Artificial intelligence (AI) is the next frontier that companies are looking to reach. A few years back, we’ve seen robots only in Hollywood movies where they co-exist with humans or in some cases, even take over the world and manipulate us.

Well, if those sights intimidated you, then you’ll be surprised to know that none of that is going to happen, at least not in our lifetime.

As a society, we have just begun our journey into the world of AI, fueled in part by development in technologies such a cloud, machine learning, storage, sensors and more.

From the perspective of companies that have taken a plunge into AI, the future looks fantastic. According to a report by Accenture Research and Frontier Economics, AI technologies are likely to fuel the profits of companies in the future. In fact, it may even be the driving force within the next couple of decades.

The report states that AI technologies can increase economic growth by an average of 1.7 percent across all the 16 industries it examined. Out of these, Information and Communication will get the highest benefit with an increase of 4.8 percent followed by manufacturing that can expect a growth of 4.4 percent. Financial services is also likely to join the party and have an economic growth of about 4.3 percent. These are the top three sectors that will gain from AI technologies, though other 13 industries will also see benefit in one form or another.

All this will increase output by $14 trillion that’ll be spread across 12 economies. And all this within the next couple of decades.

In addition, the report says that by 2035, this technology can increase productivity by a whopping 40 percent.

Where will much of these automation happen?

Education is expected to top the list at 84 percent followed by food services, construction and retail. If you look closely, many of the tasks in these sectors are fairly routine and can be performed without the need for human intervention. Such jobs would obviously be handed over to machines, and this can free up more time for humans to do other productive work.

On one side, there’s much debate about how automation will kill jobs and cause economies to stagnate. While this is true to some extent, it doesn’t take into account many factors. When automation starts spreading, undoubtedly many lower and middle class jobs will be lost. At the same time, they will be replaced by opportunities at the higher end where people can create machines, manage them and even come up with creative ways to put them to good use.

This way, jobs will not be lost, rather they will simply shift from one sector to another. It’ll be similar to what happened when the U.S moved from a manufacturing economy to a services one. We can expect a similar change to happen, and this will be a positive one not just for business, but for economies and for humans as a whole.

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Cisco, the world’s largest maker of networking equipment, is gearing up for the changing tech landscape.

First off, as more companies move to the cloud, their need for networking equipment falls greatly. They no longer need so many routers and switches and in turn, this is affecting the sales of Cisco’s core business. Even those companies that invest in infrastructure don’t seem to need an end-to-end networking gear, like in the past. All that they need now is precise equipment that fits well with their requirements.

All this means, Cisco’s existing operations and business structure is taking a beating. During the 2000s, technology and networking was expanding rapidly and Cisco simply rode that boom with its advanced networking equipment. it even became one of the most valuable company during that time.

But the picture is a lot different today. It’s now more about creating a niche and finding specialized equipment for that niche instead of building a complete networking solution from scratch.

To keep pace with the changing trends, Cisco moved into the cloud market to manufacture its equipment for cloud service providers like Amazon and Microsoft. It seemed like a good move then because Cisco simply decided to do what it knows best.

Unfortunately for Cisco, it didn’t work simply because cloud providers too wanted specialized equipment and not the general networking gear the Cisco specializes in. As a result, specialized network vendors like Artista looked more attractive than Cisco.

To top all these woes, software is becoming more central to cloud and even possibly IoT and machine learning because hardware is saturated and growing in an altogether different dimension. The focus is slowly moving towards sensors and other finer equipment rather than general networking.

So where does all this leave Cisco now?

Chuck Robbins, the new CEO of Cisco, is taking all out efforts to bring more relevance to Cisco. Robbins took helm in July 2015 and since then, has been entering into agreements to make custom products for different companies.

In addition to it, Cisco is also strengthening its software and service businesses, so it can generate a more stable and steady income from it. To this end, it has even made some acquisitions. It bought a company called AppDynamics that makes software to monitor the performance of corporate applications. It bought his company for a whopping $3.7 billion. Likewise, it bought a company called Viptela for $610 million, to tap into its expertise of making programs to manage different networks.

