Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced AWS Ground Station on Tuesday at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.

It’s a service that aims to feed satellite data straight into AWS cloud infrastructure faster, easier and at an affordable price for its customers.

There will be 12 of these ground stations located around the world and they’re effectively antennas that link up with satellites as they pass by while orbiting. This is a problem AWS customers have identified, according to the company, where satellites are only in the range of certain ground antennas briefly, making uploading and downloading data difficult.

The announcement was made by AWS CEO Andy Jassy, who cited customers as the inspiration and called the service “the first fully managed global ground station service”.

“Customers said, ‘look, there’s so much data in space and so many applications that want to use that data to completely change the way in which we interact with our planet and world,” he said. “Why don’t we just make this easier?”

There is nothing easy about dealing with satellites, particularly for transferring data.

As they’re only in range for limited periods, linking up is very challenging and the data itself needs some kind of infrastructure to be stored, processed and utilised within. From top to bottom, it’s an operation that requires a lot of resources, such as land and hardware, which is extremely expensive. Thankfully, the world’s biggest cloud provider has stepped in to find a solution.

So, how does it work? According to AWS, customers can figure out which ground station they want to interact with and identify the satellite they want to connect with. Then, they can schedule a contact time; the exact time they want the satellite to interact with the chosen ground station as it passes by.

Each AWS Ground Stations will be fitted with multiple antennas to simultaneously download and upload data through an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud – directly feeding it into the customer’s AWS infrastructure.

“Instead of the old norm where it took hours, or sometimes days, to get data to the infrastructure to process it,” added Jassy. “It’s right there in the region in seconds. A real game changer for linking with satellites.”

While AWS provides the cloud computing, the antennas themselves have come from its partnership with Lockheed Martin, which has developed a network of antennas called Verge. Where AWS offer the powers to process and store, Verge promises a resilient link for the data to travel to.

“Our collaboration with AWS allows us to deliver robust ground communications that will unlock new benefits for environmental research, scientific studies, security operations, and real-time news media,” said Ric Ambrose, executive VP of Lockheed Martin.

“In time, with satellites built to take full advantage of the distributed Verge network, AWS and Lockheed Martin expect to see customers develop surprising new capabilities using the service.”

It’s a case of Viva Las Vegas for cloud computing this week, as the current king, Amazon Web Services, takes over the casino strip for AWS re:Invent. 

Will the Amazon e-commerce division will still be heavily busy with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, its technology arm will be welcoming 40,000 people to Sin City for all things cloud.

As AMS expands its cloud footprint so too does it expand its presence in Vegas taking over the Venetian, Mirage, MGM Grand, Bellagio, and Aria hotels.

Unlike the expo’s of its biggest rivals, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, AWS saves a lot of announcements for re:Invent, which is likely to hold many function releases and version updates. We expect keynotes from CEO Andy Jassy and CTO Dr Werner Vogels to discuss some of these.

Hybrid Cloud

One of the areas AWS will need to address this year will be its hybrid cloud
services. The company is the dominant force in public cloud, but hybrid services have always been downplayed beyond its VMware partnership and its Snowball Edge device. But more and more companies are turning to hybrid clouds, looking to keep certain workloads on-premise, as they take staps towards digital transformation. 

In this instance, AWS is behind most its rivals, such as Microsoft with its Azure Stack and IBM, which recently brought Red Hat to specifically target Hybrid clouds. AWS will want to remain dominant, but it won’t do that with just VMware — we expect some news on this front.

AI and Machine Learning

Both Microsoft and Google made AI the big theme for 2018 events. Google Cloud had ‘AI for everyone’ as its tagline, so it makes sense to follow the trend and we can expect that AWS will have some sort of AI announcement or an update at the least.

In the lead up to the event, the company announced an expansion to its machine learning offerings, with new capabilities for text-to-speech service, Amazon Polly, Amazon Translate and its multi-language transcription service, Amazon Transcribe. Some of these offerings were announced last year, at re:Invent 2017, so we expect some more new expansions of capabilities to be announced during the event.

Citrix Systems has acquired micro-app maker Sapho in a $200 million all-cash deal.

The startup makes micro apps for legacy software and team collaboration apps such as Slack and Microsft Teams.

Sapho CEO Fouad ElNaggar said that the two companies shared the same a vision for improving employee experiences by helping them to be more productive.

“Our technologies create an intelligent environment that solves productivity challenges that employees and companies are facing by organizing work in a single place,” he said. “And together, we can deliver a truly intelligent workspace that redefines the way work gets done.”

Sapho began in 2014 and its micro-app platform, which launched two years later, provides contextual actions that employees can take to complete work faster and use to make better decisions.

With its platform, companies can automatically surface personalised and relevant tasks from existing systems and deliver them to any device, such as a smartphone, tablet or laptop.

