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NEW DELHI: Technology major International Business Machines Corp (IBM) has said the ongoing consolidation among India’s telcos will open up new opportunities for the company, and it is in talks with them to help the carriers through the transition.

The US-based company works with all big telecom service providers, including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular in India. India’s top two telcos—Airtel and Vodafone—have already renewed their respective outsourcing contracts with I ..

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/60050040.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

IBM’s transition from a dominant server hardware supplier to one focused on new-age software and services has been what you might expect from a 100-year old company: glacially slow and sometimes painful.

But lately the 100-year-old seems to have a bit more spring in its step.

Several years ago, IBM launched its Strategic Imperatives initiative, a mission to drive revenues in emerging markets, including cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security services, to hedge against rapidly falling sales of its legacy server hardware.

Over much of that time, IBM Strategic Imperatives revenues have grown double digits and now represent over 43% of IBM’s overall sales over the past 12 months. The company’s cloud revenues reached $15.1 billion over the past 12 months and as-a-service revenues from the Strategic Imperatives rose to $8.8 billion.

IBM’s transition to a more meaningful cloud strategy has been circuitous. The company had a somewhat aimless focus on cloud strategy until it purchased the Dallas-based SoftLayer Technologies, Inc. in 2013 for $2.5 billion. SoftLayer, then the largest privately held infrastructure provider, would hook its public cloud services with IBM’s SmartCloud offerings so users could more quickly and easily incorporate cloud computing.

From businesses to cars, many industries are constantly striving to improve their efficiency in how they run their corporation. One specific route in which industries are hoping to accomplish this is by investing in newer technology, updating software, and advancing their security programs. With all the changes in the technological field, cybersecurity is a necessity that is getting harder and harder to ignore. For the technology industry, hybrid cloud computing and fog computing are two of the better known solutions protecting against cyber attacks. Hybrid cloud solutions are able to accelerate app development, test new and old applications in the cloud faster, and enable consistent developments across a spectrum of clouds. Cloud management solutions can help optimize every aspect of public, private, and hybrid clouds.
Hybrid Cloud Computing

Hybrid cloud computing is best known for connecting two or more devices and allowing them to work together. Cloud computing uses the internet as a route to deliver data, applications, videos, pictures, and more to data centers. Cloud computing is also equipped to work with Internet of Things capable devices to increase efficiency in everyday tasks. IoT is able to generate large amounts of data and cloud computing provides a path for the data to travel on to its destination.

Cloud computing solutions have the ability to increase speed and agility as it makes resources available to developers. It also provides users with the ability to save money when operating data centers and use their applications outside of the office. One clear benefit of hybrid cloud computing is having a private infrastructure that’s directly accessible and that is not pushed through the public internet. This greatly reduces the access time in comparison to the cloud services used by the general public.
Fog Computing

Fog computing, also known as edge computing, facilitates the operation of compute, storage, and networking services between end devices and cloud computing data centers. It is another way to gather and process data at local computing devices instead of in the cloud or at a remote data center. Fog computing uses sensors and other connected devices to send data to a nearby edge computing device. It is considered a gateway device, like a switch or a router, that is able to process and analyze the data. By using fog computing solutions, a business’s cybersecurity is enhanced through the reduction of the amount of data being sent into the cloud, thereby reducing the threat and attack surfaces of IoT networks.

A study done by Business Insider’s research team stated that 570 million devices in 2015 used fog computing. It is expected that by the year 2020 that number will raise to include up to 5.8 billion IoT devices. Many IoT devices don’t have their own computing powers. Fog computing provides a better way than cloud solutions do when it comes to collecting and processing data from these devices.
What’s the Difference?

Cloud computing solutions work as a group of computers and servers connected together using the internet to create a network. With the amount of data that is being produced daily, a large portion of it needs to be easier and quicker to access. This is where fog computing can come into play. Fog computing solutions manage certain application processes or services at the edge of the network by a smart device as opposed to traditionally managing these systems in the cloud. It can be considered as a middle layer between the cloud and the hardware used to enable more efficient data processing, analysis and storage. This is achieved by reducing the amount of data that needs to be transported to the cloud.

