Category: Enterprise

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Leading cloud gaming pioneers adopt NVIDIA GRID platform

Jen-Hsun Huang at CES
Jen-Hsun Huang at CES

Six leading international cloud-gaming companies plan to use the NVIDIA  GRID Cloud Gaming Platform to deliver gaming services to global broadband companies.

The NVIDIA GRID Platform enables the smooth, seamless interactive experience of a high-performance gaming PC anywhere, on any screen – including smart TVs, PCs, tablets and smartphones.

NVIDIA GRID is a server designed to concurrently serve up to 36 times more HD-quality game streams than first-generation cloud-gaming systems, while reducing lag. It is fully integrated with a high density of NVIDIA® GPUs, specialised graphics-application streaming software and NVIDIA® VGX™ Hypervisor technology, which allows multiple users to share a GPU.

Initial partners on the NVIDIA GRID Platform include Agawi (United States); Cloud Union (China); Cyber Cloud Technologies (China); G-cluster Global (Japan); Playcast Media Systems (Israel); and Ubitus (Taiwan).

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Gartner: Worldwide IT spending to reach US$3.7 trillion in 2013

GartnerWorldwide IT spending is projected to total US$3.7 trillion in 2013, a 4.2 percent increase from 2012 spending of $3.6 trillion, according to the latest forecast by Gartner. The 2013 outlook for IT spending growth has been revised upward from 3.8 percent in the 3Q12 forecast.

Gartner analysts said much of this spending increase is the result from projected gains in the value of foreign currencies versus the US dollar. When measured in constant dollars, 2013 spending growth is forecast to be 3.9 percent.

The Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast is the leading indicator of major technology trends across the hardware, software, IT services and telecom markets. For more than a decade, global IT and business executives have been using these highly anticipated quarterly reports to recognize market opportunities and challenges, and base their critical business decisions on proven methodologies rather than guesswork.

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hybris announces first commerce solution specifically designed for telcos

hybrishybris has announced the industry’s only commerce solution specifically designed to help carriers sell more phones, plans and value-added services on the web and in the store. The new hybris Telco Accelerator comes bundled with the industry acclaimed hybris Commerce Suite and includes capabilities aimed at helping carriers launch fully functional wireless phone commerce experiences that drive higher average revenue per user (ARPU) in as little as three to four months.

“hybris has long been recognised as offering the best multi-channel user experience for selling anything online” according to Ariel Ludi, CEO of hybris. “Now, the hybris Telco Accelerator makes it much easier and faster for wireless carriers to implement a feature-rich commerce solution specifically designed to deliver a rich shopping experience for their customers regardless of channel.”

hybris Telco Accelerator includes the rich set of B2B and B2C commerce functionality rated by both major IT analyst firms as “leader” and among the top 2 or 3 general-purpose commerce platforms in the world – and now tailored for telcos.

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NVIDIA receives US$20m DARPA contract for high-performance embedded processor research

NVIDIANVIDIA has been awarded a contract worth up to $20 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to research embedded processor technologies that could lead to dramatic improvements in the ability of autonomous vehicles to collect and process data from on-board sensors.

DARPA is the US Defense Department’s research and development arm. The five-year contract, awarded under DARPA’s Power Efficiency Revolution For Embedded Computing Technologies (PERFECT) program, will fund research for processors that are 75-times more energy efficient than current embedded solutions. The goal is to enable surveillance and computer vision systems in ground and airborne vehicles to collect and analyze vastly more data than can be processed today in real time.

Existing embedded processors deliver about 1 gigaflops of performance (1 billion floating point operations each second) per watt. The NVIDIA programme, known as Project Osprey, will research low-power circuits and extremely efficient architectures and programming systems that enable 75 gigaflops per watt, using process technologies as advanced as 7 nanometre (nm) compared with today’s 28-nm process.

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NetApp supports Amazon Web Services Direct Connect with private storage solution

NetAppThe new NetApp Private Storage for Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an enterprise storage solution that utilises AWS Direct Connect to provide customers the ability to establish a dedicated network connection from their existing infrastructure to AWS.

