Adobe today announced that Cristiano Amon has been appointed to its board of directors. Amon currently serves as president and chief executive officer of Qualcomm Incorporated, a role he assumed in 2021. Amon brings deep technical, mobile and AI experience to Adobe’s board. The Adobe Board now consists of 12 board members with the addition of Amon.

Before becoming chief executive officer, Amon served as president of Qualcomm where he spearheaded Qualcomm’s 5G strategy and drove the expansion and diversification of the business to serve multiple industries, including automotive, computing, VR and AR, networking and industrial. He has overseen the successful execution and integration of acquisitions to augment Qualcomm’s capabilities in areas such as advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), spatial computing, advanced CPU and RF Front End. Amon has held numerous leadership roles at Qualcomm since joining the company in 1995, including leading Qualcomm’s semiconductor business and overall responsibility for Snapdragon® processors.

Amon has also served as chief technical officer for Vésper, a wireless operator in Brazil, and held leadership positions at NEC, Ericsson and Velocom. Amon holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and an honorary doctorate from Universidade Estadual de Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil. He is a member of the President’s Export Council, vice chair of the U.S.-China Business Council and currently serves on the board of directors for the nonprofit Father Joe’s Villages.

"Cristiano's deep technical expertise and leadership in mobile, AI and global operations will be invaluable as Adobe empowers millions more people to create, collaborate, and deliver personalized digital experiences across surfaces,” said Shantanu Narayen, chair and chief executive officer at Adobe. “I look forward to working with him to continue to expand our business and further increase shareholder value.”

Rally AI is the first AI tool in recruiting that uses benchmark data, recommendations and best practices to guide professionals in building a stand-out employer brand that attracts top talent to their company's culture and careers, while tracking and proving the ROI of their strategy

Rally®, the leading platform for learning best-practice recruitment marketing and employer branding strategies, today introduced Rally® AI™, a revolutionary AI recruitment marketing assistant that guides recruiting professionals through every step of creating a highly effective talent attraction strategy so they can gain a competitive edge in recruiting top candidates using modern social and digital marketing strategies.

Rally AI is the newest feature of Rally® Inside™, Rally's innovative recruitment marketing and analytics platform that is enabling more than 1,500 professionals to recruit passive talent and active job seekers through the social media channels and websites where candidates spend time online. With the U.S. unemployment rate near record lows, employers are shifting more of their recruiting strategy to attracting passive talent—workers who are currently employed and not actively looking for a job—estimated to be 85% of the labor force according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Rally AI is built on GPT-4, OpenAI's most advanced large language model capable of following complex instructions and solving difficult problems with accuracy. What's unique about Rally AI is that it uses Rally Inside's built-in best practices, proprietary benchmark data and recommendation engine to guide users through creating highly effective recruitment marketing per job function and channel. As a result, HR and talent acquisition teams can attract 9x more candidates compared to doing recruitment marketing alone, with real-time analytics to prove the ROI of their strategy.

With the addition of Rally AI, Rally Inside becomes a complete solution for developing, creating and measuring a high-performing recruitment marketing and employer branding strategy, empowering professionals to:

• Quickly synthesize employer brand research and see how they compare to talent competitors
• Easily collaborate on multi-channel recruitment marketing campaigns and plan out data-driven content calendars
• Instantly identify tactics and channels that work best to increase qualified applications at a lower cost per applicant
• Confidently craft authentic and compelling employee value propositions for every talent audience
• Streamline the creation of engaging recruiting content for social media, blogs, digital ads, emails and newsletters—in their brand voice
• Automatically track, measure, analyze, report and benchmark results across campaigns in real time, and
• Seamlessly manage their strategy in one, easy-to-use recruitment marketing platform that augments existing recruiting and marketing systems.

"AI is transforming the way every company operates, including how employers attract, engage and recruit talent. Learning to plan, create and analyze using generative AI is a skill that every talent acquisition and talent brand professional will need to develop, and why our goal with Rally AI is to empower them to learn this career-building skill so they can work smarter and more effectively. Today, we're all under pressure to do more with less. With Rally Inside powered by Rally AI, recruitment marketing beginners gain a trusted mentor and experts gain a capable assistant that enables our customers to not just get more done faster, but to take their strategy and results to new heights," said Lori Sylvia, Founder & CEO of Rally.

