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Technology

Best Sleep Tech For Men

Finding yourself awake within a few hours of sleep is a common problem faced by men of all ages. An estimated 50 to 70 million adults in the US are facing sleep-related problems, according to the CDC. This is partly because we are over-stimulated and stressed all the time and this carries over to our sleep as well. A lack of good night sleep makes us feel tired and groggy the next day which in turn, affects our professional and personal life.

One way to ensure you have a good night sleep is to have a happy and healthy life. Some tech apps and gadgets are also helpful to fill in the gaps. We have presented some sleep tech for you below to help you get more zzzz.

Wake-Up Light

Most alarm clocks use sound to wake you, but the Wake-up Light uses light to do it. This device works with the circadian cycle of the body to “tune” your body to nature’s day and night cycle. This device stimulates the conditions of dawn using a UV-free halogen bulb that gradually becomes brighter about half an hour before your alarm goes off. Such a mechanism helps your body to work with nature’s rhythmic pattern of sleep and wakefulness and over a period of prolonged use, it improves your sleep pattern. An added bonus is a USB port you can use to load your song play-list, so you can wake up to your favorite song every time. The Wake-Up Light is most helpful for those men who travel frequently across timezones.

Pzizz

Pzizz is a unique sleep app that creates a hypnotic sound to put you to sleep. Unlike other sleep devices, it does not play your favorite songs or reads out a boring story to put you to sleep, but rather it has soothing and modulated voices that slowly ease your brain and body into sleeping mode. This hypnotic effect is sure to work like magic on any insomniac.

Zeo Sleep Manager Pro

If you have been feeling groggy even after a good night’s sleep, then Zeo Sleep is the device for you. It measures brain waves through a headband and records your sleep patterns at night. In the morning, Zeo analyzes your sleep patterns to give you a breakdown of your sleep cycle and it even rates the quality of your sleep. This is particularly useful for men who feel tired all the time.

FitBit Ultra

FitBit Ultra is one of the coolest devices available today for sleep and fitness. The makers of FitBit sure know to pack a whole lot into this ultra-thin and handy device. It comes with a wristband that you wear at night to monitor your sleep patterns and through the day, the same wristband is used to count the number of steps you have walked or climbed including the amount of calories burned. Think of this device as a digital trainer that helps you to stay healthy during the day and night.

These sleep devices help you to get the most out of your night’s sleep, so you are refreshed for a new day of work and fun!

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Google

Google and Cisco join hands for hybrid cloud

In today’s age of intense competition, partnerships seem to be the best way to increase market share. That’s probably why we’ve seen so many companies join hands with others to create a win-win partnership for everyone involved.  The latest in this trend is the partnership between two IT giants – Google and Cisco.

Both the companies announced that they would join hands to help their respective customers create efficient hybrid cloud solutions. Through this partnership, both companies want to bring the power and advantages of cloud to the on-premise environment of their customers. To do this, they would be using the Kubernetes container created by Google. It also looks like they would be using the Istio service mesh for connecting different microservices between clouds.

Though the companies did not go into detail as to how they would implement this idea, we can understand that their solutions will take into the security and policy configurations of their respective enterprise environments and at the same time, will provide the necessary networking and performance data in real-time.

Another aspect that we know is Apigee, the company that Google acquired last year, will act as the medium through which legacy applications can connect to modern applications, and maybe even tap into the power of cloud. This is a good move because there are a ton of legacy applications in the on-premise environment, so it’s important that a fair amount of support is given to these as well.

This partnership has been in the pipeline for some time. Tech people of both the companies have been working together over the past few months to understand the feasibility and planning required to create a combined hybrid cloud. As of now, the plan is to roll out the combined service to a limited set of customers by the first week of 2018 and have it available to the general public by the second half of 2018.

A considerable stake is present in this partnership for both the companies. As for Google, it’s going all out to catch up with its competitors, Microsoft and AWS, who seem to be moving higher with every quarter. As for Cisco, it wants to redefine its business and continue to stay relevant in a changing tech world.

Let’s wait and see how this partnership plays out to both these tech giants as well as the general public at large.

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Microsoft

Cloud revenue pushes Microsoft once again

It’s become a familiar story now. The cloud segment of Microsoft is growing at astronomical rates and is pushing the earnings and profits of Microsoft to new levels. But, what is interesting is that the margin of growth grows with every quarter.

According to the earnings report released by Microsoft, earnings from Azure almost doubled, thereby accounting for a year-on-year growth of 90 percent. Though the company doesn’t break down the revenues of Azure separately, an estimate by the analysis firm Canalys, pegs it at a whopping $2 billion.

