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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Company introduces OpenText Aviator AI capabilities in Cloud Editions 23.4

OpenText™, the information company, today announced the latest release of its Cloud Editions (CE) 23.4, which includes OpenText Aviator artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that carry through the company's innovation roadmap. For over a decade, OpenText has been helping organizations manage and secure large complex data sets from IoT and robotics, to natural language processing, to complex systems and generative AI. OpenText Aviator empowers organizations to swiftly act on their data, make sharp decisions and evolve with intelligent tools that learn over time. OpenText Aviator uplevels information automation so organizations can easily make the AI pivot and conquer today's and tomorrow's business challenges.

"The AI revolution is creating an unprecedented platform shift – one that will transform all industries, all functions, and all roles," said Mark Barrenechea, CEO & CTO of OpenText. "OpenText has been developing AI capabilities for over a decade, and OpenText Aviators is an AI breakthrough for customers. OpenText Aviator will help customers massively increase productivity through new conversation interfaces leveraging Information Management data sets and language models."

The demand for and adoption of AI technologies continues to grow at record speed. According to IDC, global AI IT spending will surpass $308 billion by 2026. In response to this rapidly growing demand and market potential, OpenText introduced its opentext.ai vision and strategy for AI focused on helping organizations power and protect traditional operational and experience data while anticipating a new layer of learning data from generative AI and large language models (LLMS). Grounded in layering LLMs on top of private, secured data, opentext.ai allows for a full stack or modular approach to practical AI. Organizations can take advantage of LLM-based capabilities within applications, or they can utilize OpenText Cloud API Services to create the right sandbox to experiment with.

"From upstream and renewables to trading and transport to marketing and manufacturing, we keep goods and people moving. We span 160 markets, serve about 32 million people a day at 46,000 branded retail sites and work with more than 1 million business customers. We have been the No.1 global lubricants supplier for 16 consecutive years and offer our customers a strong portfolio of energy solutions they need today and tomorrow. AI is key to maintaining our performance in these areas whilst we play a key role in the energy transition and help our customers decarbonize their businesses in the journey to net zero," said Jonathan Cullender, Head of Integration at Shell. "We are excited to take the stage with OpenText in Las Vegas to explore the game-changing capabilities of AI within the energy sector and how OpenText solutions have been instrumental in improving our operational efficiency and security, ultimately leading to substantial cost savings."

"As generative AI moves on from the initial hype, the work to ensure a measurable return on investment begins," said Darryl Gray, Global Vice President of Software Partner Solutions at SAP. "SAP is committed to creating an enterprise AI ecosystem for the future that complements our world-class business applications suite and helps our customers unlock their full potential. We support the vision behind OpenText's opentext.ai strategy and are confident that OpenText's latest innovations will enable businesses of all sizes and industries to elevate their operations to unimaginable heights."  

OpenText Aviator enables AI orchestration and the creation of information flows across multiple clouds and knowledge bases allowing organizations to address multiple AI use cases for their enterprise without having to move their data. The latest Cloud Editions release includes:

OpenText Aviator for Business

• OpenText IT Operations Aviator™ is a cutting-edge generative AI virtual agent for OpenText Service Management Automation X (SMAX). The latest integration combines LLMs with OpenText's data security expertise to enhance the user experience, facilitate intuitive self-service, provide faster issue resolution and gain efficiency, ultimately reducing service management costs and improve end-user customer experience.
• OpenText DevOps Aviator™ revolutionizes software delivery with generative AI capabilities enabling organizations to deliver software at unparalleled velocity. This tool leverages AI to optimize software delivery with feature prediction, enhances test coverage with automatic test creation and authoring, and reduces points of risk that impact quality.
• OpenText Content Aviator™ optimizes information retrieval in the workplace, making it more efficient and productive. The interactive chat interface and natural language queries enhances user productivity and streamlines content discovery.
• OpenText Experience Aviator™ integrates Customer Communications Management (CCM) software with generative AI capabilities enabling marketing, communications and customer service support teams to produce well-formed and relevant material faster than ever, boosting development productivity.
• OpenText Cybersecurity Aviator™ offers AI-enhanced rapid deployment capabilities and cloud-based efficiency to help organizations implement new threat detection models designed to protect users from diverse, sophisticated and evolving threats.
• OpenText Business Network Aviator™ brings generative AI and large language models (LLMs) into the OpenText Business Network, placing the entire supply chain information flow into a single platform. By utilizing a comprehensive 360-degree perspective of end-to-end supply chain operations and an AI-powered conversational interface, businesses will gain access to information to respond quickly to dynamic and unpredictable market fluctuations and conditions.