Bloomfire, a leading AI-powered knowledge management platform provider, is pleased to announce enhanced generative AI and Enterprise Search solutions that are purpose-built to keep data secure, deliver accurate results, and augment employee performance. Bloomfire's thoughtful approach highlights the unique opportunities that generative AI brings to knowledge management software while addressing AI's challenges around security, reliability, and ethical use.

Bloomfire's enhanced features are built for creators, stakeholders, and administrators of knowledge across the company:

• AI Author Assist brings speed and efficiency to content creators by simplifying the time-intensive process of writing and refining high-quality, actionable posts. Authors can build summaries, key takeaways, and insights from their original work using a suite of generative AI tools with cutting-edge prompt engineering.
• AI Chat equips employees and front-line support agents with direct answers sourced from vetted company knowledge. Teams can trust that they will receive accurate responses because Bloomfire's AI technology only provides answers if relevant company knowledge is available.
• Enterprise Search enables organizations to easily scale access to company knowledge through a single AI-powered search engine that integrates with SharePoint and Microsoft Teams document libraries. Streamline content and document management with automated processes for curating, migrating, and updating content in bulk.

"To navigate the complexities of today's information-dense environment, our clients partner with us to develop thoughtful and secure AI technologies. Our customer research shows that 87% indicate Bloomfire helps improve governance and protect against security risks and 83% note work quality and accuracy as outcomes. With that in mind, I'm thrilled that we can meet people where and how they work with this expanded toolset and help them solve their problems in knowledge management, research & insights, and customer support." – Ben Little, CEO

Looking ahead to 2024, the company will continue to build and refine generative AI capabilities and expand the breadth of integrated sources for Enterprise Search to meet the unique needs of different industries and knowledge use cases.

Microsoft and Submittable announce strategic partnership to deliver market-leading grantmaking and corporate social responsibility solutions across Microsoft's cloud offerings

Microsoft Corp. and Submittable, a leading grants management and corporate social responsibility (CSR) platform, on Wednesday announced a strategic partnership to collaborate and innovate together to enable Submittable to develop new solutions powered by Microsoft Azure and Azure OpenAI Service, to provide public, private and nonprofit organizations with the solutions to accelerate social impact and better serve their communities.

Among the first offerings to be rolled out by Submittable is a new-to-market set of tools to further the mission of AI for good and improve the application process for grant givers and seekers. These tools include:

• AI-powered service that will auto-fill grant applications based on an applicant's own prior answers, saving valuable time to focus on critical work
• AI bot that can both create grant application forms and translate them into multiple languages, ensuring best practice adherence for funders while also extending opportunities across language barriers
• AI-supported tool that extracts information from official documents into Submittable, creating a simpler experience for applicants and reviewers as well as reducing the potential for human error and fraud.

Under the new partnership, Submittable's solutions will be built on Microsoft Azure including Azure OpenAI Service and will add integrations with the common data model and Microsoft Teams.

"By partnering with companies like Submittable, we can help more organizations increase their social impact effectiveness through technology that delivers better alignment of funding and other critical operational elements that enable them to deliver on their missions," said Justin Spelhaug, vice president and global lead for Microsoft's Technology for Social Impact organization. "Together we'll be able to innovate with purpose on top of the Microsoft Cloud to solve real problems for the social impact sector — one that for decades has been underserved by technology."

As a Microsoft Tech for Social Impact priority partner, Submittable is committed to aligning its solutions to Microsoft's technology stack and industry-specific offerings like Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit that enable social impact organizations to have an end-to-end view of the impact of dollars received from both individual donors and grant funders.

"The people transforming how public, private and nonprofit organizations engage their constituents, communities and employees deserve great tools," said Submittable CEO Thor Culverhouse. "Our grants management and employee giving and volunteering solutions aim to deliver that innovation for our customers. This would not be possible without our great partnership with Microsoft, leveraging the Azure platform and OpenAI service. Together, we are helping customers accelerate social impact."

Submittable's solutions are available on Azure Marketplace and AppSource today. Microsoft and Submittable will go to market together with industry-specific solutions and continue to collaborate on future innovation to help all organizations achieve their social impact goals.