With this offering, organisations can now replicate data from on-premise NetApp storage environments to NetApp Private Storage in an AWS Direct Connect facility to leverage on-demand cloud services. NetApp Private Storage for AWS allows enterprises to build an agile cloud infrastructure that balances internal datacenter resources along with AWS cloud resources to best meet their business needs.

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Gartner’s Top 5 IT predictions for China in 2013 and beyond

GartnerGartner has published its top five IT predictions for China in 2013 and beyond, as China’s IT market undergoes major transformation, especially in cloud and mobility. Analysts said that although China’s IT market has similarities with the global IT market, it also faces challenges and opportunities that are very specific to the Chinese marketplace.

Enterprise spending on IT in China is forecast to grow from US$117.8 billion in 2013 to reach $172.4 billion in 2016, representing a compound annual growth rate of 8 percent, compared to a global growth rate of 3 percent over the same period, according to Gartner.

“In common with many emerging markets, cloud and mobile initiatives are hot and enterprises are also making progress in adopting virtualisation technologies, a key stepping stone in the journey to cloud,” said Matthew Cheung, principal research analyst at Gartner. “Without the legacy systems that hamper many western enterprises, Chinese organisations have an opportunity to leapfrog in the adoption of new technologies. However, the current hype around cloud could also result in its failure to live up to market expectation in a few years time. In mobility, China is a market characterised by strong local flavors, especially in the fast growing smartphone and tablet markets.”

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Gartner predictions for IT organisations and users for 2013 and beyond

GartnerGartner has revealed its top predictions for IT organisations and IT users for 2013 and beyond.

Gartner’s top predictions focus on economic risks, opportunities and innovations that will impel CIOs to move to the next generation of business-driven solutions. Selected from across Gartner’s research areas as the most compelling and critical predictions, they address the trends and topics that underline the reduction of control that IT has over the forces that affect it.

“The priorities of CEOs must be dealt with by CIOs who exist in a still-turbulent economy and increasingly uncertain technology future,” said Daryl Plummer, Managing Vice President and Gartner Fellow. “As consumerisation takes hold and the Nexus of Forces drives CEOs to certain expectations, CIOs must still provide reliability, serviceability and availability of systems and services. Their priorities must span multiple areas. As the world of IT moves forward, it is finding that it must coordinate activities in a much wider scope than it once controlled, and as a result, a loss of control echoes through several predictions we are making.”

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Copyright hindering democratisation of 3D

Gavin Greenwalt: Copyright owners own the right to models of their products
Gavin Greenwalt: Copyright owners own the right to models of their products

Increasing power of GPUs is enabling designers to create 3D models quicker and in greater detail. Such additional details may include specific models of cars, cameras or other products instead of just generic models. This should pave the way towards democratisation of 3D.

However, a major barrier can halt this progress.

While creating a specific product is now easier, using that created model may be a challenge. Standing in the way are copyright laws and more importantly, copyright owners.

“Copyright owners own the right to models of their products. They can decide whether users can use or should remove 3D models of their products. Users need to seek permission to use such models,” said Gavin Greenwalt, Senior Artist of Straightface Studios.

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Khronos updates OpenCL 1.2 specification

khronos-group-logoThe Knronos Group has announced the ratification and public release of an update to the OpenCL 1.2 specification, the open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors. This backwards compatible version updates the core OpenCL 1.2 specification with bug fixes and clarifications and defines additional optional extensions for enhanced performance, functionality and robustness for parallel programming on a wide variety of platforms. Optional extensions are not required to be supported by a conformant OpenCL implementation, but are expected to be widely available; they define functionality that is likely to move into the required feature set in a future revision of the OpenCL specification. The updated OpenCL 1.2 specifications, together with online reference pages and reference cards, are available at www.khronos.org/opencl/.

“The OpenCL working group continues to listen closely to the demands of the developer community, and this update provides a timely increase in functionality and reliability of code ported across vendor implementations,” said Neil Trevett, chair of the OpenCL working group, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA. “The new extensions enable early access to functionality for key use cases, including security capabilities for implementations of WebCL that enable access to OpenCL within a browser.”

