Flowfinity, a trailblazer in no-code application development, is redefining how business analysts can overcome internal resistance to new software solutions. Their award-winning platform, designed with a process improvement mindset, acts as a powerful catalyst to drive digital transformation in the enterprise by empowering business users to deliver innovative applications with less strain on overtaxed IT resources.

Digital transformation is the key to competitive advantage, yet process improvers often struggle to deliver new business solutions due to resistance to change. Flowfinity experts are now sharing their strategies to turn apprehension into enthusiasm for new solutions. By understanding the psychology behind resistance, you can help users and leaders overcome their fears and build a culture of adaptability that fosters innovation. 

"We want business analysts to understand that Flowfinity is not just another tool; it's a transformative framework that encourages a cultural shift towards adaptability and continuous improvement," remarks Alex Puttonen, Director of Marketing. "By alleviating concerns regarding disruption, complexity, and cost, businesses can embrace change with reduced risks and increased confidence, all while empowering employees to be drivers of innovation."

The no-code platform leader encourages organizations to transcend the traditional confines of procedural software development and champion a culture where people and technology converge to amplify operational efficiency and unlock a realm of limitless possibilities. 

Flowfinity invites process improvers and business leaders to explore the profound impact of their no-code platform in driving successful digital transformations. Discover how adopting Flowfinity can redefine your organizational landscape, turning challenges into opportunities for innovation and growth. 

Awarded Product of the Year at the Industry DevOps Awards 2023, London

Tata Elxsi, a global design and technology services leader, is revolutionizing the telecommunications industry with its Neuron Autonomous Network Platform. This groundbreaking solution powers the deployment and operation of the world's largest and most advanced 4G/5G and fixed networks, empowering operators to build business intent-driven networks.

The NEURON platform, comprising NEURON Telco Cloud and NEURON Dark NOC, extends DevOps principles and the power of AI/ML to construct autonomous cloud-native networks for operators. NEURON Telco Cloud streamlines the lifecycle management of network elements, while NEURON Dark NOC automates network operations.

The NEURON Autonomous Network Platform has been successfully deployed globally in multiple data centers, 10000+ VNFs / CNFs serving millions of subscribers.

NEURON seamlessly integrates with existing IT systems, legacy systems, and Operational Support Systems/Business Support Systems (OSS/BSS) while creating secure domain-isolated networks. This multi-domain, multi-cloud transformed network is open, easy to manage, and significantly lowers operational expenditures (OPEX).

These deployments have been tailor-made to address each customer's unique needs, pain points, and infrastructure requirements, ensuring optimal performance and efficiency across network architecture and brownfield systems. Tata Elxsi takes end-to-end program ownership, from commissioning to rollout, delivering a comprehensive solution to operators.

"Our NEURON Autonomous Network Platform represents a major milestone in the telecom industry, aligning with Tata Elxsi's vision of driving innovation and shaping the future of connectivity. It empowers operators to effectively deploy and operate the world's largest 4G/5G networks while embracing the transformative power of automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI). By leveraging this groundbreaking solution, operators can significantly lower operational costs and deliver seamless, high-quality services at speed to their customers," said R. Rajagopalan, CTO at Tata Elxsi.

NEURON further supports operators in Private 5G deployments, facilitating the seamless delivery of use cases across various industries, including Connected and Software Defined Vehicles, Connected Healthcare, Smart Cities, and Smart Factories.

"As NEURON evolves, we collaborate with open-source and standardization organizations to enhance the convergence of IT and networking. Partnering with leading vendors, we develop standardized testing approaches to promote innovation and seamless integration. This, coupled with our support for Gen AI and Digital Twins within NEURON, empowers operators to embrace cloud-friendly practices and explore new avenues for revenue generation,'' said B. Ramesh Ramanathan, Principal Architect at Tata Elxsi and OSM TSC member ETSI Rapporteur.

The Neuron platform is showcased at the Tata Elxsi booth No. 2.80, Hall 2 at the Indian Mobile Congress (IMC) in New Delhi, India, along with tailored solutions for Private 5G across Connected Cars, Smart Factories, Connected Healthcare and Smart Infrastructure.

Rokt, the leading ecommerce technology company using machine learning to make transactions more relevant to each shopper, today announced its partnership with Redbubble, the global online marketplace where independent artists sell print-on-demand products to their customers worldwide. Through the partnership, currently live across 8 regions including US, AU, NZ, CA, UK, FR, DE & ES, Redbubble will unlock new revenue opportunities during the transaction moment on their ecommerce site.

