Tech Talks Daily

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most critical mega-trends in business in recent years. It streamlines transactions for higher productivity and automation of routine tasks such as production lines, banking, insurance companies, and so on. Founded in 2018, BeyondMinds has built the first enterprise AI solution that is universally applicable and easily adaptable. The company delivers hyper-customized, production-ready AI systems that enable companies to overcome the massive failure rate in AI adoption and rapidly implement ROI-positive transformations. The company has more than 70 employees, with the majority being AI technologists. They have offices in New York, Tel-Aviv and London. Clients include Fortune 1000 companies, including Microsoft, Samsung, KPMG, and numerous leading defense companies and financial institutions. Most recently, the company raised $15 million series A funding, co-led by leading Israeli venture capital fund Grove Ventures and private investor Marius Nacht.

Rotem Alaluf is the Co-Founder and CEO of BeyondMinds. He shares how they have built the first enterprise AI system that is universally applicable and easily adaptable. Alaluf is passionate about creating more stable and accurate ways of bringing AI to production, ultimately accelerating the adoption of AI in ways that we see and feel in the real world.

Prior to founding BeyondMinds, Rotem worked in the defense technology industry as a researcher in a variety of fields, including optimization, natural language processing (NLP), and vulnerabilities of AI systems. Rotem has a B.S. in both electrical engineering and physics from Israel's respected Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology.

Weka offers WekaFS, the modern file system that uniquely empowers organizations to solve the newest, biggest problems holding back innovation. Optimized for NVMe and the hybrid cloud, Weka handles the most demanding storage challenges in the most data-intensive technical computing environments, delivering truly epic performance at any scale.

Its modern architecture unlocks the full capabilities of today's data center, allowing businesses to maximize the value of their high-powered IT investments. Weka helps industry leaders reach breakthrough innovations and solve previously unsolvable problems.

Ken Grohe is the newly appointed President of Weka and CRO. He brings 30 years of B2B SaaS, sales, and data science experience to the table and joined Weka as they accomplished 600% growth in 2019. Ken joins me on the Tech Talks Daily podcast to chat about how the critical role of storage in successful AI initiatives. We talk about the emerging high growth AI/ML markets and the emerging role of the CDO.

We also discuss enriching people's lives by enabling faster product innovation, such as autonomous driving vehicles, and driving better business outcomes by enabling faster data analytics.

Grohe comes to Weka from Samsung's Stellus Technologies, a leading data systems company that addresses the way companies capture, store, access, and process the unstructured data, where he served as CRO and drove the company's overall go-to-market strategy. A highly seasoned veteran of the industry, Grohe previously served as President of SignNow, SVP and GM of Barracuda Networks, and CRO of Virident, a Western Digital Company.

Grohe also had an impressive 25-year career at Dell EMC, finishing as VP and GM with a focus on the global flash business. With over three decades in the SaaS and storage industry, Grohe has deep experience and possesses a rare dedication and passion for winning that is based on a customer-centric perspective. In addition to his roles at major tech companies, Grohe is an advisor and board member of many Silicon Valley fast-rising companies.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak recently published his 2020 Spending Review and kicked off the new £5bn UK Gigabit Broadband Programme. Even though the promise of full-fiber is great for 85% of the population by 2025, it's imperative it's delivered, so the whole country has access to it.

To help accomplish that, Zen has focused on full-fibre for 2021 and upgraded its core network. Paul Stobart, CEO, Zen Internet, the UK's largest independent telecommunications and technology service provider, joins me on the Tech Talks Daily Podcast.

Paul has been in the technology industry for over 20 years, 16 of those years being in CEO positions at Sage (business software), CPP (financial services), and Tunstall Healthcare (healthcare technology), and has developed a strong belief that having inspired people inside a business will deliver superior financial returns.

We discuss why full-fibre is key to the growth of the UK in 2021 for businesses and what other tech investing in full-fibre enables for companies. Paul also shares how Zen is investing in its core network to allow every customer to access full-fibre and why he left a multi-national company like Sage, where he grew the company from £120m turnover to £1.3bn, to join Zen.

