Archivo de la categoría: News & Analysis

data centre, Datacentre, Expansion, India, News & Analysis, ST Telemedia, STT, Tata communications

ST Telemedia continues expansion in data centre market

Location India. Red pin on the map.ST Telemedia Global Data Centres has expanded its data centre footprint through a joint venture with Tata Communications, where it will now take a 74% majority stake in Tata’s data centre business in India and Singapore.

The new deal expands ST Telemedia’s already healthy presence throughout the world as it adds 14 data centres in various cities across India, including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Pune, and its three Singapore facilities. The company now has a presence in four major regions, including a strong footprint in two of Asia’s fastest growing economies, India and China.

Tata will retain a 26% share of the joint venture, but will focus on advanced services within the data centre that enable digital transformation. Tata highlighted the new partnership will enable the business to refocus investments on area such as cloud enablement and unified communications.

“This partnership marks another key milestone in STT GDC’s growth,” saod Sio Tat Hiang, Executive Director at ST Telemedia. “Since ST Telemedia’s initial investment in the data centre business in mid-2014, we have made remarkable progress in building a formidable data centre footprint internationally with strategic presence in key economic hubs to capture industry demand.

“The latest addition of India to the STT GDC network will be a major impetus to advance the company’s ambition to be a significant global data centre service provider. We are pleased to partner with an established company like Tata Communications, to pursue opportunities in the growing data centre market.”

ST Telemedia’s data centre market portfolio currently contains a number of organizations including GDS Services, MediaHub, Level 3 Communications and Virtus Data Centres, the latter of which has doubled in size for two consecutive years, making it one of the largest data centre providers in the London area. The company ambitions are to develop the largest global platform of advanced, integrated and carrier-neutral data centres in every major economic centre.

While ST Telemedia has seemingly prioritized the data centre market, the team have made a number of investments additional growth areas including IoT, with an investment in software and managed services company Greenwave, and also big data following its investment in Datameer, an analytics and visualisation company earlier this year.

Big Data, Data Driven Decision Making, data science, DNV GL, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis

Organizations struggling to capitalize on benefits of big data

Laptop Screen with Big Data Concept.Big data is now considered one of the more significant priorities of businesses through 2016 however research from DNV GL has highlighted only 23% of organizations have a defined strategy moving forward.

According to research from the business assurance arm of DNV GL, while the majority (52%) of companies have outlined the importance of big data for future operations, roughly only a quarter have the capabilities to fulfil the promise and capitalize fully on the benefits. The interest increases significantly for larger organizations, those of 1000 or more employees, as 70% highlighted it as a priority.

“Big data is changing the game in a number of industries, representing new opportunities and challenges,” says Luca Crisciotti, CEO of DNV GL – Business Assurance. “I believe that companies that recognize and implement strategies and plans to leverage the information in their data pools have increased opportunities to become more efficient and meet their market and stakeholders better.”

One of the larger concerns for big data which have been voiced in conference and articles in recent months is an organizations ability to act upon the potential of the information now available. The volume of data is growing at a notable rate, though one concern is few organizations have the current technological capabilities or adequately trained employees to realize the potential.

BCN has been told during numerous conversations many organizations current capabilities can only analyse a small proportion, between 5-25% dependent on who you speak to, of the data collected. Until organizations are capable of analysing and actioning larger proportions of the data, the potential of big data or the promised ROI will not be achieved. DNV GL claim 16% of organizations are viewing better business decision making and 11% for financial savings, are the aims of big data, while 16% have prioritised an improved user experience.

“The ability to use data to obtain actionable knowledge and insights is inevitable for companies that want to keep growing and profiting,” said Crisciotti. “The data analyst or scientist will be crucial in most organizations in the near future.”

DNV GL believe more has to be done to enable and prepare the organization for utilizing big data to the full extent. The team claims only 28% have improved information management and 25% have implemented new technologies and methods. From an employee perspective, only 16% have addressed the internal culture and 15% the company’s business model.

Big data has been championed as a means to drive efficiency within organizations, but also as an opportunity to create a more personalized experience for customers in the digital era. It is also a prelude to artificial intelligence, another area which has been dominating headlines in recent months, neither of which will be achievable until investments have been made in technology and personnel to increase the proportion of data which can be understood and actioned.