Making the switch between hybrid cloud computing and fog computing requires a high-speed network with the ability to accomplish real-time data transmission and program different devices. A programmable device allows the user to develop proprietary applications that are able to filter out unnecessary data. The smaller the data packets, the faster data can be transmitted. These smaller packets allow faster transmission to the analytics engines and able to send data using mesh networking technology proven to provide greater and stronger security.
Conclusion

In industries and businesses where even milliseconds are vital, certain processes and programs tend to move away from the Cloud towards fog computing. This shift can save money, time and space. The Cloud is secure, but is still known to be capable of security breaches. Understanding this vulnerability, industries have shifted from hosting all their data and analytic tools through the cloud to the process of fog computing and using sensors and devices that are already equipped with security.

As technology continues to evolve at breakneck speed, we take a look at five big digital revolutions which changed the way we consume data.

From the previous centuries till the time today, we have witnessed the shift in the socio-technological paradigm. The world has experienced the agricultural revolution which changed into industrial revolution and presently is showing evident signs of an information/ digital revolution. Throughout each revolution, new inventions have largely influenced the mindset and thinking approach of the users. They have gained the advantage from the latest technology and have managed to up their business game using the recent digital advancements.

Everything from the robotic appliances to self-driving cars, gene editing and 4D printing is making its mark in different fields. The field of marketing and business development is also privileged by technology revolutions which have completely changed the world of business.

The most dominant technologies and the way they have entirely changed the world are mentioned as follows:
Broadband and Wearable Internet

People have been using the internet for years to browse for the things they want. However, the spiking stats of active internet users in recent time suggest that its use has now become dominant like never before. Whether it is digital marketing, appliance manufacturing, vehicles launching, agricultural or a food industry, the use of internet has become irresistible.

The introduction of a broadband connection brought much accelerated speeds and has radically changed the lifestyle of internet users. They are now more readily connected and and can engage in a much more interactive way, thanks to the enhanced speeds. The availability of smartphones with 4G connections now dictates the ease of use of the internet in public and private places.

Moreover, it is expected that by 2025, 10% of people will be wearing clothes connected to the internet. It is also expected that the first implantable mobile phone will be sold in the coming years as well. (Reference: https://www.weforum.org)
The Internet of Things (IoT)

The internet of things has made daily life easy. The interconnection of different devices through the internet rules out a lot of difficulty factors and paves the way for interconnected lifestyles. It makes things easy and efficient for all users. The use of sensors to send and receive data has allowed breakthroughs in health fields and activity tracking.

Presently, a lot of electrical devices are connected through the IoT and are expected to deliver a seamless experience. You may know this more familiarly as ‘Smarthome’. It allows the users to control specific electronic systems in their home. This includes lights, security systems and even the heating system. The convenience of this technology is already bringing about a new era where everything in the room can be fully automated.
The Launch of Advanced Smartphones

Smartphones could possibly be the biggest disruption to how we consume technology since the advent of the internet. Throughout time, we have seen mobile phones change from simple monochrome screens with basic WAP to bezel-less touchscreens capable of 4G speeds. The new smartphones bring exciting features at our fingertips. They act as a point-of-access to the internet wherever you are, meaning nobody is ever really ‘offline’ anymore.

The launch of Google’s Android Play Store and Apple’s iPhone App Store brings further advancement in this technology. Using dedicated phone applications, users can now enjoy games, carry out their office work, manage their health and fitness and even control their home and office appliances.

Moreover, digital marketing and business firms are highly dependent on smartphones as well. Most internet websites have become mobile responsive in recent years and online e-stores are run through mobile devices to generate an increased number of leads and sales. This revolution has brought mind-blowing success and change in the working style and productivity of business firms worldwide.
Social Media Usage and Promotion

The Pew research center picked the three technology revolutions throughout its tenure and social media was one of them.