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Gartner: Worldwide server shipments up 3.6%, revenue down 2.8%

GartnerIn the third quarter of 2012 worldwide server shipments grew 3.6 percent year-on-year, while revenue decreased 2.8 from the third quarter of 2011, according to Gartner, Inc.

“The third quarter of 2012 again produced shipment growth on a worldwide level, but server revenue was weak due to ongoing economic weakness and market segment differences,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. “Only the North America and Asia/Pacific regions managed any revenue growth, and even those were essentially flat year to year, with North America showing a 1.1 percent increase and Asia/Pacific a 0.7 percent increase. The picture in terms of shipments was slightly more positive with North America, Latin America and Asia/Pacific all growing, but both EMEA and Japan continue to struggle and both saw shipments contract, compared to the same period last year.”

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Rhythm & Hues makes skies soar with NVIDIA GPUs in Life of Pi

Global visual effects giant Rhythm & Hues (R&H) recently completed the lion’s share of visual effects shots on the acclaimed new film, “Life of Pi,” leveraging NVIDIA GPUs to maximize throughput and accelerate creative workflows. “Life of Pi,” from Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee, tapped legions of R&H artists at offices in Los Angeles, India, Kuala Lumpur, Vancouver, and Taiwan to create several hundred visual effects shots in stereo 3D that included the Bengal tiger, digitally recreated water and skies, Meerkat Island and myriad additional creatures and effects.

R&H is known for its custom development of proprietary visual effects tools, many of which are written specifically for the GPU. One of those tools, dubbed Rampage, was particularly instrumental in achieving the remarkable skies that set the tone in this tale of an Indian zookeeper’s son named Pi, shipwrecked with a Bengal tiger and adrift in the Pacific Ocean.

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hybris enables digital content providers to create high-value, ongoing relationships with customers

hybris has further strengthened its position of offering the most agile, most modern commerce platform by announcing important new features that empower publishers of books, magazines, games and software, as well as other service providers, to sell more digital goods, content and services online.

“Digital products are different from physical products. They’re alive,” stated Ariel Ludi, CEO of hybris. “Using the internet to stay connected after the initial sale, offering related or next-in-series products in context, gives publishers of any digital goods or content the ability to have high-value perpetual digital relationships with their customers. hybris helps them create – and grow – those relationships.”

A host of new enhancements to the hybris Commerce Suite, purpose-built to support the sale of non-physical products, enables online sellers to offer a variety of flexible recurring pricing models.  In addition, merchandisers can easily construct complex bundles of products, with sophisticated rule-based discounts, and give their customers the power to create their own packages with a modern guided-selling user experience.

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Mugshot: Informix

Founded as Relational Database Systems Inc in 1980, Informix Sofware was a leading developer of relational database management software across a variety of platforms, including Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Windows and Unix. After selling its core […]

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NetApp unleashes new Data ONTAP to enable greater IT agility

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Global business faces a new era in which agility in IT is central to success, today and in the future. Competition, an always-on global economy, and the urgency to make data a propellant for advantage all require the CIO to provide the business with an infrastructure agile enough to cope with a very dynamic business environment. Customers want to accelerate their business with greater efficiency and productivity, but they must think differently to remove the complexity, cost, and inefficiencies of decade-old IT approaches.

Today, businesses can make agility in IT a reality. NetApp, in collaboration with its partners, is introducing a new way for customers to fundamentally architect and manage their data storage infrastructure differently to be more agile. Building on years of storage efficiency and clustering innovation, new platform features, products, and technologies with the latest release of Data ONTAP software, enable IT to better respond to changing business requirements, maintain non-disruptive operations, and grow the business without limits.e future. Competition, an always-on global economy, and the urgency to make data a propellant for advantage all require the CIO to provide the business with an infrastructure agile enough to cope with a very dynamic business environment. Customers want to accelerate their business with greater efficiency and productivity, but they must think differently to remove the complexity, cost, and inefficiencies of decade-old IT approaches.

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