Rokt's advanced AI technology will help optimise post-purchase offers on the marketplace and create relevant customer experiences for each customer, ultimately driving positive customer engagement, brand loyalty and an additional revenue stream for the brand.

Since launching with Rokt, the Redbubble marketplace has seen significant incremental revenue, generating nearly $500k in revenue to date, across millions of transactions.

"We are thrilled to partner with Redbubble in their mission to unlock new revenue streams and optimise customer experiences," said Craig Galvin, Chief Revenue Officer of Rokt. "Rokt's advanced e-commerce technology powered by AI, combined with Redbubble's vibrant marketplace, creates a powerful synergy to deliver innovative solutions and further accelerate their growth."

"We are very pleased to join forces with Rokt and deliver a relevant shopping journey," said Rebecca Zarate, Chief Marketing Officer of Redbubble. "By harnessing Rokt's cutting-edge AI technology, we are able to provide our users with highly tailored recommendations and a personalised experience, reinforcing our dedication to offering the best possible experience for artists and their customers."

Rokt's collaboration with Redbubble is just one example of the expanding roster of global ecommerce partners they are working with, such as Lyft, Gopuff, ASOS, Mercari and others. Collectively, these partnerships provide advertisers with a valuable chance to enhance their competitive advantage by targeting and engaging with a fresh set of online shoppers who are actively making purchases.

Among the various possibilities offered by cloud computing is the adoption of hybrid environments, mixing public cloud and private cloud services, with on-premises infrastructure. uni.cloud , a cloud service provider company, highlights that in this hybrid cloud architecture , all resources work independently, but in an orchestrated way, supporting the organization's demands.

A characteristic of the hybrid cloud is that it consolidates IT resources and facilitates the migration of workloads between different environments. In other words, it is possible to move data and applications from one cloud to another. Furthermore, despite encompassing different services, management is unified, using a single tool and interface.

For experts, the hybrid cloud can solve different demands of organizations.

"In a hybrid cloud structure, the organization gains a flexible and agile cloud computing environment. And a great advantage is the possibility of making assertive adaptations according to business needs", highlights Arley Brogiato, CEO of uni.cloud, cloud service provider company.

For example, during a peak in demand, the organization can direct extra loads to the public cloud, quickly and scalably, without touching the on-premises infrastructure.

Likewise, it is also possible to choose where to store  certain data and applications based on criteria such as compliance, privacy, risk mitigation, ease of data recovery , cost optimization and how critical the workload is.

In practice, the company gains granular control, with security, scalability and redundancy benefits.

Why Enterprises Adopt a Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

The adoption of cloud computing  is growing year by year. According to research by FGV (Fundação Getúlio Vargas), 42% of data processing in companies is already carried out in the cloud, and this percentage is expected to exceed 50% in the next two years.

In this context, adopting a hybrid cloud can be both a calculated strategy and a natural path to migrating to the cloud.

Some organizations start by migrating part of their workloads to the cloud, but keeping others in the data center for reasons such as cost, logistics or even business culture.

See some of the factors that lead companies to adopt a hybrid cloud:

• Minimize risks, with the possibility of keeping sensitive data and applications in a more controlled environment, such as a private cloud;
• Reduce costs by starting the migration to the cloud without having to change the entire local infrastructure;
• Meet seasonal variations in demand for computing and storage resources.

One point to note is that defining the hybrid cloud architecture is challenging, as is managing multiple clouds and an on-premises environment. An assessment is needed to define the best structure for each workload considering factors such as security, efficiency and cost.

Therefore, whatever the company chooses, the journey to the cloud must always be accompanied by a trusted partner.

"Every cloud strategy needs to be well worked out, and the ideal partner will understand and meet the organization's needs so that the process can flow without headaches", reinforces Brogiato.

He highlights that uni.cloud, as a Cloud Services Provider, has a specialized network of partners  who work precisely in the implementation of cloud services.

News Summary:

• New Cisco portfolio of collaboration devices, powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing, offers customers the best collaboration experiences across a spectrum of workspaces.

• New Room Kit EQX, the latest device from Cisco built on the NVIDIA Jetson edge AI platform, delivers a flagship room experience that is simple to deploy.

• Customers benefit from frictionless and equitable AI-fueled collaboration experiences, regardless of location, with expanded Cinematic Meetings capabilities.

Cisco today unveiled the next milestone of its ongoing work with NVIDIA to deliver AI-powered meetings for hybrid workers. Cisco announced the launch of Room Kit EQX and the expansion of its Cinematic Meetings capabilities — both powered by NVIDIA's AI engine — with the goal of enhancing collaboration experiences with audio and video intelligence and enabling more equitable hybrid meetings.

