Ephesoft, Inc., a leader in intelligent document processing (IDP), automation and data enrichment solutions, presented Kodak Alaris with an award for the Most Innovative Property Management Solution. The accolade was bestowed during Ephesoft’s Hackathon event, where partners were invited to come up with a creative use case for Ephesoft Transact IDP platform. After six weeks, they presented their solution to the Ephesoft Decision Committee, which includes Ephesoft’s CEO, CTO and VP of Product Marketing.

The integrated offering is a result of a global alliance between Kodak Alaris and Ephesoft. Together, we are helping organizations all over the world to simplify and automate their digitization processes through a combination of intelligent document processing software, best-in-class scanners, and professional services. The combination of technologies enables instant data capture from a variety of document types, with automatic separation, classification, extraction, and validation of all data, for seamless delivery into business processes and systems.

The award recognizes an innovative technology collaboration between the two companies, which helps real estate agents to quickly transform physical documents into usable digital data, making it faster and easier to process their clients’ property-related bills.

Real estate agents are required to manage large amounts of paper-based bills linked to rental properties on behalf of their clients. This can be a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Each billing company has its own document templates, and the inconsistency and varying document quality often presents a data processing challenge.

To streamline this process, Kodak Alaris leveraged the INfuse Smart Connected Scanning Solution to create an automated solution that extracts payment data from property bills and exports it into a desired format. Once captured, documents are transferred to a central point where the information is processed by Ephesoft Transact, enabling payments to be made through the real estate agency’s preferred financial institution. The ability to automatically extract critical data from documents, combined with machine-learning technology for indexing and classification, significantly reduces the time required to process bills.

“We are thrilled to receive this award, which is a tangible endorsement of the value this partnership brings to our customers,” said Vanilda Grando, Global Business Development Director at Kodak Alaris. “This global alliance provides organizations with access to best-in-class solutions to help them drive digital business. The integration of our intelligent capture technologieswith Ephesoft is helping companies across many industries to automate paper-based manual processes, improve data accuracy, and significantly increase operational efficiency.”

Stephen Lee, Vice President of Sales, APAC, Ephesoft added: “The fully integrated KodakINfuse Smart Connected Scanning Solution and Ephesoft Transact offering, provides organizations with a best-in-class solution for image enhancement, capture, classification of varying document types and extraction. The joint solution can be used across many areas to help businesses automate their document-centric processing and provide true ROI, scalability and efficiency improvements. Our combined offering is a perfect fit for organizations looking to modernize their existing legacy applications as well and implement something that is lightweight, easy to use and will drive productivity with minimum maintenance.”

For more information, please visit the Kodak Alaris website.

By Jadd Elliot Dib, Founder and CEO of Pangaea X

Climate change affects every country, disrupts economies and natural habitats, and puts the future of the planet at grave risk. Even though some damage is irreversible, it is still possible, with the use of a wide variety of technological measures, to control the increase in temperature globally.  Addressing environmental concerns and operating in a sustainable manner are becoming increasingly important to businesses as they adapt and contribute to the growing governmental and societal drive for sustainable development.

Big Data can generate useful insights towards fostering environment sustainability.  . Mining Big Data is essential to predict, plan, manage, and control environmental processes. Artificial Intelligence (AI), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), modelling, simulation, and user interfaces, are key tools for environmental sustainability that can also be used to improve green infrastructure and to optimise energy use, water consumption, and reduce waste and pollution, For example, big data can provide new and powerful ways of studying and improving environmental, social, and economic systems to enhance urban sustainability by allowing scientists to discover, analyse, and better understand environmental changes from a micro to global scale. 

Data science can also help the corporate world to optimise resource consumption.   . Governments can now adopt insights from real-time environmental quality data. The data output can then be used monitor the emissions of large utility facilities, and adjust if the data shows detrimental effects to the environment.

Big data can also illustrate how sustainability and cost saving go hand in hand. Sophisticated technology, including AI, can monitor and organisation’s energy expenditures, and highlight energy wastage, which, in turns saves money on energy costs.

There are infinite ways in which big data can enhance our ability to live sustainably. The first step, however, is for organisations to adopt data capture and analysis as a regular practice. 

According to a recent Gartner report, business leaders must explore a combination of big data analytics and advanced AI to provide a richer context for accurate business decision-making. This will also help with the predictive analytics aspects that are increasingly becoming the front and centre of any sustainable business initiative.

 
NetApp ONTAP is the only storage and data management software now available natively in the top three public clouds, enabling organizations to build a hybrid multicloud data fabric  

NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) a global, cloud-led, data-centric software company, today announced continued growth and momentum helping organizations unlock the best of cloud at less cost, through its collaboration with the world’s three largest public clouds.

