Wednesday, October 26, 2016

AT&T Activates First LTE-M Commercial Site

AT&T switched on North America’s first LTE-M enabled commercial site in San Ramon, California.

Key features and benefits expected from LTE-M are:

  • Lower costs for modules that connect IoT devices to the LTE network.
  • Longer battery life; up to 10 years for certain enabled IoT devices.
  • Better coverage for IoT devices underground and deep inside buildings.

The site activation supports the pilot of AT&T’s LTE-M Low-Power Wide-Area network at the AT&T Labs in San Ramon. AT&T said it plans to make the technology widely available across its commercial network throughout 2017.

It will connect a wide variety of IoT solutions challenged by existing network technology. These include smart utility meters, asset monitoring, vending machines, alarm systems, fleet, heavy equipment, mHealth and wearables.

The pilot will also include solutions from a robust contingent of technology providers:  Altair, Ericsson, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Sierra Wireless, Telit, u-blox, Wistron NeWeb Corp. (WNC), and Xirgo Technologies.  The technology is expected to be available to customers outside of the pilot starting in 2017.

“We’ve joined with Altair, Ericsson and technology leaders from across the ecosystem to launch the first LTE-M enabled commercial site in North America,” said Chris Penrose, president, Internet of Things Solutions, AT&T. “Innovations like LTE-M will bring IoT to more end points than ever before. It’s part of our strategy to offer the widest range of IoT network options to our customers.”

Participants in the pilot will include:

  • Badger Meter – analyze how the LTE-M network, which is dedicated to supporting the IoT, may be used to enhance communications for smart water devices.
  • CalAmp – explore how the LTE-M network can help companies more efficiently manage their connected vehicles and assets.
  • Capstone Metering – demonstrate how LTE-M can improve Smart Cities sensor technologies. It will look to increase battery life and improve connectivity and sensor monitoring for underground smart water meters.
  • PepsiCo -- examine and test ways that sensors can improve the in-store experience with smart vending solutions for the thousands of PepsiCo products consumers love and enjoy.
  • Samsung – evaluate an LTE-M-based solution to enhance performance for consumer solutions. This may include wearables or other consumer devices.

http://about.att.com/story/north_americas_first_ltem_site_to_grow_iot.html

Vendors Showcase Application Portability with OpenStack

Vendors at this week's OpenStack Summit in Barcelona showcased application portability across a diversity of OpenStack public and private clouds.

The Community Interop Challenge took a holistic approach to prove interoperability, asking all participants to successfully run the same workload and automated deployment tools across their OpenStack distributions and public clouds. The challengers ran a 3-tiered LAMPStack enterprise application using Ansible and OpenStack Shade live on stage, and also executed a second workload using Docker Swarm scripts and Terraform as part of the collaborative effort.

Participating OpenStack vendors included AT&T, Canonical, Cisco, DreamHost, Deutsche Telekom, Fujitsu, HPE, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Linaro, Mirantis, OSIC, OVH, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE and VMware.

The Foundation also announced continued progress and adoption of the “OpenStack Powered” program, which requires OpenStack products and services to run interoperability tests in order to carry the OpenStack brand. There are now 46 products and services meeting interoperability standards, including 11 public cloud providers which alone have a footprint of 34 datacenters globally.

In addition, the European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC) also demonstrated a different type of interoperability and performance of OpenStack within complex Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) systems.

https://www.openstack.org/

Ericsson Brings on Investor AB's Börje Ekholm to Head Turnaround

Ericsson's Board of Directors has appointed Börje Ekholm President and CEO, effective January 16, 2017.

Ekholm currently serves as CEO of Patricia Industries, a division within Investor. Prior to assuming this position in 2015, Börje Ekholm held the position as President and CEO of Investor AB between 2005 and 2015. Previous positions also include President of Investor Growth Capital Inc., as well as positions with Novare Kapital AB and McKinsey & Co Inc.

Ekholm is a member of the Board of Directors for Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, Alibaba Inc., NASDAQ OMX Group Inc. and Trimble Navigation Ltd. He is also a member of the University Board of KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

Chairman of the Board Leif Johansson says: "I am very pleased to announce the appointment of Börje Ekholm. He has a solid understanding of both the technology and business implications of the ongoing convergence of telecoms, IT and media. Having served on Ericsson's Board of Directors for the past ten years, Börje Ekholm has full understanding of the challenges and the opportunities Ericsson currently faces."

https://www.ericsson.com/news/2051527

Hans Vestberg is Out as CEO of Ericsson

Hans Vestberg has stepped down as President and CEO and member of Ericsson's Board of Directors.

Jan Frykhammar, Executive Vice President and CFO, will assume the CEO position until a new CEO is in office.

The resignation comes under pressure from the company's Board of Directors, which issued a statement saying that new leadership is required to address changing market conditions and "drive the next phase of Ericsson's development."  As stated during the disappointing financial report last week, the company must further cut expenses.

In a press statement, Chairman of the Board Leif Johansson says: "Hans Vestberg has led the company for seven years through significant industry and company transformation. Hans has been instrumental in building strong relationships with key customers around the world and his leadership and energy have been an inspiration to employees and leaders across Ericsson. However, in the current environment and as the company accelerates its strategy execution, the Board of Directors has decided that the time is right for a new leader to drive the next phase in Ericsson's development."

https://www.ericsson.com/news/2030327


  • In June 2009, Hans Vestberg took over as CEO of Ericsson, replacing Carl-Henric Svanberg who had taken over as CEO of BP.