"In order for people to want to come to the office, companies must fundamentally reimagine and reconfigure workspaces to provide seamless and immersive collaboration experience," said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Cisco Security and Collaboration. "Our collaboration with NVIDIA helps make this possible as we expand our portfolio of AI-powered solutions that unlock the potential of hybrid workers."

The integration of video devices supporting AI and machine learning is critical to ensuring the longevity of investments made to deliver hybrid work experiences. The tight integration of Cisco's world-class hardware, leading conference room operating system, RoomOS, and NVIDIA's AI capabilities allows Cisco to deliver the industry's most capable AI and machine learning platform— enabling 20x the AI capabilities of previous generations.

"Edge AI is playing a vital role in bringing autonomy and improving productivity across many industries," said Deepu Talla, Vice President of Embedded and Edge Computing, NVIDIA. "Cisco and NVIDIA have been pioneering the use of AI to enhance collaboration in the workplace, and the new line of products will bring transformative technology to this space."

Room Kit EQX = Beautiful, Future-of-Meeting Rooms

Cisco has reimagined its portfolio of devices with NVIDIA AI modules, featuring solutions for any cost point and workspace. The highest priority for many customers is refreshing medium to large spaces, which are often flagship rooms for high-stakes meetings. Up until now, video-enabling these spaces has been complex, requiring integrators to stitch together multiple audio, video and furniture components, and requiring a specialist on-site to deploy. 

The Room Kit EQX is a new, integrated collaboration solution that allows customers to deploy beautiful, future-of-meeting rooms simply and consistently across sites.

Benefits for hybrid workers include:

• Simplified deployment and maintenance: Customers benefit from flexible mounting options, including wall-mounted or free-standing, in some cases eliminating the need for permits and added building costs. This device also eliminates the need for patchwork speaker solutions, mounting options and furniture enclosures, reducing both time and cost to deploy flagship spaces.
• Advanced audiovisual capabilities: Leveraging the NVIDIA Jetson edge AI platform to power advanced camera, audio and speech intelligence, the EQX reduces the feeling of distance between in-person and remote participants.
• Interoperability across platforms: On RoomOS mode, the EQX features native Webex Meetings and powerful video interoperability with third-party meeting platforms. The EQX also natively supports Microsoft Teams Rooms augmented with the full-featured Webex Meetings.
• Unified management and security: IT admins can take advantage of device management and workspace analytics capabilities in Cisco Control Hub.

Cinematic Meetings through Distance Zero

With an increasingly digitized and globalized workforce, meetings where everyone is physically present are no longer the norm. Cisco's Cinematic Meetings capabilities leverage an NVIDIA Jetson system-on-module to deliver collaboration experiences that reduce the impact of distance and make all meeting attendees feel like they're in the room, even if they aren't, a concept Cisco is calling Distance Zero. To create more equitable and inclusive meeting experiences for all meeting attendees, Cisco is bringing Distance Zero experiences to new workspaces and use cases:

• New immersive workspace setups: Cisco is unveiling the blueprint for an all-new campfire-like boardroom experience. At the center of the configuration are four quad cameras and screens at eye-level, all configured in a circular arrangement to provide an immersive view of the content and remote participants. To ensure an equitable and inclusive experience, this setup creates the feeling of face-to-face collaboration for remote and in-person attendees alike.
• Hybrid presentations: Customers can now experience cinematic meetings in auditorium and training style rooms. Cisco devices seamlessly switch cameras and views to provide remote participants with the best view of speakers, their content and close-up audience reactions. And in a new hybrid presenter mode, a remote and an in-room speaker can easily take the stage together for virtually in-person hybrid presentations.

Continued Collaboration Between Cisco and NVIDIA

Cisco and NVIDIA have worked together since 2015— years ahead of today's AI boom— to create various industry-leading devices that address some of the biggest challenges of workplace collaboration including meeting equity and video fatigue. We look forward to continued efforts to empower today's flexible workforce with innovative AI-powered solutions for seamless collaboration.

New "2023 API Impact Report" Study Finds API-Driven
Innovation has Increasing Macroeconomic Influence Across North American and Global Economies

Kong Inc., a leading developer of cloud API technologies, today announced its most recent study, the company's "2023 API Impact Report." The research, undertaken by Kong experts and an economist from Brown University, explores the expanding macroeconomic influence of APIs and associated technologies in the U.S. and globally. By leveraging survey insights with economic data, the report underscores the growing influence that APIs will have on global economies and enterprises in the coming years. Moreover, the study also analyzes the escalating risks of cybersecurity threats aimed at inadequately secured API technology infrastructures.