NetApp’s expansion in the cloud has been driven by customers and supported by these partnerships, accelerating NetApp’s public cloud services’ customer and financial growth by bringing its leading CloudOps and ITOps solutions to existing and new addressable customers. Furthering its investment in the cloud, NetApp acquired Data Mechanics in early fiscal year (FY)’22, and this month announced the intent to acquire CloudCheckr to bolster the Spot by NetApp portfolio’s existing continuous cloud optimization capabilities.

This growth, driven by NetApp’s ONTAP data management software, which provides high-performance shared storage for file and block workloads, has propelled the native integration of NetApp’s cloud file services into each of the major public clouds.

“The three largest public clouds in the world are choosing NetApp, because customers are choosing ONTAP,” said Anthony Lye, Executive Vice President & General Manager, Public Cloud Services at NetApp. “Our strategy has positioned ONTAP as the native shared storage solution with rich data services inside the three public clouds. Now, our public cloud partners provide customers with the simplest path to the cloud and allow them to derive the most value from their data and applications.”

“The completeness of NetApp’s offering, combined with the ability to address a very broad set of storage use cases beyond cloud file storage, and the availability as a Tier 1 offering both on AWS and Azure, makes it a compelling choice,” said Enrico Signoretti, Senior Data Storage Analyst at GigaOm.[1]

Microsoft Azure
NetApp has partnered with Microsoft for nearly 30 years. In 2021 Microsoft recognized NetApp as the global Customer Experience Partner of the Year, and the U.S. SAP on Azure Partner of the Year. In the last 12 months, NetApp has more than tripled the number of co-sells offered on the Azure Marketplace, making it easy for Azure customers to consume NetApp’s leading cloud services.

Since it’s general availability in 2019, Azure NetApp Files (ANF), a fully managed, first-party service sold, billed, and supported by Microsoft in 35+ regions globally and is the first and only shared file service certified for use with SAP HANA. Recent innovations with Azure include the general availability of Azure Cross Region Replication, public preview of Azure NetApp Files Backup to preserve storage efficiencies, and of Spot PC for secure, optimized Azure Virtual Desktop-based Cloud PC environments.

“Alongside NetApp, we have worked with ANF customers to successfully migrate and run some of their largest and most important ONTAP production workloads, enabling the most demanding applications with performance and scale that meets or beats what they get on-premises” said Jurgen Willis, Vice President, Product Management at Microsoft Azure Storage.

“With ANF we get scalability and flexibility, which is important for businesses to run and have a

faster time-to-market for their products,” said Lalit Patel, Chief Technology Officer, Enterprise Cloud Services at SAP. “We are able to deploy environments almost 30 to 40 percent faster and reduce the number of outages by 80 percent because of the stability that ANF provides.”

Google Cloud

NetApp and Google Cloud began collaborating in 2018, introduced NetApp Cloud Volumes Service (CVS) for Google Cloud in 2019, and launched NetApp Astra with support for Google Cloud in 2020. Earlier this month Google announced that NetApp would serve as the primary data and storage vendor for its new Google Distributed Cloud Hosted offering and introduced the integration of Google Cloud VMware Engine with NetApp Cloud Volumes Service support for VM datastores – a fully managed service that helps organizations meet their need for virtual workload storage and disaster recovery.

“Our partnership with NetApp continues to grow, rolling out new capabilities that will make it easier and more cost-effective to deliver enterprise workloads on Google Cloud and bringing customers even more flexibility across hybrid and cloud deployments,” said Bronwyn Hastings, Vice President Global Technology Partnerships at Google Cloud.

“With NetApp’s deep integrations with Google Cloud, we’re reaping all of the benefits of the cloud as a service, with configurations preset, elasticity built-in and disaster recovery capabilities in place within five minutes,” said Tom Gentry, Technologist at Gunpowder. “By making the technology challenges disappear for these studios, we’re able to deliver the high performance our customers need anywhere in the world.”

Additionally, Spot by NetApp and Google Cloud have partnered to help companies take full advantage of the recently announced Google Spot VMs. With this, Google Cloud customers can continuously optimize performance, availability and cost with Spot by NetApp for cloud cost savings without the risk of service interruption.

