75F, the leader in IoT-based building automation, today announced the launch of Saffron AI, the first AI Platform (AIP) for commercial buildings. With Saffron AI, facilities professionals can talk directly to their buildings and unlock a new way to get things done.

"This is about employing technology to make our buildings work in service to us, to deliver answers built on trust. To put the human at the center," 75F Founder and CEO, Deepinder Singh, told an audience at Saffron AI's exclusive launch event today. "Let me be clear: Saffron AI is for people, and we can't wait to show you what meaningful AI in buildings looks like."

Saffron AI is an AIP for commercial buildings trained on real-time and historical building systems data and industry standards such as ASHRAE Guideline 36. Using its own line of thermostats and sensors to standardize and structure data, 75F provides an out-of-the-box digital twin for each building. Accurate and standardized data empowers Saffron AI to provide human-in-the-loop intelligence — every explanation, recommendation, and action empowers building users and places humans at the center. Users can seek Saffron AI's guidance to reduce energy consumption, create sophisticated energy dashboards, and can even entrust it with schedule updates or temperature adjustments, all with the assurance that the advice and actions are data-driven and site-specific. 

The powerful simplicity of Saffron AI lowers barriers to smart building management and all the energy, air quality, and comfort benefits that come with it. Instead of wasting time troubleshooting or watching tutorials, 75F users can ask their building for help. And, if they want, they can ask in 50 different languages with the tap of a microphone button.

"Until now, only the largest and most expensive buildings, or only buildings with the most experienced facilities managers could be run efficiently or effectively," said Madhu Tennakoon, Head of AI at 75F. "We are hearing that even experienced facility managers struggle to keep up with too many buildings under their control. Saffron AI is our answer to this challenge and a platform we expect to build on in the future: We want to help customers explore, analyze, and act with a level of ease and confidence that was previously unimaginable."

enreap announced it has become an official Atlassian Specialized Partner in ITSM. A validation of Atlassian's platinum Solution Partner's deep knowledge, extensive experience, and delivery of consistent, high-quality services to optimize customer satisfaction and outcomes.

enreap has achieved the Atlassian ITSM Specialization since the program was launched on April 5th, 2022

Atlassian would like to recognize enreap for their specialized delivery practice, as they have proven success implementing service management principles based on ITIL methodology for improved satisfaction and cost-efficiencies," said Ko Mistry, Atlassian's Head of Global Channel. "The level of commitment in the ITSM Specialization Program recognizes Atlassian Partners' effort and dedication to delivering consistent, high-quality services to optimize a customer's experience and success."

ePlus inc. today announced that on November 7, 2023, it will release earnings and host a conference call regarding its financial results for the three and six months ended September 30, 2023. Earnings will be released after the market closes, and management will hold a conference call and audio webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET.

A replay of the call will be available approximately two hours after the call through November 14, 2023.

New cloud-scale, high performance storage appliance for unstructured data to power the most demanding AI and capacity-intensive workloads

IBM introduced the new IBM Storage Scale System 6000, a cloud-scale global data platform designed to meet today's data intensive and AI workload demands, and the latest offering in the IBM Storage for Data and AI portfolio.

For the seventh consecutive year and counting, IBM is a 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Leader, recognized for its vision and execution.¹ The new IBM Storage Scale System 6000 seeks to build on IBM's leadership position with an enhanced high performance parallel file system designed for data intensive use-cases. It provides up to 7M IOPs and up to 256GB/s throughput for read only workloads per system in a 4U (four rack units) footprint.²

To leverage the economic value of both foundation and traditional AI models, businesses must focus on the data – their current capacity and growth forecasts, where the data resides, how it's secured and accessed, and how to optimize future data storage investments.

"The potential of today's new era of AI can only be fully realized, in my opinion, if organizations have a strategy to unify data from multiple sources in near real-time without creating numerous copies of data and going through constant iterations of data ingest," said Denis Kennelly, general manager, IBM Storage. "IBM Storage Scale System 6000 gives clients the ability to do just that – brings together data from core, edge, and cloud into a single platform with optimized performance for GPU workloads."