OpenText Aviator for Technologists

• OpenText Aviator Platform offers a suite of tools and connectors to administer enterprise-grade data warehouses, data lakes, analytics of structure and unstructured data, and visualization for intelligent decision-making.
• OpenText Aviator Search introduces a new advanced capability to go from clicks to conversations with search that spans all data types across multiple repositories to build any custom solution, portal, or experience for an enterprise. 
• OpenText Aviator IOT brings forward a collection of tools to better connect and protect millions of IoT endpoints to get real-time insights and visibility into assets location, condition, utilization, performance and health.
• OpenText Aviator Thrust & Thrust Studio is a set of robust cloud API services and developer tools built over the last three years that can power secure information flows, fuel custom AI solutions, and fast-track new AI-embedded applications.
• OpenText Aviator Lab is a partnership for experimentation with professional AI experts to help customers accelerate AI development through rapid prototyping, AI reference architectures in a secure sandbox environment.

DXC will manage the implementation and development of private and public cloud infrastructures for the Spanish Autonomous Community

DXC Technology, a leading Fortune 500 global technology services company, has been awarded a transformation contract by the Technological Modernization Agency of Galicia of its cloud platforms and solutions.

The Xunta de Galicia is the public administration of the autonomous region of Galicia in Spain. DXC will coordinate, manage and develop the organization's cloud infrastructure and solutions across private, public and cloud environments.

The agreement will have a positive impact on the government agency's decision-making processes. DXC advises the agency on methodologies, best practices, cost optimization, compliance, governance and the implementation of new cloud services.

Xunta de Galicia aims to become a service provider for public institutions in the region and will offer regional public institutions a flexible and secure cloud infrastructure through a cloud consumption model.

The two organizations will work together to determine the most efficient and successful cloud infrastructure strategy in the region. This also includes the ability to have a “cloud dashboard” to monitor projects and platforms to provide a holistic view of cloud technology performance in the region.

“Almost three million Galician citizens rely on our public services. Cloud technologies provide us with a flexible platform to optimize processes while ensuring the stability and security we need to protect our operations 24/7. Now we have the proven experience of DXC as a partner to pave our path to the cloud," said Miguel Montero , Head of Cloud Infrastructure at Xunta de Galicia.

“Our contract will define and implement the cloud strategy for Xunta de Galicia. We will become a reference point for Spanish public administrations by modernizing and improving services for various Galician organizations and institutions, benefiting citizens throughout the region," said Elías Castro, Territorial Director of DXC Technology Iberia in Galicia. "With our expertise in cloud architectures, we will help introduce new solutions and services that will drive innovation and improve the operational efficiency of Xunta de Galicia."

Crayon, a global leader in IT services and innovation, today announced it is expanding its partnership with Google Cloud to deepen its expertise on Google Cloud generative AI through Crayon's Centers of Excellence in Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa region.

With more than 150 data experts, and the increased focus on Google Cloud AI, Crayon will be able to deliver more best-in-class AI projects and solutions to its customers and partners, including helping customers pilot and deploy products like Duet AI and Vertex AI.

"We are excited about expanding our partnership with Google Cloud and the business value that we will create," said Crayon CEO Melissa Mulholland. "Our customers and partners increasingly see the need for using generative AI to provide better services and solutions. With our AI Centers of Excellence, we have the capabilities to help companies explore their own data and use it to accelerate their business. Google Cloud is a great partner to help customers get the best data and AI experience."

"Crayon's long-time experience in digital transformation, its AI Centers of Excellence and deepening of its expertise on Google Cloud will help global business more quickly adopt and see value from AI," said Bron Hastings, VP, Partnerships at Google Cloud. "Through this new and growing partnership, we will work together to accelerate customers' AI-driven transformations with Google Cloud technology, models via Vertex AI, and expert services from Crayon."