Revenue from the intelligent cloud business segment rose 14 percent to $6.92 billion. This was higher than analysts’s expectations, which was $6.7 billion. Surprisingly, Satya Nadella kept a target of $20 billion for the cloud business by 2018 and in this quarter itself, it surpassed the target as the total revenue was $20.4 billion. This goes to show that Microsoft is doing great under the able leadership of Satya Nadella.

Cloud was the lifeline that Microsoft was looking for almost a decade now, and it has made the most of it. At a time, when PC sales were plummeting and the company was looking for some direction, the emergence of cloud and the change of leadership to Satya Nadella, both seemed to have weaved the magic again for Microsoft.

One of the highlights of this quarter was the deal that Costco, an Azure customer. In fact, this came along the heels of a deal with Whole Foods that brought it under the Microsoft umbrella.

While this quarter spells good news for Microsoft, it can’t afford to relax. AWS is growing at a much higher rate. It raked in $4.6 billion this quarter, representing an almost 46 percent year-on-year growth.  Though AWS missed out on Costco this quarter, it still managed to secure deals with a ton of big names such as Hulu and General Electric.

Other than AWS, Google is also fast catching up with Microsoft. It entered deals with retailers like Kohl’s and payment processing companies like PayPal. ALl this means, Microsoft needs to amp up its efforts to stay ahead of competition.

In other results, revenue from Microsoft’s cloud computing division fell by 0.2 percent to $9.38 billion. Nevertheless, it beat the analysts expectations at $8.81 billion. This quarter also saw an increase in revenue from Surface. In fact, after two consecutive quarters of declines, it saw an increase of 12 percent in revenue.

Such positive results was welcomed by its investors and the share market as a whole. The value of Microsoft’s shares increased by 3.1 percent to end at $81.20.

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Why did Akamai shift its focus to cybersecurity?

When you hear the word Akamai, the first thing that comes to your mind is its web traffic management system. Well, if you’re not familiar, Akamai is known for managing web traffic at busy sites, so the latency rates are low.

But today, Akamai is into a completely different line of business – cybersecurity. Why?

Companies like Apple and AWS began to have their own in-house solutions to handle traffic management, so they no longer needed the services of Akamai. In fact, this move made it difficult for Akamai to sustain its operations. So, it decided to give a shot at cybersecurity.

And that was probably the best decision by its management because it entered the market when cybersecurity was just beginning to grow. Also, there was a big need to fill the security gaps in the digital world, considering the many hacking incidents that were happening a few years ago. Specifically, the hacking of Target’s systems brought to the fore the immediate need to have sound cybersecurity solutions.

Due to these factrs, Akamai began to extensively grow in this business. Since it began operations, it has grown 27 percent year-on-year and today, it is making about $121 million in revenue each year. Undoubtedly, this is the strongest growing segment of Akamai’s business and one that is all set to grow even more in the coming years.

Akamai has created the right kind of products that will spruce the cybersecurity of companies today. For example, the Equifax breach exposed the records of more than 143 million Americans. A product called Kona Site Defender from Akamai is designed to prevent exactly such incidents from happening.

Also, this company is constantly working to improve its cybersecurity line of products, so it can stay one step ahead of hackers. So far, it’s been helping companies to protect their confidential data and through it all, has helped Akamai find its space again in an evolving tech world.

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News

Hashicorp raises $40 million

Hashicorp, a leading player in the cloud infrastructure automation industry, announced that it has raised a Series C funding of $40 million. The entire funding came from its existing investors and till date, the total amount raised is $74 million. This round was led by GGV Capital and Redpoint along with other investors such as Mayfield and True ventures. A release by the company says that this funding will be mostly used for investment in its go-to market, besides its engineering and customer service teams.

Hashicorp is a company based in San Francisco that offers open-source tools and paid products that make it possible for developers to secure and run distributed application infrastructure. It was founded five years back, in 2012, by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar.

Hashicorp’s key products include:

  • Vagrant – This is a virtualization product that supports the building of reproducible software environments
  • Packer – This tool helps to build virtual machine images that can be deployed later.
  • Terraform – It helps to provision and adapt infrastructure across different cloud platforms
  • Consul – This tool provides DNS-based service recovery, RPC and KV storage.
  • Vault – It handles privileged access management, encryption as a service and anything that will beef up the security of the infrastructure.
  • Nomad – This tool supports scheduling and deployment of different tasks.