Last year, I attended the Dynatrace Perform event in Las Vegas and interviewed their CEO John Van Siclen. This year Dynatrace has made several announcements aimed at helping organizations overcome existing challenges with IT complexity and transform faster to meet today's business needs.

Steve Tack, SVP, Product Management, joins me on the Tech Talks Daily podcast to talk bout some of the big news coming out of the event. We talk about the Infrastructure monitoring enhancements, and by expanding its automatic and intelligent observability with native log support for Kubernetes and multicloud environments, Dynatrace is enabling teams to drive faster innovation. I learn more about the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Hub and how within just a few clicks, Dynatrace customers can access an ecosystem of 500+ technologies from leading providers including AWS, and Google, enabling them to build and manage customer Dynatrace extensions without additional code.

We also discuss the extension of Session Replay and business analytics to native-mobile applications, and now organizations in even the most highly regulated industries – financial services, health care, government – can optimize mobile app performance, feature adoption, and conversions. Steve shares more details about the Cloud Automation Module and how the new module enables DevOps and SRE teams to automate operations and continuous delivery processes to deliver higher-quality cloud-native apps faster and with less risk. Finally, I learn more about how they are broadening application security coverage with enhancements that will empower DevSecOps teams to make more informed decisions.

With almost 20 years of experience in software support, engineering, and product management, he's just as comfortable with performance technologies as he is with competitive cycling. His broad business consulting and market development expertise bring a relentless customer focus to the product organization. As he teaches the kids on his lacrosse and soccer teams, speed is important―but it takes clear strategies and endurance, and velocity to win the game. He brings them all together for Dynatrace.

Kevin Ruef co-founded 10-8 Systems after exceeding multiple companies' sales records (both domestically and internationally). With more than a decade in sales, his experience ranges from B2B, B2G, and B2C. Since the company's start in 2019, Kevin is responsible for business development, strategic partnerships, and business operations.

Kevin Ruef, the co-founder of 10-8 Systems, shares the story behind launching 10-8 Systems on The Tech Talks Daily Podcast. 10-8 Systems is a cloud-based computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system for first responders, law enforcement, EMT, firefighters, and other government agencies.

FEMA used the software in the Bahamas during Hurricane Dorian. With the help of their system, 500 people were rescued! They have since been contacted by organizations ranging from security to search-and-rescue across the world, such as in Africa, Australia, Canada, the European Union, and Caribbean countries.

10-8 Systems' computer-aided dispatch software leverages technology to provide public safety agencies with the most up to date information and pinpoint precise location information to better help response time and connectivity. I learn more about how their technology helps revolutionize the way first responders handle emergency calls.

The coronavirus pandemic is the kind of unpredictable, global catastrophe of staggering proportions that comes along not just every few years but perhaps once in a hundred years. What started out as health crisis, has quickly developed into an economic crisis spurring social unrest across the world. And yet, despite the widespread distress, the picture is more complex than it may seem. For some companies, the crisis has and continues to, provide opportunities for new growth.

A timely book by a visionary business practitioner, Nitin Rakesh, CEO, Mphasis, and an award-winning academician, Jerry Wind, Lauder Professor Emeritus, Wharton bridges the worlds of industry and academia to bring you the knowledge that can help your business thrive in the new world. The book defines 8 key principles that form a highly adaptive framework, that gives businesses the tools to adapt and succeed in a new reality.

When Nitin Rakesh and Jerry Wind started collaborating on the book prior to the 2020 pandemic, these 8 principles were concepts on the best ways to navigate disruption that needed further exploration. However, today, having incubated the ideas for a period and encountering the unprecedented crisis, this book is a game-changer for the business community. Any business, large or small, can customize and implement a winning strategy by using the eight principles and tools clearly outlined here to seek out opportunities for long-term value creation in a post-pandemic world.

Nuvei, one of the world's largest payment technology providers, has partnered with companies all over the world to create seamless commerce experiences, specifically in the esports and online betting industries. Motie Bring, Chief Commercial Officer, Digital Payments, Nuvei, joins me on the podcast.

We discuss how local marketplaces like Etsy are going global and how markets are shifting towards global eCommerce. We also talk about the rise in the esports and sports betting industries and how payment technology providers are creating seamless commerce experiences. I also learn more about how COVID-19 has accelerated the shift to eCommerce.

