Forty-five percent of small business are looking at AI solutions to enable more time to be spent on core business operations

This year, more small and midsize businesses are expecting an uptick during the holiday season — 63% compared to 56% last year

Free 5G Phone when you switch, with no trade-in required, during this year’s Small Business Days (October 16-22)

Verizon Business today announced the findings of its fourth annual State of Small Business Survey, conducted by Morning Consult. The survey data, comprising responses from 681 small and midsize businesses across the country, demonstrates that small businesses have a constant need to increase connectivity to meet business demands and are exploring the applications of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), but as their technology dependence grows, looming concerns regarding cybersecurity persist.

“The fact that nearly half of small and midsize businesses are either using or are aware of the AI-specific use cases that can drive their companies forward highlights what we hear from our customers every day regarding their desire to stay ahead of the pace of change to drive their business forward,” said Aparna Khurjekar, Chief Revenue Officer, Business Markets and SaaS, at Verizon Business. “For businesses looking to learn more about what emerging technologies can do for them, our upcoming Small Business Days is a fantastic opportunity to meet with one of our experts and through a complimentary tech check to understand what possibilities exist.”

Key findings:

• Using AI to address labor challenges and more. More than a third of small and midsize businesses (35%) believe AI can help offset pain points caused by labor shortages. Additionally, to enable small business owners to spend more time on their core business and with customers, 46% would find value or are using AI to drive order processing, and the same amount also see AI being utilized in inventory management and supply chain operations.
• Concerns about AI. Though more and more small and midsize businesses are exploring AI solutions, many are still leery of its implementation. Nearly half (45%) are concerned about integrating AI solutions, and 43% are worried AI tools will expose them to cybersecurity risks.
• Upgrading internet bandwidth. In 2020, more than a quarter (27%) of small and midsize companies upgraded their internet connection bandwidth. The economic shutdown drove much of that, as businesses had no choice but to operate digitally in order to reach customers. But even after the economy reopened, businesses continue to upgrade their bandwidth: 52% in 2021, 51% in 2022 and 53% in 2023. This continued desire for increased bandwidth highlights the growing digital dependency for businesses of all sizes.
• Cybersecurity lags behind digitalization. A good portion of small and midsize businesses are failing to invest in cybersecurity proportionately to their investment in internet bandwidth and other technology upgrades. Only one in three have implemented new systems of technology to ensure security, and almost half (45%) do not offer their employees any training on cybersecurity practices.
• Inflation remains a top concern. Eighty-one percent of respondents are concerned about the impact inflation will have on their business. Four out of five business owners have experienced increased costs in the last year. Additionally, 59% have either raised or planned to raise the prices of goods and services and a similar number (57%) have either reduced or plan to reduce their spending on non-essential items and activities. In spite of these concerns, most business owners (63%) are expecting an increase in demand this holiday season.

Verizon Small Business Days (October 16-22)
Small Business Days are back taking place October 16-22, providing businesses with special discounts, a free “tech check,” and business advice. Verizon Small Business Experts will be available to evaluate business owners’ specific technology needs and tailor a solution to those needs, ranging from communications and connectivity to security. Offers available this week include a free select 5G Phone when you switch to Verizon with a new line and a select data plan, no trade-in required, and, for wireless internet, save $100/mo when you switch to LTE Business Internet 50 Mbps plan, or switch to 5G Business Internet 200 Mbps self-set up plan for $69/month (a savings of $30/mo for 24 months).

Verizon Small Business Digital Ready
Verizon Small Business Digital Ready is a free online platform that provides small businesses with free, personalized access to learning, including more than 40 courses, mentorship opportunities with industry experts, peer networking events, one-to-one expert coaching and more. Verizon Small Business Digital Ready portal was created with and for small businesses, with a specific focus on under-resourced business owners. This initiative is part of Verizon’s goal to support 1,000,0000 small businesses by 2023 with the resources to thrive in the digital economy as part of its responsible business plan, Citizen Verizon.

Flowfinity Inc. has worked closely with engineers specializing in non-destructive testing (NDT) to help them create a unique solution using no-code tools that greatly reduces the time and effort required to collect, format, and report testing data while remaining compliant with all relevant standards and regulations.

Balancing the need for accurate, detailed reporting with time and cost constraints when dealing with highly complex data structures is a constant challenge in the field of non-destructive testing. Poorly documented reports or delays can lead to misunderstandings or incorrect assessments of infrastructure critical for safety and reliability in construction, utilities, transportation, and other crucial industries. 

By creating custom apps that put reporting in the hands of engineers in the field you cut days off the full cycle of collecting and organizing data and then drafting and delivering the finished reports and completion certificates, automatically generated with all photographs, annotations, and attributions included. 