Social media promotion and usage all over the world has changed the way people live and interact significantly:

Introduced a change in the way of thinking
Brought a vast change in the digital marketing strategies
Has become a dominant marketing platform
A place where new connections are built
Exposed itself as the source of ultimate and latest information
Key to success for the firms like Miami SEO, digital marketers, and business owners

Cloud Computing and Big Data

The last big change is cloud computing technology and the revolution driven by big data. Although both these technologies are different, they are often used together and can effectively enhance business sales. Cloud computing has been functional in the corporate sector for a long time, though faster broadband speeds have made it more accessible and effective than ever before. It’s an agile, scalable and efficient service with high security which allows the business owners to run their firm more easily. The different models of the cloud service from public to private and hybrid models offer different services suitable for different users.

Big data, on the other hand, offers predictive analysis services and looks into the consumer’s online behavior pattern. Both these technologies when combined together prove to be useful for a wide range of industrial firms.

Regarding the technology revolution, Nick Bostrom says: “We might define a technological revolution as a dramatic change brought about relatively quickly by the introduction of some new technology.” This is ideally the case and then these revolutions are what rule the world and transform it to a better place to live in. The ones we have mentioned above form the gist of the most wanted and successful technologies. Without these, we would have been living in an entirely different world.

It is well-known that we are in the middle of a productivity boom, and that computers have helped with this. However, the Internet of Things has taken this to the next level, because of how it has helped us use machines.

Many industries have been impacted by this, and IoT will improve the productivity of these markets.
Agriculture and technology

First of all, you may not equate agriculture with technology, but it is becoming a competitive market. In addition to all the inventions in the farming industry, IBM has worked with Gallo wines to utilize a wide array of data from sensors in the soil with satellite imagery, as well as, weather updates.

Additionally, the company added an irrigation system that is tailored to each block of vines, which reduces water consumption and increases productivity and output.
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Furthermore, these new applications are expected to offer 24/7 visibility into good crops and soil, utilizing machinery storage, the ways your animals behave as well as your energy consumption level.
How Internet of Things helps farming

Moreover, the open space IoT is a vital middle ware technology, which allows the person to safely walk into a field. Furthermore, you can use it for farming products; such as, smart metering devices, livestock trackers, and failure prediction systems. Additionally, if you’re a farmer, you will get solutions such as resource mapping and farming produce analytics.

Some of the things that you will be able to do with this technology is sensor-based field and resource mapping, remote equipment monitoring, predictive analytics for crops and livestock, remote crop monitoring and livestock tracking and geofencing. These are just some of the features companies, like Kaa, use.

Some additional tasks you can do are climate monitoring and forecasting, smart logistics and warehousing, as well as statistics on livestock feeding and produce. Moreover, you will be able to use warehousing and smart logistics.

The world seems to be catching on to this, and even companies such as Prospera recently added cameras and other sensors in fields to compare the crops. This will help the farmers identify problems such as parasites, pests, and nutrients deficiencies.

However, the utilization of the Internet of Things doesn’t stop here. According to Inc website, IBM and the Dublin City University Water Institute have launched a program that combines advanced analytics and Internet of Things that monitors and manages ecological systems.

This has the potential to manage the environment and can be a large step towards being ecologically friendly. Now that sensors are becoming cheaper and durable, we can now put them into water systems and remain up to date on data.

This aims to prevent ecological disasters, as well as reduce the impact on political systems.
The construction industry

Another industry that is positively impacted by the Internet of Things is the construction industry. If you own construction equipment, you will be able to rent idle machines and receive a better return on their investment, and lower the costs.

However, if you aren’t interested in doing that, another option is paying for the EquipmentShare technology that will track the machines and analyze the usage.

These are just some of the ways that the Internet of Things has changed how we stayed connected, and it will aim to help us to work smarter, not harder.

March 5, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Cisco (NYSE: CSCO) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new solutions for VersaStack™, converged infrastructure jointly developed by the two companies. VersaStack helps organizations reduce complexity and automate processes to accelerate the delivery of applications. The additional technologies incorporated in the announcement today extend VersaStack to include hybrid cloud capabilities and also take advantage of the latest software defined storage technologies to address cloud-scale applications.

