TechTouch Asia

- The world's first Open Accelerator Infrastructure (OAI)-compliant and liquid cooling rack-scale AI computing product, X-MAN 4.0, is jointly launched by Baidu and Inspur - Inspur launches the first 21” reference system supporting the OAI Universal BaseBoard (UBB) specification Inspur , a data centre and artificial intelligence (AI) full-stack solutions provider, has announced two AI-driven open computing systems. The X-MAN 4.0, developed with Baidu, is the world’s first OAI-compliant and liquid-cooled rack-scale AI computing product optimised for deep neural network applications, the OCP Platinum Member and OCP Solution Provider said. Source: Inspur. The X-MAN 4.0. The hardware needed to run AI is becoming more complex, Inspur says, with AI accelerator integration typically taking six to 12 months. The OAI specification—led by Baidu, Facebook and Microsoft in the Open Compute Project (OCP) community—centralises the technical specifications of the accelera...

Workiva , the cloud provider of connected reporting and compliance solutions, and accounting automation software player  BlackLine   have announced that their platforms are now integrated. The integration will enable users to seamlessly connect and transfer data between the two platforms, improving accuracy and transparency in the record-to-report process. “Many of our customers use BlackLine to automate balance sheet reconciliations and other processes they need for a successful financial close before they use the Workiva platform for reporting and compliance,” said Mike Rost, VP of Partners and Alliances at Workiva. “With this new integration, our joint customers will be able to benefit from better transparency across applications and a higher level of trust and confidence in the data they report.” Both providers were named Leaders in Gartner’s 2018 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Close Solutions.* “Thousands of leading finance and accounting teams around the...

- The outlook on renewables as a source of data centre power has shifted - Rack density has increased, but not as much as expected - Edge computing grows in importance - Talent management has to evolve Vertiv has identified an increasing focus on edge computing for data centres as we move towards 2025. Data centre operators and owners in Singapore and Asia Pacific are highly optimistic about the future of edge computing, a new survey from Vertiv has revealed. In Data Centre 2025: Closer to the Edge, a global, industrywide survey* conducted by Vertiv , 57% of respondents from Singapore expect IT resource utilisation at the edge to reach at least 60% by 2025. This reflects a global sentiment on the increasing prevalence of edge computing in the data centre landscape, which is fuelled by more process-intensive applications such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, the Internet of things and 5G technology. Globally, 55% of respondents expect IT resourc...

Fuji Xerox Singapore, a document and communications solutions, provider, brought together industry leaders and senior executives to share research insights and enterprise implementation best practices in enabling a future ‘smarter’ workplace in Singapore last week. The second Innovation Re:Mix Forum Future x Smart 2019 featured keynote presentations, panel discussions, and interactive workshops which led back to customer pain points. On creating a ‘smarter’ workplace, US-based Dr Lynn Wilcox, CTO, Fuji Xerox Palo Alto  Laboratory (FXPAL) and Cheng discussed how enterprises can leverage on ambient computing, and enterprise AI to drive productivity, and improve collaboration and communications within an increasingly mobile workforce. The laboratory’s work on the Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet of Humans (IoH), human-sensing and artificial intelligence (AI) in shaping future workplace collaborations was shared. "We’re trying to provide good for the people. We’re ...

Digital journeys are very much a product of corporate vision, customer expectations and industry landscapes, shared a panel convened during the Fuji Xerox Innovation Re:Mix Forum Future x Smart 2019 . Asked about what triggers digital transformation Patrick Kok, MD, Group Operations, Great Eastern Life said that his company wanted to increase speed to market, improve the cust experience and reduce the cost of internal operations while increasing efficiency. He added that a customer’s pain points should dictate what kind of technology should be used. “Digital transformation has changed consumer behaviour a lot. My take is if you want to look at digital transformation, start with the customer first, then you work backwards,” he said. Dr Lily Kong, President, Lee Kong Chian Chair Professor of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University (SMU) divided digital transformation drivers into the reactive and the proactive. An example of a reactive driver would be massive open online c...

Enterprise data management company Rubrik is ramping up in Asia. The company offers software-based platform that delivers backup, instant recovery, archival, search, analytics, compliance, and copy data management for data centres and clouds. "Multicloud (is what) companies are struggling with. We have to get the cloud right. It's what the company is built around," Kamal Brar, newly-appointed VP, Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) for Rubrik said. He elaborated that the company's value proposition is its API-based policy-driven platform built with next-generation operating architecture in mind. The cloud-agnostic and application-agnostic platform provides data recovery, governance, compliance, and cloud mobility capabilities in a multicloud world. The technology can be used to trigger backups automatically based on weather information, for example. "We've grown as a company in the last three years. We've evolved from purely protecting customers to now let...

by Ben Chan, Chairman, the WOLOT Foundation . Utilised in business decision-making and data modelling, data is the key raw material for the new digital economy. It can be used to continually improve user experiences, and help to optimise and create more smart applications. There are key issues surrounding its usage, however. The man in the street may be reluctant to share too many insights about his behaviour or preferences. He doesn't know how it's going to be used, and even if he does give permission for data-sharing, there's always the risk that those permissions are ignored or tampered with. Last but not least, there is nothing in it for him to actually share his data. Privacy protection and data ownership have long been the core unresolved issues for data assetisation. These issues need to be resolved in order to achieve mainstream adoption of big data. To realise true data assetisation, we​​ require Blockchain technology.    Firstly, it promote...