Cisco celebrated its 30th annual Live user conference here last week by talking up its new “cognitive collaboration” strategy that spans Webex tools for video meetings to contact center interactions.

While cognitive implies plenty of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will be included, the strategy stresses the importance of making meetings and interactions simple to set up, reliable and secure.

The new Webex features and the vision of video agility are partly a response to Cisco’s bulky Telepresence system as well as to the changing nature of business and increasingly decentralized workforces. Employees expect to be able to join a meeting wherever they are.

“You’re going to see us hold to the promise of building bridges and integrations—no more islands,” said Amy Chang (pictured), senior vice president of Cisco Collaboration, who has emerged as a force behind the new collaborative vision since Cisco acquired her startup, Accompany, last year. “Context and intelligence are being slip-streamed into the product, building highly personalized experiences, with everything brought to you on a silver platter.”

New features of Webex that Cisco announced earlier this spring include the AI features that make up that platter. Proactive Join will ask a user if they’d like to join their meeting when they walk into a meeting room. People Insights surfaces information about each person in the meeting, and facial recognition automatically identifies each person.

Citizens Financial Group recently completed a move to Webex as part of an effort to modernize its operations and transform its workplace, said Erik Johnson, senior vice president of Workplace Technology for the New England-based institution.

A new 3,000-employee, five-building campus features 150 conference rooms, all of which are video-enabled by Webex, he said at Cisco’s Workplace Transformation Summit here. “There are no projectors. Everything is Webex digital in the cloud,” he said, adding that the company is logging 10 million minutes of meetings a month.

 “We are getting close to realizing the vision of a truly unified and connected bank,” Johnson said. “We can connect a customer interaction in a branch to a relationship manager anywhere.”

Collaboration in the Call Center

Cisco is also making major cognitive investments into its Contact Center Enterprise product, as the use of AI is revealing new ways to get value from the old-fashioned call center. Where legacy contact center interactions are reactive, often lacking in context, and measured in call time or call volume, new tools can enable them to be “pre-emptive, contextual and measured in business outcomes,” said Vasili Triant, vice president and general manager of Cisco Contact Center.

Contact centers always collected a lot of data, Triant said in an interview with eWEEK, but that data was seldom accessible. “There’s lots of dark data in contact centers,” he said. “We need to find it and light it up [for the call center customer service rep].”

Cisco’s solution would automate several manual processes by using natural language processing that transcribes a customer conversation in real time and surfaces actions that a rep can take to satisfy the customer. “We are trying to change the business process along with the technology,” Triant said. “Part of the selling process is to get them to make changes.”

Customer Connections

Around the show floor at Cisco Live, it was evident that networking is about more than connecting switches and routers; it is also an important part of improving customer experiences, say Cisco and its partners. That customer satisfaction goes all the way down to the bits and bytes that flow through the wires and airwaves of the internet.

For instance, network monitoring vendors such as AppNeta are helping customers use their network monitoring tools with an eye toward customer satisfaction. Marriott International uses the technology to get more visibility into its hotels’ branch networks, which tend to be ignored in this day of cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, said Matt Stevens, AppNeta’s CEO. By doing deep-packet inspection, the networks can automatically give priority to customer services applications over nonessential apps.

Likewise, Google’s recent outage showed that major cloud failures can impact customers down the line. So, businesses using the cloud need to be more aware of their providers’ policies for responding to outages, said Angelique Medina, director of product marketing for SD-WAN monitoring company ThousandEyes and author of an analysis of the Google outage.

“Users should ask, where do I fall into these policy buckets, because it’s not clear based on the type of traffic [we analyzed],” she said. “Users also need to have redundancy across regions, not just availability zones.”

As Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said in his opening keynote at Cisco Live: “It’s not 1989 any longer.” Users and businesses and their customers have come to expect more from the internet—more speed, more reliability, more better experiences, more of everything. Cisco is betting that it can meet that challenge.