In the past several months, there has been a massive acceleration of generative AI technologies available to power and accelerate digital transformation across all industries. There is an unprecedented demand from customers asking for help in understanding how to best leverage generative AI to accelerate their transformation and deliver business impact.

Crayon has developed expertise to support customers and partners on their generative AI journey. With Google Cloud, the data experts at Crayon have found an impressive array of innovative, open, scalable, secure, and enterprise-ready generative AI solutions.

Industry's most complete, cloud-based enterprise AppSec solution leverages groundbreaking AI technology, streamlines end-to-end developer experience and expands Supply Chain Security capabilities

Checkmarx, the industry leader in cloud-native application security for the enterprise, today released version 3.0 of its AI-powered Checkmarx One™ enterprise AppSec platform. Purpose-built for enterprise cloud development, Checkmarx One 3.0 dramatically improves the end-to-end developer experience while expanding the AI-driven security capabilities of the platform's CheckAI Plug-in, its reporting and analytics capabilities and its Supply Chain Security solution.

"Checkmarx One is the AI-driven AppSec platform for today and for the future. Enterprise CISOs now see the strength of their application security as critical to their overall security postures," said Sandeep Johri, CEO at Checkmarx. "Leveraging the power of AI to protect the most complex enterprise applications is critical. Yet it's also important to ensure that the platform is easy and rewarding for developers to use and offers the most robust defense possible against software supply chain attacks."

Checkmarx One Version 3.0 now offers:

• AI-Powered Application Security: The CheckAI Plugin for ChatGPT is joined by AI Query Builder for SAST, AI Query Builder for Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Security, and AI Security Champion to both secure changing developer workflows and make AppSec easier for overburdened enterprise AppSec teams.
• Seamless Developer Experience: Checkmarx One integrates easily into the most popular integrated development environments (IDEs) and feedback tools to increase adoption and help teams find and fix vulnerabilities swiftly. New features such as the presentation of the attack vector, linked directly to the line of code within the developer IDE, save substantial time for developers.
• Expanded Supply Chain Security Capabilities: In addition to the detection of malicious packages and the Checkmarx Supply Chain Threat Intelligence feed, Checkmarx One now includes a Secrets Detection Engine and Project Scorecard.
• Advanced API Security: Checkmarx One offers the industry's most complete API Security solution, automating the discovery and testing of an organization's shadow APIs and expanding from pre-production to runtime.
• Consolidated, Simplified AppSec: Through integration of runtime insights from Sysdig as well as App Risk Management, Checkmarx One now consolidates vulnerabilities, risk ratings and prioritization guidance across an organization's entire application portfolio. One comprehensive dashboard helps direct developers toward the riskiest application vulnerabilities first.
• Advanced Reporting and Analytics: An all-new reporting module elevates risk comprehension through sharper insights and drill-down analytics.

"Checkmarx One offers tremendous and measurable benefits for our customers, improving both application security and developer experience for a more seamless AppSec experience and faster time-to-market," said Amit Daniel, Chief Marketing Officer at Checkmarx. "One Fortune 500 customer customized their AppSec solution, strengthened their AppSec skills with secure code training and created a security champions program to build a bridge between development and AppSec teams. All of this resulted in a 1600x increase in the number of vulnerabilities remediated for a significant boost to enterprise security."

• BT announces new strategic security partnership with Google Cloud, targeting a range of joint innovation opportunities.

• As a first step, BT becomes an official reseller of Google Chronicle, including its Autonomic Security Operations framework.

• The move builds on existing collaboration between the companies across data, cloud migration, and AI programmes.

BT and Google Cloud today announced a new partnership focusing on an enhanced commitment to cybersecurity innovation. Serving customers in more than 180 countries and with a team of 3,000 security professionals, BT works with the security industry's leading vendors to provide managed security solutions to private and public sector organisations around the world.