It has also taken the route of subscriptions, so many of its products are available under this pricing model. This is to keep pace with the new model of selling products to its customers.

All these changes have helped Cisco to some extent, as it continues to be a key hardware manufacturer for the new age tech industry.

Let’s hope it continues to build on these initiatives, so it can use its vast experience and expertise to fuel the growth of cloud and other new technologies that are likely to transform our society in a big way.

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We have always seen IBM as a old warhorse because it’s been around for a really long time and has a solid foothold in the tech industry. But, that doesn’t mean it can’t make a foray into the newer aspects of tech industry.

In fact, IBM’s transformation into the cloud market has been remarkable. At the core of this transformation has been a bold and decisive management that has never shied away from taking the necessary steps needed to slowly and steadily gain a firm market share in the cloud industry.

Besides the management, its research team in cognitive development, specifically Watson, has been a great catalyst for this transformation. In many ways, it helped IBM get more interest towards its products and services, and this made it a little easy for IBM to plough its way through the cloud market.

One of the most important and often ignored aspect that brought about this big change for IBM is the overhaul of its existing culture. Since IBM has been around for many decades, it’s business model was based on huge and profitable standalone business units such as mainframes and consulting services. Such standalone divisions were more concerned about account control, profits and numbers in general than on delivering services.

In other words, these units did not revolve around customers, rather they revolved around profits and accounts. Such an approach worked at a time when technology was a novelty, but when it became a mainstream industry and an integral part of everyday living, this approach faltered.

To overcome this problem, IBM had to completely change the structure of its company and the way its divisions worked. It had to change siloed divisions to an integrated amalgamation of different businesses, so each could benefit from the other. This meant that all divisions had to work together at one time or another to create a rich experience for the user. In turn, this brought the focus back on to the customer.

This transformation was probably the best thing that happened to IBM over its operations because it’s outlook and performance improved by leaps. Also, it is in a better position to compete with the likes of newer companies like AWS and Google. In addition, it was able to create a multitude of relationships, partnerships and more to establish itself as a strong player in the cloud industry.

Though these changes are heartening, IBM still has a long way to go, as it has to strike a fine balance between its legacy business and cloud. It also needs to strengthen the skills of its employees and empower them to take on the challenges that come with the fast-changing tech world.

And of course, the competition. AWS, Microsoft and Google are expanding at a rapid pace backed by vast investments in their infrastructure. If IBM wants to compete, then it has to act big and really fast.  Personally, I think IBM will pull it off considering the strides it has made in the last few years, not to mention its rich experience and expertise.

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As a customer, you’d expect virtual reality in console games simply because virtual reality is becoming a mature technology and it adds a big dash of fun to any game.

Unfortunately, all the three top console makers, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, don’t think so. At least not yet.

The annual gaming conference E3 saw presentations and announcements by these three companies and none of them had any virtual reality games for their audience. In fact, many people flocked to the Microsoft press conference in the hope that there will be some form of virtual reality based console, but there was not even a mention of any of it.

Well, if you had been following Microsoft’s announcement closely, this lack of virtual reality mention shouldn’t come as a surprise for you. Over the last few weeks Microsoft has been hinting that it will not dive into “mixed reality”. This is an umbrella term that Microsoft uses to describe both virtual and augmented reality experience.

If you’re wondering why, the answer is the economics. Last October, Sony released Playstation VR, a virtual reality headset that gives users of Playstation 4 a whole new user experience. This product is definitely not top of the line, but sits in the middle between the high-end products like HTV Vive and lower end products like Google Daydream.

However, a look at the sales numbers of Playstation VR shows that it didn’t sell as much as Sony would have expected. So far, the company has sold 55 million pieces, which roughly translates to about 1.8 percent of the overall target market.

These numbers go to show that not all customers want virtual reality in their games. On the contrary, it has attracted only a small percent of its target market, so it makes no economic sense for a company to invest heavily in virtual reality when the audience is not ready to use them.

This bring us to the next question – why are the audience not ready for a virtual reality console yet?

First off, its’ expensive. Companies spend a ton of money in research and implementation and this is passed to the customers in some way. For example, the Playstation VR headset costs a whopping $400, and this is almost the same price of a brand new PS4 Pro.

