by Dotun Olagbadebo | Sep 21, 2017 | Business, Technology
6 IT Companies to Watch
Next-generation technologies are promising to revolutionize business processes. In many ways, it is a boon time for enterprise technology. for finance chiefs trying to pick their way through whitepapers, conferences, product pitches, and webinars, the array of products and vendors can be dizzying. And new IT companies pop up continually, making it difficult to keep up with the latest and greatest.
The 6 IT companies that make this list offer compelling products that address definable pain points in many businesses, and while many of these vendors are privately held, they look to be formidable players in their categories.
- Automation Anywhere.
Automation Anywhere is the clear market leader in the burgeoning field of robotic process automation (RPA), and 2017 is shaping up as a year when demand for RPA could explode. Like other RPA vendors, it sells robotics software designed to automatically replicate keystrokes that humans make to complete back-office processes. In the case of Automation Anywhere, such processes include procure-to-pay, quote-to-cash, human resources administration, and claims processing.
Automation Anywhere counts 27 channel partnerships that generate about 50% of its revenue. Forrester Research ranks it first, among many strong competitors, in both the strength of its product and the strength of its overall strategy.
- Sprinklr
Sprinklr manages more than 4 billion social connections in 150 countries and mines some two dozen social media channels for information about clients’ individual customers. Sprinklr incorporates that data directly into a client’s existing CRM system. The company co-exists with industry Goliaths, like Salesforce and products from Adobe and Oracle, and provides extra value for businesses that are looking to include social media in their advertising and marketing campaigns.
With more than 1,300 employees in 14 offices worldwide, the six-year-old company now lists 9 of the world’s 10 most valuable global brands as clients, including the likes of Nike, McDonald’s, and Microsoft.
- Oomnitza
Most vendors of IT management services focus mainly on “things” that by now are considered at least a generation or more old: desktop computers, laptops, cell phones, and servers.
Oomnitza, which raised a modest $2.3 million of funding in 2014 and since then has grown quickly, has a software-as-a-service subscription offering flexible enough to manage a lot more than laptops and cell phones: its product manages the sensors and other new-age capital equipment that make up the Internet of Things. Oomnitza’s software tracks the lifecycle of devices and objects—from the time they’re budgeted pre-purchase, all the way to archiving the data generated by obsolete assets earmarked for destruction.
- Workiva
The company’s Wdesk cloud-based platform features proprietary word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications built on top of a data management engine. But don’t mistake Wdesk for a desktop application suite, because it’s in a whole other league. The platform offers synchronized data, controlled collaboration, granular permissions, and a full audit trail. Companies trust it for reporting to the Securities and Exchange Commission, managing audits, and complying with Sarbanes-Oxley.
- SecurityScorecard
Founded in 2013 by Yampolskiy and Sam Kassoumeh, the former head of security and compliance at Gilt Groupe, the software-as-a-service provider collects “thousands of signals every second” regarding the cybersecurity of companies.
After gathering that data via a proprietary search engine and subscription services, the firm then assigns a company a letter grade from A to F. In language that’s a bit thick with tech jargon, the firm’s website gives an overview of the sources its search engine scans: “malware analysis pipelines, monitored hacker chatter crawlers, honeypot/sinkhole infrastructures, vulnerability cadence checkers, and deep social engineering sensors.”
- Slack
Slack’s secret is its simplicity. The platform lets users keep track of their messages by organizing them into channels. Instead of sending individual emails that get lost in inboxes, users can communicate directly with colleagues in real time. The conversations are searchable and highly transparent, although they can also be private. The company even rolled out voice and video chatting to users last year. According to Slack, its plug-ins, including popular ones for Trello, Skype, and Dropbox, are downloaded 415,000 times each month, making it one of the fastest-growing enterprise-messaging companies. But Slack’s simplicity doesn’t stop at messaging. The platform also allows users to share files by dragging them from the desktop and dropping them directly into the Slack app. It’s that efficiency and integration that Slack is betting on to boost growth in 2017.
Culled from http://ww2.cfo.com/technology/2017/04/20-tech-companies-watch/
by Onyia Ifeluwa | Sep 13, 2017 | Technology, Web Design
Information Retrieval Skills and Its Accompanied Benefits For Information Seekers
Information retrieval should become part of schools curriculum as the number of information sought online, and level of information explosion keeps rising. Meaning some people with low technical skills of retrieving information could be having difficulty retrieving information that is acceptable and perfect for their information needs.
So, what is Information retrieval? The definition below is derived from Wikipedia’s definition on Information retrieval.
“Information retrieval (IR) is the activity of obtaining information resources relevant to an information need from a collection of information resources. Searches can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for metadata that describe data, and for databases of texts, images or sounds.”
An information retrieval process begins when a user enters a query into the system. Queries are formal statements of information needs, for example search strings in web search engines. In information retrieval a query does not uniquely identify a single object in the collection. Instead, several objects may match the query, perhaps with different degrees of relevancy.