The widespread use of cloud, especially infrastructure-as-a-service, has led to a surge in the demand for Hashicorp’s products. Over the last few years, this company has seen tremendous growth in many key areas. Some of its notable achievements are:

  • It has added new customers almost every quarter and today, its customer base includes top names such as Adobe, SAP Ariba, SpaceFlight, Barclays, Comcast, and Lotto New Zealand.
  • Its products were downloaded 22 million times so far and it has released around 150 updates across all its suite of products.
  • Last year, it introduced a program called HashiCorp Partner program to include resellers and system integrators across different regions in North America, Europe, Middle-east and Africa, and Asia Pacific.
  • Its User Group has expanded to 44 cities and includes more than 8,000 members.

With such an impressive list of achievements within a short span of time, Hashicorp sure has a bright future ahead.

 

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News

Cisco Buying Broadsoft

Cisco systems, one of the giants in the world of IT, has announced that it is buying Broadsoft Inc for $1.9 million in cash. This translates to about $55 per share for Broadsoft’s investors, thereby marking an almost two percent increase over the closing price of Broadsoft’s shares on Friday.

Broadsoft is based in Gaithersburg, Maryland and it specializes in providing telecommunication services like phone, audio, video conferencing, and virtual meeting rooms. This company’s primary focus is on small and medium customers who can’t afford an overhaul of their existing infrastructure. This niche area of small and medium business is one of the reasons for Cisco’s acquisition.

In addition, Broadsoft has many software tools that are used by large cable and telecommunication providers, and Cisco believes these tools will come handy as it expands to cater to a network-intensive world.

Cisco, based in San Jose California, is changing its strategy to meet the new needs of its business environment. According to the company’s spokesperson, more businesses want to have a complete contact center that they can deploy in the cloud. Though Cisco is ready for this change, it still makes sense to have collaboration tools from smaller companies like Broadsoft.

This move also signals a push away from its traditional switching and routing business. In fact, this move can give Cisco access to small and medium-sized business markets that need an integrated mobile, video, voice and other forms of communication.

To top it, most of Cisco’s products such as WebEx are based on premises, which means, they have to be installed manually. On the other hand, Broadsoft’s products are cloud-based, so Cisco can make the most of them without going through the cycle of development.

For all these reasons, it’s a good move by Cisco and it got a big thumbs up from its investors right away, as the share prices rose by one percent.

This deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2018, after which broadsoft’s employees will be a part of Cisco’s unified communications technology group.

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IBM

Can IBM get back to the top again?

The changing landscape of the IT industry has changed the fortunes of many companies. While companies like AWS, Microsoft and Google have been able to cash in on the fortunes, others like IBM and HPE haven’t been so lucky. In fact, HPE recently closed its low-end cloud server business because it’s not profitable for the company any more.

As for IBM, the changes have been too hard. This company was deep-rooted in the traditional server and infrastructure business, so it has been tough to adapt to new technologies like AI and cloud that need a paradigm shift in the way the infrastructure is setup and handled.

Over the last 21 quarters, this almost-century-old company has seen falling year-on-year revenues. In fact, Warren Buffet, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway announced that in May of this year, the company sold about a third of its stake in the company. This alone amounted to around $13.5 billion.

To make up for this loss, the company has been aggressively pushing into the areas of cloud computing and AI, but is this a story of too little too late or can IBM get back to the top again?

Well, the latest results announced by the company on October 17th show that revenues have slipped again. However, the good news is that revenues fell lesser than expected. So, many supporters of the company including its management believe that the next quarter could see good returns. This positive statement by the company caused its shares to rise by 8.9 percent the following day, which is the biggest single day gain in the stock market since 2009.

These signs indicate that good things are yet to come for the company and after all, there is still some hope. This is not the first time that IBM had to make this strategic shift in its operations. After almost a near-death in 1990s after the collapse of mainframes, IBM continued to find its niche and stay on top of the technology sector. In fact, if you look back, you’ll see that it was one of the first companies to adapt to the Internet and back open-source software. It assured investors of good returns within five years and even spent billions of dollars in buyback programs. This strategy worked well for the company and its investors.

Likewise, this time too, we can expect IBM to bounce back because it is after all doing the right things. Though AWS, Microsoft and Google have a huge lead in the cloud services market, IBM is not too far behind. With such diligence, good strategy and wise managerial decisions, it can definitely bounce back.

 

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News

HPE to shut down its cloud server business

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is shutting down its cloud server business as it’s no longer profitable and sustainable for the company.

Over the last few years, HPE was supplying low cost cloud servers to large cloud companies like Microsoft and Google. According to industry experts, these large companies negotiate and get large discounts, and this means, HPE is left with little to no profits. But at least, HPE was covering its costs and this segment continued operating.