The other reason, at least, one given by Microsoft is that it is not that practical to use. It argues that a quality VR experience requires a hard-line connection between the home base and headset and this could be inconvenient, to say the least.

So, this is typically a chicken and egg dilemma that could take a few years to become more mature. Maybe that’s probably when it would make sense to introduce VR as a viable option for entertainment. Until then, all VR enthusiasts would have to wait. Or if you’re in a hurry, you can always buy the uber-expensive products available today that aim to give you the experience you want.

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Alibaba, a Chinese multinational cloud company, has been looking to expand beyond the Chinese shores. Also called Aliyun, this is the largest cloud provider in China.

Recently, the company announced that it is opening two datacenters, one in India and the other in Indonesia, in a clear strategy to expand its footprint in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. Already, the company has been operating in places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, UAE and Australia within APAC and Germany and the US in the Western world. Besides these data centers, there’s one in Malaysia that is expected to open sometime in 2017.  It plans to open two more datacenters by 2018, as it believes these facilities are essential to meet the growing demands from its customers.

The company’s strategy has been to meet the needs of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) across the entire region. This sector operates with limited budgets, so it’s not easy for them to spend much money for cloud. Also, their operations tend to be smaller, which means, they need lesser computing resources when compared to larger players. To meet this unique requirements, many cloud companies are crafting their own strategies and products, and Alibaba is no different.

In fact, Alibaba has more experience in this sector than many other cloud companies because a good number of its clients in China are SMEs. So, Alibaba thoroughly understands the workings, expectations and the restrictions of this sector and has adopted its products to effectively meet them. It now wants to put this experience to good use by offering services to SMEs of other countries as well.

Another advantage that Alibaba has is that it understands the cultural context and pulse of the Asian market better than companies like Microsoft and Amazon. Much of this is again because it has its roots in China, which is culturally very different from the Western countries where AWS, Google and Microsoft had their roots.

This strategy has worked well so far for the company. During the 2017 fiscal year, Alibaba’s customers grew to 874,000 and this represents an increase of almost 70 percent over the previous year.

That said, Alibaba has a long way to go if it truly wants to catch up with companies like Microsoft and AWS. In fact, Alibaba sees AWS as its competitor, though both the companies are nowhere in the same league when it comes to revenue and operations.

For one, Alibaba doesn’t use an open cloud platform like AWS and this is a big disadvantage for many clients, especially those that want to use their own tools or explore more options. As of now, they can pick from Alibaba’s proprietary tools only and this is not always a convenient choice.

Even in it terms of infrastructure, Alibaba can never handle  the same amount of workloads as that of AWS, Microsoft or Google Cloud. So, these are some of the area that it needs to address, especially if it wants to fulfill its ambitions of becoming a truly international company.

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Losing data due to a system failure is probably each one of our worst nightmares. How many times have we worried if our data will be safe for us to continue working the next day? How many sleepless nights have we spent worrying about it?

Well, technology, specially cloud, is our savior again.

Cloud backup is a service that allows us to store our data in a public or private cloud, located far away from our physical premises. There are many advantages that come with it, some of which are:

• Automatic – This is one of the biggest advantages of cloud backup, as the backup process happens automatically without any intervention from your end.
• Protection against natural disasters – When a disaster strikes your city and your infrastructure is unfortunately damaged, you can rest assured that your data is safe because it’s stored in a different location, sometimes even in a different continent.
• Affordable – Cloud backup is a lot cheaper than on-premise data centers that require heavy investment, right from setup to everyday maintenance.
• Anytime access – With cloud backup, your employees can access data at anytime and from anywhere, as long as they have Internet connection.
• Simple and hassle-free – Cloud backup is a simple and hassle-free process. It requires no prior technical knowledge and works well for all kinds of employees.

These advantages have made cloud backup one of the most preferred backup options today.

Let’s now look at a few subscription-based cloud backup options available today.

Acronis

Acronis, headquartered in Switzerland, is a company that specializes in cloud software for backup, disaster recovery, data access and file share. Last week, it announced the release of its latest version, Acronis Backup 12.5.