Scot Petersen is a technology analyst at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. He has an extensive background in the technology field. Prior to joining Ziff Brothers, Scot was the editorial director, Business Applications & Architecture, at TechTarget. Before that, he was the director, Editorial Operations, at Ziff Davis Enterprise. While at Ziff Davis Media, he was a writer and editor at eWEEK. No investment advice is offered in his blog. All duties are disclaimed. Scot works for a private investment firm, which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

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Here at Coindesk’s Consensus 2019 conference, fledgling software companies pitched new pieces for future incarnations of blockchain, while new advocacy groups discussed why it is important to normalize the technology for customers and regulators, and economists said they were skeptical of the whole thing.

To be sure, there is a lot of development going on in blockchain, cryptocurrency, coins and security tokens and distributed ledgers, as vendors look to improve on basic plumbing of blockchain frameworks like Ethereum and Hyperledger or make their own.

For instance, Polymath is building a security token blockchain in collaboration with Ethereum pioneer Charles Hoskinson. Dubbed Polymesh, the new platform will be designed specifically for companies that want to create regulation-compliant security tokens. The idea, Hoskinson said, is that now small businesses “can use templates and not have to hire armies of lawyers and bankers to do business.”

Another company, Bloq, added to its Enterprise and Labs platforms with the new Bloq Cloud, dubbed as blockchain infrastructure as a service, which among other things will enable different blockchains to work together. Likewise, Ark announced Ark Deployer, dubbed a point-and-click blockchain, which is due out in Alpha later this month. Yet another vendor, Blockstack, is creating its own ecosystem that promises to give users control over fundamental digital rights of identity, data-ownership, privacy, and security, said co-founder Muneeb Ali in a session here.

Acceptance is growing for using cryptocurrency as a means of exchange, and payment network Flexa launched its “Spedn” wallet app that will let people buy goods with cryptocurrencies online or in physical stores. The technology currently supports bitcoin, ether, bitcoin cash, and the gemini dollar, and it’ll work at retailers including GameStop, Nordstrom, Whole Foods, Caribou Coffee, Jamba Juice, and Crate and Barrel.

Rallying for blockchain

All these projects are still young and relatively untested, which is putting pressure on the communities of stakeholders and developers around the projects to advocate to grow them in every way, from number of developers working on code to businesses using them, and to putting it into clear language for regulators to understand.

A major initiative is called the Web 3 Foundation, whose mission is to see a fully decentralized web come to fruition, one that is protected by mind-bogglingly complex cryptographic protocols such as Zero-Knowledge Proofs. One company betting on ZKP is privacy vendor QEDIT, which late last month announced it is working with ​VMware​, ​Ant Financial​, and ​RGAX to develop privacy applications.

Another brand-new organization is the Open Money Initiative, which is seeking to leverage blockchain and cryptocurrency to help citizens in closed or repressed economies, such as Venezuela. But as Jill Carlson, co-founder of OMI, acknowledges, such technology is not enough to help such difficult situations. “We want it to be a technology problem,” she said. “But it’s really a human problem.”

Also, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), the standards body working for businesses using Ethereum’s code, released a third version of its client specification, as well as updates on privacy and performance.

In search of use cases

Despite active development and passionate proponents, the real obstacle to widespread adoption of blockchain is enterprise use cases. IBM have been talking up blockchain for years, but there have not been many new ideas beyond supply chain management. IBM has a major project ongoing with shipping giant Maersk.

At Consensus, Kimberly Harrington, Blockchain Center of Excellence Leader at Bayer, discussed some live deployments the company has around tracking and tracing of seeds.

“Traditionally, when you think about transparency, the concept is ‘farm to fork,’ but we start before the farm,” she said. “The seeds are produced and leave our organization and then go into fields with growers, where there’s an entire process that transforms that product into something that’s sold. [Blockchain] really helps to get all of the parties to coordinate and participate more efficiently.”

Other compelling use cases show up in healthcare, where organizations are testing blockchain for managing clinical trial data, and another for physician credential management. That one is done by Hashed Health, which is looking to help organizations cut administrative costs, said Corey Todaro, the company’s CTO.

