Isomorphic Software is the global leader in high-end, web-based business applications. We develop, market, and support the SmartClient & Smart GWT HTML5/Ajax platform, combining the productivity and performance of traditional desktop software with the simplicity and reach of the open web.

With staff in 10 timezones, Isomorphic provides a global network of services related to our technology, with offerings ranging from turnkey application development to SLA-backed enterprise support.

Leading global enterprises use Isomorphic technology to reduce costs and improve productivity, developing & deploying sophisticated business applications with unprecedented ease and simplicity.

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Intel is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, in the Silicon Valley. It is the world’s second largest and second highest valued semiconductor chip maker based on revenue after being overtaken by Samsung, and is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers (PCs). Intel supplies processors for computer system manufacturers such as Apple, Lenovo, HP, and Dell. Intel also manufactures motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors and other devices related to communications and computing.

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Dave Mitchell

3CX’s affordable Phone System is the IP PBX host with the most and a great choice for SMEs

The vast majority of organizations today are in the earliest stages of AI initiatives and this shift will be dramatic as more enterprises move forward in the AI journey. Although companies are at different stages of this journey, most agree that finding or developing analytic talent is a key concern and bottleneck for doing more. What if your business could take advantage of the most advanced ML/AI models without the huge upfront time and investment inherent in building an internal ML/AI data scientist team?

In this presentation, I will introduce the pros and cons of three pathways: 1. Utilize prepackage ML APIs, 2. Customizable AutoML, 3. Training your your ML models specifically tailored to your business needs. To win with Cloud ML, you will need to know how to choose a right approach in a quicker time frame and without significant investment.

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When you’re operating multiple services in production, building out forensics tools such as monitoring and observability becomes essential. Unfortunately, it is a real challenge balancing priorities between building new features and tools to help pinpoint root causes. Linkerd provides many of the tools you need to tame the chaos of operating microservices in a cloud native world.

Because Linkerd is a transparent proxy that runs alongside your application, there are no code changes required. It even comes with Prometheus to store the metrics for you and pre-built Grafana dashboards to show exactly what is important for your services – success rate, latency, and throughput.

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Sponsored If the agenda and sessions at MWC 2019 don’t explicitly mention cloud computing, then there’s a good reason. The emerging technologies that will be explored at the show, which runs as ever in Barcelona from February 25-28, from artificial intelligence (AI), to 5G, to the Internet of Things, all need cloud to underpin them.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking there won’t be any presence on that front. The vendor literature is naturally full of advocating a holistic, tech-utopian landscape. Mavenir describes itself on its page as “the industry’s only 100% software, end-to-end, cloud-native network software provider.” Gemalto on its page puts as a key strength “trusted data exchange from edge devices up to the cloud”, while Huawei in its invitation notes now “new technologies like 5G, AI, IoT and cloud computing are more important than ever.” Exhibitors at this year’s event include, in the shape of Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and IBM, three of the biggest cloud vendors in the space.

Regular readers of this publication will be more than aware of how cloud is the glue which holds the more emerging technologies together. Speaking last year Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware, summed it up nicely. Cloud enables mobile connectivity; mobile connectivity creates more data; more data makes artificial intelligence better; AI enables more edge use cases; and more edge needs more cloud for storage and compute.

Indeed, the links between cloud and AI go deeper. Writing in November, Dr. Wanli Min, chief machine intelligence scientist at Alibaba Cloud, noted that while AI “seems to mean all things to all people”, the evidence suggests a gradual path.

“Crucially, cloud computing using AI isn’t a radical or revolutionary change. In many respects it’s an evolutionary one,” he wrote. “For many organisations, it has been a seamless integration from existing systems, with AI investment gathering pace quickly. Over the next few years we can expect to see the industry continue to boom, with AI driving cloud computing to new heights, while the cloud industry helps bring the benefits of AI to the mainstream.”

If you do look hard enough you will see more concrete references, including an interesting session on February 27 around the concept of ‘cloud XR’ (extended reality) – ‘the spectrum of technologies [combining] generated virtual elements into the real environment.’

Yet this coming together has seen MWC’s message change. Indeed, as is shown in its 2019 theme of ‘intelligent connectivity’, the industry has gone beyond the original ethos of mobile. “We are rapidly moving to a world where mobile will connect everyone and everything, but at the same time, we are expanding our reach beyond ‘just’ mobile,” a blog post explains.

“The theme of this year’s event is ‘intelligent connectivity’ – the term we use to describe the powerful combination of flexible, high-speed 5G networks, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and big data. Intelligent connectivity marks the beginning of a new era defined by highly contextualised and personalised experiences, delivered as and when you want them. This is the future of our industry and our world.”

Read the full article here and find out more about MWC19 by visiting here.

Editor’s note: This article is brought to you alongside MWC19.

Kubernetes as a Container Platform is becoming a de facto for every enterprise. In my interactions with enterprises adopting container platform, I come across common questions: – How does application security work on this platform? What all do I need to secure? – How do I implement security in pipelines? – What about vulnerabilities discovered at a later point in time? – What are newer technologies like Istio Service Mesh bring to table?In this session, I will be addressing these commonly asked questions that every enterprise trying to adopt an Enterprise Kubernetes Platform needs to know so that they can make informed decisions.

