Author: Admin Clear

HPE Announces New NVMe Storage Options and More at Discover 2019

Posted on by Admin Clear

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At Discover 2019, HPE announced new innovations expanding their Intelligent Data Platform to solve major challenges for our customers and drive new levels of enterprise agility.

HPE Primera, mission-critical redefined.

As enterprises become increasingly digital, new storage capabilities are required for mission-critical apps. While traditional high-end storage delivers extreme resiliency and performance, it also holds enterprises back with extreme complexity and administration.

The big storage news from HPE Discover was the announcement of a new high-end storage array called Primera.  Positioned above 3PAR in the HPE’s line-up, Primera is designed to compete against Dell’s PowerMax and Pure’s FlashArray//X at the upper edges of the storage market.

HPE Primera delivers the extreme resiliency and performance needed for the most demanding apps, but with the simplicity of the cloud. Enterprises no longer have to sacrifice cloud agility for high-end resiliency.

Primera is a new product, both hardware and software, but its legacy derives directly from 3PAR. Primera’s software stack is based on 3PAR’s operating system. HPE executives said a customer can install a Primera array in their data center on their own in less than 20 minutes, provision storage within seconds, and upgrade the software in five minutes, without rebooting or disrupting services.

HPE engineers based the design on the simplicity of their Nimble storage platform and mission-critical heritage of its high-end storage platform 3PAR StoreServ, and combined them with the intelligence (including AI-powered predictive analytics) of its InfoSight software.

The company’s target customers for Primera are enterprises with large-scale, mission-critical database environments as well as public-sector organizations or service providers looking to consolidate multi-tenant workloads.

HPE Primera radically transforms how high-end storage is deployed, managed, and upgraded – delivering an on-demand experience for instant app access and consumable as-a-service; app-aware resiliency that sees beyond storage with predictive analytics and backed with a 100% availability guarantee; and predictive acceleration with embedded AI for ultra-fast performance at scale for every mission critical app of today and tomorrow.

Extending HPE InfoSight to HPE SimpliVity

HPE SimpliVity is a market-leading HCI platform for data center virtualization and edge workloads. At HPE Discover, HPE announced HPE Simplivity as the first HCI solution to include HPE InfoSight.

HPE InfoSight leverages the power of predictive analytics and machine learning. These capabilities now provide HPE SimpliVity customers with system details for previous capacity consumption, trends, and forecasts to predict when additional hyperconverged nodes will be required. Data protection analytics analyze consumption patterns to identify when backup resources may be at capacity risk, and predictive wellness alerts alleviate common support issues that impact service. These innovative features should save customers time and reduce costs.

It is not surprising to see that HPE InfoSight now supports SimpliVity.  InfoSight, HPE’s predictive analytics solution, continues to expand across HPE’s data center portfolio.  The AI-driven predictive capabilities inherent in InfoSight once applied to Simplivity, should make HPE SimpliVity strongly competitive due to this differentiator.

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, simplicity of HCI with the flexibility of converged.

HPE’s Intelligent Data Platform goes beyond the storage layer to deliver the cloud experience on-premise. As IT struggles to scale its operations to meet growing needs, hyperconverged infrastructure delivers the freedom to innovate – on an architecture that is ideal for workloads with predictable growth, scaling compute and storage together.

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI (the “d” stands for “disaggregated”) is a bit of an odd duck. This software was first developed at Nimble before its acquisition by HPE, but updated to meet the current needs of the market.

HPE’s dHCI is a software stack providing the utility of HCI, including single-pane-of-glass manageability for storage and compute through a sophisticated vCenter plug-in. Instead of a dedicated appliance, dHCI runs on a combination of Nimble arrays and HPE ProLiant servers.

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI provides the simplified experience that has driven the success of HCI, while at the same time providing the flexibility of HPE composable infrastructure. It allows compute and storage to scale independently, delivering the right mix of resources for the hosted workloads. Its Nimble legacy ensures that InfoSight integration is there day one, bringing nearly a decade of predictive analytics models to the storage nodes.

HPE is targeting Nimble Storage dHCI at the mid-market where traditional composable infrastructure may be an over-fit, and traditional HCI too limiting.