Economists on a panel made the distinction between cryptocurrencies like bitcoin vs. blockchain platforms that enable users to get things done. “Count me as a crypto skeptic,” said Harvard University economist Eric Maskin. “It’s a dubious store of value and I worry that we’re replacing government fiat currency with private money.”

The question of “Why Blockchain At All?” also was considered. Joshua Gans, Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto, said, “You have to boil it down to, what is this reducing the cost of?” he said. “There are two places. One is the cost of verification [of a transaction] and the cost of building out a network. The rest is supply and demand.”

Crypto visions pointing the way forward

At the end of the day it was not clear if anyone was closer to agreeing what it all means beyond the price of bitcoin. One thing is for sure: The people who are working around blockchain are true believers that their technology will someday become pervasive, whatever the eventual use case. The blockchain is inevitable, they say.

Perhaps that is why Ken Liu was such an inspired keynote speaker this week. Liu is a Hugo Award winning science fiction writer, a lawyer, and also a coder. He has unique a perspective on blockchain’s role in a hypothetical future where “code is law.”

“I got interested in the potential of blockchain and bitcoin to transform a lot of the problems that we have in contemporary life. I wanted to explain them in ways that are beyond the usual stories, that cryptocurrencies are only used to buy drugs, which seems to be the narrative in popular culture,” Liu said.

There are other stories about blockchain, like distributed, transparent, securely executed smart contracts, and utopian visions that blockchain will eliminate government corruption and enable democracy to flourish, he said.

“A storyteller can make up all kinds of stories and doesn’t need to back it up with any kind of real implementation,” he said. “I really have to caution the rest of you against believing your stories as though they are the truth.”

The only way forward is to invest in and work toward the vision, and then see what happens. “You have to put in the work to enjoy the result,” he said.

Scot Petersen is a technology analyst at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. He has an extensive background in the technology field. Prior to joining Ziff Brothers, Scot was the editorial director, Business Applications & Architecture, at TechTarget. Before that, he was the director, Editorial Operations, at Ziff Davis Enterprise. While at Ziff Davis Media, he was a writer and editor at eWEEK. No investment advice is offered in his blog. All duties are disclaimed. Scot works for a private investment firm, which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

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That’s what it looks like in the wake of the Google Cloud Next conference, and yesterday’s news of former Oracle executive and current Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian welcoming the former cloud chief of SAP, Robert Enslin, to Google Cloud.

The traditional enterprise software axis of Oracle and SAP has infiltrated Google, which until now was known as a technology powerhouse that was lacking in enterprise chops.

Google thought that VMware veteran Diane Greene, who came to Google in late 2015, could bring Google Cloud up to the level of the competition. Greene made some significant strides in focusing Google’s product offering, but the cloud business was not gaining ground on AWS or Azure in the category that matters most—enterprise customers.

Kurian’s Mission: To Better Commercialize Google Cloud

Kurian, of course, created a stir last fall by abruptly leaving Oracle, where he was the chief executive in charge of cloud and software under Larry Ellison. Originally Kurian announced he was taking a leave of absence, but soon after it was announced he’d been hired as Google Cloud CEO.

One of the first things Kurian did was bring on his former No. 2 at Oracle, Amit Zavery, as Head of Platform for Google Cloud. As Executive Vice President at Oracle, Zavery oversaw Oracle Cloud Platform (PaaS), middleware, analytics and Java.

The Enslin move solidifies the strategy of bringing enterprise experience to Google. The new President of Global Customer Operations will look to continue to build out solutions for enterprises, with a special focus on vertical industries—a topic that Kurian hit on during his Next keynotes last week. He announced many new large customers from retail, finance, media, manufacturing, logistics and transportation.

Key partners said Google is finally on the right track with cloud, marrying technology with business solutions.

