WekaIO's President sees the company as the Tesla of storage suppliers, and says OEM Hitachi Vantara is making inroads into the Dell EMC Isilon customer base as Weka crosses the chasm between it and general enterprise use. WekaIO's scalable, parallel and high-performance filesystem software has made its name in high-performance computing and become popular in enterprises that have HPC use cases -- such as AI, machine learning, and genomics. It's now set to cross over into more general enterprise file workloads. BMW motorcycle-riding Jonathan Martin became WekaIO's President this month. He had previously been the Chief Marketing Officer at Hitachi Vantara, serving from March 2019 to May 2021.

The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) for practical business applications has introduced a number of uncertainties and risk factors across virtually every industry, but one fact is certain: in today's AI market, hardware is the key to solving many of the sector's key challenges, and chipsets are at the heart of that hardware solution. Given the widespread applicability of AI, it is almost certain that every chip in the future will have some sort of AI engine embedded. The engine could take a wide variety of forms, ranging from a simple AI library running on a CPU to more sophisticated custom hardware. The potential for AI is best fulfilled when the chipsets are optimized to provide the appropriate amount of compute capacity at the right power budget for specific AI applications, a trend that is leading to increasing specialization and diversification in AI-optimized chipsets. During the past 2 years, the deep learning chipset market has experienced a dramatic period of evolution, led by NVIDIA and Intel.

A proprietary machine learning algorithm is behind Pluralsight's ability to accurately assess technology skills. Organizations are increasingly using technology to gain strategic competitive advantages. A problem for employers is an overall lack of technology-based skills across the workforce. Pluralsight (PS), provider of a cloud-based technology learning platform, is one vendor leading the disruption in corporate training. Pluralsight management has referred to the company as "the supply chain" of technology skills.

For Google Cloud, 2019 meant a major change in the leadership. Thomas Kurian - an industry veteran who spent 22 years at Oracle - is at the helm of the cloud business at Google. He succeeds Diane Green who stepped out after spending three years at the company. Google Cloud is an umbrella brand for the enterprise productivity suite, cloud infrastructure and platform offerings. According to industry analysts, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is at a distant 4th place from AWS which is leading the pack.

With the release of a voice assistant for desk phones, Avaya is the latest unified communications vendor to explore whether the artificial intelligence technology increasingly popular among consumers has value in the enterprise market. The voice assistant, available for download in the Google Play Store, lets users verbally command their Avaya Vantage phones to make calls, dial into the next meeting on a calendar, and execute Google searches. People activate the artificial intelligence (AI) technology with a customizable trigger phrase; the default is "Hello Vantage." "Avaya is engaging in far-field voice activation at an inflection point in the industry: Voice assistants will disrupt enterprise communications and UC," Gartner analyst Werner Goertz said. "In future, rather than to dial into meetings and conference calls, we will simply say'Assistant, dial me into my 10 o'clock meeting' -- no user IDs, passwords, conference IDs that the user needs to remember."

Alexa is coming to smart glasses such as these. "Alexa, what is it I'm looking at?" You're used to summoning help from Amazon Alexa, the voice inside Amazon's Echo smart speaker in your kitchen or by your bed. If Amazon has its way, the artificial intelligent-infused Alexa digital assistant will be pretty much at your beck and call everywhere, and that means the bathroom, and even in a product such as the see-through augmented reality glasses that a company called Vuzix will be showcasing this week during the mammoth CES tech show in Las Vegas. More: You can't miss Google at tech's largest trade show this year Spreading Alexa's voice has been Amazon's vision for some time, and was a major theme at last year's CES too, with Alexa starting to infiltrate cars, fridges and other household appliances. This year Amazon, and its partners, are taking Alexa even further, which seems critical since rival Google has similar ambitions for its own Google Assistant, the voice inside Android phones and Google Home speakers.

The company, founded in 2012, initially focused on consumer electronics devices such as headphones. The new artificial intelligence product, similar to Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, marks a sharp departure for the firm, which now employs about 300 people. Its most recent funding round, an $89 million investment by a group including Salesforce Ventures, closed in March but had not been previously announced. Will.i.am, who rose to prominence as a member of The Black Eyed Peas, said the corporate market offered the company an opportunity to quickly deploy and develop its assistant, called Omega. "I wanted to create something that allows us to do many things," said will.i.am,

Lenovo Group Ltd. dipped its toe into the enterprise market in 2014, when it acquired IBM's x86 server business. Now competing in the enterprise market with heavy hitters like Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Dell Technologies Inc., the company revealed it is now trying to boost its rack space in the data center.

Google dispelled any lingering questions about its commitment to cloud in 2016, as its strategy emerged to become a major player in the enterprise market in the years ahead. The company has spent tens of billions of dollars to build the underlying infrastructure, services and talent pool that feed Google Cloud Platform (GCP). As a result, it has de-emphasized price as the main differentiator and instead focused on enterprise demands, data analytics and a set of technologies to drive applications the company said will dominate the industry in the future. Machine learning is still too new for many IT shops, but Google has banked on it as the future of cloud computing. New services added in 2016 included the Machine Intelligence suite of services and new releases for translation, text analysis, and image and speech recognition.

It seems almost comical to think that artificial intelligence and machine learning are becoming, or rather have become, full-blown buzzwords. First of all, according to the annals of science fiction literature, we should have already invented a smarter-than-human AI by now, and according to "Terminator," we're 19 years overdue for a giant, AI-based nuclear annihilation of the human race. I prefer the 1970 movie, "Colossus: The Forbin Project," a film that does not appreciate the premise that the United States could, alone, create a computer smart enough to take over the world. Colossus, you see, required the help of its Soviet counterpart. The world of AI is far more scientific and mundane than this, however. Its history is littered with startups, hardware firms and software projects that were often just as much a product of the times as they were products of machine-learning advances.