The IBM Storage Scale System 6000 is optimized for storing semi-structured and unstructured data including video, imagery, text, instrumentation data, etc., that is generated daily and accelerates an organization's digital footprint across hybrid environments. With the IBM Storage Scale System clients can:

Expect greater data efficiencies and economies of scale with the addition of IBM FlashCore Modules (FCM), to be incorporated in 1H 2024:

• New maximum capacity NVMe FCM will provide capacity efficiency with 70% lower cost and 53% less energy per TB vs. IBM's previous maximum capacity flash drives for IBM Storage Scale System.³ This can help clients realize the full performance of NVMe with the cost advantages of Quad-level Cell (QLC).⁴
• Powerful inline hardware-accelerated data compression and encryption to help keep client data secured even in multi-user, multi-tenant environments.
• Storage Scale System 6000 with FCM will support 2.5x the amount of data in the same floor space than the previous generation system.⁵

Accelerate the adoption and operationalization of AI workloads with IBM watsonx: 

• Engineered with a new NVMeoF turbo tier, new parallel multi-tenant data isolation and IBM patented computational storage drives, this is designed to provide more performance security and efficiency for AI workloads.
• Storage Scale software, the global data platform for unstructured data that powers the Scale System 6000, connects data with an open ecosystem of multi-vendor storage options including AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud and other public clouds, in addition to IBM Storage Tape.

Gain faster access to data with over 2.5x the GB/s throughput and 2x IOPs performance of market leading competitors⁶:

• High-processing throughput and access speed with multiple concurrent AI and data-intensive workloads that can be run to meet a range of use cases.

The Benefits of IBM Storage Scale in Applied AI at the University of Queensland

The University of Queensland (UQ) is a world-class research institution that has significantly accelerated a wide range of workloads providing faster access to data and improved efficiency and capabilities using the IBM Storage Scale global data platform and IBM Storage Scale System. Examples of some of the research where IBM Storage is used include applied AI for the characterization of neurodegenerative diseases and in the search for more effective and flexible vaccine technologies. 

"With our current Storage Scale Systems 3500, we are helping decrease time to discovery and increase research productivity for a growing variety of scientific disciplines. For AI research involving medical image analysis, we have decreased latency of access by as much as 60% compared to our previous storage infrastructure. For genomics and complex fluid dynamics workloads, we have increased throughput by as much as 70%," said Jake Carroll, Chief Technology Officer, Research Computing Centre, The University of Queensland, Australia. "We get all the benefits of a high-speed parallel file system inside our supercomputing resources with the data management transparency and global data access that the IBM Storage Scale software provides."

Carroll added, "IBM's Storage Scale System 6000 should be a gamechanger for us. With the specs that I've seen, by doubling the performance and increasing the efficiency, we would be able to ask our scientific research questions with higher throughput, but with a lower TCO and lower power consumption per IOP, in the process." 

Accelerating AI with the IBM Storage Scale System and NVIDIA Technology

The Storage Scale System 6000 has the ability to create an information supply chain from an NVIDIA AI solution to other AI workloads independent of where they are located. IBM's new NVMeoF turbo tier has been engineered for small files like those collected from remote devices or to provide access to smaller transactions like data lake or lakehouse analytics so they can be integrated into an NVIDIA solution.

The Storage Scale System 6000 supports NVIDIA Magnum IOTM GPUDirect® Storage (GDS) with a direct path between GPU memory and storage. It has also been designed to increase performance with data movement IO when GDS is enabled. Utilizing NVIDIA ConnectX-7™ NICs, the Scale System 6000 supports up to 16 ports of 100Gb RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), 200Gb/s and/or 400Gb/s InfiniBand, or a combination of both to increase performance between nodes or directly to NVIDIA GPUs.

The Company will offer a variety of offerings and solutions to help clients accelerate their AI Journey

WinWire, a leading Microsoft Solutions Partner, announced the launch of its Generative AI Center of Excellence (CoE) to empower businesses to adapt this emerging technology in more agile and efficient ways.

Through its CoE, WinWire is launching an industry-leading 20 Generative AI Azure Marketplace Offerings, which provides numerous pathways for Enterprises and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) looking to adopt a Generative AI strategy. As inputs for its CoE strategy, WinWire has spoken with more than 600 executives in 2023, through a series of engaging and informative webinars on Generative AI, along with a recently completed AI in Healthcare Roadshow with Microsoft.

