Cloud Security
Avanade | November 06, 2023
Avanade launches an AI-based platform, "Avanade Cloud Impact", to unlock up to 50% of cloud spend.
The platform generates insights on IT estate risks and opportunities by analyzing cloud consumption patterns.
Avanade offers a free cost optimization workshop to clients interested in adopting an AI-first approach.
Avanade, a leading Microsoft solutions provider, launches a new platform, ‘Avanade Cloud Impact’, designed to help businesses establish an AI-ready digital core and unlock funding for innovation. The platform uses AI and machine learning to analyze industry, business, and technical data sources, providing tailored modernization insights for companies on their cloud journey. It has already saved Avanade clients up to 50% of their cloud spend.
The platform works by analyzing cloud consumption patterns and comparing them with various data sources to generate insights on a wide range of risks and opportunities across an IT estate. These insights can include modernization recommendations and cost-benefit analyses. Avanade Cloud Impact can deliver information about data egress cost spikes, application redesign options, and achieve up to 50% cloud cost savings while quantifying sustainability benefits, all without the need to make any code changes.
Andrew Stahel, Regional Applications and Infrastructure Solution Area Lead, Avanade Australia, emphasized the importance of AI in today's business environment and the need for businesses to rethink what the cloud can do for them. He expressed excitement about the potential of the Avanade Cloud Impact platform to help Australian businesses harness the true potential of AI by strengthening their digital core.
Merrie Williamson, CVP, Azure Infrastructure, Digital and App Innovation, Microsoft, also expressed enthusiasm about the new platform and its ability to provide deep insights and recommendations that accelerate value for Azure customers.
While Avanade's new platform, ‘Avanade Cloud Impact’, promises to unlock up to 50% of a business's cloud spend and provide tailored modernization insights, it does come with potential drawbacks. The platform's effectiveness is heavily dependent on the quality and accuracy of the data it analyzes, and incorrect or incomplete data could lead to misleading insights. Additionally, there may be a learning curve associated with understanding and effectively utilizing the insights generated by the platform. Furthermore, the platform might not be suitable for all types of businesses, particularly those with unique or complex cloud consumption patterns.
However, the benefits of the platform are significant. It can lead to substantial cost savings and help businesses make informed decisions on their cloud journey. The use of AI and machine learning allows the platform to handle large amounts of data and provide comprehensive insights. Plus, Avanade offers a free introductory cost optimization workshop, providing additional support for businesses adopting an AI-first approach.
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Cloud Infrastructure Management
PR Newswire | October 20, 2023
Oracle today announced that NVIDIA AI Enterprise, an enterprise-grade software that accelerates data science and streamlines development and deployment of production-ready AI, and the NVIDIA DGX Cloud AI supercomputing platform are now available through the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. These offerings provide customers with easy access to NVIDIA's accelerated, secure, and scalable platform for end-to-end AI development and deployment on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Qualified customers can purchase NVIDIA AI Enterprise and NVIDIA DGX Cloud with their existing Oracle Universal Credits.
In March, OCI became the first hyperscale cloud provider to offer NVIDIA DGX Cloud. Now, with the addition of NVIDIA AI Enterprise and availability in the Marketplace, customers can quickly and easily perform any kind of large-model training for generative AI applications on OCI – including for workloads optimized by NVIDIA NeMo, an end-to-end, cloud-native framework to build, customize, and deploy generative AI. After customizing and training their models, customers will be able to use the same software containers and tools to deploy inferencing with NVIDIA AI Enterprise on any OCI Compute instance using the NVIDIA Triton Inference Server. Customers will now have access to an end-to-end set of training and inference capabilities on OCI, alongside OCI services for building applications and managing data across a range of distributed cloud deployment options.
Many organizations are taking advantage of accelerated computing and AI from NVIDIA on OCI. For example, Gemelo.ai runs NVIDIA Maxine GPU-accelerated AI software development kits and cloud-native microservices on OCI AI Infrastructure to drive its next-generation text-to-speech, voice-to-voice, and voice cloning systems. This has enabled Gemelo.ai to deploy "AI twins" that act as trained interactive service agents for its customers.
Gemelo.ai is pioneering new AI-based business models that showcase the combined power of OCI and NVIDIA's software, said Karan Batta, senior vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. We have worked closely with NVIDIA for years to provide organizations with an accelerated compute infrastructure to run NVIDIA software and GPUs. The addition of NVIDIA AI Enterprise and NVIDIA DGX Cloud to OCI further strengthens this collaboration and will help more organizations bring AI-fueled services to their customers faster.
"We are excited to put the dual resources of OCI and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise suite to use in building our next-generation AI-driven applications and ever more useful digital twins," said Paul Jaski, CEO, Gemelo.ai.
"Enterprises looking to fast-track their generative AI initiatives are seeking platforms where they can train and deploy their applications in a secure environment," said Charlie Boyle, vice president of DGX systems, NVIDIA. "The addition of NVIDIA DGX Cloud paired with NVIDIA AI software, including NVIDIA AI Enterprise, into Oracle Cloud Marketplace enables OCI customers to use their existing cloud credits to accelerate the development of generative AI applications."
