ron Westfall took a look at the recent developments in the 5G ecosystem that we think you might want to know about.

Their conversation covered:

• News that Dish plans on slowing its spending on 5G, at least for a bit. What's the rationale here?
• Speaking of Dish, the company has filed a petition with the FCC hoping to block T-Mobile's purchase of 600MHz spectrum – what's that all about?
• And speaking of spectrum, are politics getting in the way of unleashing 5G innovation, especially in rural and other underserved areas? Maybe.
• And they closed the show talking about Qvantel Flexx BSS, a cloud-native SaaS based BSS, which comes with pre-built out of the box use cases designed for quick deployments that will allow telcos to develop, manage, and monetize new services now available on AWS. CSPs should like this.

In this video, I share my thoughts on Microsoft's Dynamics 365 Copilot and the benefits of new technologies, like Generative AI, to increase productivity for businesses– especially sales and marketing organizations. As businesses look to new technologies to enable their sales and marketing teams to be more successful, and provide better customer service, especially in the current economic landscape– I believe solutions like Microsoft's Dynamic 365 Copilot are providing powerful tools to do more with less.

This webcast covers:

• The current technological and economic challenges facing sales, marketing and customer service-centered organizations
• The benefits Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot offers businesses, particularly the reduction of manual tasks and improving critical client-outreach
• An overview of Generative AI, as well as the problems and key productivity issues that tools like Generative AI help to solve
• The significance of the customer experience when considering increased consumer expectations, given that 70% of customers would switch to another company after a single negative experience
• How Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot is revolutionizing the way we work, offering game-changing solutions that save time and money

Learn more about Microsoft Dynamic 365 Copilot here.

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