The company believes that Acronis Backup 12.5 is one of the fastest, reliable and most economical solutions in the market now, thereby giving customers excellent value for their money.

With a unified web interface, family data protection, support for local and cloud storage, rescue bootable media, support for six hypervisors, SAN storage snapshots, backup validation and more, Acronis Backup 12.5 is definitely one of the top contenders in the cloud backup industry.

Crashplan

Crashplan is another good choice that comes with good security options and virtually unlimited versioning. Probably, the most salient feature of this service is its slick and user-friendly interface that makes it super easy to backup all your content.

Backblaze

Backblaze is an economical cloud-based backup solution that’s easy to setup and offers unlimited backup storage with little to no input from you. Once you configure the services, it runs in the background automatically and you can simply forget about it.

SpiderOak

For privacy enthusiasts, SpiderOak is a good choice as all your data is encrypted and only you have the keys to decrypt it. Also called as zero-knowledge provider, this offers complete protection, besides other cool features.

Carbonite

If you’re looking for a backup solution with well developed mobile apps, Carbonite is a good choice. It’s continuous backup feature combined with good security features make it a popular choice.

Regardless of which service you choose, make sure you back up your data to avoid sleepless nights.

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Cloud is a booming tech niche that offers plenty of opportunities for anyone with the right idea. Little wonder then that this sector is seeing so many startups, a lot of which end up being successful.

Before moving on, let’s define “success” in the context of cloud startups. Every company is started with an innovative idea or with the need to fill a gap in the existing infrastructure or services. Though many ideas are hard to implement and don’t take off as a general rule in other sectors, the cloud industry is different. Since it’s an emerging field, there’s a greater chance for entrepreneurs to come up with an innovative idea and implement it well.

Such well-done implementations brings in revenue for companies and more importantly, sets them as a perfect target for acquisition. If you look at the trends in this industry over the last few years, you’ll know that acquisition is a form of success because the idea and implementation of the startup was recognized and it was given an opportunity to become a part of a larger group.

These acquisitions work well for both the acquirer and the acquiree. The acquirer, or the company taking over a startup, is likely to gain from the new idea or practice that it can implement to a larger customer base. In the case of the company that’s being acquired, it’s a welcome event because their idea can now be sold or implemented among a larger customer base. They’ll also have access to more resources to improve on their implementation. In this sense, it’s a win-win situation for both the companies and for the public at large.

So, in the cloud industry, success means not just more revenue, but also becoming a potential target for acquisition.

That said, let’s look at a few cloud startups that have been successful or are on the path of achieving success this year.

Apcera

Apcera provides a container management platform to help its clients operate in the cloud. Founded in 2012, a unique aspect of this company’s offering is that it helps clients to manage both modern and legacy applications that so far are a thorn in cloud management.

Hedvig

Hedvig is a company that operates in hyper-scale storage, a small but growing niche. Founded in 2012, this company specializes in replicating data across public and private  cloud systems with a view to provide high levels of data protection.

Pulseaway

This company helps its clients to remotely monitor and manage any kind of cloud infrastructure. Its user-friendly interface and application access ensure that users can connect to their infrastructure from any device including tablets, smartphones and desktops.

Skyhigh Networks

Founded in 2011, this company gives real-time visibility to companies to gauge their cloud initiatives. This way, they stay on top of their threats, implementations and progress and can even lay the basis for deciding on their future business strategies.

Cazena

Cazena offers big data as a platform (dPaaS) that run well on Azure and AWS. It deals with data movements, analytics and security.

These startups are expected to go big by this year.

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Cloud companies are growing at a rapid pace and this means, they’re constantly going to need cloud professionals to manage their infrastructure and client projects. This translates to more opportunities for cloud professionals. In fact, this profession is likely to be the future of IT.

Given these opportunities, it makes sense for IT professionals to move to the cloud. The best way to do that is by getting hands-on knowledge about cloud applications, infrastructure, management, deployment and more.

One way to acquire this knowledge is through self-study, but then you also need to show your potential employers that you’re proficient in this area. So, a good way to learn and showcase your skills to your future employer is through certifications. The obvious advantage is you learn new things and at the same time, you have some proof to show the world your expertise on the subject.