As part of the partnership, BT will become a managed services delivery partner for Google's Autonomic Security Operations (ASO) offering based on Google Chronicle. ASO is a holistic framework that combines principles, practices, and tools that enable organisations to take an adaptive and automated approach to threat management. Underpinned by Chronicle's peta-byte scale detection, a data lake powered by Google Cloud's data and analytics platform BigQuery, and rich, compelling analytics via Looker, the solution decreases the time to detect and respond to threats—which is essential in the face of the increasing volume and complexity of cyber-attacks.

Customers will benefit from the new partnership by gaining the technological capabilities of Google Chronicle, combined with BT's track record of delivering cybersecurity services to organisations with complex estates and requirements. Customers will be supported by experts from BT's Security Advisory Services team, who leverage BT's deep experience in security operations and integration to help organisations ensure that they have optimised their wider security architecture to fully align with their priorities and ambition.

"Combining Google Chronicle's capabilities with BT's view of global networks and experience of providing managed security services is a really exciting prospect. The ASO solution will help our customers to rapidly identify risks and automatically enhance their cyber defences—providing the speed that's essential to combating cyber-attacks. It represents the first step in our partnership with Google Cloud on cybersecurity, with both companies committed to providing new innovations and solutions that help organisations stay ahead of an increasingly threatening cyber threat landscape," said Tris Morgan, Managing Director, Security at BT.

"Our partnership brings the best of BT's experience in deploying big data-based security platforms with Google Cloud's innovative security capabilities to help our multinational customers transform their approaches to cyber risk management in the face of a rapidly changing threat landscape," said Magali Bohn, Global Director, Partnerships & Channels at Google Cloud Security.

The partnership builds on BT Group and Google's existing relationship to house BT Group's data in Google Cloud to support its analytics and AI ambitions. BT and Google Cloud will also seek to incorporate solutions from Mandiant, a market leader in threat intelligence solutions acquired by Google in 2022, as an additional aspect of the partnership. Finally, BT is working with Google Cloud to trial Google's Vertex AI and Duet AI capabilities.

• The app connects Unilever's factory-based colleagues across the globe to Unilever systems

• It supports Unilever's commitment to putting people at the heart of digital transformation, leveraging technology to support employees

• The app allows secure, quick and easy access to key Unilever systems all in one place, and enables one-click access to collaboration tools on Google Workspace including email, chat, and document sharing

Google Cloud and Unilever have partnered to launch a new app for employees, My Unilever. The app has been designed to digitally connect Unilever's factory-based colleagues across the globe, enabling them to tap into Unilever's digital resources from any location or device.

Built on Google Cloud, and delivered in partnership with Accenture, the My Unilever app unlocks the opportunity for Unilever's 53,000+ factory-based colleagues to have easy and secure access to key Unilever systems. It also enables one-click entry to Google Workspace, which includes the communication and collaboration apps such as Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Chat, Meet, and more, relied on by more than three billion users and over 10 million customers. The app also utilises Appsheet, Google's no-code platform, as the main end-user interface for the My Unilever application.

The My Unilever app will also give users access to a variety of third-party tools including learning and payroll, some of which were previously only accessible through paper-based methods or via time-consuming in-factory processes. In streamlining these previous methods, My Unilever helps to save time and increase productivity - benefits that will continue to grow as the application expands into more use-cases.

Adam Raeburn-James, Chief Technology Officer at Unilever comments: "Digital transformation, at its heart, is about people. In launching the My Unilever app, we're helping our factory-based colleagues to become digitally connected. By giving all of our people access to key HR, support and learning systems, we can continue to work towards our goal of ensuring that everyone at Unilever can develop the future-fit skills they need for the evolving workplace by 2025.

"Our partnership with Google Cloud allows us to continue taking our use of technology to the next level. Alongside this, we're drawing on Accenture's global expertise in deployment, change and adoption, to ensure the best possible transition and experience for our colleagues. We've already received great feedback across our recent pilot programme."

"This partnership will help support Unilever in building this capability for the future, and we are excited to be part of this journey," said Laurence Lafont, Vice President, Strategic Industries EMEA, Google Cloud. "With Google Cloud's technology, Unilever's factory-based colleagues are now able to connect in a new way, supporting them to develop and thrive. The My Unilever app brings the business closer together as one team, empowering them to achieve more."