Key findings from the study include:

• API monetization is projected to grow by 115% in the United States domestic market — from $3.97 billion in 2023 to $8.56 billion by 2027.
• The economic impact of APIs in the U.S. will increase from $2.1 trillion in 2023 to $2.8 trillion in 2027, a $640 billion increase and 30% relative growth rate.
• The global economic impact of APIs is expected to increase from $10.9 trillion in 2023 to $14.2 trillion over the next 4 years.
• The total value of APIs to artificial intelligence-related growth will reach $5.4 trillion in 2027, a 76% increase from 2023 estimates.
• The impact on blockchain, cryptocurrencies and web 3 is forecasted to increase 78%, from $2.5 trillion to $4.4 trillion.

"APIs represent the building blocks and critical infrastructure that enable businesses to innovate and deliver superior digital experiences," said Marco Palladino, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, Kong Inc. "And it's not hard to anticipate that forward-thinking businesses that adopt API-first strategies today, will come out on top in the economic landscape that we foresee coming. This data attempts to quantify this sea change in the economic landscape."

"What impressed us in developing this study was the sheer value of APIs as an economic catalyst," said Dr. Christopher Whaley, Ph.D. and associate professor, Brown University. "They are the digital accelerators to our interconnected world, in which data and services flow freely, clearing the path for innovation and technology-led growth."

Additional capabilities advance Neo4j's position as the authoritative data source for analytical and operational systems within an enterprise

Neo4j®, the world's leading graph database and analytics company, announced major new capabilities enabling cloud or self managed customers to increase analytical queries by up to 100x faster,¹ run both transactional and analytical processing within one database, and automatically track data changes in real time for faster mission-critical decision making.  

"Neo4j's integration of operational and analytical workloads within a single database is now enhanced by the power of parallel runtime and change data capture, empowering our customers with real-time insights, cost-efficient data management, and simplified architecture," said Sudhir Hasbe, Chief Product Officer, Neo4j. "The results foster quicker decision-making, superior customer experiences, and a competitive edge in the market at a magnitude of speed, performance and agility that is far greater than ever before." 

New capabilities and benefits include:

• Up to 100X faster performance of analytical queries via Parallel Runtime capability, which adds concurrent threads across multiple CPU cores to run analytical graph queries. Neo4j also leverages a technique called morsel-based parallelism to optimize this capability, for greater scalability, better resource utilization, and seamless multitasking.
• Faster mission-critical decisions now enabled by native Change Data Capture (CDC), which automates the real-time tracking and notification of data changes in the database. CDC is also integrated with Neo4j Connector for Kafka and Confluent, which streams these changes for easier consumption across other data platforms and applications.
• Easier Knowledge Graph creation via new embedding models that predict and find missing relationships and infer new connections within an organization's knowledge graph for greater semantic understanding.
• New pathfinding algorithms that make complex workflows more efficient by identifying the best sequence and critical paths between nodes on a graph.

"Neo4j's Change Data Capture capability enables us to synchronize the latest changes happening in our customers' various data sources simultaneously – and helps us guarantee that when they use Dropbox Dash, they can search and find their content accurately," said Anil Masakal, Engineering Leader, Dropbox.

"Neo4j's new capabilities enable modern law enforcement agencies to react with greater agility to mission-critical events, empowering them to fight more crimes and solve them faster," said Christophe Willemsen, CTO, GraphAware. "For example, we can trigger alerts and send them to front-line officers when the phone number of a Person of Interest pings from a cellular tower near a high-risk event where a VIP is present, bodycam footage shows the image of a child at risk, and other events."

These advancements follow a series of milestones for Neo4j. The company recently integrated native vector search into its core database capabilities, enabling more accurate, explainable, and transparent outcomes for LLMs and other generative AI applications. It earlier won Google Cloud's 2023 Technology Partner of the Year award in the data management category, and placement in CRN's 2023 Big Data 100. Neo4j was recognized for the first time in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems, the first time that any native graph vendor was included in the report². 

Tech veterans release Acorn, a solution for simplicity and sharing among individual developers and teams.

Today, Acorn Labs announced public beta availability of its cloud developer platform Acorn, a service that makes it simple for anyone to run software in their own cloud sandbox and easily share their creations. From the creators of Rancher and k3s, Acorn aims to make cloud computing accessible, collaborative and delightful for developers.