This broad set of solutions allows IT organizations to:

Simplify and standardize service delivery through infrastructure automation: with Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite and VersaStack; improving efficiency while reducing complexity and cost; and delivering a rich set of storage capabilities.
Deploy premier solutions for hybrid IT: utilizing Cisco CloudCenter and IBM Spectrum Copy Data Management to deploy, provision, and manage applications and data in hybrid cloud environments, with 20+ cloud types and regions, including IBM Bluemix Infrastructure (formerly IBM Softlayer).
Improve the manageability, recovery and storage of data: Spectrum Software Defined Storage with VersaStack and Cisco UCS® help improve efficiency and leverage existing server and storage resources while delivering a rich set of storage capabilities.
Easy scaling to multi-petabyte storage for fast growing cloud-scale applications: The combination of the Cisco® UCS S-Series Storage Servers with IBM Cloud Object Storage delivers an on-premises storage solution for data intensive workloads by supporting IT organizations to help prepare for business requirements with an easily scalable solution.
“Our GIS, engineering, and other applications were slow and underperforming,” said Bill Reed, Chief Technology Officer, Arizona State Land Department. “With our VersaStack solution, we’ve been able to boost system and staff performance and enable mobile access to business-critical data and tools via a hybrid cloud. VersaStack gives us faster, smarter systems that enable us to make better-informed decisions about the State Land Trust much more efficiently for the benefit of all students in the Arizona Public Schools education system, the primary beneficiary of the trust.”

“These additions to VersaStack create an environment well suited for both traditional and emerging scale-out applications, addressing our customer needs in a simplified way,” said Liz Centoni, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cisco Computing Systems Product Group. “By bringing together Cisco and IBM technologies for hybrid IT we help customers diversify their consumption models and achieve the agility and efficiency digital transformation demands.”

“Pressures facing today’s organizations are at the center of our VersaStack collaboration with Cisco,” said Ed Walsh, general manager, IBM Storage and Software Defined Infrastructure. “For clients, the expanded VersaStack portfolio delivers extensive IT automation, hybrid cloud versatility for applications and data, support for object storage easily scaling into multi-petabyte configurations, and the ability to cut costs by improving efficiency, manageability, and protection.”

Details of this announcement will be discussed by IBM’s Ed Walsh, general manager, IBM Storage and Software Defined Infrastructure, and Cisco’s Satinder Sethi, vice president, Datacenter Group on Wednesday, March 8 at Cisco Live!™ Melbourne 2017 during the Innovation Talk: Go Beyond Automation: Advancing Your Next Gen Data Centre.

Supporting Resources:

Join the Cisco and IBM live broadcast at 2:45 p.m. AEDT / 10:45 p.m. EST (March 7) / 7:45 p.m. PST (March 7).
Please visit the following blogs, which provide further details about today’s announcement: VersaStack for Hybrid Cloud: Introducing the Converged Cloud, Private Transformation with VersaStack and An Ocean of Possibilities with IBM Spectrum Software Defined Storage and VersaStack.
For more information about VersaStack visit landing pages via IBM and Cisco.
About Cisco:
Cisco (CSCO) is the worldwide technology leader that has been making the Internet work since 1984. Our people, products, and partners help society securely connect and seize tomorrow’s digital opportunity today. Discover more at thenetwork.cisco.com and follow us on Twitter at @Cisco.

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco’s trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.

About IBM:
For more information about IBM Storage, visit ibm.com/storage. Follow IBM Storage on Twitter at @IBMStorage or @IBMSystemsISVs.

IBM announced today that it was updating its Quantum Experience cloud with a new API that it hopes will increase the abilities of researchers and other interested parties to build more sophisticated applications with its experimental quantum computing system.

Last May, IBM opened up its 5 qubit computer in its NY state labs to the public in the form of a cloud service. The hope was that by providing interested parties with a working quantum computing model, it would help advance the technology, which remains very much in the preliminary stage of development.