Previously NDT data was manually collected in the field on forms and then turned over to be transcribed and reviewed in the office before a completion certificate was finally delivered to the client or requesting agency, all taking up valuable time from highly skilled and well-compensated engineers and their admin staff.

Now, using applications created in the Flowfinity no-code platform, digital reports are generated in a specially formatted Word template as soon as the data is collected on mobile devices. Report submissions that once took several days of effort are compiled and can be sent for client review in near real-time.

"We are very excited to see how effectively engineers have leveraged our no-code platform to solve problems they encountered with field data collection generally and in NDT reporting and compliance specifically," remarked Len Melcer, Sales Director at Flowfinity.

"Any organization in any industry with strict regulatory compliance requirements could also use these same tools to create automated data collection and organization templates that simplify and accelerate the entire reporting and visualization process." 

Data collection apps and reporting templates can be easily modified without code for any project, client, or testing type including Magnetic Particle, Ultrasonic, Liquid Penetration, Thermographic, Visual Inspections, and more. 

Flowfinity's no-code platform has the customization potential and scalability to help process improvers in any industry overcome challenges with data management when there is complexity in data structures and specialized reporting requirements.

Award Announced at the 2023 Oracle CloudWorld Event

Mythics, an award-winning systems integrator, consulting firm, managed services provider and value-added reseller and member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), has won the 2023 Oracle North America Cloud Technology Partner Award. The annual Oracle Partner Awards celebrate partners that have shown exceptional innovation, entrepreneurial success, and dedication to customers. Mythics won this award for the business impact of its Cloud Migration Platform that is helping organizations determine the best way to launch their journey into a cloud- based environment.

"Mythics is driven by our passion to deliver value and customer success in all that we do. Our Cloud Migration Platform is just one example of how we strive to provide innovative solutions that bring tangible benefits to our customers," said Paul Hughes, Senior Vice President, Mythics Managed Services and Digital Transformation. "We understand the challenges businesses face when it comes to transitioning to a cloud-based environment and our platform offers a standard, repeatable, and holistic framework to help them navigate this complex journey."

Criteria for this award was based on the partner's go-to-market approach, solution repeatability, ease of implementation and manageability, performance and ROI. Mythics' Cloud Migration Platform provides a standard, repeatable and holistic framework for Mythics to assess customer's workloads and current environment and determine the efficient path to migrating to Oracle Cloud.

"Receiving the 2023 Oracle North America Cloud Technology Partner Award is a testament to our dedication and success in helping organizations achieve their cloud transformation goals," said Doug Altamura, Chief Revenue Officer, Mythics. "Success is achieved through the collective expertise of our team and the unwavering commitment they place on client success. We are humbled and grateful for this recognition and we will continue to push the boundaries of innovation, driving value for our customers in every endeavor."

The award recipients were celebrated at the Oracle CloudWorld Partner Reception on September 20, 2023

Vonage Channel Team Also Receives Two Channel Manager Awards

Vonage, a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation and a part of Ericsson, has been recognized by Sandler Partners for its Vonage Business Communications (VBC) unified communications solution with the '2023 Top Collaboration/UCaaS' Provider Award. Sandler Partners is America's fastest-growing independent Technology Solutions Distributor of Connectivity and Cloud services.

VBC leverages unified communications and communications APIs, empowering users to be more productive than ever before. Integrating seamlessly with tools for rich messaging, increased mobility, network optimization, and video collaboration, VBC completely transforms the way employees communicate and businesses operate. Traditional on-premises solutions no longer meet the needs of today's businesses, which require cost-effective, cloud-based solutions for improved team collaboration and customer engagement. VBC is a cloud-based solution that offers simple onboarding, remote support, and eliminates the need for expensive legacy systems and standalone applications.

"We are honored that Vonage Contact Center has been recognized by our longtime, trusted partner, Sandler Partners," said Ron Maayan, SVP Product Management for Vonage. "In today's dynamic business environment, effective communication and collaboration are essential. With the power of the Vonage Communications Platform, Sandler Partners is delivering an omnichannel approach to communications that combines voice, messaging, and video, enabling consumers to connect and collaborate with their favorite brands across any channel. With VBC, they are empowering their customers to create exceptional employee and customer experiences from anywhere."

"Partners have come to know how much they can rely on Vonage," states Justin Marano, Sandler Partners, Chief Revenue Officer. "They consistently and across the board provide a level of support that customers talk about enthusiastically. Their commitment to constant innovation not only makes their product better, it makes for increased engagement with customers, and the chance to satisfy more of their needs. We look forward to continuing our strong growing relationship with this amazing Provider."

In addition to receiving the '2023 Top Collaboration/UCaaS' Provider Award, Vonage Senior Channel Manager Jeff DeRose was also awarded Sandler Partners Midwest Channel Manager of the Year. In his role, DeRose works closely supporting each Sandler Partner, their customers, and cross-functional internal teams to ensure timely and successful delivery of Vonage solutions according to customer needs. 