However, the last few years, things took a downturn for this company. Instead of bargaining and negotiating for discounts, Microsoft, Google and other companies began to directly approach the suppliers in China and Taiwan to build low-cost cloud servers, thereby cutting out HPE’s role and profits.

This change in strategy by HPE’s large clients has hit its revenue. During the first quarter, for example, HPE’s profits plunged because Microsoft canceled a large order. In June, sales dropped further. Obviously, it makes no sense for HPE to continue fighting in this market and that’s why it has decided to exit this segment.

A company spokesperson said that HPE will continue to sell high end servers, that’s more profitable and tenable to the company. In fact, HPE’s CEO, Meg Whitman, has been pushing high end cloud servers including converged hardware to its clients, and this move has been working for the company.

Again, the longevity of this strategy is questionable simply because more Fortune 500 companies are moving their operations to AWS, Microsoft and Google because of the many benefits that come with it. As a result, they are no longer inclined to invest in the high-end cloud servers offered by HPE.

In all, this is a difficult situation for HPE and it has to come up with an out-of-the-box solution to get out of this dilemma. IBM faced a similar situation three years ago and eventually, it sold its cloud server business to Lenovo. Maybe HPE can also think along the same lines, provided it’s able to find a buyer for its business.

In the meantime, it’s going to be a tough road ahead for HPE.

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News

Camelot ITLab is all set to boost the Blockchain market

Blockchain is the latest technology that has the power to transform the way we think of networks and even do digital transactions. Though this technology is in its nascent stage, many companies are already taking the lead in providing the right solutions to boost this technology. One such company is Camelot Innovative Technologies Lab, or Camelot ITLab, in short.

Camelot ITLab is the first company to provide a solution for identifying and implementing specific solutions using blockchain technology in the logistics industry. This is, in fact, a configurable IT solution that aids the development and evaluation of blockchain applications in the entire logistics processes. It uses different blockchain technologies like Etherum and Hyperledger to create a design thinking, and this is combined withe xisting agile technologies to create a unique product that’ll help players in the logistics industry to tap into the power of blockchain technology.

These innovations caught the eyes of some of the biggest players in the blockchain world. One such player is SAP’s Blockchain and Co-Innovation program. Through this initiative, SAP offers its customers the opportunity to create, identify and implement different aspects of blockchain.

Camelot ITLab has been invited to be a part of this program to help customers to better understand the potential of blockchain technology and use the best practices available today. Specifically, different use cases along with its application in IoT will be explained to customers to bring more people into the blockchain bandwagon. Currently, some of the use cases that will be focused include parcel tracking and serialization, anti-counterfeiting, connected vehicles, machine sensor data, smart grid, distributed manufacturing and security.

Besides its expertise, Camelot was also chosen because of its long-standing with SAP as a business consultant in the digital value chain management segment.

SAP and its partners like Camelot ITLab are encouraging companies to register in this program and gain the knowledge that will help them top leap frog into the next era of computing and technology.

Let’s hope such initiatives pave the way for enhanced adoption of these technologies to make this world a more connected place.

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IBM

A look into IBM’s new services

IBM has launched two new services with an aim to bring more businesses to the cloud.

Currently, many businesses are stuck with legacy systems that make it difficult to migrate to the cloud, and as a result, they miss out on the benefits that come with cloud. To overcome this limitation, IBM has come up with two services that will make this migration easy.

These two processes are IBM Cloud Migration Services and IBM Cloud Deployment Services. Cloud migration services, as the name implies, helps businesses to get ready to move to the cloud. In this service, IBM works with you to identify your existing IT infrastructure and your goals, and based on this, they create a plan to help you migrate to the cloud.

Cloud deployment services, on the other hand, is an automated service hat eases the deployment process. Essentially, it models infrastructure and application solutions and repeats this pattern to automate the entire process.  This product is available for public and hybrid cloud providers, including non-IBM products and services.

So, how are these services different from the large repertoire of services that IBM currently offers?

The biggest advantage is that these services make it a lot less expensive and easy for companies to orchestrate their workloads, regardless of the underlying cloud delivery model. The cloud deployment services, in particular, are a next generation set of tools that can automate based on the existing workflows. As a result, the service provisioning time including the time it takes to design, build and deploy is greatly reduced.

Another advantage is that all these services are tied with Watson, so businesses can leverage the power of this cognitive platform as well. This means, over time, the system can learn from patterns and predict behavior and solutions. It can be most helpful for identifying problems, self learning, self healing and avoiding disruptions to existing services.

From IBM’s perspective, both these services are the perfect addition to its existing portfolio of products and services. With more such innovative products, IBM could expand its client base, especially in emerging markets in the Asia Pacific region where the potential for cloud services still remains huge.

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