At the time, the company released a simple programming language to write programs for the system that worked in a similar fashion to writing musical notes on a staff. Jerry Chow, manager of the experimental quantum computing group at IBM says that has worked extremely well to this point with 40,000 users signing up, generating 200,000 executions on the system’s processors and resulting in 15 externally generated research papers.

But participants have longed to interact with the system in more advanced ways, which led to the release of the API today on the IBM cloud platform. Having an API will help programmers who want to write scripts in their programming language of choice to deliver batches of experiments, rather than using the simple interactive language that IBM released last May. What’s more, according to IBM, it gives users the ability to build connections between IBM’s cloud-based quantum computer and more traditional computers without needing an extensive background in quantum physics to do it.

The idea is to provide the basis for higher end experimentation. “The API allows programmers to test more theories and lay the groundwork to scale up these larger systems. What we really want to do is work with the community to figure out what quantum computing looks like in the future when we have a larger number of qubits,” Chow explained.

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The company also announced that it’s offering a computer simulator for what a 20 qubit quantum computer could look like, and plans to release a Software Development Kit (SDK) to allow researchers to begin building simple quantum applications for this system.

Although we are years away from exploiting the full abilities of quantum computing, all of this is designed to advance the field to get to a point some time in the future when we have a 50-100 qubit system. Chow says this is believed to be the holy grail of quantum computing when we can really begin to take advantage of its power.

Quantum computers, unlike traditional computers, don’t work on a simple on or off switch. Instead qubits can be in multiple states of on/off or some combination. This could open up ways to solve problems that aren’t solvable with today’s computers, Chow explained.

As I wrote in May in the Quantum Experience launch story, there are many rivers to cross with this technology and there are vast obstacles ahead due to the nature of this type of computing:

Among the challenges here are that quantum computers take enormous cooling systems that in some cases are colder than outer space (we’re talking seriously cold). What’s more, they maintain so much information, none of which is necessarily static; keeping all of that information available long enough for meaningful analysis is an enormous task.

By offering free access to this type of cutting-edge computing, IBM is hoping to advance the field with the belief that everyone will benefit if that happens. Other companies working on quantum computing including Google, Microsoft, Intel and startups like D-Wave Systems.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today an industry-first initiative to build commercially available universal quantum computing systems. “IBM Q” quantum systems and services will be delivered via the IBM Cloud platform. While technologies that currently run on classical computers, such as Watson, can help find patterns and insights buried in vast amounts of existing data, quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen because the data doesn’t exist and the possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous to ever be processed by classical computers.

IBM also announced today:

• The release of a new API (Application Program Interface) for the IBM Quantum Experience that enables developers and programmers to begin building interfaces between its existing five quantum bit (qubit) cloud-based quantum computer and classical computers, without needing a deep background in quantum physics.

• The release of an upgraded simulator on the IBM Quantum Experience that can model circuits with up to 20 qubits. In the first half of 2017, IBM plans to release a full SDK (Software Development Kit) on the IBM Quantum Experience for users to build simple quantum applications and software programs.

The IBM Quantum Experience enables anyone to connect to IBM’s quantum processor via the IBM Cloud, to run algorithms and experiments, work with the individual quantum bits, and explore tutorials and simulations around what might be possible with quantum computing.

“IBM has invested over decades to growing the field of quantum computing and we are committed to expanding access to quantum systems and their powerful capabilities for the science and business communities,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud and director for IBM Research. “Following Watson and blockchain, we believe that quantum computing will provide the next powerful set of services delivered via the IBM Cloud platform, and promises to be the next major technology that has the potential to drive a new era of innovation across industries.”

IBM intends to build IBM Q systems to expand the application domain of quantum computing. A key metric will be the power of a quantum computer expressed by the “Quantum Volume”, which includes the number of qubits, quality of quantum operations, qubit connectivity and parallelism. As a first step to increase Quantum Volume, IBM aims at constructing commercial IBM Q systems with ~50 qubits in the next few years to demonstrate capabilities beyond today’s classical systems, and plans to collaborate with key industry partners to develop applications that exploit the quantum speedup of the systems.