"At WinWire, we firmly believe that the technology industry is at an inflection point and Generative AI will transform businesses. Our mission is to guide our clients through understanding this technology and exploring the opportunities that make sense for them. Our investment in a Generative AI Center of Excellence reflects our passion for purpose-driven innovation and our unwavering pursuit of technology leadership," said Ashu Goel, CEO, WinWire.

"We believe that embracing cutting-innovative technologies such as Azure OpenAI services is the key to empowering businesses and fostering unparalleled growth. By responsibly integrating Generative AI into various business processes, we will enable enterprises to make data-driven decisions, improve efficiency, automate complex tasks and deliver personalized customer experiences," said Vineet Arora, CTO, WinWire.

WinWire and Generative AI

WinWire empowers businesses to kickstart their transformative journey with Generative AI. The company partners with Microsoft on their Azure OpenAI focus and has held joint webinars with Microsoft experts on topics such as the Power of Generative AI, the Generative AI based Copilot Framework, and Responsible Generative AI. 

Enhanced collaboration will expand cloud engineering capabilities to help global clients scale cloud-native development and solve complex business challenges with AI.

EPAM Systems, Inc., a leading digital transformation services and product engineering company, today announced a Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help enterprises solve complex business challenges, drive growth, and scale innovation through cutting-edge cloud solutions, services, and strategies. The agreement will focus on accelerating modernization, adopting cloud-native architecture, and leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics to create customer value in key industries, including healthcare, life sciences, financial services, insurance, energy and gaming.

While cloud transformation has grown vital for achieving business success, many organizations encounter challenges in managing the complexity of cloud operations. This SCA leverages EPAM's 30 years of experience in engineering, consulting, and software development paired with AWS's solutions to help clients address cloud complexity and expand capabilities with greater agility, efficiency, and speed to achieve business outcomes. To help organizations modernize and become cloud-native, EPAM will build new offerings and products to support AWS-based business solutions and data platforms, as well as advance AI and machine learning capabilities.

"We're excited to expand our work with AWS to help our clients transform into adaptive, cloud-native organizations and stay competitive in a quickly evolving digital landscape," said Elaina Shekhter, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at EPAM. "Building on more than a decade of collaboration, we are able to further deliver advanced cloud capabilities and unique end-to-end experiences through our global team of expert consultants, designers and engineers."

As a part of the agreement, EPAM will establish a dedicated AWS Center of Excellence built on its more than 15,000 AWS experts who hold 5,000 AWS certifications. The SCA furthers EPAM's decade-long collaboration with AWS and has allowed EPAM to streamline the process of building infrastructure, applications and business platforms for clients while mitigating business risks.

"There has never been a greater time to bring operational efficiency to the resource-constrained healthcare industry. At XSOLIS, we rely on EPAM's expertise to help us leverage our AI-driven technology more rapidly and effectively to eliminate administrative waste and accelerate data-driven decision-making across our connected network of providers and payers," said Zach Evans, Chief Technology Officer at XSOLIS. "The expanded collaboration between EPAM and AWS empowers us to offer a more robust solution, leveraging cutting-edge cloud-native capabilities. This collaboration will positively impact our mission to create a frictionless healthcare system, with efficiency gains that benefit providers, payers and patients alike."

"EPAM has a proven track record of helping global enterprises accelerate digital transformation and navigate their cloud journeys to gain a competitive advantage," said Chris Sullivan, Vice President, Worldwide System Integrators at AWS. "Together, EPAM and AWS can help clients further modernize their businesses, applications and software to become faster and more efficient." 

As an end-to-end provider of digital transformation services with more than 50,000 team members across 50+ countries, EPAM delivers innovative cloud-enabled AI, data modernization, migration, data, and analytics solutions to many Forbes Global 2000 organizations around the world.

Thomas Collins , former COO of Accion Labs and former leader of GlobalLogic, takes over

Marlabs Innovation LLC., the global digital solutions company, today announced the addition of Thomas Collins as its new CEO. He brings 28 years of experience in various leadership positions in global companies. Prior to Marlabs, Collins was COO of Accion Labs and worked successfully at Accenture, Siemens, Atos and GlobalLogic. He is also the co-founder of AppliLog, a supply chain management software company, and Customer Experts, a business development consulting company. The company's co-founder and current CEO, Siby Vadakekkara, will become president.