It uses pre-defined APIs that integrate with leading enterprise applications such as Salesforce, Outlook and Google Drive. According to Sapho, companies can effectively guide employees through their most common work so that they can get things done and move on.

By acquiring Sapho, Citrix said it can “redefine the future of work” by offering a better customer experience than the competition.

“In today’s tight labour market, the advantage goes to companies that can recruit, develop and engage employees better than the competition,” said Tim Minahan, chief marketing officer at Citrix.

“Employee experience will ultimately determine winners and losers and Citrix is committed to delivering intelligent digital workspaces that give companies an edge.”

The edge needed by many companies is to do with managing workloads from different sources as hybrid cloud services become more popular.

“Organizations are experiencing a need to securely aggregate and automate access to applications and data from an increasing number and variety of sources, both on-premises and in the cloud,” said Chris Marsh a researcher director at 451 Research.

“Citrix understands the need and is evolving its workspaces product to balance security with an improved end-user experience with the goal of elevating employee productivity, and reducing frustration with corporate IT systems among users.”

A Nigerian internet service provider (ISP) has taken responsibility for a glitch that caused some Google traffic to be misrouted through Russia and China.

A misconfigured border gateway protocol (BGP) filter, used to route traffic across the internet, inadvertently sent Google traffic through Russia and China, raising concerns of intentional hijacking.

But, the Main One Cable Co, or MainOne, a small firm in Lagos, Nigeria, said it was due to a “technical glitch” during a planned upgrade.

“In the early hours of Tuesday morning, MainOne experienced a technical glitch during a planned network upgrade and access to some Google services was impacted,” the company said in a statement. “We promptly corrected the situation at our end and are doing all that is necessary to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

“The error was accidental on our part; we are not aware that any Google services were compromised as a result. MainOne is a major internet service provider in West Africa and has direct reachability with over 100 leading networks globally.”

Two of those leading global networks were TransTelekom in Russia and China Telecom, the latter being a partner with MainOne. China Telecom is said to have leaked the routing information out to the rest of the world, where TransTelekom picked it up.

Google is said to have lost control of several million IP addresses for more than an hour on Monday, causing problems for its cloud service and a number of other sites such as YouTube and Spotify. But it said it had no reason to believe it was a malicious act.

“We’re aware that a portion of internet traffic was affected by incorrect routing of IP addresses, and access to some Google services was impacted,” said a Google spokesperson. “The root cause of the issue was external to Google and there was no compromise of Google services.”

Adding to suspicions of hijacking, some Cloudflare-owned IP addresses were also sent through China Telecom. But again, the cloud company has said this is due to the Nigerian ISP inadvertently leaked the routing information to China Telecom, who in turn then leaked it out to the rest of the world.

“Route leaks like this are relatively common and typically just the result of a mistaken configuration of a router,” said John Graham-Cumming, Cloudflare CTO. “The global routing system, which is based on BGP, is entirely trust-based. As a result, if a major network wrongly claims that they are the rightful destination for certain traffic then it can cause a disruption.”

“The impact on us was minimal. Cloudflare’s systems automatically noticed the leak and changed our routing to mitigate the effects.”

Graham-Cumming added that if there was something nefarious afoot there would have been a lot more direct, and potentially less disruptive and detectable, ways to reroute traffic.

Virgin Media has launched a secure software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) services designed for enterprise customers that want to rapidly scale their networks to meet operational demands. 

The SD-WAN is a “cloud-ready” service meaning it will operate with the next-generation networking infrastructures and cloud data, apps and services many companies are no putting to use as they pursue digital transformation doctrines. 

It comes with optimisation tools, for example, that will enable large organisations to access cloud data, applications and services such as Office 365 from multiple sites.

Virgin said its service will provide insight, analytics and visibility of network traffic so that key applications can be prioritised and traffic optimised to improve performance. The service is end-to-end IPsec encrypted and comes with a secure stateful firewall as standard.

Peter Kelly, managing director of Virgin Media Business, said that the service will give its users greater control.

“SD-WAN as a service transforms legacy infrastructure into an agile, responsive and secure digital platform with the cloud at its heart to help enterprises transform the way they work,” he said.

“By giving customers greater flexibility and control, SD-WAN helps businesses to evolve and tailor their networks quickly and easily.”

For security, Virgin Media is partnering with award-winning Versa Networks, which is a provider of next-generation software-based networking and security services.

The company said the launch comes after thorough integration and penetration testing that ensures a proven secure service.

Software giant SAP has agreed to acquire Qualtrics for $8 billion, just days before the US company was due to go public.

Qualtrics is a technology platform that businesses can use to collect, manage and act on data. SAP will add the company’s XM Platform, which is a system for managing core business experiences, such as customers, products, employees and brand, on a single platform.