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Nicole Kobie

AI and automation stand accused of embedding existing biases and furthering discrimination – but it doesn’t have to be that way. We can build machines that make us better, helping us recognise and push back against our assumptions, confirmation bias, and other flaws that lead to discrimination.

That’s the idea behind a multitude of HR and work-themed bots and AI systems, all hoping to machine discrimination out of existence and encourage diversity at work. One prominent example has been the Financial Times’ sourcing bot, which skims through journalists’ copy, making note of the gender of people mentioned, helping the newspaper track its own tendency to interview and feature men rather than women.

In recruitment, LinkedIn has added diversity data to its recruitment tools, while startup Textio will read your job ads and advise changes to encourage a wider range of applicants.

“Recruitment and HR is our fastest growing area, where HR directors are coming to us saying we want to build unbiased systems,” said Tabitha Goldstaub, co-founder of AI advice platform CognitionX.

Like tools such as Grammarly, Textio pop-ups help improve the language recruiters use

Diversity at work has both a moral impetus and legal ramifications: discrimination on the grounds of gender, race or religion is already illegal in the UK. However, companies are starting to realise that choosing from a wider range of applicants and creating an inclusive workplace can be good for profit margins, too.

Indeed, consultancy McKinsey & Co analysed more than 1,000 companies across a dozen countries, revealing that those with the most diverse staff saw higher than average profits.

No wonder then that building diverse and inclusive teams is the number one talent priority for HR departments, according to a LinkedIn report on recruiting trends, with 78% of respondents saying it was “very or extremely important” to their hiring plans. Why? They think it’s good for business and creates a better working culture. (Rarely is it listed as being “the right thing to do” or “a legal requirement”, but we’ll take what we can get.)

Tracking talent

Tracking diversity is a challenge: 42% of HR departments said in the LinkedIn survey that they lack the data quality necessary to address such challenges. With that in mind, the professional social network has added gender-tracking tools to its Talent Insights platform, a data reporting tool that helps recruiters.

“When it comes to gender diversity, using tools such as LinkedIn Talent Insights will help organisations understand their own overall workforce composition, as well as within different functions, and see how they benchmark against the industry at large and spot areas of opportunities to address,” said Jerome Leclercq, senior manager of product marketing at LinkedIn UK. “This avoids manual processes that deliver insights that is often outdated by the time you get it in your hands.”

LinkedIn’s Talent Pool Report helps recruiters access more diverse talent pools by including gender insights

In LinkedIn Talent Insights, companies will be able to see the gender representation of their own workforce, compare that to industry benchmarks, set recruiting objectives, and find out where to find more diverse applicants for roles – more colloquially, where the ladies are.

“The Linkedin Talent Insights Talent Pool Report now includes gender insights to help talent teams identify industries, locations, titles and skills where the gender representation is more favourable,” said Leclercq.

“Using these insights, recruiters can refine and expand their sourcing to tap into more diverse talent pools.”

In the LinkedIn Recruiter platform, HR departments will still see all qualified candidates, but more attention is paid to distribution in search results, with each page reflecting the gender mix of the available talent pool, Leclercq explained.

“As a very simple example, if the available talent pool for programmers with C and C++ skills in the Philadelphia area that you identified in Talent Insights is 42% women and 58% men, you’ll see that same basic proportion on each page of results to make sure your recruiting team is seeing candidates that best reflect the gender distribution of the marketplace,” he said.

Tweaking job adverts with Textio

Textio is similar to Grammarly or a spellchecker in Word, but rather than looking for typos, it considers the response you’ll get from the words and phrases you choose. Textio Hire is its first application, a tool to analyse job posts and recruitment emails to make suggestions to speed up hiring times, candidate quality, and diversity of applicants.

Textio Hire analyses the tone of job adverts, giving a score and suggesting improvements

“Textio’s predictive engine uses a combination of natural-language processing and data mining to find the words that have an impact on your hiring pipeline and bring them to your attention while you are writing,” explained CEO and cofounder Kieran Snyder. “In the example of unconscious gender bias in your writing, the predictive engine finds the words and phrases that are statistically likely to create an imbalance between the number of men and women who are inspired to respond to your job ad today.”

The app not only highlights problematic language, but makes suggestions, too. “Textio Hire uses its massive analytical power to not only improve what’s been written, but it also imagines the things that haven’t been written,” said Snyder. “It can tell which one of those alternate phrases will create the best version of the job post.”

While we humans can watch for biased language in our own writing, automation can make it easier to spot patterns and see outcomes that aren’t obvious to us.

“Most of the patterns that emerge are truly things you just cannot theorise or guess, which is why a platform like Textio needs so much data to uncover the real patterns that change hiring outcomes,” said Snyder, noting that “exhaustive” is a word that attracts more male applications, “loves learning” attracts more women, and “synergy” is a turn-off to people of colour. “You can’t guess what works without massive data sets and the machine learning technology to find the hidden patterns,” she said. “Intuition fails us.”