An object is an entity that is represented by information in a content collection or database. User queries are matched against the database information. However, as opposed to classical SQL queries of a database, in information retrieval the results returned may or may not match the query, so results are typically ranked. This ranking of results is a key difference of information retrieval searching compared to database searching
The evaluation of an information retrieval system is the process of assessing how well a system meets the information needs of its users. Traditional evaluation metrics, designed for Boolean retrieval or top-k retrieval, include precision and recall. Many more measures for evaluating the performance of information retrieval systems have also been proposed. In general, measurement considers a collection of documents to be searched and a search query. All common measures described here assume a ground truth notion of relevancy: every document is known to be either relevant or non-relevant to a particular query. In practice, queries may be ill-posed and there may be different shades of relevancy.
Virtually all modern evaluation metrics (e.g., mean average precision, discounted cumulative gain) are designed for ranked retrieval without any explicit rank cutoff, taking into account the relative order of the documents retrieved by the search engines and giving more weight to documents returned at higher ranks.
You would agree that information is useless when it is not meeting an information need, making it irrelevant. Hence, knowing how to retrieve information in this day and time is important, if it is to be seen relevant. And reason I join the numbers of experts arguing that information retrieval should be emphasized on.
What do you think as well?
by Onyia Ifeluwa | Sep 8, 2017 | Technology
IBM and MIT launch lab In Process of Fastening AI development
On Thursday, IBM and the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) announced a new $240 million research center called the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab that’s focused, at least in part, on how new hardware can help energize and grow AI technologies. The MIT- IBM Watson AI Lab centre is expected to provide the solutions to many problems after it’s purpose of existence must have been achieved.
“The field of artificial intelligence has experienced incredible growth and progress over the past decade. Yet today’s AI systems, as remarkable as they are, will require new innovations to tackle increasingly difficult real-world problems to improve our work and lives,” said Dr. John Kelly III, IBM senior vice president, Cognitive Solutions and Research in a statement.
The physics of AI is a critical area of study for the lab, said MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab co-chair Dario Gil in an email exchange with Mashable.
“Today, it takes an enormous amount of time to train high-performing AI models to sufficient accuracy. For very large models, it can be upwards of weeks of compute time on GPU-enabled clusters….Our teams will explore new materials, devices and architectures for analog AI computation, as well as the intersection of quantum computing and machine learning. The latter involves both using AI to help characterize and improve quantum devices, and also researching the use of quantum computing to optimize and speed up machine-learning algorithms and other AI applications,” he said.
furthermore, the MIT-IBM AI Lab will investigate existing and new AI algorithms and focus on how AI can help cybersecurity and healthcare, though Gil told me they will look at professional use of AI in other industries, as well.
Gil will co-chair the lab with Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of MIT’s School of Engineering. They plan to ask MIT and IBM researchers to submit research proposals for joint study.
According to IBM, this 10-year collaboration will involve 100 researchers, professors, and students across IBM research centers in Cambridge Massachusetts and MIT’s campus.
The new AI lab is a continuation of along partnership with IBM. “Our ability to solve complex technology problems with MIT has given us the confidence to commit to a partnership of this magnitude,” he said.
Thanks for the information being shared with Mashable, it is obvious we are getting clearer vision of what the future of AI will look like.
by Onyia Ifeluwa | Aug 23, 2017 | Technology
In a few hours from now, Google will be holding a remote webinar, August 23rd, for businesses interested in adopting Chrome Enterprise.
What is the perfect definition of Chromebook? It is a laptop running the Linux -based Chrome OS as its operating system. The devices were originally designed to be used primarily while connected to the Internet, with most applications and data utilizing cloud technology. The original Chromebook was an example of a thin client. Chromebooks are primarily sold both directly from Google and from the company’s retail partners. By 2012, schools had become the largest category of customer. That October, Google broadened its marketing strategy to include first-time computer users and households seeking an additional computer.
The good news now is that the company just announced a new enterprise version of Chrome OS that will make it much easier for businesses to use Chromebooks.
What are we expecting as features from this? Well it will interest you to know the following features are available: single-sign-on support, theft prevention tools, integration with Microsoft Active Directory, and the ability for businesses to remotely manage printers, browser extensions, software updates, and networks.
With their cheaper price tags and limited features which has made them popular in schools, yet Google argues that its new enterprise features will make the devices attractive to businesses as well.
Google notes that that several hardware makers, like HP, Lenovo, and Samsung, are already building enterprise-ready Chromebooks, so it makes sense they would customize Chrome OS to these use cases. Still, it’s an interesting shift since Chromebooks have generally been thought of as too underpowered for most settings outside of schools.