Acorn offers a free sandbox environment where users can deploy software for up to two hours at a time, as often as they like. Users can experiment with innovative technologies, learn how containers and server software work, and easily share their creations, all without cost barriers. This free plan is designed so even someone with little experience can launch a cloud application as easily as they install an app on their phone. The only thing users need to sign up for free access is a GitHub account.

"Cloud computing has become increasingly complex for large organizations, let alone individual developers and small teams," said Acorn CEO Sheng Liang. "With Acorn, we've eliminated that complexity. Users don't need to be experts in Kubernetes, Terraform, DevOps or AWS to take advantage of the power of cloud computing. Acorn puts the power of the most popular cloud computing solutions at your fingertips. The only question is what you will create from then on."

As users progress to production, Acorn's commercial plans provide flexible and scalable solutions tailored to the unique needs of organizations of all sizes. Built on AWS infrastructure, Acorn enables users to pay for infrastructure as they use it, without having to navigate the complexity of cloud computing platforms.

Introducing Acorn Links for Application Sharing

Acorn is also introducing a simple new way for anyone to publish and share application templates across any channel. Acorn Links are user-generated URLs that launch private instances of shared applications within a user's free private sandbox.

With Acorn Links, users can share application templates on websites, blogs, social media, videos or even through QR codes, and anyone can experiment with what they have created without sharing a credit card or being charged for server hosting.

Here are a few sample links to launch an app on Acorn:

• Minecraft Server
• AutoGPT.js (a browser-based AutoGPT AI agent)
• Wordpress
• Mealie (a self-hosted recipe manager)
• Nextcloud (a private file sharing service)
• Ruby on Rails Development environment
• Square Off (Pong meets Tetris)

"Countless app stacks are being created to leverage advances in AI. Yet setting up a cloud server and installing software on it is a significant undertaking, even for DevOps pros. For regular users, this challenge is incredibly daunting and, in some cases, insurmountable," said Acorn President Shannon Williams. "Acorn Links will change the status quo by democratizing access to cloud computing much like GitHub has made coding accessible to all."

Key Features of Acorn:

1.  Free Cloud Sandbox: Acorn's free sandbox environment allows anyone to experience cloud computing without barriers. Whether you want to build an amazing AI agent or just run a MERN stack, Acorn provides a powerful runtime environment in the cloud for everyone to experiment with. Sandbox environments give users the ability to run up to 4 GB of RAM at any given time for up to two hours. At the end of the two hours, workloads are stopped but can be recreated as often as a user desires.

2. Collaborative Cloud Development: Acorn accounts can run multiple projects and, with a Pro account, users can invite team members to their projects to collaborate on development and testing workflows. Teams can collaborate across multiple applications and environments, rapidly spinning up new testing and development environments. When a workload goes into production, Acorn's team management tools allow users to define role-based access control (RBAC) policies and enforce controls.

3. Production-Grade Infrastructure: While the Acorn sandbox is always free, by upgrading to a Pro account, users can deploy to pro regions and run their applications without any limitations. Acorn infrastructure is deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with resource billing based on consumption.

4. Acornfiles and Acorn Images: Workloads on Acorn are created by launching Acorn Images, which are built from Acorn Files. Acorn Images are OCI-compliant, work with any registry and will be familiar to anyone who has experience with containers. Like containers, Acorn Images are identical wherever and whenever they are deployed. In other words, all environments, whether they are development, testing or production, are consistent. This dramatically reduces errors and environment configuration challenges. Acorn Images are based on the open-source Acorn Runtime project, which was released in 2022 and can be run on any Kubernetes cluster.

5. Production Operations Tooling: Every Acorn deployment includes an intuitive set of DevOps tools, including monitoring, logging, secret management and a powerful cloud-based management console. Users can access Acorn environments directly from a powerful command line interface (CLI) and easily integrate it with existing workflows or CI tools.

6. Acorn Dev Mode: Acorn Dev Mode can be used on any Acorn, allowing users to work directly on a running Acorn application. With Dev mode, Acorn users can synchronize real-time changes, attach debuggers and view live logs against a running app. Development teams can create dev instances of production environments in minutes and launch them in dev mode so they can immediately see their work. New developers can join projects and come up to speed quickly by creating dev environments identical to production.

7. Deploy to Your Own AWS Accounts: Acorn Platinum and Enterprise accounts can create Acorn Private Regions using their own AWS accounts. With Acorn Private Regions, teams are charged directly by AWS for whatever infrastructure and services they consume, while still having all the application management capabilities of Acorn. Acorn Private Regions make it easy for teams to utilize AWS credits and discounts. Acorn Private Regions also support direct Acorn access to AWS services such as RDS, SQS and S3, making cloud native development seamless.