NVIDIA AI Enterprise and NVIDIA DGX Cloud can be accessed via private offers through the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.
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Cloud App Development
Business Wire | November 02, 2023
Box, Inc. (NYSE: BOX), the leading Content Cloud, and Google Cloud today announced an expanded partnership to transform work in the enterprise with generative AI. Box will integrate with Vertex AI to build new gen AI features that help customers more efficiently process and analyze data stored in the Box Content Cloud, which is also now available to customers directly through Google Cloud Marketplace.
Enterprises today want to work with strategic technology platforms that can help them work smarter and more productively, said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box. Google Cloud is an incredibly important partner that helps us serve our customers globally. This deepened partnership underscores our joint commitment to delivering solutions that leverage cutting edge technology to power entirely new ways for users to intelligently interact with their content and revolutionize the way businesses operate in the AI-first era.
“Generative AI can streamline some of the most time-consuming processes facing enterprises today, such as manual data entry and analysis,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “Our expanded partnership with Box will provide customers with new tools that help them quickly process and create insights from documents stored within Box Content Cloud, saving time that users can reallocate towards more impactful work.”
New Box AI Capabilities, Powered by Vertex AI
Box has chosen to integrate with Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s unified AI platform, to help customers process and analyze data faster, create more personalized user experiences, intelligent search, and more.
Building on the earlier announcement that Box will integrate Google Cloud’s advanced large-language models (LLMs) into Box AI, Box will now use Vertex AI to help power its new metadata extraction feature. The new feature, coming first as an API, will save customers’ time inputting and maintaining data by automatically identifying and tagging key context from their documents, including matching metadata fields to attributes within a file. Soon, customers will be able to:
Automatically classify and label documents at scale to surface key insights, such as contracts nearing their expiration and invoices requiring payment within the current month.
Define metadata templates to extract information for custom use cases, such as automatically recognizing and tagging products in images or categorizing PII in specific types.
Populate defined metadata templates and integrate with ERP and CRM systems to automate workflows such as invoicing, executing contracts, client and employee onboarding, and more.
Identify and preserve critical information, such as timestamps, authorship, and document versions history, to maintain compliance protocols.
Recognize and extract metadata in different languages to ensure consistent term recognition while operating in different countries and regions.
Box is Now Available on Google Cloud Marketplace
As part of the expanded partnership, Box is now also available on Google Cloud Marketplace, making it even easier for customers using Google Cloud infrastructure to purchase Box’s content management platform. With the Box app available on Google Cloud Marketplace, eligible customers can realize key benefits including:
Reduced procurement cycles allowing for faster, smoother, and simpler buying process.
Consolidated Google Cloud billing.
Cost savings against existing Google Cloud commitments when purchased through Google Cloud Marketplace.
Box Expands Its Use of Google Cloud
Box already leverages Google Cloud as a key infrastructure provider for data storage and compute globally. Now, Box will expand its usage of Google Cloud by adopting several new services across networking, data analytics, and machine learning to deliver faster performance and higher-reliability to its customers. For example, Box is now applying:
Google Cloud as a storage option for Box KeySafe, which enables Box customers to use their own encryption key within Box. This provides customers with more choice over where they maintain their encryption keys.
Google Cloud’s global networking infrastructure to power Box network communication with customers, resulting in faster content transfers and increased productivity for customers around the world.
Cloud Bigtable for improved performance and uptime for the core data systems that power Box. This enables Box to deliver its customers with a more reliable service to secure and manage all of their content needs.
Google Cloud BigQuery to power Box's data application, analytics, and insights. With BigQuery, Box can now deliver more comprehensive data-driven insights to customers faster.
Google Workspace Integrations
The expanded partnership builds on existing integrations with Google Workspace, which lets Box customers create, collaborate, and save content in Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides from the secure Box Content Cloud platform. Additionally, the Box for Google Workspace add-on enables smooth and secure productivity and collaboration across Google Workspace, including Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Calendar. With these integrations, customers can:
Create, open, and edit content using Google Workspace’s collaboration tools directly within Box.
Add Box files directly to emails and save email attachments to Box without leaving Gmail.
Include Box files and link Box Notes directly to your Google Calendar events.
Save files in Google Drive to Box.
Apply Box’s enterprise-grade security, compliance, and governance capabilities to Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides.
About Box
Box (NYSE:BOX) is the leading Content Cloud, a single platform that empowers organizations to manage the entire content lifecycle, work securely from anywhere, and integrate across best-of-breed apps. Founded in 2005, Box simplifies work for leading global organizations, including AstraZeneca, JLL, Morgan Stanley, and Nationwide. Box is headquartered in Redwood City, CA, with offices across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Visit box.com to learn more. And visit box.org to learn more about how Box empowers nonprofits to fulfill their missions.
About Google Cloud
Google Cloud accelerates every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business and industry. We deliver enterprise-grade solutions that leverage Google’s cutting-edge technology, and tools that help developers build more sustainably. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to enable growth and solve their most critical business problems.
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