Acquia showcases customer success with keynotes from leading brands, including Fidelity Investments, Mars, and New Balance, as well as AI and accessibility specialists

Acquia, the digital experience leader, brings its signature event, Acquia Engage, to Boston on November 14 and 15. Designed for digital innovators, Acquia Engage Boston features keynotes, sessions, and workshops, with a focus on AI and product innovations that deliver strong return on investment.

This year’s two-day agenda includes detailed guidance and thought-provoking presentations for marketers, web designers and developers, IT operations teams, and practitioners. The focus of the event is to offer practical advice and use cases with keynotes and workshops including:

• Haben Girma, the first deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School and disability rights advocate, on why making technology accessible and inclusive benefits all users
• Paul Roetzer, the founder and CEO of the Marketing AI Institute, on how marketing and business leaders should approach artificial intelligence and make what they have learned actionable
• Marketing Leaders Summit, hosted by Jennifer Griffin Smith, Acquia Chief Market Officer, and Jill Grozalsky Roberson, Velir VP of Digital Marketing, and moderated by Paul Roetzer of the Marketing AI Institute
• Executive panels featuring digital innovators from brands including Mars, Fidelity Investments, Rhode Island School of Design, New Balance, and more
• Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal and Co-Founder, Chief Technology Officer, and Chief Strategy Officer of Acquia, along with Deanna Ballew, SVP of Product, will present an Acquia Innovation Showcase
• Jon Meck, Bounteous SVP of Marketing, on three horizons of AI in digital marketing
• Pat Gilbert, Senior Director of Strategic Alliances at TA Digital, on AI-powered content generation and personalization
• Justin Emond, the CEO and Founder of Third and Grove, on AI in action
• Adam Borden, VP of Digital Marketing at Live! Casino & Hotel, on brand management

“Acquia Engage is for those who are rewriting the rules of digital engagement and thinking differently about how customers experience their brands,” said Jennifer Griffin Smith, Chief Market Officer, Acquia. “Attendees will leave with a wealth of practical knowledge and inspiration for how to drive competitive advantage and bottom line results through highly effective, personalized digital experiences and digital marketing efforts.”

At the end of the first day’s sessions, the 2023 Acquia Engage Award winners will be announced, showcasing organizations who have gone above and beyond to deliver the world’s most ambitious digital experiences.

Acquia thanks our Engage Boston sponsors:

• Platinum: Bounteous
• Diamond: TA Digital
• Gold: AWS, Brightcove, EPAM, Phase2, SearchStax, and Third and Grove
• Silver: CI&T, Elevated Third, FFW, Genuine, KPMG Customer Advisory, Material+, Moovly, Smartling, and Velir
• Exhibitor: Altudo, Axelerant, Hounder, and Tactis

Crumbl Cookies joins top AI creators including Heather Cooper, Tatiana Tsiguleva, Nicolas Neubert,
and Ben Myhre to re-imagine brand marketing using AI

Forum3, a technology company that builds experiences for brands and consumers using emerging technologies, is announcing the launch of Hive3, a new platform that connects brands with generative AI creators to deliver innovative marketing assets. Hive3 mobilizes a passionate community of creators and runs competitions to reimagine brand marketing and uncover future possibilities using AI.

Hive3 has been operating in beta mode since July 2023. To date, the platform has hosted 10 community-driven challenges, during which AI creators have competed to deliver the best creative work—from solar sneaks to a futuristic take on outdoor apparel—winning cash prizes and rewards from their favorite brands.

"The new digital transformation playbook starts with brands understanding how to use AI, and the Forum3 team is uniquely positioned to guide brands as they navigate this technology, often for the first time," said Adam Brotman, co-CEO of Forum3 and former Chief Digital Officer of Starbucks. "We look forward to partnering with forward-thinking brands like Crumbl Cookies to generate new types of creative output, activate a community of customers, and elevate brand marketing using AI."

To kick off Hive3's public launch, Crumbl Cookies, the fastest-growing dessert chain in the nation that drops new cookie flavors weekly through their rotating menu, will be tapping the Hive3 community to create a new, AI-powered twist on its advertising campaigns.

"Crumbl Cookies has always sought to bring novel and creative ideas to our customers, from specialty flavors to our iconic pink packaging," said Mai Pham, EVP of Growth at Crumbl Cookies. "The next frontier of marketing innovation is generative AI, and we look forward to being the first brand to partner with Hive3 on a challenge where top AI creators will leverage their skills to create an exciting new ad campaign for our brand."

Early creators that have signed on as Hive3 Ambassadors include Heather Cooper, Tatiana Tsiguleva, Nicolas Neubert, and Ben Myhre. These influential creators will play an active role in contributing to the Hive3 community through tutorials, events, judging, and participating in co-branded competitions. This will enable brands to leverage the power of top AI creative talent to ideate their marketing initiatives in entirely new ways.

"Hive3 is built around competitions because we believe that will attract the very best creative AI talent to our community," said Andy Sack, co-CEO of Forum3. "The top AI creators will be the ones to inspire and educate brands and community members about what is possible in the fast-evolving landscape of AI, and Hive3 will be the platform where it all comes together."

Hive3 is now officially accepting briefs from marketers that wish to up-level their creative game, explore AI technology in a safe environment, and win over customers with marketing that stands out from the rest. The platform is also open to AI creators who want to compete for cash prizes, as well as enthusiasts looking to follow their favorite brands and talent.