---

[1] Source: GigaOm, Radar for Cloud File Systems, September 22, 2021

Predictions Overviews:

• The First Phygital Catastrophe is Coming: A central mission-critical application will go down and create a ripple impact across businesses and for consumers around the world. For example, a hack on a major central system like an internet gateway, public cloud provider or a healthcare system like Epic will impact millions of people and we will see the physical ramifications in our everyday lives. Healthcare could be upended, businesses unable to provide digital services, flights cancelled, food and supplies not delivered and more. 

• The Consumerization of Cyberattacks Will Rise for Easier Wins: The attack perimeter is becoming more personal, and the consumerization of attacks will rapidly increase. For example, the last iOS update alone had 11 zero-day attacks. Hackers will amplify attacks on mobile apps and people. This issue will proliferate because as zero-day attacks are rising, consumer cyber awareness and the steps people need to take to protect themselves have not increased in tandem.

• Cybersecurity and Data Science Fields Will Unite: Cybersecurity and data science have been disconnected fields that served two distinct purposes, but they will come together to help organizations better understand and proactively protect against increasing threats. The fields will collide and continue to grow together out of necessity, as application creation and enterprise data continue to explode and dramatically expand the attack surface.

• Cyber Insurance Will be Mandated: In the next 12 months, the quantum of cyber insurance needed to protect against ransomware and other attacks will be mandated, at least in some geographic regions and industries. In a similar manner to requiring everyone to have auto liability insurance, high at-risk industries will be mandated to have a minimum level of cyber insurance. For example, companies may be required to have insurance to cover at least two percent of their annual turnover. In the next five years, almost all industries and geographic regions will mandate cyber insurance.

• A Healthcare Cyber Regulator Will be Established: Healthcare continues to be the most targeted and attacked vertical, putting consumers at risk while not effectively protecting itself. A healthcare regulator or governing body will be put in place soon, like the SEC for the highly regulated financial services industry, to help strengthen the healthcare industry’s security and consumer protection.

• More Cybersecurity Services will be Sold by Non-Cyber Companies in the Next Five Years: Cell Phone service providers and device manufacturers will embed cybersecurity as a service into their plans to help consumers manage their security. Businesses will purchase cybersecurity offerings within their IT plans to protect employees and infrastructure. A large chunk of cybersecurity, both personal and enterprise, will be sold by large technology companies rather than solely through cyber vendors.

Fortinet, a global leader in broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions today announced a multi-year partnership with the European Tour.  As an Official Tour Partner and Official Cybersecurity Partner, Fortinet will provide its expertise and innovative security solutions to support the Tour’s digital innovation journey.

The European Tour hosts one of the largest and most complex “Bring Your Own Device” environments in the sports industry, with up to 25,000 fans, media and key stakeholders attending tournaments each day on its flagship European Tour – which becomes the DP World Tour next season – spread across a 47-tournament season in 27 countries. The Fortinet Security Fabric – which offers a broad set of automated, integrated solutions supported by advanced threat intelligence and AI-enabled security services – will enable the European Tour to enhance its security analytics, reporting and response capabilities at tournaments, as well as implement a zero-trust security approach.

The European Tour also operates a hybrid cloud environment for its office and tournament-based services around the globe. By partnering with Fortinet, the Tour will benefit from Fortinet’s adaptive cloud security solutions to bring advanced security, broad visibility and control across the Tour’s cloud infrastructures and increase the speed of its operations.

Speaking about the new partnership Michael Cole, Chief Technology Officer at The European Tour said; “In recent years we have pioneered the Tournament-As-A-Service concept, which packages intelligent and connected golf course systems into a cloud-based “smart city” solution that can be rolled out at any tournament. As we continue to bring this concept to life, Fortinet’s platform approach, through its Security Fabric offering, will further enhance the management, monitoring and agility of this complex operation and make sure we give our various stakeholders – whether that be fans, media, partners or players – an exceptional and secure experience.”  

John Maddison, EVP of Products and CMO at Fortinet said; “The European Tour delivers an amazing experience – in equal measure for their fans and world class golfers. As the European Tour’s Official Cybersecurity Partner, our company will bring its deep expertise in cybersecurity innovation to the world of golf.  We are thrilled to be working together with the European Tour, to accelerate its digital innovation journey thanks to the Fortinet Security Fabric, enabling broad visibility, seamless integration and granular control and automation.”

Max Hamilton, Commercial Director at the European Tour, added; “Following the ongoing and extensive transformation of the European Tour’s technological landscape, we have been keen to find a new partner that will help protect our investments and keep us at the forefront of technology in sport. Technology plays such an integral role in modern golf and Fortinet’s innovation and expertise will enhance our ability to successfully deliver a secure experience. It’s a true partnership in every sense of the word and further demonstrates our excellent commercial momentum.”