Due to these multiple advantages, many companies are offering these certification courses. Let’s look at some of them. All these certifications are in alphabetical order, so the choice of a certification simple depends on what you want to do and the niche you want to carve for yourself.

Atlassian Certified JIRA Administrator

This is a fairly tough certification that helps you to understand the popular JIRA deployment. This certification is perfect for anyone who want to become the administrator for mission-critical applications based on JIRA. According to Indeed, the average salaries for JIRA administrators is anywhere from $70,000 to $95,000 per year.

AWS Certified DevOps

DevOps is a happening field, as it combines development with operations. In other words, you not only code and develop applications, but you also manage them. With this skill, you’ll act as a bridge between development and administration teams, putting your valuable knowledge to good use to streamline and increase the pace of deployment.

To get you into this interesting line of work, AWS Certified DevOps course is a good fit. The average salary for people with this certification can be upwards of a $100,000 a year.

CompTIA Cloud+

If you’re looking for competence in cloud technologies, then this is the one for you. It’s a non-vendor certification that tests on your general knowledge and understanding of the cloud, without going into any specific niche areas.

This makes this certification a good starting point for a more technology-agnostic and generic cloud training. It’s great if you’re just starting off and want to know as much as you can about cloud technologies in general, before deciding the specific area you want to take up.

Oracle Database Cloud Administrator

Oracle implementation specialist is a pre-requisite for this certification. As the name suggests, this certification helps you to learn more about cloud databases and how you can manage them in an efficient way. Average salary is around $87,000 according to the 2017 IT Skills and Salary Survey.

In short, if you want to become a cloud professional, choose from one or more of these certifications, as they’re sure to give you an edge over that of your competitors.

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Virtustream, an enterprise class cloud company, announced today that it will be launching a new healthcare cloud for its clients. This new product is built on Virtustream Enterprise Cloud and is aimed to helping clients to comply with the security requirements from regulatory bodies.

One of the key aspects of this healthcare cloud is that it offers an environment that is compliant with existing standards like HIPAA and HITECH. The service level agreements ensure that these requirements are met 99.999%, and this can be a big relief for healthcare companies.

Currently, the many regulations take up a lot of time and resources of healthcare companies and it also takes their time away from their core business. If the IT environment they work on is going to take care of all these requirements, then it’s sure going to make life easy for them.

This healthcare cloud product is designed to support a range of different electronic medical record systems and a ton of other healthcare and non-healthcare applications that are used by hospitals worldwide.

The best part is this cloud can be deployed as a public, private or hybrid cloud, depending on the business needs of the client and the infrastructure they want to implement. Such a flexibility is definitely heartening in today’s cloud environment.

This is a significant move from Virtustream considering its history and expertise. Just to give you a brief background, Virtustream is a subsidiary of Dell Technologies. A few years back, this cloud company was acquired by EMC for $1.2 billion in 2015 and it became a part of Dell, when the latter acquired EMC for $67 billion in 2016. As a result, Virtustream became a part of Dell Technologies and this has been a blessing for this division.

Virtustream’s strong cloud presence combined with the IT expertise of Dell makes it a perfect company to offer a healthcare cloud. To top it, this company already has a large target market within the US. It is estimated that more than two-thirds of U.S hospitals are customers of Dell EMC and at least 49 percent of storage infrastructure for hospitals run on Dell software.  Around the world, more than 6000 hospitals use this Dell software for their operations. In addition, seven out of ten top pharmaceutical companies are Dell customers.

This is a significant market and having a healthcare cloud that will make life easy for them would be an attractive option. This way, the company doesn’t have to spend a ton on marketing campaigns, as the target market is clear and ready.

Yet another major feather in the cap is the joint creation of a new connection by Virtustream and VMware. Both the companies recently announced that they will create a VRA Connector to allow VMware’s private cloud customers to extend their mission-critical applications to Virtustream’s Enterprise Cloud.

In all, this is an important announcement and one that can take cloud’s reach to new heights, especially in the healthcare sector. It also, in many ways, shows the wide-reaching impact of cloud technology as a whole.

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