Can tweaking a few words in a job ad work? Textio Hire claims that it helped Johnson & Johnson increase applications from underrepresented candidates by 22%, while Cisco gets 10% more female candidates and fills positions more quickly.

Using the right data

Another way to boost inclusivity in hiring is using automation to sift through applications, but train a system on flawed or skewed data and it will mirror your previous mistakes, notes Goldstaub. Look at Amazon: according to reports, the tech giant used AI to sift through CVs, but as the system was trained on skewed data – its own previous hires, which were predominantly male – it tended to chuck applications from women into the bin. The machine-learning system has since been dropped, according to a Reuters report.

The Recruiter platform on LinkedIn gives the gender balance of candidates as a percentage

Getting such technology right requires three elements: feeding the correct data, training the AI appropriately, and having humans in the loop to check the results, says Goldstaub. If, as with the Amazon trial, most successful hires in the past were men, there won’t be enough data to train your system with. But if you’re trying to encourage a wider range of applicants, you can “weight the data so we can find the people we want to look for, rather than people just like the ones we already have,” said Goldstaub. As she notes, ignore anyone who blames bias on the machines – it isn’t in control, we humans are. “We are in control of this, and don’t need to just use the data we have already.”

But that raises an “ethical conundrum,” as Goldstaub puts it. “Should we have fairer data, even if it’s not accurate data? That’s a question we can ask ourselves and decide how we want to manage that.”

Artificial intelligence might give us tools to battle back against discrimination, but we still need to face the tough questions ourselves.

In today’s always-on world, customer expectations have changed. Competitive differentiation is delivered through rapid software innovations, the ability to respond to issues quickly and by releasing high-quality code with minimal interruptions. DevOps isn’t some far off goal; it’s methodologies and practices are a response to this demand. The demand to go faster. The demand for more uptime. The demand to innovate. In this keynote, we will cover the Nutanix Developer Stack. Built from the foundation of software-defined infrastructure, Nutanix has rapidly expanded into full application lifecycle management across any infrastructure or cloud .Join us as we delve into how the Nutanix Developer Stack makes it easy to build hybrid cloud applications by weaving DBaaS, micro segmentation, event driven lifecycle operations, and both financial and cloud governance together into a single unified stack.

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EU adoption of cloud computing increased to 26% in 2018, up from just 18% from four years prior, according to new research published by Eurostat. However, while the majority of EU businesses are utilising cloud services for emails and file storage, fewer are embracing more advances cloud-based business applications like accounting software, ERP, CRM data analytics, or team productivity tools.

For business leaders, cloud computing represents an opportunity to improve business flexibility and facilitate increased growth by providing elastic, on demand access to core business applications, key analytics platforms and collaboration tools.

While third-party cloud services are often associated with reduce capital cost, including fewer FTE’s compared to traditional locally hosted infrastructures or privately hosted cloud servers, the price of this flexibility may incur some additional operating costs. However, often these additional costs are justifiable for reducing complexity and increasing business flexibility. Cloud vendors assume the responsibility for keeping their software up to date, backed-up, and applying all security patches; removing the need for in-house specialists to do the same.

The availability of new cloud hosted team communication tools can also help to improve cross departmental collaboration and ultimately, improve business efficiency. Cloud collaboration tools such as video conferencing, web conferencing and project management platforms can help to increase creativity, teamwork and efficiency. The ability for entire teams to work seamlessly and concurrently on a single project, irrespective of time or location can help to streamline workloads and decrease project timelines.

Utilising cloud-based software means businesses can also foster a culture of organic collaboration within their organisation; by unifying office-based employees and remote employees with teams across the globe and giving them the tools to build collaborative working relationships.

Another key driver in the increasing adoption of cloud technology, across both the EU and the US, is flexibility. In adopting cloud services, companies are able to scale their transaction volumes up and down depending on the immediate business needs. This model is an incredibly attractive proposition for companies who experience cyclical resource demands, as the provision of computing and storage resource capacity is elastic and can be scaled up or down in direct response to changes in the number of application users, number of customer calls or volume of customer orders.

Cloud computing vendors can also offer businesses great value by offering to handle the ever-increasing amount of data businesses gather from their customer base. Vendors’ specialist in-house teams can build internal processes into their platforms to ensure that all data is handled in line with best practice, regional laws and regulations.

In a post-GDPR landscape, businesses on both sides of the Atlantic need to ensure that they are appropriately safe-guarding European citizens’ data. Not only are cloud vendors well versed in the legislative landscapes of the regions they serve, but they can also offer a series of storage offerings such as virtual private clouds. Cloud vendors will also ensure the necessary levels of encryption are implemented to keep your customer’s data safe, compliant and minimise the risk of breaches.

Ultimately, cloud services can help to significantly improve the scalability and elasticity of a business, while simultaneously providing companies with the opportunity to improve connectivity, communication, and organic collaboration across their organisation. They also present an opportunity to out-source many business-critical systems and services, improving their accessibility and reliability. Cloud services can offer considerable strategic value to business leaders by enabling their teams to focus on the core business capability, whilst providing them access to a range of scalable key business applications to give them the opportunity to gain a competitive edge over their competitors.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.