Juniper, News & Analysis, SDN, Software Defined Data Centre, Software Defined Networking

What is the role of SDN in data centre security?

Door to new opportunitySoftware Defined Networking (SDN) is a breakthrough which is seemingly in everyone’s technology roadmap, but not ‘sexy’ enough to command column inches in recent months. At Telco Cloud, Juniper Cloud Automation Architect Scott Alexander argued the use case for security.

Companies who are striving towards 100% secure are likely to be disappointed as most within the industry now accept this is not achievable. Irrelevant of how many advances are made to secure the data centre, there will always be a collection of individuals who dedicate time to find new weaknesses. The new objective for the majority is to remain as secure as possible, consistently, reacting as quickly as possible to new threats which may emerge.

One of the main challenges for the data centre is the traditional defence. A number of data centres have one large firewall around the perimeter, which can be effective at keeping out threats, but on the occasion one breaches defences, traditional data centres are very linear, allowing the threat to roam freely. Larger segments of the data centre will be ring fenced, however the same principle applies here; once you crack that defence you are once again free to roam.

Alexander highlighted once you write various SDN policies, you can define which applications can ‘talk’ to each other. Until this is defined through an effective SDN policy, an application can talk to any other application, create the free roaming problem. Once a threat is in the data centre damage control becomes very difficult.

If every application is a room with several doors, Alexander said though implementing SDN you can keep relevant doors open and close doors to areas a given applications has no need to have access to. Spinning up various applications allows you to retain internal perimeters and create a policy of damage control.

Virtualizing a company’s assets can be a painful process, as it has to be done application by application. This however can be an advantage as Alexander highlighted to understand what doors are open and closed, you have to analyse the applications individually; there isn’t currently a method to do a blanket risk assessment of your applications. As you are migrating the applications individually any case during the virtualization efforts, it shouldn’t be too much of a task to understand what doors are open.

For the most part, the concept of 100% secure has seemingly been irradiated from the industry; most have accepted it is almost impossible. However, segmented security can aid a team in driving towards the objective of remaining secure as possible, consistently.

Data, developer, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Streaming, Tibco

Tibco announces stream of new updates

Cloud data sharing conceptTibco has announced four new updates for its Spotfire, LiveView, community support and IoT offerings.

The company’s current focus is on leveraging analytics for augmented intelligence to discover new insights then productively share those insights across the enterprise in the shortest amount of time possible.

“Some in the industry would lead you to believe that computers are going to replace people. We think that’s dead wrong,” said Mark Palmer, SVP at Tibco. “Computers should serve to augment human experience and intellect. At Tibco, we focus our industry-leading visual, advanced, embedded and, streaming analytics solutions on delivering a pragmatic approach to cognitive computing, which we achieve by combining enhanced intelligence features with algorithmic automation capabilities.

“This combination encapsulates the essence of our Fast Data analytics platform – it balances human insight with intelligent technologies for superior productivity and a competitive advantage in end users’ respective markets.”

The Spotfire offering now includes self-service data preparation, management, and utilisation functionality to extend the platform’s analytics capabilities. The team highlighted the product requires no third-party coordination for data preparation, as the inline datawrangling functionality in Spotfire is built-in.

The company has also launched open source, BSD-licensed Accelerator package for Apache Spark and the IoT. The offering includes five subsystems; Connector, for edge connection to IoT and enterprise data; Digester, a stream data preparation layer; Finder, predictive model discovery template; Automator, a streaming analytics-based automation engine for Apache Spark; and Tracker, to monitor predictive models and automatically invoke model retraining.

LiveView now includes a code-free HTML5 operational-intelligence dashboard development platform for use with the Live Datamart. Finally, the team have introduced a new developer community space for sharing end-user-driven technical expertise, insights, and Wiki articles.

CRM, Digital Transformation, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Salesforce reveals secret recipe for digital transformation

Salesforce 1Speaking at the London edition of Salesforce’s world tour, EVP of Customer Success & Growth Simon Short outlined the case for digital transformation, and also the factors which underpin a successful transformation project itself.