IBM's Watson to Analyze Video Content

IBM introduced new Watson-powered cognitive services for unlocking data-rich insights for video content and audiences.

The idea is to apply cognitive technology for mining and analyzing the complex data in video.

“Companies are creating video with vast amounts of valuable data, but they don’t have a way to easily identify that information or audience reaction to it,” said Braxton Jarratt, general manager, IBM Cloud Video. “Today’s new services are a major step forward in using IBM’s cognitive and cloud capabilities to help companies unlock meaningful information about their videos and viewers so they can create and curate more personalized content that matters to specific audiences.”

Accessible through the IBM Cloud, these new services analyze video data that can otherwise be difficult and time-consuming to manually process. They include:            

  • Live Event Analysis: Combines Watson APIs with IBM Cloud Video streaming video solutions to track near real-time audience reaction of live events by analyzing social media feeds.
  • Video Scene Detection: Automatically segments videos into meaningful scenes to make it more efficient to find and deliver targeted content.
  • Audience Insights: Integrates IBM Cloud Video solutions with the IBM Media Insights Platform, a cognitive solution that uses Watson APIs to help identify audience preferences, including what they are watching and saying, through social media.   


http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/50889.wss

F5 Posts Strong Quarter, Sales Rise to $525.3 million, up 6% YoY

F5 Networks posted revenue of $525.3 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2016, up 6 percent from $496.5 million in the prior quarter and 5 percent from $501.3 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2015. For fiscal year 2016, revenue was $2.0 billion, up 4 percent from $1.92 billion last year.

GAAP net income for the fourth quarter was $108.9 million ($1.64 per diluted share) compared to $91.8 million ($1.37 per diluted share) in the third quarter of 2016 and $97.0 million ($1.36 per diluted share) in the fourth quarter a year ago. GAAP net income for the year was $365.9 million ($5.38 per diluted share) versus $365.0 million ($5.03 per diluted share) in fiscal year 2015.

"Strengthening product sales in the second half of fiscal 2016 culminated in strong fourth quarter results and record annual revenue and earnings,” said John McAdam, F5 president and chief executive officer. “On a regional basis, Americas, APAC and Japan all delivered solid sequential and year over year sales growth, while sales in EMEA were down significantly from the fourth quarter a year ago.

“We believe there are several emerging market conditions that are driving an increased appeal of our products with our customers. These include the ability to orchestrate SSL traffic flows, provision our proxy based security solutions to deploy a consistent security stack across on-premise, off-premise and public cloud infrastructures, and customers moving workloads to public and private cloud architectures. We believe these trends, combined with our new product offerings will drive our business forward in fiscal 2017 and beyond.

http://www.f5.com

Infinera Reports Revenue of $186 Million

Infinera reported GAAP revenue of $185.5 million for its third quarter of 2016 compared to $258.8 million in the second quarter of 2016 and $232.5 million in the third quarter of 2015. GAAP gross margin for the quarter was 45.6% compared to 47.8% in the second quarter of 2016 and 44.2% in the third quarter of 2015. GAAP operating margin for the quarter was (5.9)% compared to 6.2% in the second quarter of 2016 and 6.1% in the third quarter of 2015. GAAP net loss for the quarter was $(11.2) million, or $(0.08) per share, compared to net income of $11.5 million, or $0.08 per diluted share, in the second quarter of 2016, and net income of $8.5 million, or $0.06 per diluted share, in the third quarter of 2015.

“As expected, weak demand across much of our business in the third quarter led to financial results that were below our standards,” said Tom Fallon, Infinera’s Chief Executive Officer. “While the revenue environment is likely to remain challenging in the near term, we are making continued progress towards delivering our next generation of products and increasing the cadence in which we will introduce step function technology improvements. I firmly believe that we have the team and the core technologies that will enable us to recover from our current challenges and ultimately return to delivering differentiated financial results.”

http://www.infinera.com

Aqua Comms Appoints Nigel Bayliff as CEO

Aqua Comms , the operator of Ireland’s first dedicated subsea fibre-optic network interconnecting New York, Dublin and London, has appointed Nigel Bayliff as its new Chief Executive Officer, replacing interim CEO Greg Varisco, who remains a senior executive with the company.

“We are excited for Nigel to join the team as our new CEO,” remarks Mr. Varisco. “Nigel’s strategic vision, technological expertise and proven leadership experience with some of the most successful global telecom and subsea cable companies in the world will prove invaluable as Aqua Comms embarks on the next leg of its journey and expands its customer base and networks.”

Prior to joining Aqua Comms, Bayliff was advisor and consultant to cable development, private equity and government clients in the industry, and Vice-Chairman of the United Nations joint task force that examined the gathering of disaster mitigation and climate information from the global web of undersea cable systems.  Mr. Bayliff also served as CEO and a board member of Huawei Marine Networks, which he led from a start-up to initial success in the subsea cable construction industry while introducing several major, technological advances into the marketplace.  Prior to this, he was a member of the executive team of FLAG Telecom where he served as an officer and deputy chairman for a number of group companies.  At FLAG, Mr. Bayliff was responsible for the construction and operation of the FLAG Global Network, which encompasses 65,000 km of submarine cable systems and provides carrier-grade connectivity services to 40 countries.

http://www.AquaComms.com


https://youtu.be/SVjGxgPe8uY