Sandler Partners also recognized Vonage National Channel Manager, Vincent DiCicco, as a Sandler Partners National Channel Manager of the Year. In his role, DiCicco works closely with Vonage partners daily to enable, empower, and grow their businesses, helping them deliver solutions that drive long-term customer success, while expanding overall market presence and revenue potential.

Joint solution delivers a powerful combination of robust data protection, scalability, and operational efficiency to global customers

Commvault^®, an enterprise data protection leader for today's global businesses, announced new highly reliable backup and recovery solutions for enterprise organizations, powered by Lenovo technology.

Paired with Lenovo's award-winning hardware systems, Commvault is delivering simplicity to IT teams with data protection and management from a single view, while giving CIOs flexibility, reliability, and blazing performance at immense scale with better TCO and faster time to value.

"Innovation through collaboration has always been at the heart of Commvault. Partnering with Lenovo propels us further into a future where enterprises can safely say their data is secured, protected, and recoverable," said Alan Atkinson, Chief Partner Officer, Commvault. "This partnership stands as a testament to both companies' commitment to supporting global enterprises in navigating the multifaceted challenges posed by today's data-driven business landscape."

"As we continue to operate in such a fast-paced and data-driven business environment, ensuring the safety, accessibility, and recoverability of critical business data has never been more important. It is for this exact reason that Commvault and Lenovo have come together to deliver highly reliable backup and recovery solutions for enterprise organizations," said Brian Connors, Vice President and General Manager, Software & Business Development, Lenovo.

Commvault software is recognized for its unmatched depth in cloud-native integrations, supporting an array of applications, databases, and infrastructures. For the 12^th consecutive year, Gartner positioned Commvault as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions. Commvault also ranked highest in six out of seven use cases in the 2023 Gartner® Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions.

BlackBerry in collaboration with AWS announces UEM at the Edge and UEM for the IoT

BlackBerry Limited, a pioneer in enterprise mobility management, today announced two major Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) innovations: BlackBerry UEM at the edge and BlackBerry UEM for the IoT.

BlackBerry® UEM software is used to manage, monitor, and protect all end-user devices in an organization. Bringing BlackBerry UEM to the edge will improve enterprise productivity and the employee experience by placing workloads close to the end user and their device for ultra-low latency connectivity, while maintaining the highest security standards in what customers trust and rely on BlackBerry: In testing, users saw a latency reduction of up to 87%. The solution brings BlackBerry's Network Operations Center (NOC), the company's proprietary secure connectivity infrastructure, to the edge and integrates with AWS Local Zones and Availability Zones to securely place compute, storage and other services where data is generated and consumed. BlackBerry UEM at the edge supports BlackBerry UEM on-prem and cloud.

BlackBerry UEM for the Internet of Things (IoT) will extend unified endpoint management to IoT devices, enabling organizations to leverage the tremendous benefits of IoT and reduce unknown risks in their environment. The solution integrates BlackBerry UEM with AWS IoT Greengrass, an open source edge runtime and cloud service used on millions of IoT endpoints across the connected world - in factories, vehicles, healthcare, enterprises - to provide visibility and manage IoT endpoints and train IT teams. Advancing the company's convergence vision, this new addition to BlackBerry UEM will enable organizations to seamlessly and securely inventory and manage their IT and IoT endpoints from a single console.

"BlackBerry founded and has been a market leader in enterprise mobility management for over twenty years. We are once again revolutionizing the market, ahead of the industry in endpoint management innovation and paving the way for convergence" said Neelam Sandhu , head of customer success at BlackBerry. "It has been wonderful to collaborate with AWS to develop BlackBerry UEM at the edge and BlackBerry UEM for the IoT, to enable our customers to unlock new business value through digital technologies, which offer the potential to transform and advance everything." of the connected world, encompassing how we live and work.

"IoT has advanced in recent years in different sectors: automotive, business, medicine and manufacturing. The convergence of the Internet of Things with security at the forefront of the conversation is now emerging as essential for the connected world. Uniting systems The cloud provides scale, consistency and flexibility for organizations to access data through the IoT and for developers to innovate and deliver new value. AWS is excited to collaborate with BlackBerry on UEM edge and IoT solutions to deliver a solution for unified and innovative endpoint management for the future of the connected world," said Dr. Sarah Cooper , General Manager of Industrial Products at AWS.

IoT is a foundational pillar of the future of digital transformation and unlocks new business opportunities for organizations by dramatically expanding the reach of information technology. The value of enterprise IoT is largely untapped today due to the large computing requirements of IoT and the complexity of the IoT network. Edge computing responds to the growing demand for real-time data processing and analysis, and the increased visibility into endpoints provides valuable situational awareness and security benefits, allowing organizations to easily integrate IoT into their IT strategies. YOU.