Collins' appointment comes after an extensive search to recruit an exceptional leader who resonates with Marlabs' cultural values. Siby said: "I congratulate Tom on his new role. Throughout his career, he has been instrumental in formulating go-to-market strategies, winning notable clients and transforming teams into hyper-growth organizations. I am sure "Tom's experience in scaling digital engineering companies and helping clients drive transformation initiatives will accelerate our growth ambitions while delivering compelling value to our clients."

Recognized in the industry for his strategic leadership, communication, negotiation and interpersonal skills, Collins holds a diploma in business administration from Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich.

"It is an honor and a great responsibility to lead Marlabs," said Collins. "I was attracted to Marlabs' exceptional customer base and reputation for accelerating enterprise digital transformations. I would like to especially thank Siby and Matt Kinsey , managing partner of Marlabs investor BV Investment Partners, for trusting me to take on this role," Collins stated about his appointment.

Marlabs has continued on an accelerated growth path since its partnership with BV Investment Partners, and continues to provide high-value, high-impact services to clients in the pharmaceutical and life sciences, manufacturing and retail, as well as banking and insurance sectors. It acquired Extentor Tquila in 2015 to strengthen the capabilities of its Salesforce platform and earlier this year announced its expansion into LATAM with the acquisition of Monitora Soluções Tecnológica, based in Brazil, which will allow it to access new markets to grow, offering close capabilities. to shore customers while deepening technological capabilities.

Kyndryl, the world's largest technology infrastructure services provider, today announced the availability of new services for financial services organizations seeking to use Google Cloud to safely store and protect their confidential and sensitive data. Kyndryl's new services are designed to enable a unified, scalable and security-rich data platform to support customers' regulatory and compliance activities and requirements.

Kyndryl developed the new services on Google Cloud's reference architecture for financial services, with a focus on automation, security, and making compliance easier for customers. Customers can utilize Google Cloud's security solutions, such as Confidential Computing to encrypt their confidential data and Google Cloud Security Command Center to identify vulnerabilities and detect threats.

Kyndryl's financial services implementation for Google Cloud is tailored to meet the unique requirements and compliance standards of the financial industry. The new services feature many capabilities and differentiators essential to helping banks and financial institutions digitally modernize, including Kyndryl Consult architects and engineers; Kyndryl's experienced developer and delivery teams; Kyndryl Cloud Native Managed Services; and Kyndryl compliance and security expertise.

With its modular, industry experience-based approach designed for cloud security and privacy, Kyndryl is partnering with Google Cloud to meet the needs of financial services customers via an industry cloud approach that overcomes the inadequate and limited capabilities of generic services.

"We have developed innovative services with advanced security capabilities to help financial services organizations plan and implement their data and application environment in Google Cloud," said Meenagi Venkat, Vice President, Kyndryl Consult, Cloud. "Kyndryl brings 30+ years of experience with designing, building and managing mission-critical IT infrastructures to provide customers what they need to run and transact their businesses in the cloud with confidence and security."

"Services partners like Kyndryl provide the ongoing expertise and resources that many enterprises need for large-scale digital transformation projects," said Benjie Harrison, Director of Global Alliances, Google Cloud. "Kyndryl will now provide financial services companies with new solutions that apply Google Cloud's trusted infrastructure and security tools to help customers achieve their business transformation goals."

Kyndryl designed its financial services capabilities to take advantage of the Google Cloud security features and services that the financial services industry requires and relies upon, including:

• Confidential Computing for core financial services that encrypts data during processing to help prevent unauthorized access to the data.
• Google Cloud Sensitive Data Protection provides tools to discover, classify and mask sensitive data to help prevent it from being used in analytics or training of AI/ML models.
• Security Command Center (SCC) to maintain and govern regulatory and security compliance and provide rapid alerts on non-compliance, as well as remediation guidance.

To enable a rapid and smooth transition to Google Cloud for financial services customers, Kyndryl has focused on key enablers, such as an industry-specific design that accelerates onboarding. The services enable customers to adopt modern operations practices such as Infrastructure as code (IaC) and can be adapted to specific customer requirements and local regulatory requirements and helps customers confidently and securely build and solve business challenges.

Kyndryl also applied its deep industry expertise and cloud native capabilities to create dynamic financial services based on an operating model that continuously governs and optimizes performance, aligns cloud pricing and spend with business outcomes, and provides composable cloud services that facilitate faster solutioning and time to revenue.