Short’s view on digital transformation is there are very few companies who achieve the goal of becoming digitally orientated. This is done to three reasons. Firstly, the aggressive expansion of technology is so vast some organizations are drowning in information overload. Another is the cultural side of digital transformation, there simply aren’t enough companies embracing the necessity of cultural change. And finally, despite implementing various technologies and advanced platforms, some companies still operate in silos. Until these digital silos are connected on one overarching platform, the digital transformation journey is not complete.

The invention of chess is a good anecdote to demonstrate the progression of technology. The inventor, Ibn Khallikan, approached the Indian king with the game and his reward was to be rice, more specifically one grain for the first square on the chess board, two for the second, four for the third, and doubling there on until the end of the 64 squares. Although at first it would not appear to be a great amount, the geometric progression of the amount of rice far exceeded the king’s resources. Short believes the same theory can be applied to the growth of technology in the business world.

“If you apply the same doubling theory and Moore’s law to the growth and importance of technology, we get have way through the chess board in 2002,” said Short. “Since then we’ve seen an explosion of technology within the business world. As we continue to move forward, it’s a real challenge for those with existing technology to make the change and get ahead of the trend. No one really knows what the power of technology is and where it will go. This is the conundrum for businesses throughout the world.”

One of the main challenges here is focused around legacy technologies, businesses cannot rid themselves of the cumbersome platforms quickly enough to capitalize on the potential on emerging technologies. But at the same time, Short highlighted the companies who focus on technology implementation and do not embrace the cultural change required will not be successful in the digital transformation journey.

Salesman painting tree instead of cityAccording to Short, digital transformation is so much more than simply implementing technology. Ensuring you employees embrace the digital change, as well as connecting the individual silos (for example the eCommerce platform to the customer call centre and also the logistics/delivery team), are more important aspects of the project than the technology itself. Without the digital culture and the connected model, the customer simply sees a business which is broken even if the technology is revolutionary. “Silos and culture are the two things which can kill any transformation project,” said Short.

But what is the secret to a successful digital transformation project? And what have the successful ‘Digital Masters’ done which other companies haven’t?

For Short, the project has to be led by the CEO and has to be phased in. The various different components of the project (business change, strategy, technology implementation, employee digital engagement etc.) have to be implemented hand-in-hand. If one area progresses faster than the rest, the project will stutter. And most importantly, there has to be a governance and accountability role, an area which most companies overlook, to ensure all components of the project are heading in the same direction and progressing at the same speed. In general, there are six lessons from Short’s and Salesforce’s perspective:

  1. Change has to be led from the CEO and not delegated down. The business unit and IT cannot get into a shouting match, pointed fingers at each other, the CEO needs to take control and pull the business along with him
  2. Physical and digital experience needs to be co-ordinated. The customer experiences the brand in the physical world as well as the digital despite the growth of the internet and technology; the physical and digital experience for the customer needs to be co-ordinated to be successful
  3. Outside-in thinking. Many companies make the mistake of telling their customers about how they are changing the brand, as opposed to understanding what the customer journey is and adapting the digital experience to enhance this.
  4. Understanding it’s okay to fail. This is one of the more challenging facets according to Short, as accountable businesses don’t like to fail. But the belief every PoC will be an extraordinary success is somewhat wishful thinking. Short highlighted being okay with failure is the only way to move on and achieve success.
  5. Data driven insights. The amount of data available to businesses is unprecedented and growing faster every day. Decisions should be based on the data available which has been derived directly from the customer. It removes uncertainty (as much as possible in any case) and provides justification.
  6. A single platform to connect the business units. Without a single platform to connect all business units, digital transformation cannot be achieved, as digital transformation should focus on the connected journey. The aim should be the seamlessly interact with the customer on all their touchpoints.

Digital transformation is a key objective for the majority of businesses around the world, and rightly so. According to MIT research which Short quoted on stage, digitally transformed businesses are 26% more profitable than what would be perceived as the norm, but too many companies are focusing on the technology as opposed to the customer. Until the ideas of culture, technology and silo connections are addressed on a level playing field, digital transformation cannot be achieved.

Cisco, Collaboration, data centre, Financial Results, IoT, News & Analysis, software

Cisco reports 3% growth for Q3 and sets targets on IoT market

Cisco corporateCisco has reported 3% year-on-year growth for Q3, topping $12 billion for the quarter, with its security business leading the charge, though the team have reconfirmed IOT, software cloud and collaboration markets are priorities for the future.