That’s why an important selling point for businesses is Chromebooks’ ability to run Android apps from Google’s Play Store. Though Google has shown off consumer-facing apps and games in the past, there are now a number of business apps available for Chromebooks as well. Additionally, administrators can remotely manage Play Store apps for enterprise customers as well.
by Onyia Ifeluwa | Aug 21, 2017 | Technology
IBM!!! Few years ago, a friend came meeting me to assist him in making some researches on IBM, he was to do an assignment which entails him gathering as much as possible information on the topic. The task was demanding but the knowledge I garnered from it later helped me at some point, especially when IBM started making bolder impressions.
So, what is IBM? International Business Machines Corporation which is commonly referred to as IBM is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States, with operations in over 170 countries. The company originated in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording-Company (CTR) and was renamed “International Business Machines” in 1924.
IBM manufactures and markets computer hardware, middleware and software and offers hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology.
Nicknamed Big Blue, IBM is one of 30 companies included in the one of the world’s largest employers, with (as of 2016) nearly 380,000 employees.
IBM has a large and diverse portfolio of products and services. As of 2016, these offerings fall into the categories of cloud computing, cognitive computing, commerce, data and analytics, Internet of Things, IT infrastructure, mobile and security.IBM Cloud includes infrastructure as a service(IaaS), software as a service(SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offered through public, private and hybrid cloud delivery models. For instance, the IBM BlueMix PaaS enables developers to quickly create complex websites on a pay-as-you-go model. IBM Softlayer is a dedicated server, managed hosting and cloud computing provider, which in 2011 reported hosting more than 81,000 servers for more than 26,000 customers. IBM also offers Cloud Data Encryption Services (ICDES), using cryptographic splitting to secure customer data.
IBM also hosts the industry-wide cloud computing and mobile technologies conference InterConnect each year.
What are the services IBM offer? Services offerings include Redbooks, which are publicly available online books about best practices with IBM products, and developerWorks, a website for software developers and IT professionals with how-to articles and tutorials, as well as software downloads, code samples, discussion forums, podcasts, blogs, wikis, and other resources for developers and technical professionals.
IBM Watson is a technology platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of unstructured data. Watson was debuted in 2011 on the American game-show Jeopardy! Where it competed against champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a three-game tournament and won. Watson has since been applied to business, healthcare, developers, and universities. For example, IBM has partnered with Memorial Sloan Kettering Center to assist with considering treatment options for oncology patients and for doing melanoma screenings. Also, several companies have begun using Watson for call centres, either replacing or assisting customer service agents.
(Via Wikipedia)
by Onyia Ifeluwa | Aug 18, 2017 | Technology
The influence of music in this modern day is indescribable; there is no doubt that music is the food of the soul. With the ever growing presence of technology and social media, it is amazing how far and wide a music composed or recorded in a particular place reaches every nook and cranny where human exists. This has impacted the bank statement of the individuals in the music industry, from the artists to the engineers to producers to make-up artist and the entire musical team.
A number of artistes have come out to strongly argue that technology has disconnected them from earning the deserved royalties they deserve and giving no thanks to the impact of music streaming services. Let us take Tinie Tempah as an example, the name should be familiar with followers of hip hop, an artist like Tinie Tempah accepts that the streaming era makes it difficult for artists to be properly compensated past a certain point. Having said that, the popular artiste admits to one of the significant effects of technology in this day which is, technology allowing him to connect and engage with fans on a one-to-one level through the social media platform. You would agree these feedbacks have helped and will continually help many artistes in knowing how, when and where to channel their musical energy while producing, which can be seen as an advantage to these artistes.
He also said that it has made the industry bigger and more inclusive, giving new artistes the opportunity to get their music heard when they would have had little chance before.
On the subject of new music platforms like Deezer, SoundCloud and Spotify – Tinie Tempah also emphasised how tapping into data can also help artists further their own creativity.
For him, understanding how a fan or listener feels about a new piece of music can prove far more valuable than money.
As you know argument goes up and down, some artists have also argued that while having a visible presence on Twitter and Facebook gives them a direct link to their fans; allowing them to gauge feedback and response, some have also come out to say it has taken away their creativity of being artistes.
Interestingly, the millennials are dictating the pace of the music industry in an influencing manner. With 15-20 year olds growing up with iPhones and Android rather than iPods and PCs, predictive technology is the present norm. This means that a feed tailored to unique musical tastes is an expectation rather than a perk.
At the same time, the fact that people now consume music passively – letting it find them rather than actively searching for it – takes away the linear aspect of listening to music.
Never mind even playing an album from start to finish – it wouldn’t be unusual for a 16-year-old to switch from Roberta Flack to The 1975 in the same playlist.
Whatever the case may be, it is certain that technology is the pillar of today’s century and the millennials are in business of controlling the pace of the musical empire.
It is also agreeable that technology has it own effect on some artistes from the financial aspect but could also be an advantage to many others; because many artistes that would have been denied the opportunity of becoming successful because they lack sponsor , have recently had little to worry about as far as they(artistes) are good and can produce valuable contents.
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