"Platforms like Hive3 give creators the opportunity to use new skills with generative AI technology to produce full projects with different tool stacks that mimic real-world activities with a competitive spirit," said Heather Cooper, AI educator and creator, and Hive3 brand ambassador. "I'm excited to join Hive3 as a brand ambassador, and I look forward to helping more creators advance their skills using generative AI."

"Given the rapid development of generative AI tools, it's evident that this revolution will not only introduce new job titles like Model Training Art Director, AI Art Director, and Fine-tuning Specialist, but also elevate existing professions and create new professional opportunities," said Tatiana Tsiguleva, Hive3 brand ambassador. "Platforms like Hive3, which support AI enthusiasts through paid competitions, opportunities, and education, are essential as the new job market is just beginning to take shape."

Former Lyft and Facebook Executive Will Spearhead Global Communications Strategies Across Yahoo Properties

Yahoo today announced the appointment of Sona Iliffe-Moon as Chief Communications Officer. Iliffe-Moon brings over 20 years of experience leading strategic consumer, crisis, and corporate communications for iconic brands including Facebook, Instagram, Nestle, Toyota, and, most recently, Lyft. Iliffe-Moon’s appointment follows several recent key hires including Tressie Lieberman as Chief Marketing Officer and Ryan Spoon as President of Yahoo Sports.

“Sona has a proven track record in elevating influential brands, and we look forward to welcoming her to Yahoo at a pivotal inflection point in the company’s history,” said Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo. “As Yahoo charts a new path forward and our story continues to unfold, Sona will be instrumental in shaping our narrative and sharing it with the world.”

Reporting directly to Lanzone, Iliffe-Moon will guide all aspects of Yahoo’s global communications strategy, overseeing corporate, consumer, and internal communications. In this role, she will promote innovation across Yahoo’s products and demonstrate the brand’s evolution, leading end-to-end communications that help consumers, partners, and employees connect with Yahoo’s mission. Iliffe-Moon will partner closely with marketing to tell integrated stories at the intersection of earned and social.

“Yahoo was a huge part of my introduction to the internet, and today it remains a highly trusted guide with potential to play an even more meaningful role in people’s lives,” said Iliffe-Moon. “I’m thrilled to join Jim and the rest of the executive team to help tell the story of what’s next.”

Prior to joining Yahoo, Iliffe-Moon served as Vice President of Communications and a member of the executive leadership team at Lyft. She was responsible for communications across corporate, consumer, and policy as well as direct-to-consumer storytelling through brand social and content.

Before joining Lyft, Iliffe-Moon’s experience spanned various industries. She previously drove communications at both Facebook and Instagram, launching key products and programs including Instagram’s IGTV, Instagram Stories, Facebook Dating, Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Communities Summit, and many more. She additionally oversaw communications across Nestlé’s beverage and international divisions, and spent nearly nine years at Toyota driving corporate and marketing communications.

Survey findings highlight that amid a deluge of holiday content, brands must focus on the right—and right amount of—content, as U.S. consumers are quick to turn on brands that overdo it

With generative AI fueling a boom in marketing content heading into the holiday season, and the holidays being the peak season for marketing content year in and year out, how are consumers responding to the sudden content boom? A new Aprimo survey found that many are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of messages they are exposed to during the holidays—creating a double-edged sword for marketers.

The 2023 Aprimo Holiday Content Survey found that 85% of 1,000 U.S. adults surveyed said that holiday content influences their purchasing decisions. At the same time, 58% said the dramatic increase in content during the holiday season adds to their stress level. For brands that overdo it with excessive content, respondents are quick to unsubscribe from email lists or even leave negative reviews.

Key findings of the survey include:

• Nearly a third (31%) of consumers said they have unsubscribed from a brand’s communications due to excessive holiday marketing, and 15% have gone so far as to post a negative review of a brand online for this reason.
• Despite their mixed feelings toward holiday content, 85% of consumers admit it influences their purchasing decisions—with nearly half (49%) embracing content focused on promotions and discounts.
• Holiday shoppers prefer deals and contests over sentimentality in marketing content, with content that “focuses on an enticing discount or offer” more than three times as likely to influence respondents than content that seeks to “make an emotional connection.”
• Among content channels, consumers say they are most influenced by television advertising and social media—although they are wary of celebrity and influencer endorsements.
• Holiday marketing content affects brand perceptions—with more than half of respondents (53%) saying they prefer brands that are consistent in their holiday messaging.

“The survey’s biggest takeaway is that people notice a huge surge in marketing content around the holidays, and this is a double-edged sword,” said Erik Huddleston, chief executive officer of Aprimo. “It drives people to find deals and make more purchases, but brands also run the risk of overdoing it and turning people off, leading to consumers unsubscribing from email lists or developing a negative impression of a brand.”

Huddleston concluded, “One way to reduce your risk as a holiday marketer is to focus on the content types your audiences respond to most—because while consumers may say they don’t want sentimentality in holiday content, the survey shows they do embrace traditional content formats. Brands that are consistent in their messaging have the best chance of breaking through the noise while not rubbing customers the wrong way.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accelerating AI with the IBM Storage Scale System and NVIDIA Technology

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

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