The security portfolio demonstrated revenue growth of 17% while deferred revenue grew 31% driven by the ongoing shift from hardware to more software and subscription services. The Collaboration portfolio grew 16%, while the team were also confident in the performance of its next generation data centre portfolio. The ACI platform grew revenues approximately 100%, exceeding a $2 billion annualized run-rate.

“We delivered strong Q3 results against the backdrop of the Macro environment that continues to be uncertain,” said CEO Charles Robbins. “Despite this uncertainty we executed very well, with revenue growth of 3%. The operational changes we continued to make will further enable our customers to leverage strategic role to network as they transform their businesses to become digital.”

Regionally, the America’s accounted for a 4% lift, whereas EMEA and APJ were slightly less at 2% and 1% respectively. The emerging markets demonstrated healthy results for the business, as BRICs increased by 4%, Mexico by 4%, China up 22% and India up 18%. The team highlighted while there was good growth in the public and service provider segments, the enterprise was not as positive as the team pointed towards pressure driven by macro uncertainty as the reasoning.

The quarter also saw Cisco as one of the more active players in the M&A market, completing five acquisitions over the course of the quarter. The $1.4 billion acquisition of Jasper Technologies now makes Cisco the largest cloud based IOT service platform in the industry, the team claims. Cisco also completed the acquisitions of Acano, Synata, Leaba and CliQr during the period, the latter a $260 million orchestration platform to help customers simplify and accelerate their private, public and hybrid cloud deployment. Cisco had already integrated CliQr with its Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Unified Computing systems (UCS) prior to acquisition.

“These acquisitions are clearly focused on our key growth areas including IOT, software cloud and collaboration as well as continuing to strengthen our core,” said Robbins.

The IoT market has been a long time target of Cisco, with the Jasper deal adding to the ParStream acquisition last year. The acquisition offered the opportunity for instant analysis of masses of data at the network edge with minimal infrastructural or OPEX repercussions, the company claimed.

Business Transformation, Cloud Enablement, Cost Reduction, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, SDN, Software Defined Networking

SDN on the rise and cloud still not understood – survey

Dollar SignsResearch from Viavi Solutions has indicated SDN technologies are on the rise within enterprise organizations, but there also might be a number of organizations who are implementing the cloud for the wrong reasons.

In its ninth annual State of the Network study, the team highlighted enterprise organizations are increasing deployment of 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100 GbE), public and private cloud, and software-defined networking technologies. Two thirds of respondents indicated they had some kind of deployment in the production environment, and 35% have implemented SDN underlay.

“There is a growing trend of enterprise customers realizing how they can improve the operations of their network,” said Steve Brown, Director of Enterprise Solutions at Viavi. “It’s been a slow burner, but SDN is beginning to break through into the mainstream. While encouraging, the statistics are a little higher than we expected. After comparing the adoption rates from the last couple of years, we expected SDN to be around 50%, but the survey does highlight some real momentum in the industry on the whole.”

The findings also highlighted that while cloud adoption is continuing to rise, 90% have at least one application in the cloud and 28% said they have the majority, there is still a level of immaturity in understanding the perceived and realized benefits of cloud computing. Lower operating costs was listed as the top reason for the transition at 63%, while the faster delivery of new services and the ability to dynamically adapt to changes in business demands were the least popular reasons, both accounting for 39%.

“If you look at what the chief benefits which people are seeing, we’re seeing a lot of feedback on the CAPEX/OPEX reductions,” said Brown. “This is great, but that’s not really what the point of cloud is. Expenditure reduction is something which the top decision makers in the business want to see, it’s more of a tactical play. If this is the end objective these companies are not really seeing the promise of cloud and what makes me excited about cloud.

Deploying cloud

Top reasons for adopting the cloud

“The areas which I see the key benefits are the ones which are lowest on the results, delivering services faster and dynamically changing to meet the needs of the business. I found it quite surprising that these were quite low. The results show that the decision to enter the cloud for the majority of consumers is more tactical than a strategic decision.”