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Clear Technologies, Inc Recognized on CRN’s 2019 Solution Provider 500 List

Posted on by Admin Clear

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Addison, Texas, June 5,2019–Clear Technologies, Inc., a Dallas-area based Information Technology Services and Solutions Provider, announced today that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has named Clear Technologies, Inc to its 2019 Solution Provider 500 list. This annual list ranks the largest North American IT channel partner organizations by revenue. The Solution Provider 500 is the industry standard for recognizing the highest performing technology integrators, strategic service providers and IT consultants. It is the industry’s predominant channel partner list, serving as a valuable resource for technology vendors looking to partner with top solution providers.

“The rapid development of new technology and information that is important to customers has impacted many solution providers. To say it has not would be false…” said, President, Phil Godwin. “…but what we feel separates us are our core values, that guide us throughout our dealings not only with our clients, but also in determining the direction of our company. Being recognized in the top 500 solution providers is validation of our client first approach.”

“The companies on this year’s list represent an incredible combined revenue of $320 billion, a sum that attests to their success in staying ahead of rapidly changing market demands,” said Bob Skelley, CEO of The Channel Company. “Congratulations to the solution provider organizations leading the way in digital transformation and the latest technology services.”

Clear Technologies began in 1993, purely as a hardware reseller of IBM’s Power line of data center infrastructure, such as the AS/400 line of servers. Clear added a multitude of other product lines to its resell portfolio, but also noticed a shift in the industry that caused them to want to understand the direction clients were headed. This lead to in 2010, the launch of its first homegrown product, Visual One Intelligence™, a storage analytics and reporting SaaS offering.

“At Clear Technologies, we think of transformation as a constant, instead of, as a destination. We invest in our clients by seeking to understand our client’s problems not only for today, but also tomorrow. That is what lead us to launch Clear Intelligence in 2018. We wanted to be prepared to answer the current and future AI/Cognitive needs of our clients” continued Godwin.

The complete 2019 Solution Provider 500 list is available online at www.CRN.com/SP500.

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IBM I Announces V7R4

Posted on by Admin Clear

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For the first time in over three years, IBM i announced a new release, Version 7 Release 4, which is generally available June 21, 2019, for POWER8 and POWER9 processors. With this announcement, the highly integrated IBM i:

  • Improves Scalability and Growth– The new updates allow the IBM i to meet your demands
  • Updates Security– Enhanced Security with tools and implementation of new protocols
  • Adds More Applications– Continues to add industry standards and popular tools
  • Expands 24/7 Capabilities– High Availability and Recovery improves with new options

IBM i systems continue to grow larger for analytics and cognitive workload, as well as, traditional workloads. With IBM Lab Services implementation, IBM i V7R4 will support 192 cores per LPAR as well as more disk capacity. Improved tools for measuring the 8 concurrent tasks (Intel Hyperthreading is 2 concurrent tasks) in the POWER8 and POWER9 network speed accelerates with 100 Gbps Ethernet adapter with options for RoCE (an NVMe protocol). IBM has Statement of Direction to add native IBM i support for Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe). IBM® Power® Enterprise Pools 2.0 allow E980 to more easily share and load balance processors.

The increased importance of security continues, as additional enhancements were included in the recent announcements. On POWER9 servers, PowerVM V3.1 uses on-chip compression/encryption to efficiently and securely move a live and active VM from one local server to another that shares the same storage. IBM i provides a tool to aid in understanding the minimum security to run a program. Also included is the industry standard Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3, a cryptographic protocol that provides network security between systems and/or users.

Popular industry tools are added in this announcement. Announced for statistics, analysis, and data mining, R programing language is able to take advantage of the 8 concurrent tasks on a POWER9 chip SMT-8, four times more than Intel processors.

The announcement increases the i’s High Availability and Recovery. IBM i data can be saved to the Cloud through BRMS with IBM Cloud Storage Solutions for i. IBM DB2® Mirror for i, available for IBM i 7.4 clients, provides a simplified method of near-continuous IBM i DB2 database replication for local environments.

IBM i users continue to benefit from an integrated, reliable operating system providing an easy to scale and manage environment. Take advantage of Clear Technologies 25+ years of IBM i experience to help integrate those technologies that would benefit your IBM i environment. Our very own Neil Clark has been testing V7R4 for a few months now.

