Coupa Software (NASDAQ: COUP), a leader in Business Spend Management (BSM), announced that it has acquired LLamasoft, a leader in AI-powered supply chain design and planning for a purchase price of approximately $1.5 billion. Based in Ann Arbor, Mich., LLamasoft's technology is used by hundreds of enterprise customers, including brands such as Boeing, Danone S.A., Home Depot, and Nestle. The acquisition will strengthen Coupa's supply chain capabilities, enabling businesses to drive greater value through Business Spend Management. The events of this year continue to demonstrate the importance of supply chain agility, as companies work to more rapidly adapt to changing consumer preferences, economic conditions, and the political landscape. With demand uncertainty on one hand and supply volatility on the other, companies are in need of supply chain technology that can help them assess alternatives and balance trade-offs to achieve desired business results.

Can an organisation responsibly entrust their most sensitive data and workloads to a cloud service provider without losing visibility and control? Must you risk trading security for convenience in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment? These are the kind of questions that will crop up in mind when moving your assets to the flexibility and decentralised nature of a cloud environment. As organisations move to the cloud, Diana Kelley, Microsoft's Cyber Security Field CTO, told TechRadar Middle East, that they [organisations] don't have the same kind of visibility they had on-premises but that does not mean they don't have visibility. Microsoft has two data centres in the UAE – one in Abu Dhabi and one in Dubai.

As businesses struggle to combat increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity attacks, the severity of which is exacerbated by both the vanishing IT perimeters in today's mobile and IoT era, coupled with an acute shortage of skilled security professionals, IT security teams need both a new approach and powerful new tools to protect data and other high-value assets. Increasingly, they are looking to artificial intelligence (AI) as a key weapon to win the battle against stealthy threats inside their IT infrastructures, according to a new global research study conducted by the Ponemon Institute on behalf of Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company HPE, 1.66% This press release features multimedia. The Ponemon Institute study, entitled "Closing the IT Security Gap with Automation & AI in the Era of IoT," surveyed 4,000 security and IT professionals across the Americas, Europe and Asia to understand what makes security deficiencies so hard to fix, and what types of technologies and processes are needed to stay a step ahead of bad actors within the new threat landscape. The research revealed that in the quest to protect data and other high-value assets, security systems incorporating machine learning and other AI-based technologies are essential for detecting and stopping attacks that target users and IoT devices.

It's an idea that excites and inspires many, as much as it concerns others. In the age of Industry 4.0, it gives us the opportunity to do things better, and smarter – we just need to see the potential behind the curtain. Richard Chamberlain from Bosch Rexroth explains that up to now, we've been asking the wrong question: will machines become more intelligent than us? We should be asking: how will intelligent machines help us become more intelligent? With transparency in mind, let's go right back to the start. What exactly is machine learning?