IBM Q systems will be designed to tackle problems that are currently seen as too complex and exponential in nature for classical computing systems to handle. One of the first and most promising applications for quantum computing will be in the area of chemistry. For a simple molecule like caffeine, the number of quantum states in molecules grows astoundingly fast – so fast that all the conventional computing memory scientists could ever build could not contain the problem.

IBM’s scientists have developed techniques to efficiently explore the simulation of chemistry problems on realistic hardware (https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.08213 and https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.02058) and experimental demonstrations of various molecules are in progress. In the future, the goal will be to scale to even more complex molecules and try to predict chemical properties with higher precision than possible with classical computers.

Future applications of quantum computing could include:

– Drug and Materials Discovery: Untangling the complexity of molecular and chemical interactions leading to the discovery of new medicines and materials;
– Supply Chain & Logistics: Finding the optimal path across global systems of systems for ultra-efficient logistics and supply chains, such as optimizing fleet operations for deliveries during the holiday season;
– Financial Services: Finding new ways to model financial data and isolating key global risk factors to make better investments;
– Artificial Intelligence: Making facets of artificial intelligence such as machine learning much more powerful when data sets can be too big such as searching images or video; or
– Cloud Security: Making cloud computing more secure by using the laws of quantum physics to enhance private data safety.

“Classical computers are extraordinarily powerful and will continue to advance and underpin everything we do in business and society. But there are many problems that will never be penetrated by a classical computer. To create knowledge from much greater depths of complexity, we need a quantum computer,” said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of IBM Systems. “We envision IBM Q systems working in concert with our portfolio of classical high-performance systems to address problems that are currently unsolvable, but hold tremendous untapped value.”

IBM’s roadmap to scale to practical quantum computers is based on a holistic approach to advancing all parts of the system. IBM will leverage its deep expertise in superconducting qubits, complex high performance system integration, and scalable nanofabrication processes from the semiconductor industry to help advance the quantum mechanical capabilities. Also, the developed software tools and environment will leverage IBM’s world-class mathematicians, computer scientists, and software and system engineers.

Growing the IBM Q Ecosystem

IBM believes that collaborating and engaging with developers, programmers and university partners will be essential to the development and evolution of IBM’s quantum computing systems.

Since its launch less than a year ago, about 40,000 users have run over 275,000 experiments on the IBM Quantum Experience. It has become an enablement tool for scientists in over 100 countries and, to date, 15 third-party research papers have been posted to arXiv with five published in leading journals based on experiments run on the Quantum Experience.

IBM has worked with academic institutions, such as MIT and the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, to leverage the IBM Quantum Experience as an educational tool for students. In collaboration with the European Physical Society, IBM Research – Zurich recently hosted students for a full-day workshop to learn how to experiment with qubits using the IBM Quantum Experience.

“Unlocking the usefulness of quantum computing will require hands-on experience with real quantum computers,” said Isaac Chuang, professor of physics and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. “For the Fall 2016 semester of the MITx Quantum Information Science II course, we featured IBM’s Quantum Experience as part of the online curriculum for over 1,800 participants from around the world. They were able to run experiments on IBM’s quantum processor and test out for themselves quantum computing principles and theories they were learning.”

In addition to working with developers and universities, IBM has been engaging with industrial partners to explore the potential applications of quantum computers. Any organization interested in collaborating to explore quantum applications can apply for membership to the IBM Research Frontiers Institute, a consortium that develops and shares a portfolio of ground-breaking computing technologies and evaluates their business implications. Founding members of the Frontiers Institute include Samsung, JSR, Honda, Canon, Hitachi Metals and Nagase.

“We heavily invest in R&D and have a strong interest in how emerging technologies such as quantum computing will impact the future of manufacturing,” said Nobu Koshiba, President of JSR, a leading chemical and materials company in Japan. “Our pipelines of innovations range from synthetic rubbers for tires to semiconductor and display materials, along with products in the life sciences, energy and environmental sectors. By having exposure to how quantum computing can provide new computational capability to accelerate materials discovery, we believe this technology could have a lasting impact on our industry and specifically our ability to provide faster solutions to our customers.”