In the past, IBM has supported two levels of IBM i concurrently. Please be aware that with the announcement of V7R4, we are expecting a withdrawal notice for V7R2 soon. Currently, IBM has no announcement of V7R2 support withdrawal, but V7R4 is not generally available until June 21.

Also, POWER7 processors are not supported under V7R4, so IBM has taken the first step in the ending the lifecycle of the entire POWER7 family.

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Industry 4.0 – Using AI in the Global Industrial Products Industry

Posted on by Admin Clear

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The following contains excerpts from “The Artificial Intelligence Effect On Industrial Products” by IBM

A small group of out performers in the industrial products industry is using AI/cognitive to help deliver on the promise of Industry 4.0.

Using AI to unlock the hidden insights in industrial products data

The industrial products industry is awash with data. Instrumentation, sensors, machinery, automation systems, production and operation, maintenance records, and health and safety applications collectively produce a constant flow of data. Industrial products enterprises need technology that supports the vertical delivery of insightful data throughout the organization, both to meet consumer needs and to aim for continuous process improvement. In this report, financial outperformers share their AI successes.

The global industrial products challenge

Organizations in the global industrial products industry face significant cost pressures, increased regulations, disruptive technologies, and the increasingly costly delivery of raw resources.

High volatility in commodity prices has put severe pressure on company margins and can quickly expose inefficient operations. Processes, workflows, and the understanding of performance are dramatically changing. Operations can no longer work in linear execution, or in isolation of other functional work streams such as engineering, maintenance, and planning. Instead, the value chain needs to perform as an integrated whole to support the fluctuating demand cycles and higher cost supply activities.

New AI technologies have the capacity to make sense of the abundance of data through systems that can adapt and learn. By expanding digital intelligence adoption, AI technologies can help executives translate data into insights to drive greater innovation, and better operational and financial decisions.

To understand how organizations can better plan for AI adoption, the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV), in collaboration with Oxford Economics, surveyed more than 6,000 C-suite members and heads of functions worldwide—including 300 industrial products respondents. The goal was to better understand their considerations, expectations, and objectives in applying AI solutions to the most pressing business challenges and opportunities.

This report explores how industrial products executives perceive the readiness of the technology, the industry, and their organizations for AI adoption. It identifies how companies are currently applying AI and their plans in the next few years. We also identified a select group of outperformers that are ahead of others in AI adoption and examined what they’re doing differently compared to similar organizations.

Why AI and why now?

AI enables organizations to synthesize vast amounts of structured and unstructured data, query results in natural language, and apply machine-learning capabilities to data analysis. Together, these capabilities can significantly enhance insights, efficiency, and speed. Industrial products companies are at a critical inflection point in their adoption of AI. Surveyed executives recognize that the technology is market-ready, and well over half say the industry and organizations are ready to adopt it.

So where do industrial products organizations specifically want to invest in AI? Each of these three priorities presents significant opportunities to improve efficiency and decision making.

• For quality control, AI systems can analyze data from raw materials, production lines, finished products, maintenance records, and customer complaints to identify causal factors that led to quality problems.

• In production operations, AI systems can continuously learn from process data and actions taken by top-line operators. Similarly, it helps predict and identify impacts and recommend actions to improve production.

• For machine maintenance, AI can identify anomalies, assess their criticality, determine the root cause, and help maintenance technicians correctly perform the repair the first time.

Industrial products leaders gain value from AI

How can enterprises capitalize on new AI capabilities? To help answer this question, we analyzed the survey responses and identified a small group of industrial products outperformers, consisting of 12 percent of our study.

This group self-reported that it significantly outperformed revenue compared to competitors over the past three years, and was significantly more efficient and profitable.

What do these outperformers do differently?

They use data to glean insight, and are confident their organizations are ready for an AI future. Over seven out of ten of these leaders strongly agree that their organization is ready to adopt AI, compared to two out of ten of all other respondents.

Given the potential benefits, not surprisingly, a number of industrial products outperformers have already begun to adopt AI—nearly two thirds (64 percent) versus only 32 percent of all others surveyed.

By examining these leaders, other organizations can understand the need to take action in the AI era. They can then begin to:

• Build an AI data foundation

• Focus on new skills

• Create a new level of intelligence

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Storwize V5000 – IBM Announcement & How Clear Can Help

Posted on by Admin Clear

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IBM, on April 2, announced a broad spectrum of innovations, enhancements and new features across their entire storage portfolio, aimed at providing leading-edge solutions for 21stcentury business and technology challenges.