The company will keep its leadership structure in place and operate within SAP as normal but said it expects it’s 2018 revenue to exceed $400 million now its a part of SAP.

“Our mission is to help organizations deliver the experiences that turn their customers into fanatics, employees into ambassadors, products into obsessions and brands into religions,” said Ryan Smith, CEO of Qualtrics.

“Supported by a global team of over 95,000, SAP will help us scale faster and achieve our mission on a broader stage. This will put the XM Platform everywhere overnight. We could not be more excited to join forces with Bill and the SAP team in this once-in-a-generation opportunity to power the experience economy.”

At the time of sale, Qultrics had over 9,000 enterprises worldwide, including more than 75% of the Fortune 100. The deal will give the German enterprise software maker access to more than 413,000 customers and a global sales force of around 15,000

“Together, SAP and Qualtrics represent a new paradigm, similar to market-making shifts in personal operating systems, smart devices and social networks,” said SAP CEO Bill McDermott. “SAP already touches 77% of the world’s transactions.

“The combination of Qualtrics and SAP reaffirms experience management as the groundbreaking new frontier for the technology industry. SAP and Qualtrics are seizing this opportunity as like-minded innovators, united in mission, strategy and culture.”

With the AI revolution in full swing, there’s a growing need for a simpler way to understand and deploy the smart technology so businesses can see its full potential.

And, it’s not just big organisations; it’s small and medium-sized businesses from all industries looking to get the most out of machine learning and data. To help manage these dauntingly complex technologies, Google Cloud is launching an AI Hub and Kubeflow Pipelines for businesses.

It’s as complex as it sounds and proof of Google Cloud’s point. For every business to fully understand AI and machine learning, they need a little help and guidance which Google Cloud is packaging as a set of building blocks.

However, the cloud giant’s new chief has more of a warning tone for businesses adopting these new technologies. Speaking to MIT Review, Andrew Moore laid bare the reality of embedded AI and machine learning into a business.

“It’s like electrification,” he said. “And it took about two or three decades for electrification to pretty much change the way the world was. Sometimes I meet very senior people with big responsibilities who have been led to believe that artificial intelligence is some kind of ‘magic dust’ that you sprinkle on an organisation and it just gets smarter. In fact, implementing artificial intelligence successfully is a slog.

“When people come in and say ‘How do I actually implement this artificial-intelligence project?’ we immediately start breaking the problems down in our brains into the traditional components of AI-perception, decision making, action and map those into different parts of the business. One of the things Google Cloud has in place is these building blocks that you can slot together.”

The AI Hub is described as a “one-stop destination for plug-and-play machine learning content” and includes TensorFlow modules. This, Google Cloud says, makes it easier for businesses to reuses pipelines and quickly deploy them to production in the Google Cloud Platform in a few simple steps.

The pipelines themselves are also a new component of Kubeflow, which is an open source project that packages ML code. It provides a workbench to compose, deploy and manage reusable ML workflows, making a “no lock-in hybrid solution” according to Google Cloud.

The introduction of Kubeflow Pipelines and the AI Hub reinforces Google’s large-scale efforts in 2018 to invest in artificial intelligence. As the bronze medalist in the cloud wars against Amazon and Microsoft, AI has become its most important product to entice customers to its cloud services.

“These are important, differentiating moves in artificial intelligence from Google,” states Nicholas McQuire, head of enterprise and artificial intelligence research at CCS Insight.

“Customer fear of being locked in by the cloud providers is reaching an all-time high and this has been a key barrier for AI adoption. Meanwhile, hybrid cloud and open source technologies like Kubernetes, which Google pioneered, have become very popular so Kubeflow Pipelines addresses many AI requirements in a single stroke.

Despite being an internet company, Confused.com still needed to undergo a digital transformation.

Such is the rapid rise of AI and cloud computing, the 16-year-old price comparison website only adopted a cloud service five years ago. And the tricky part was not about introducing new technology to the business, it was about introducing it to the workforce.

“We have always been tech geeks at heart and we make sure we are using technology to help customers,” says Louise O’Shea, Confused.com’s CEO. “I hate this idea that if we have contractors in or we outsource something, then where is the knowledge share? Where is the ownership?

“You want your team that’s with you every day to feel proper ownership of what is going on, you don’t want them to think ‘oh that’s something that is going on over there and I don’t need to know about it’ or think that someone else is doing all the sexy exciting things. That’s not fair.”

Those doing the “sexy exciting” things, were engineers from Microsoft Azure who helped to migrate the comparison site’s data to the cloud. But rather than gawp in amazement from afar, or just accept the new tech would be Microsoft’s problem, O’Shea and the Confused.com management team, wanted the staff to take ownership and sought to educate them.

Confused.com is a small organisation which employs 200 people, all of whom work in Cardiff, South Wales. Only a third of its staff have technology-based roles and earlier in the year the company launched a school of tech.