One conclusion that can be drawn from the findings is a lack of understanding of what the cloud can offer. Gartner’s ‘Cost Optimization Secrets’ highlighted the average cost reduction for companies implementing cloud propositions was just over 14%. While this is encouraging, whether cloud adoption would remain an attractive option for organizations if they knew expenditure would be reduced by just 14% remains to be seen.

“There’s more than just cost saving when adopting the cloud,” said Brown. “Are there savings, absolutely, but the majority don’t come upfront. If you’re going to be running applications which could see aggressive spikes, the flexibility of and agility of the cloud will reduce the cost. But at the same time it’s difficult to justify the cost savings because you may be taking on new projects due to the fact you have the ability to scale your capacity at a moment’s notice.

“Rather than thinking about it as a cost saver, hybrid cloud should be seen as an initiative enabler. Until this idea is recognised by the industry, adoption may continue to struggle to penetrate the mainstream.”

For Brown and the team at Viavi, the benefits of cloud computing are focused around the business capabilities which are enabled in the medium and long-term. Cloud offers companies the opportunity to react to diversifying market conditions faster and ensure products remain relevant on an on-going basis.

“In my own personal opinion, I would like to see people embrace a hybrid cloud model because it enables them to develop competitive edges,” said Brown. “This also justifies future investment in technology, it moves these new concepts and implementations from ‘nice to have’ to ‘must have’ as technology will then be one of the supporting pillars of the business strategy. Cloud has the ability to do this and to be a competitive enabler.”

AI, Artificial intelligence, CRM, Financial Results, Marc Benioff, News & Analysis, Salesforce

Marc Benioff backs AI as Salesforce reports 28% growth

Marc Benioff

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

Salesforce reported healthy results over the course of Q1, growing 28%, as CEO Marc Benioff backed AI as the next major growth driver, during the company’s quarterly earnings call.

While social and mobile has facilitated Salesforce growth in recent years, the team are backing artificial intelligence as the next major trend to take the company through the targeted $10 billion annual revenue target. Benioff highlighted that in the same way the company is now known for being a social and mobility brand, the ambition is for Salesforce to be perceived as “an AI first company”.

“When I look at kind of the next major trend for Salesforce and our industry that will drive tremendous growth is got to be artificial intelligence,” said Benioff. “And as we look out into the future and we start to look at extreme improvement and advances in artificial intelligence whether it’s machine learning, whether it’s deep learning, whether it’s machine intelligence itself, I think that those kind of capabilities appearing inside our applications that is going to be a major growth capability going forward.”

One of the newest product launches for the company, Salesforce Inbox, uses these AI and machine intelligence opportunities to gives companies a perspective on how they can be more efficient in the sales, service, and marketing processes. SalesforceIQ is another offering which uses the same capabilities as it has an artificial intelligence front end, whereas Benioff also highlighted Sales Cloud has a machine learning front end.

While others in the industry have been very vocal about their progress within the AI field, Salesforce has seemingly been sneaking in under the radar with additional acquisitions including Tempo AI and PredictionIO. SalesforceIQ, an AI-driven calendar app which can prioritize work schedules for sales employees, was incorporated into the product portfolio following the $390 million acquisition of RelateIQ in 2014. These acquisitions, as well as organic development, are aiding the company in adapting to what Benioff described as “an AI first world”.

Salesforce’s new efforts will focus on the new, digitally enabled customers and consumers, who could be seen to driving the transformation worldwide. This new generation is defined by technology and speed, as Benioff highlighted they want services faster and easier than ever before, as well as being ever more reliant on social and mobile technologies. Companies who do not adapt themselves to this new proposition but remain in a more traditional model are those who will struggle to remain competitive.

“We’re in the midst of a massive generational shift; a new generation of customers and consumers is clearly emerging,” said Benioff. “We have been calling them here at Salesforce C generation customers. I mean this is really part of a huge shift that’s happening in computing. We’ve gone from the first generation of computing which was very much about systems of record to the second generation which was systems of engagement we talked about that on these calls many times over the last 10 years.

“And we are clearly moving into this incredible world that the system of intelligence that’s all yielding these incredible systems of customers or C generation customers that are — that our customers are connecting to. And that’s we’re so excited about.”