This completes the refresh of the Storwize product line, including the previously refreshed Storwize V7000 line.

With the growth of data, companies are in of need low-risk IT solutions, to do more with fewer resources, and to drive business value from their oceans of data. These requirements make infrastructure automation and intelligence increasingly essential to the successful data-driven company. Organizations are needing to transform and become more agile, to be able to pivot toward new opportunities faster– which their infrastructure must allow.

To address these critical business challenges, IBM announced the new Storwize V5000 family offerings that complement Storwize V7000 Gen3. The new Storwize V5010E and Storwize V5030E models provide increased performance and enterprise-class functionality, availability and reliability in easy-to-buy, easy-to-use, and easy-to-manage entry storage systems.

Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) technology can help lower storage latency, enabling analytics and AI applications powering the new economy. The new all-flash Storwize V5100F and V5100 bring the performance advantages of end-to-end NVMe into a new affordable system. These new members of the Storwize V5000 family combine the proven capabilities of IBM FlashCore technology with NVMe performance and the rich enterprise-class data services of IBM Spectrum Virtualize software-defined storage to create a solution with the capability, scalability, and speed required to support demanding AI and analytics applications.

Multicloud architectures are a powerful new deployment model rapidly sweeping modern business ecosystems. Companies both large and small need to keep some data on premise for increased performance and security, while at the same time moving other data out into the public cloud for increased cost efficiency and business agility. The entire IBM Storwize family, FlashSystem 9100, SAN Volume Controller, and VersaStack leverage the extensive capabilities of IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud to simplify the implementation of multicloud solutions. Now, IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud can be deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as well as on IBM Cloud to increase flexibility and choice.

Businesses need to be focused more on developing new revenue streams and less on repetitive maintenance tasks. That’s where Visual One Intelligence™ comes in at. Visual One Intelligence™ is your single pane of glass for your entire storage environment. Visual One’s reporting and analytics is proven to provide valuable information that can do everything from reduce the time spent on those repetitive maintenance tasks to plan future storage purchases using trend reporting based off storage growth and usage. Before purchasing new storage, use Visual One to truly gain an understanding of your current storage environment, improve efficiency, and even discover unused storage.

IBM is focused on continuing to provide practical, comprehensive, and cost-efficient storage solutions for the real-world business and technology challenges faced by clients. Visual One not only helps you gain an understanding, but it can help you communicate current and future storage needs with management. With Visual One, you are able to learn exactly which workloads in your current environment would be more suitable for the cloud. You are also able to understand which of your current workloads would benefit from being placed on one of the new Storwize V5000 family line.

Contact your Clear Technologies rep to learn more about how the new V5000 storage line and Visual One Intelligence™ could benefit you!

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Clear Technologies HQ move!

Posted on by Admin Clear

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We’ve got some news! We moved!

We are excited to announce that as of April 1, Clear Technologies moved from our old office on Westgrove. We spent the previous five years in a building about a mile away from our new location — our old office served us well, and we made great memories there, but we couldn’t be more excited about our new space.

Luckily, we have not moved far away as we are just down the road in Addison Tower. The growth we have experienced over the past five years called for us to move.

This new office allows us a few benefits:

  1. Location– It is still centrally located in Addison which puts in in the middle of many of our customers and close to all major highways. We now have much more parking space.
  2. Space– We often would invite clients and partners the opportunity to work from our office, but with the growth we needed more room. This move has increased the amount of cubicles and huddle rooms so that we can still offer the ability to work from our office.
  3. New look and Feel– With the move it allowed for us to “modernize” our space to better reflect our transformation as a company.

It has been an exciting three years for Clear, and we look at this new location as the start of another chapter in our history. We’re still working on getting settled in and adding artwork to the walls, but we’re incredibly excited to be in the new space. Be on the lookout for an invitation as we’ll be hosting a happy hour soon for clients and partners, and if you’re in the area, feel free to stop in and say hi!

Thanks for everyone’s support through the years and with the move especially our leadership, Phil Godwin, James Hargis, and Van Symons.