“I was very clear with the staff,” says O’Shea. “I said: ‘look, as an employer, it is my responsibility to make sure you guys are educated in technology because it’s changing what we do as a business and changing what you do in your day to day job, very, very quickly’. I wanted to make sure that they had the skills while they were at Confused.com or if they left, to succeed in the future.”

“We wanted them to understand what the technology can do and the possibilities, because they are the ones that will spot where they can use it in their own day to day job. The engineers in the business know how this works, but you’ve got to bring these two parties together.”

When it comes to digital transformation, a CIO with an innovative mindset – and the right team – is ideally positioned to take the reins. Discover why in this whitepaper.

Download now

Part of the learning curve was to partnering the staff with an engineer to both understand the technology and take away any fear.

“They are the ones that are close to what they are doing every day and can see the opportunities. If they can understand what the engineers do, then they can spot those opportunities easier. We’ve already had some successes with 20% of our staff going through that program,” noted O’Shea. 

“Ownership is really important. If people don’t own it, they are just going to say’ it’s someone else’s thing, so I’m not going to touch it’.”

Despite being an internet company, Confused.com still needed to undergo a digital transformation.

Such is the rapid rise of AI and cloud computing, the 16-year-old price comparison website only adopted a cloud service five years ago. And the tricky part was not about introducing new technology to the business, it was about introducing it to the workforce.

“We have always been tech geeks at heart and we make sure we are using technology to help customers,” says Louise O’Shea, Confused.com’s CEO. “I hate this idea that if we have contractors in or we outsource something, then where is the knowledge share? Where is the ownership?

“You want your team that’s with you every day to feel proper ownership of what is going on, you don’t want them to think ‘oh that’s something that is going on over there and I don’t need to know about it’ or think that someone else is doing all the sexy exciting things. That’s not fair.”

Those doing the “sexy exciting” things, were engineers from Microsoft Azure who helped to migrate the comparison site’s data to the cloud. But rather than gawp in amazement from afar, or just accept the new tech would be Microsoft’s problem, O’Shea and the Confused.com management team, wanted the staff to take ownership and sought to educate them.

Confused.com is a small organisation which employs 200 people, all of whom work in Cardiff, South Wales. Only a third of its staff have technology-based roles and earlier in the year the company launched a school of tech.

“I was very clear with the staff,” says O’Shea. “I said: ‘look, as an employer, it is my responsibility to make sure you guys are educated in technology because it’s changing what we do as a business and changing what you do in your day to day job, very, very quickly’. I wanted to make sure that they had the skills while they were at Confused.com or if they left, to succeed in the future.”

“We wanted them to understand what the technology can do and the possibilities, because they are the ones that will spot where they can use it in their own day to day job. The engineers in the business know how this works, but you’ve got to bring these two parties together.”

Part of the learning curve was to partnering the staff with an engineer to both understand the technology and take away any fear.

“They are the ones that are close to what they are doing every day and can see the opportunities. If they can understand what the engineers do, then they can spot those opportunities easier. We’ve already had some successes with 20% of our staff going through that program,” noted O’Shea. 

“Ownership is really important. If people don’t own it, they are just going to say’ it’s someone else’s thing, so I’m not going to touch it’.”

The theme for this year’s Microsoft Future Decoded is AI, and specifically, how it can transform your business faster than any technology before it.

But artificial intelligence is not new; It’s been around since Alan Turing was cracking codes in World War II. So, what is actually accelerating this revolution?

According to Cindy Rose, Microsoft’s UK CEO, there are three reasons why and she outlined them on stage during her keynote speech to open this year’s event.

“Firstly, it’s the explosive growth of data,” she said. “These connected consumer devices and IoT [internet of things] sensors are producing more data today then humans can possibly make sense out of.”

Indeed, using AI for data processing is a necessity as she gave an estimate that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are being created every day. That’s more than 15 million text messages and 100 million spam emails every minute.

“It is also the power and pervasiveness of cloud,” she added. “Cloud is what enables the efficient and rapid analysis of all this data. Microsoft is investing billions of dollars in a global cloud infrastructure to make sure we can deploy AI, quickly and at scale.

This “explosive” growth of data and the capabilities within cloud computing, combined, are enabling the development of increasingly powerful algorithms — ones “we’ve never seen before”, according to Rose. It’s indisputable, the two need to be combined because the sheer volume of data we now generate cannot be processed by a human.

This speed of processing is Rose’s third reason for the sharp rise in the AI revolution. This is what makes it a far more game-changing technology than anything that has gone before it.

“It’s taken us nearly four decades to put a PC on every desk and a smartphone in every pocket,” added Rose. “But the pace of AI deployment will be much faster and its impact more profound.

“And the pace the of change of these dynamics is why we believe that the time to embrace AI in your organisation is right now.”