ImageSource, Inc., the manufacturer of ILINX, the world's flexible process-improvement platform, is proud to announce the successful achievement of its annual goals, marked by a significant migration of customers to its ILINX Cloud solutions. The transition of clients to the ILINX Cloud signifies a pivotal moment in the company's journey toward enhancing efficiency, security, and accessibility for its valued customers. ImageSource, Inc. had a clear vision with its ILINX Cloud deployment goals: to empower organizations of all sizes to streamline their business processes, reduce costs, and adapt to the ever-evolving enterprise solution landscape. The ILINX Cloud, a cutting-edge cloud-based process improvement solution, offers a myriad of benefits, including:

1. **Scalability:** ILINX Cloud allows organizations to scale their ILINX platform usage as their needs grow. This ensures that businesses can adapt to changing circumstances without the hassle of extensive infrastructure changes.
2. **Enhanced Security:** ImageSource, Inc. recognizes the paramount importance of data security. The ILINX Cloud employs state-of-the-art security measures, including updated security patches and on-time product enhancements, to protect sensitive information and provide peace of mind to customer-partners across industries.
3. **Accessibility:** The ILINX Cloud is accessible from anywhere, anytime, facilitating remote work and collaboration, a feature that has become increasingly vital in today's global business landscape.
4. ** Efficiency:** By migrating to the ILINX Cloud, customer-partners can significantly reduce the costs associated with systems. This move saves money, frees up resources for other strategic initiatives, and reduces staffing burdens.

ImageSource, Inc.'s dedication to assisting customer-partners in maximizing their operational potential has led to the widespread customer adoption of the ILINX Cloud. The company's team of experts worked to ensure a seamless transition for each client, offering comprehensive support and guidance throughout the process.

"I am immensely proud of our team's hard work and dedication in helping our customer-partners move to  ILINX Cloud," said Terry Sutherland, CEO of ImageSource, Inc. "This achievement is a testament to our unwavering commitment to innovation and customer success. We remain dedicated to providing top-tier solutions that drive efficiency, security, and growth for our customer-partners."

Virtana, a leading provider of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven observability for hybrid-cloud infrastructure, today announced that it has been recognized by Gartner across eight recent reports related to infrastructure monitoring, AIOps, and digital transformation.

Virtana was named in Gartner's Cool Vendor² in Monitoring and Observability, six Gartner Hype Cycle³ reports, including Hype Cycle for Data Center Infrastructure, Hype Cycle for I&O Automation, Hype Cycle for I&O Digital Workplace Transformation, Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Platforms, Hype Cycle for ITSM, and Hype Cycle for Monitoring and Observability, and the Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools.

"We believe being included in eight Gartner reports this year reinforces the value Virtana delivers for enterprises needing AI-driven actionable insights and robust observability across increasingly complex multi-vendor hybrid cloud environments," said Kash Shaikh, President and CEO of Virtana. "We believe this recognition reflects our innovative approach of leveraging open-source for telemetry data and AI and ML-driven analytics to predict customer issues, perform root cause analysis, and take automated actions to provide the best performance while optimizing capacity and cost across hybrid IT environments."

In the above-mentioned Gartner Cool Vendor in Monitoring and Observability report, Gartner notes an increase in "reliance on open standards for telemetry collection, support for agentless implementation, and use of adaptive ML algorithms to identify changes in Kubernetes and serverless workload behavior. These profiling and analysis mechanisms, coupled with recommended resolution actions, allow IT operations and SRE teams to manage complex environments efficiently."

Virtana leverages leading open-source monitoring tools for metrics, logs, traces, flows, and configuration data, freeing customers from costly proprietary lock-ins. Virtana applies artificial intelligence (AI) to seamlessly analyze massive amounts of telemetry across the full infrastructure stack - from application code to containers to virtual machines to storage arrays, reducing the complexity of monitoring global estates.

The Virtana platform incorporates unique capabilities like dependency mapping and various AI methodologies to automatically detect anomalies, identify root cause, and drive intelligent remediation in real-time, reducing MTTR by over 95%. Customers also benefit from having an end-to-end view into their hybrid-infrastructure performance, ensuring critical applications meet SLAs while optimizing efficiency and cost.