The new address is 16415 Addison Rd Suite 300, Addison, TX, 75001

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The Cost of Disaster Recovery vs the Price of Downtime

Posted on by Admin Clear

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A Backup and Disaster Recovery (BU/DR) solution is a lot like car insurance; you hate paying the bill, but you’re sure glad you did when there’s an accident. And yet, many businesses still refuse to implement a proper data protection solution because they view it as an expense instead of an investment. After all, why pay for something that might never get used? However, with increasingly complex infrastructures, exponential data growth and rapidly growing cybersecurity threats, chances of data loss become more and more likely. That’s why it’s extremely important to understand the cost of implementing a BU/DR solution versus the price of not doing so.

Consider the following scenario:

  • A water pipe bursts on a Sunday at 11 pm and floods the entire data center.
  • Water damage completely destroys the primary server, the backup server and the tape library along with all its data storage media.
  • There’s 1 TB of critical data under protection that’s backed up to an offsite tape library daily at 8:00 pm.
  • The offsite location is 50 miles from the production site.

Without a proper BU/DR scenario, the recovery process will look a little like this:

  1. First, you’re going to have to replace the damaged equipment. This means contacting a hardware vendor and placing an order for new equipment that you hope can be sent overnight to your data center.
  2. Next, you’ll need to retrieve your offsite tapes. With a 50 mile round trip and the time it takes to actually collect and package the tape, this can probably be done while awaiting the new hardware.
  3. Then, you’ll have to install and configure the new equipment and ingest backup data from the tapes to your backup server.
  4. Once all that’s complete, you can restore data from the backup server to your primary server, test that everything is working correctly, and return to normal operations.

If you’re able to complete all this by 11:00am on Tuesday, you’ll have been down thirty-six (36) hours.

So what has that cost you? Well, if your business generates $1,000 of revenue per hour and it’s offline for 36 hours, you’ve already lost $36,000. That doesn’t even factor in the hardware replacement costs which could be anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000. Then there are the man hours involved in standing up and restoring the infrastructure.

This means being down for a day-and-a-half can cost your business well over $50,000. And that doesn’t even factor in potential loss of customer due of damaged credibility.

The time it took to bring your business back online was thirty-six hours! This is commonly known as the recovery time objective (RTO) and most modern business try to get that number down to an hour. For a business today to be offline for a day-and-a-half is absolutely intolerable!

Another important metric is recovery point objective (RPO), which is the time between backups. In our example, the RPO would be 3 hours, since the most recent backup was at 8 pm. This means any data created after 8 pm would be lost.

Today’s backup and disaster recovery systems can offer very low RTO and RPO at an extremely cost effective price. If you find that your current backup strategy does not meet your RTO and RPO needs, there are many solutions available today that can resolve that issue. Carbonite Server, for example, offers RTO and RPO measurable in minutes rather than hours or days.

So when evaluating a new data protection solution, consider the price of downtime instead of the cost of the solution. A little investment up front may can save you a lot of pain down the line!

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Security Assessment for the Digital Age

Posted on by Admin Clear

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By 2020, 30% of Security spending will be on vendors with integrated platforms

By 2020, 50% of Security telemetry will leverage Machine Learning & Cognitive solutions.

In the newest digital age, security is one of the most important assets to have in an IT environment. Despite the rapid pace of innovation and growing sophistication of enterprise cybersecurity operations, the success and impact of attacks continues to expand. The greatest gap in our advancement of cybersecurity effectiveness is the understanding of cybersecurity risk.

Clear Technologies helps uncover the security issues that management is concerned with – before they can impact the overall business. This includes unique challenges which can be answered by one or a bundle of security solutions. Clear Technologies Security Profile Assessment helps uncover security solutions aligned to core areas of the NIST Cyber Security Framework to ensure a holistic security posture.

Clear Technologies is offering security assessment checks to analyze vulnerable points such as:

  • Endpoint Security
  • Data Security
  • Perimeter Security
  • Identity & Access Management
  • Mobile Security
  • And more!

The purpose of the Security Profile Assessment is to gather information about your organization’s security controls, provide reporting that contains a summary and action plan to improve security posture, and how to respond to gaps & weaknesses in place. That, in turn, will enhance overall confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your organization’s data and information by following the included action plan.

If you are interested in a undergoing a security assessment, contact Brian Murphy, bmurphy@cleartechnologies.net.

