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.

In the wake of major CDN acquisitions by Akamai, CacheFly stands out as the go-to alternative, offering businesses unmatched speed, reliability, and customer-first flexibility. With over two decades of unparalleled service and innovation, CacheFly remains committed to empowering global content delivery.

Aprimo continues to push AI boundaries and drive digital asset management innovation, while prioritizing safety, security and value.

Aprimo, the leader in digital asset management and marketing resource management solutions, is helping to define the next generation of collaboration through the seamless integration of artificial intelligence across its offering. The company has unveiled a range of innovative features that not only demonstrate a visionary approach to the future of content operations—but also offer practical benefits for companies today.

“AI has moved beyond being a buzzword, now serving as a transformative force driving business evolution and enhancing customer interactions,” said Erik Huddleston, chief executive officer of Aprimo. “Aprimo is leading in strategically integrating AI features that significantly improve the content lifecycle. This pragmatic approach empowers businesses of all sizes to advance into a future characterized by enhanced collaboration and innovation.”

A pivotal element of this journey is the launch of Content Collaboration, a paradigm-shifting addition to digital asset management (DAM) that redefines traditional collaboration within content creation workflows. At its core are Collaborative Rooms, seamlessly integrated within DAM, fostering effortless collaboration among users. These ad-hoc rooms provide an ideal environment for creative brainstorming and team ideation, enhancing content creation workflows.

Aprimo's AI Content Coach utilizes the user’s library of assets as a learning model, swiftly training and updating GPT frameworks. It tailors brand-aligned content for marketing channels and customer segments, facilitating quick access to product/service information across departments. The tool generates content variations in tone, language, and audience for a versatile content creation solution. Aprimo’s innovations include near-term plans to enable customers to invite a Content Coach to a Collaborative Room.

In addition to Content Collaboration and AI Content Coach, Aprimo has issued successful releases of multiple practical, purpose-built features, including Smart GPT Document Tagging, Smart GPT Text Fields, Smart Tag Trainer and Smart GPT Video Summaries – each playing a vital role in streamlining content management, ensuring digital assets are tagged, structured and presented effectively. All together, Aprimo’s comprehensive suite of features empower businesses to enhance their content operations, making content more accessible, manageable and engaging, thereby optimizing productivity and customer engagement.

Importantly, Aprimo has also been a leader in content governance. An active member of the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), the company has introduced AI Content Detection. Identifying AI-generated content is vital to managing and governing it effectively. AI Content Detection automatically identifies AI-generated content from popular AI engines. This detected content can then be connected to automated review workflows, significantly lowering the risk that AI-generated content will be released without human review.

Looking ahead, Aprimo is actively unveiling transformative AI releases, including:

• Personalization: Enhancing customer engagement through highly personalized content suggestions, tailored to individual preferences and behaviors.
• Predictive Analytics: Utilizing AI to forecast content trends, enabling proactive adaptation of content strategies for optimal outcomes.
• Real-time Language Translation and Localization: Instantly translating and localizing content with the help of AI, breaking down language barriers and facilitating global collaboration.
• Advanced Security Measures: Implementing AI-driven security protocols to safeguard sensitive content and ensure compliance with data protection regulations.

“Aprimo’s AI features have added real, practical value for us, saving money and time,” said Shauna Lallatin, digital asset coordinator for Plaid Enterprises, one of the world's largest, most diverse manufacturers of creative do-it-yourself products. “Among its benefits, AI increases the searchability of our assets. The system reads product labels in images, PowerPoint, PDF, Word and Excel documents to add to the information included in the metadata we enter to allow a single search to pull up all related information. Our assets are quickly findable and available as soon as they are uploaded.”

Said Huddleston: “Generative AI is driving foundational changes for content operations. Aprimo is committed to ensuring our customers can capitalize on the tangible business benefits of AI and will continue to push AI boundaries and drive content management innovation, all while prioritizing safety and security.”

Today Sinch, which powers meaningful conversations between businesses and their customers through its Customer Communications Cloud, announced that Mailgun Optimize, the first deliverability solution built on an email sending platform, and Mailgun Validate, the fastest and most accurate address verification solution, are now part of the Sinch Mailgun product suite. Mailgun is an industry leader in email delivery, with over 400 billion emails sent every year for the world's biggest brands and technology providers. The expanded product suite improves every part of the email management lifecycle, all through one integrated platform and global Super Network, versus relying on piecemeal third-party solutions that lack insights at scale.

Email deliverability is extremely complex and poised to become even more difficult with upcoming policy changes from major inbox service providers. Following a dramatic increase in email volume that started in 2020, Google and Yahoo! will implement increased identity validation and other spam-prevention requirements for high-volume senders, matching established best practices such as DMARC, SPF and DKIM. Reaching users will be harder than ever, making sender reputation and strong deliverability practices the keys to successfully driving ROI. Mailgun Optimize and Mailgun Validate work seamlessly with Mailgun Send to bridge the complexities of delivery and deliverability, ensuring emails are reliably sent and landing in the primary inbox.

"Mailgun takes the guesswork out of reaching the inbox, setting the stage for unmatched ROI for every email sent," said Daniel Morris, Chief Product Officer, CPaaS, at Sinch. "By bringing together Mailgun Send, Optimize and Validate into a single platform, we are now the most reliable, scalable, and impactful email solution for enterprise brands and innovative technology companies."

A 2023 Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ Study found that for a composite organization of customers interviewed, the three-year incremental impact of using Mailgun for sending and deliverability was $627,000 due to 20.6 million additional emails being delivered and opened. Mailgun found that deliverability customers have a 97.4% average delivery rate, significantly outperforming the industry average of 84.8%, with bounce rates dropping to just 0.42% and open rates increasing by upwards of 21%.

Introducing the Mailgun Product Suite

Mailgun Optimize, formerly known as InboxReady, maximizes inbox placement by helping customers build and maintain their sender reputation while avoiding disruptions like blocklisting with advanced monitoring, reporting, and visualization. While Optimize is email service provider (ESP) agnostic and can be used on any platform to get actionable deliverability insights, leveraging it as part of the full Mailgun solution unlocks added benefits such as:

• Automatically integrated Microsoft SNDS IP data
• Real-time bounce classification
• Simplified inbox placement testing
• Expanded spam trap monitoring

Mailgun Validate verifies email addresses on demand to ensure customers are protecting their reputation by sending to the cleanest list possible. Validate uses real-world send data, rather than broken SMTP handshakes, combined with an industry-leading proprietary process for more reliable results. This multilayer verification approach includes MX record validation, grammar and typo checks, domain analysis and more.

Mailgun Send empowers businesses to send, receive and track emails effortlessly. Built by developers for developers, Send makes integrating a world-class cloud sending infrastructure easy through our RESTful email APIs, maintained SDKs and global compliance policies. With 99.99% server uptime and 24/7/365 support, even the largest enterprises can build impactful customer experiences on their terms.