"AI and ML have always been a core element of the Virtana Platform," says Jon Cyr, VP of Product Management at Virtana. "With the recent advancements in Generative AI (GenAI), Virtana is well positioned to and is already taking advantage of GenAI to help our customers get the right information to the right person faster. Ultimately, our goal is to get IT leaders out of the business of responding to tickets and alerts so they can focus on growing their business and driving value for their customers."

With its observability platform powered by both AI and human expertise, Virtana leverages open-source standards such as OpenTelemetry (OTEL) and open-source tools such as Prometheus and Loki to enable enterprises to deliver exceptional digital experiences, accelerate innovation, and maximize the return on infrastructure and cloud investments. The company's innovative approach has disrupted the market and made it a leader in multiple Gartner reports tracking the infrastructure monitoring and AIOps spaces.

Plintron today announced that its IoT Connectivity Management Platform (I-CMP) has been selected as the winner of the 'IoT Platform of the Year' award in the 7^th annual Mobile Breakthrough Awards program conducted by Mobile Breakthrough, a leading independent market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global wireless and mobile market today.

Plintrons' IoT Connectivity Management Platform (I-CMP) consists of a single dashboard in which users can view deployments and manage their IoT inventory & lifecycle management including activations, suspension, and ability to fire APIs from existing applications. The solution is compatible with GSMA and regulatory requirements, and is agnostic to SIM form-factors or type of network. Plintron's platform also provides white-labelled branding for MVNOs and is built to support multi-layer organization.

"We developed our breakthrough I-CMP based on customer feedback, especially from the Automotive, Logistics, Manufacturing, and other verticals in order to find a solution for the challenges being faced by customers," said Subhashree Radhakrishnan, Vice Chairman and Co-founder, Plintron. "We're thrilled to receive this award from Mobile Breakthrough which solidifies our commitment to innovation and reliability in the IoT Connectivity space. We'll continue to develop solutions to help our customers gain more control and flexibility over their IoT networks."

"Plintron I-CMP is a simple, smart and secure solution that's easy to use and aids customers in faster adoption of IoT. It controls operating costs, improves customer experience, and generates new revenue streams for various industry domains," stated Steve Johansson, Managing Director, Mobile Breakthrough. "Plintron I-CMP is our choice for 'IoT Platform of the Year' given its ability to offer users complete control over their devices, connections, and data all in one place, easily and intuitively."

The CRN Triple Crown is an Award in Recognition of Exceptional IT Market Leadership

Converge Technology Solutions Corp. ("Converge" or "the Company") a services-led, software-enabled, IT & Cloud Solutions provider, is pleased to announce that CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Converge as a 2023 Triple Crown Award winner. This is Converge's second year on the list.

For ten consecutive years, the Triple Crown Award has accredited unparalleled performance from top solution providers in North America based on revenue, growth, and technical expertise within the IT channel.

The recipients of the CRN Triple Crown Award are recognized for their remarkable accomplishment of securing a position on three distinguished lists in the same year. These lists include the Solution Provider 500, which ranks the largest IT solution providers in North America based on revenue, the Fast Growth 150, which ranks the fastest-growing organizations in the channel, and the Tech Elite 250, which acknowledges the attainment of the highest-level certifications from leading vendors in the industry. While each list is a noteworthy achievement, being featured on all three in a single year is a testament to exceptional service and warrants special acknowledgement from the entire channel community.

Jennifer Follett, Vice President, U.S. Content, Executive Editor, CRN, at The Channel Company, expressed his excitement and congratulations to the top solution providers who have achieved the prestigious Triple Crown Award. "These providers have not only demonstrated exceptional revenue growth in North America but have also surpassed many other channel organizations in terms of their progress. They have successfully maintained and enhanced their technical skills, resulting in the highest level of service in the IT channel." Follett emphasized that "this award represents the pinnacle of honor, recognizing truly extraordinary solution providers who consistently exceed expectations in their contributions to the channel and the industry's future through their unwavering dedication and expertise."

"Converge is proud to once again be given the CRN Triple Crown Award," stated Greg Berard, Global CEO and President of Converge. "We were honored to have been named to the Solution Provider 500, Fast Growth 150, Tech Elite 250, and Managed Service Provider 500 lists earlier this year, and being awarded the Triple Crown rounds out all of the exceptional work of the Converge team and is a testament to the deep technical expertise and solutions we build with our clients."