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IBM Think Recap 2019

Posted on by Admin Clear

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Clear Thoughts on IBM THINK 2019

In mid-February, a group from Clear Technologies had the privilege to go to San Francisco for IBM THINK, which included IBM PartnerWorld. IBM THINK is IBM’s annual technology conference showcasing the latest products, services and technologies as well as use cases, demos and client testimonials. As an IBM Platinum partner with meetings to attend with clients that were in attendance, discussions with key IBM executives at PartnerWorld, booth duty to show our storage analytics and reporting, Visual One Intelligence™, as well as a full conference of break-out sessions and lectures, it was a whirlwind week!

There were three main takeaways we noted after a very busy week for our team: 1) The Hybrid Cloud message is now more important than ever 2) AI Anywhere with IBM Watson leading the charge 3) Data Center Infrastructure will continue to be relevant to our clients

In total, Clear had 38 meetings with various clients, prospects, IBM executives and partners. While the meeting agendas and goals were unique to each meeting, the overall themes kept going back to two areas Clear has clearly differentiated itself from others in the market – Clear Intelligence and Visual One Intelligence™.

The AI solutions and use cases we have developed and continue to develop through Clear Intelligence continue to spark interest from clients and partners of all shapes and sizes, especially our Design Thinking Workshops. One thing that remains a constant is our focus on driving business value and solving problems. While we wish we could work with every client in every industry, we are focusing on solving unique issues in three main verticals: Distribution, Industrial and Utilities. In these three markets, we will focus significant resources in the AI arena focused on Vision solutions such as IBM PowerAI Vision, which is now under the IBM Watson Machine Learning umbrella. Clear Technologies intends to launch its own AI Vision Cloud in April for clients to run Proof of Concepts in a quick and agile way to prove their use cases prior to committing to a large investment of time, resources and money.

Storage is another area the Clear team committed a great deal of time discussing while at IBM THINK, which goes very well with our Clear Intelligence mission now that IBM has a family of storage products designed for Artificial Intelligence workloads. However, Visual One Intelligence™ still represents the majority of our discussion in the storage area. Our partners and clients continue to see the unique heterogenous analytics Visual One provides as well as how it can enable a true Hybrid IT strategy by identifying the right platform for each application and workload. The extremely fast time to value is also still very unique in this space.

Overall, Clear Technologies enjoyed a tremendous week at IBM THINK. We thank all of our clients, prospects and partners for making it such as success. As always, we stand ready to discover, pursue and solve problems that are meaningful to you.

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Think 2019 Preview – 10 Sessions to Look Forward To

Posted on by Admin Clear

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IBM Think 2019 is around the corner! Think is IBM’s flagship conference, focused on delivering the technical training, certifications, expertise, and networking opportunities customers need to stay ahead. Think 2019 is the place where IBM unveils and presents the technologies it feels will help transform customer’s IT environments. Below are some of the scheduled sessions that we feel will help lead customers into the future:

Digitizing the Flow of Goods, Information and Money with Blockchain

Early adopters have built blockchain networks to re-wire their existing processes and transactions. Networks across banking, financial markets, insurance, retail, consumer goods and others have moved into production and are realizing business value. The vision of these networks is to fully connect the flow of goods to information to money to form efficient networks to automate business processes in global trade. Leaders in the blockchain industry are realizing this vision today, including the leader of a dozen major European banks, a pioneer of a food safety network, a consumer goods leader and the team that is building a payments network.

The Multicloud Enterprise: Deliver Data Management and Availability with Veeam and IBM

Join Veeam for a discussion on how the senior datacenter executive’s job is changing from delivery to an IT business role. Bit by bit, the landscape, infrastructure and processes that we utilize will broaden to support a federated, multicloud world, where on-premises as well as a mix of private, managed, public and SaaS clouds are the new norm. Intelligent data management and availability must adapt to meet new business expectations. Veeam and IBM solutions can help. Join us to discuss: Why are our environments and requirements changing, and what do the new realities look like? What is a sound approach to intelligent data management and improved availability? How can Veeam and IBM solutions meet the needs of today and tomorrow?