Motie Bring has over 18 years of experience in payments, holding various management and leadership positions in related industries. He served the last seven years in senior management roles at WorldPay (acquired by FIS in 2019), most recently as General Manager EMEA, Global Enterprise eCommerce, while also heading up the global commercial gambling teams. Prior to this, he was responsible for leading the company's iGaming and digital content relationship management groups.

Deloitte's annual 2021 Tech Trends report examines how enterprises have adapted to fluctuations, accelerated digital transformation, and overall emerged resilient amidst a year of disruption. Although COVID-19 rendered even the best-laid of January 2020's plans useless, the crisis has driven change in an important and unexpected way and CIOs are already charting a promising path toward the future. The 12th annual Report discusses the opportunities, strategies, and technologies that will drive confidence in new planning and implementation during the next 18 to 24 months. The 9 trends fall under three categories:

1. The Heart of the Enterprise: Strategy, Engineered; Core Revival; and Supply Unchained focus on the alignment of organizational and technology strategy. These components of the enterprise are complex, but imperative for success, and must work in concert to support each other.
2. A Better Experience, Inside and Out: Bespoke for Billions: Digital Meets Physical and Rebooting the Digital Workplace explore merging digital and physical experiences to drive more value for customers and employees. DEI Tech: Tools for Equity discusses increasingly sophisticated tools to support organizational DE&I, which is the spark that powers innovation.
3. Data: The Art of the Possible: As enterprises move further towards automation, human capacity can be augmented at scale. MLOps: Industrialized AI; Machine Data Revolution: Feeding the Machine; and Zero Trust: Never Trust, Always Verify represent three specific opportunities for enterprises to realize more value through industrialization. Scott Buchholz Emerging Technologies Research Director and Government and Public Services CTO at Deloitte Consulting, joins me on the podcast to discuss this year's Trends!

Despite holding up remarkably well during the pandemic, the early disruption to the supply chain has served as a wake-up call to the agriculture sector. Consequently, an industry that has typically been five-ten years behind the technology curve is (finally) coming to recognize the potential of AI as a catalyst for (arguably, much-needed) change.

A recent survey by Proagrica, the world's largest data and tech business serving the ag sector, looked into attitudes towards AI across seven core sectors: government, healthcare, insurance, legal, science/medical, banking and agriculture.

It found that AI has risen up the agenda in agriculture - here are some key findings:

• 87% of agricultural respondents believe that AI technologies played a role in slowing the spread of COVID-19.
• 76% of agricultural respondents say they've increased investment in AI in the last year against an average of 68% across other sectors
• 87% of agricultural respondents state that their company offers training on AI technologies, up from 81% in 2019.

Lindsay Suddon, Chief Strategy Officer for Proagrica, joins me on the podcast to discuss the findings. As one of the original architects of Proagrica, Lindsay's focus continues to be on strengthening Proagrica's ability to provide a wide range of data-centered solutions to a variety of industry segments across the supply chain, unlocking value for all.

Under Lindsay's time with Proagrica, the division has transformed itself into a technology and data business, acquiring a variety of best-in-class assets such as GateKeeper, F4F (Adaptris), and SST. A large part of the strategy involves organic innovation and development, bringing together existing and acquired assets to create new, valuable products and solutions; smart insight-driven data analysis that helps drive the industry forward; managing risk and driving productivity; and profitability and compliance.

The world order has changed overnight. The IT organization is under more pressure and scrutiny than ever before. In addition to ensuring security, there is a strong argument in favor of modernizing enterprise infrastructure. Trusted by leading managed service providers, Airgap's patent-pending enterprise-grade Agentless Zero Trust Isolation platform addresses some of the fundamental security and networking challenges faced by the IT organizations.

Ritesh Agarwal, CEO, Airgap, joins me on Tech Talks Daily and shares Airgap's core capabilities, the roadmap, and their vision. I learn more about how Airgap's Zero Trust Isolation Platform offers defense against cyber-threat propagation. Airgap's patent-pending agentless solution works for any user and any device accessing business assets from any location and it can be installed in a few minutes without any forklift upgrades.