In terms of financials, revenues for Q1 grew to nearly $2 billion, up 28% in constant currency. Sales Cloud demonstrated 15% year-over-year growth, Service Cloud grew 32%, Marketing Cloud grew 29%, whereas Apps Cloud and other business units grew 45%. Growth in Sales Cloud was the highest recorded in the five previous quarters, which Benioff attributing to a number of new innovations including its Lightning platform, where the team have recently released an updated government edition, as well as Pardot and SteelBrick capabilities.

The team are also raising 2017 revenue guidance to $8.16 billion to $8.2 billion, and are expecting revenues of between $2.005 billion to $2.015 billion in Q2.

“I’m also thrilled to announce we’re raising full-year revenue guidance $80 million raising the guidance we feel really excited about that, $8.2 billion is the high-end of our range and our current outlook puts us on its square path, look we are going to see now that we’re going to realize very shortly our $10 billion dream,” said Benioff. “This is amazing I think that one of the reasons that we are doing so well is because Oracle and SAP are doing so poorly in the cloud”

Big Data, BusinessObjects, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, SAP

SAP updates BusinessObjects offering at SAPPHIRE NOW conference

SAP sailingSAP has announced a number of new updates for its analytics solutions portfolio at the 28th annual SAPPHIRE NOW conference.

The company’s business intelligence portfolio, BusinessObjects, will continue to offer solutions on premise and in the cloud, as well as incorporating a number of new features for visualizations and storytelling, data wrangling and blending, geospatial, trend analysis, custom filters, linked stories, notifications and chat.

“SAP is enabling companies to lead in the digital economy by significantly simplifying the platform, providing best-in-class analytics and a superior user experience,” said Stefan Sigg, SVP for SAP Analytics. “SAP BusinessObjects remains the most relevant analytics in the industry — and we offer the best end-to-end capabilities both on premise and in the cloud in the market today.”

One enhancement has focused more on the integration and collaboration efforts of the business, as the offering can now connect and blend existing data sources such as the SAP ERP, SAP SuccessFactors solutions, Salesforce, and Google Drive (amongst others), on a single platform without having to move data into the cloud environment. The offering now also includes predictive analytics capabilities leveraging powerful built-in algorithmic models, to enhance data-driven decision making capabilities.

SAP also updated its BusinessObjects Enterprise offering, which has been mainly designed for on premise analytics. Enterprise organizations have a choice of premium, professional and standard editions, which offer a variety of services including enhancements which make the platform Internet of Things–ready.

The company also launched one of its newest cloud offerings, the Digital Boardroom (see below), which has been built on the BusinessObjects platform. The Digital Boardroom is real-time business intelligence and ad hoc analysis portal, which provides executives with information sourced from all SAP S/4HANA Lines of Business data to provide a “single source of truth for the company”.

Digital Boardroom

AWS, Database, Datacentre, News & Analysis

AWS announce launch of X1 Instances for EC2

Cloud in my handAWS has announced the availability of X1 Instances for Amazon EC2, which it claims is the most memory available in any SAP-certified cloud instance available today.

The X1 instances have 2 TB of memory, and are powered by four 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon E7 8880 v3 processors delivering 128 vCPUs. The X1 instances also offer up to 10 Gb per second of dedicated bandwidth to Amazon Elastic Block Store, which the team believe is well suited to support large-scale in-memory databases, big data processing, and high performance computing.

“Amazon EC2 provides the most comprehensive selection of instances, offering customers, by far, the deepest compute functionality to support virtually any workload,” said Matt Garman, VP at Amazon EC2. “We’ve had a Memory Optimized instance family (our R3 family) for a while that is quite popular for high performance databases, in-memory analytics, and enterprise applications; however, customers have increasingly asked for even more memory to help run analytics on larger data sets with in-memory databases, generate analytics in real time, and create very large caches.

“With 2 TB of memory – 8 times the memory of any other available Amazon EC2 instance, and more memory than any SAP-certified cloud instance available today – X1 instances change the game for SAP workloads in the cloud. Now, for the first time, customers can run their most memory-intensive applications at scale with the elasticity, flexibility, and reliability of the AWS Cloud, rather than having to battle the complexity, cost, and lack of agility of colo or on-premises solutions.”

The X1 Instances are available via request in a number of AWS regions, including US East, US West, EU (Germany and Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Sydney and Singapore), and will be available in the remaining areas over the next few months.