Out-of-the-Box Blockchain Solution Acceleration Platform for Supply Chain

After years of working with top clients to deploy scalable supply chain solutions like IBM Food Trust, IBM has developed a rich set of capabilities around building Blockchain-based supply chain solutions. These capabilities, served through an API platform, address supply chain network requirements such as ecosystem onboarding, multi-party document workflow, asset provenance, invoicing, etc. Clients and partners can develop unique solutions to address ecosystem-wide requirements or individual needs as part of a supply chain network. This session introduces the value, capabilities and architecture of these assets, and showcases how they are used in some of IBM’s Blockchain solutions like IBM Food Trust and Blockchain Invoicing for TradeLens.

All Together Now: Building a Multicloud Strategy with IBM Power Systems

Industry experts and leading CIOs agree: Enterprises should pursue a hybrid or “multicloud” strategy to ensure they will have the agile, secure, high-performing and cost-effective IT resources necessary for future growth, innovation and competitiveness. But how to put all the pieces together? This session shares how clients can leverage multiple clouds and architectures in the cloud, including IBM Power Systems-based VMs, containers and GPUs in IBM Cloud, to deliver the best digital experiences from a heterogeneous, multicloud strategy.

Nutanix Basics: Unify AIX and Linux Infrastructure and Cut Deployment and Management Time by 50%

Enjoy fresh levels of simplicity in provisioning, managing and running your AIX and Linux environments on a common datacenter infrastructure. Learn how IBM Hyperconverged Systems powered by Nutanix converges compute, storage and virtualization into standardized building blocks that build a foundation for your private cloud. This infrastructure can start small and then seamlessly grow to handle the most demanding workloads, from midsized companies to the world’s largest corporations.

Building Computing Architecture for the Era of Multicloud and AI

A “cloud-first” strategy drives efficiency and competitiveness. But as organizations deploy more demanding, data-intensive workloads like in-memory databases, predictive analytics and AI in a cloud environment, most infrastructure hits a wall when it comes to performance. Learn how “purpose-built” infrastructure and co-optimized software can help you overcome these challenges, accelerate your journey to multicloud and drive performance for cutting-edge workloads like AI.

What’s New and What’s Next for AI in Watson Supply Chain Solutions

IDC projects that the application of artificial intelligence (AI) will increase cost efficiencies by up to 10%. Already, AI capabilities in IBM Supply Chain Insights (SCI) and Business Transaction Intelligence (BTI) are driving dramatic efficiencies and optimizing decision-making for clients across industries. Join us to hear their stories and learn how we’re extending the value of SCI and BTI with new capabilities, such as anomaly detection in supply chain processes, leveraging conversational analytics for response management and automatic creation of supply chain playbooks. We’ll also discuss our product roadmap and vision for integrating with solutions for Blockchain, sourcing, inventory, order management and optimization.

Learn about IBM’s Storage Solutions for Data-Driven Businesses

We live in a data-driven world, and it’s getting more data-driven by the day. IDC reports that “By 2020, 50% of the Global 2000 will see the majority of their business depend upon having ability to create digitally enhanced products, services and experiences.” To face all these challenges, the right infrastructure matters—storage matters. Hear how IBM provides the most comprehensive portfolio of storage products to help you prepare for a data-driven future.

IBM Storage Solutions for IBM Blockchain

Blockchain is becoming a disruptive technology in payments, logistics, medicine or anywhere a trusted, immutable ledger with provenance is required. But finding hard numbers on the storage required for on-chain data for Hyperledger blockchains is difficult, due to the newness of the technology and a lack of documentation from organizations using Blockchain in daily operations. IBM has recently announced an end-to-end, storage-to-compute, on-premises Blockchain solution for your distributed peer. Come hear about the latest IBM storage solutions specifically for Blockchain, including use cases and storage impacts.

How IBM PowerAI Vision Brings AI within Reach

Computer vision applications—from autonomous driving to automated inspection to clinical diagnosis—increasingly rely on complex neural models. But many researchers and developers are not able to take advantage of these powerful tools because of a gap in deep learning skills. In this discussion, you’ll learn how IBM PowerAI Vision streamlines the process of developing computer vision and AI applications by providing a powerful, integrated development environment from data preparation to guided model development to inference deployment.

If you’re attending Think 2019 be sure and stop by the TechData booth, say hi to our team and check out whats new with Visual One Intelligence™.

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