BlackBerry UEM has the highest number of security certifications in the industry and is the only UEM product named a 2023 Customers Choice by Gartner® Peer Insights™.

New fully diverse PoP serves demand for content and cloud applications in media and technology markets

Arelion today announced a new partnership with eStruxture, the largest Canadian cloud and carrier-neutral data center provider, deploying a fully diverse Point-of-Presence (PoP) at eStruxture's VAN-2 site in the Harbour Centre Building, the largest carrier hotel in the Vancouver market. Arelion's second fully diverse PoP in the Vancouver market will provide wholesale and enterprise customers with high-speed connectivity to Arelion's global IP backbone and access to Arelion's ecosystem of cloud, content and application providers, enabling further growth in Vancouver's gaming, film and technology markets.

eStruxture's Harbour Centre data center site is strategically located in downtown Vancouver, offering business continuity, scalability and low-latency service delivery to customers on a global scale. Vancouver is one of North America's fastest-growing tech job markets, with over 111,000 tech jobs in the region as of 2022. The city is also the third largest film and TV production center in North America. As a result of these booming industries, there is significant demand in the Vancouver market for low-latency, high-quality connectivity services to provide multi-cloud access that enables digitalization.

Vancouver is a gateway to Asian markets, with new subsea cables driving significant traffic growth in the region, including Google's Topaz subsea cable connecting Canada to Japan. Arelion's new PoP will meet the needs of wholesale customers seeking fully diverse connectivity to markets in Vancouver and Asia while providing enterprises in Vancouver's technology, gaming and media production industries with high-capacity access to Arelion's full ecosystem of cloud and content services, including direct, fully resilient access to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud on a global basis.

"We partnered with eStruxture because they are well-positioned to help us provide our services at scale to customers in Vancouver, enabling a new level of network quality in the market," said Art Kazmierczak, Director of Strategic Sales & Network Development, Arelion. "eStruxture provides an optimal solution to reach the established customer ecosystem in the Harbour Centre facility, with sufficient power, physical security and connectivity that will enable us to provide affordable, low-latency services to our customers with diverse connections to our global network."

"Our partnership with Arelion underscores our ongoing dedication to helping our customers extend their reach as their business necessitates it. We're actively expanding our carrier-neutral ecosystem to provide our customers with superior network connectivity choices. This new Point of Presence (PoP) will offer enhanced redundancy and capacity, lower latency, and enable us to effectively support our customers' sustained growth." says Todd Coleman, President and CEO of eStruxture Data Centers

With the addition of this PoP at eStruxture's Harbour Centre site, Arelion provides customers in Canada with enhanced access to Arelion's number one ranked Internet backbone, AS1299, as well as Arelion's portfolio of leading connectivity services, including high-speed IP Transit, Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), Cloud Connect, Global 40G Ethernet Virtual Circuit (VC), IPX and DDoS Mitigation services for service providers, content providers and enterprises.

CISOs now have the ability to see risks and vulnerabilities at both the site level and the enterprise level to improve the security of their Operational Technology (OT) systems.

Today, Honeywell launched Cyber Watch, a breakthrough enterprise solution designed to help organizations better identify, mitigate and manage the latest Operational Technology (OT) cyber threats.

"Everyone from the plant manager to the CISO is a line of defense against the next cyberattack. No company wants to be a frontpage headline as the next victim of a ransomware attack. We know hackers are lurking – waiting for months or even years – to strike," said Kevin Dehoff, president and CEO, Honeywell Connected Enterprise. "Our industry-leading technology, supported by Honeywell's deep domain experience in critical infrastructure, is designed to empower leaders and workers to stop an attack before it happens, from detection to remediation to response."

According to findings from Forrester Research in 2023, almost three-quarters of organizations reported one or more data breaches in the past 12 months.ⁱ Additionally, there has been a 140% year-over-year increase in attacks on industrial organizations.ⁱⁱ

"Understanding vulnerabilities and gaining insight at both the site and enterprise level will help enable faster and more informed decisions to better defend against cyberattacks, reduce potential downtime and create a safer environment for our employees," said Chase Carpenter, Honeywell chief security officer.

Cyber Watch, part of the Honeywell Forge Cybersecurity+ Suite, is being demonstrated at this week's Honeywell Connect, the premier software symposium for industrial companies. Attendees can also experience an enhanced version of Honeywell's powerful Cyber Insights technology.

Honeywell Forge Cybersecurity+ Suite is designed to uncover security weaknesses within an organization's OT environment by providing specific insights into vulnerabilities, configuration issues and compliance gaps at both the site and enterprise level, with the objective of improving overall resiliency.