“Google still needs to develop a level of sophistication about the enterprise, but it has made big inroads so far and are well on their way,” said Ajit Thomas, managing director, Accenture Google Cloud Business Group, in an interview with eWEEK. “The good thing is Kurian is investing in people for facing off against clients. That’s very healthy, and we are seeing that mentality accelerate through the company. And with lots of new customers, anchored by vertical industries, they are picking their spots on where to win in the enterprise.”

A Cloud Built for the Enterprise

On the product side, Google took two big steps in enabling customers to harness Google’s technology more easily and effectively. It announced Anthos, a Kubernetes-based platform for enabling true write-once, run-anywhere portability for container-based applications in any cloud and on premise. Also, the company has made working with AI even easier with the AI Hub, a collaboration tool for developers, data scientists and DevOps administrators.

Google can no longer rely on the power of its in-house tech to win the cloud wars. One of Google’s problems all along has been that many of its cloud products are based on applications Google built to support its own advertising and search business, yet there are few customers in the world who can use these tools the way Google can.

Two examples of that are the container orchestrator Kubernetes (originally conceived as “Borg”) and the Spanner distributed database. Kubernetes has spawned a large and vibrant community to make it easier to use and integrate. Meanwhile, startup Cockroach Labs took the concept of Spanner and built a version of it that can be deployed on other clouds and on premise.

“Our founders came from Google and saw a need for a broader commercial version of big data problems that [Google] was solving for themselves with Spanner,” said Kurt Heinemann, Chief Marketing Officer

of Cockroach Labs. “Spanner was built with Google’s needs first and then commercialized. We built around the absolute needs of the customer, with cloud neutrality and data locality with CockroachDB.”

Google Cloud Not for Everybody–Yet

When Greene hosted the first Google Cloud Next conferences, she told attendees that she wanted the Google Cloud to be their cloud, too. As we have seen, Google’s Cloud is not for everybody.

It will be a fine line Google continues to walk between running its own business while developing cloud products and services for the enterprise. But if Kurian’s enterprise vision is a success, then Google Cloud will be part of a new three-horse race in the cloud.

Scot Petersen is a technology analyst at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. He has an extensive background in the technology field. Prior to joining Ziff Brothers, Scot was the editorial director, Business Applications & Architecture, at TechTarget. Before that, he was the director, Editorial Operations, at Ziff Davis Enterprise. While at Ziff Davis Media, he was a writer and editor at eWEEK. No investment advice is offered in his blog. All duties are disclaimed. Scot works for a private investment firm, which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

The post Kurian’s Enterprise Chops Enable New Deals for Google Cloud appeared first on eWEEK.

SignalFx, a third-party specialist in application performance monitoring (APM) and visibility, was ready with news of its own, announcing new integrations with several Google Cloud Platform services: Google Cloud Functions, Istio on GKE and Knative.

“The world of cloud infrastructure is moving at warp speed, with new development models and new architectures,” said Karthik Rau, Founder and CEO at SignalFx in an exclusive interview with eWEEK. “More of these architectures are about dealing with elasticity and lighting speed and shifting complexities. This requires a new way of monitoring.”

SignalFx brought its real-time architecture to GCP through deep integration with Google services and APIs, enabling GCP to take advantage of SignalFx’s “no sample” technology. Most monitoring tools take snapshots of application activity, but SignalFx, which was started in 2013 by ex-Facebook engineers working on APM technology, captures every bit of information about an application to help tune, debug and extract analytics from it.

Google Cloud Functions is similar to AWS’s Lambda serverless framework and Azure Functions, which SignalFx already supports. The company makes use of Function Wrappers to encase the function in Java, Nodejs or C# code, depending on the application (Python and Go is also supported for AWS).

While Google Functions can be monitored by Google’s own APM tool, Stackdriver, the Wrappers enable a “micro” view of the function’s performance and availability metrics, said SignalFx Chief Technology Officer Arijit Mukherji, referring to Stackdriver’s as a more “macro” view.

Monitoring the Service Mesh

Istio, a major open source project led by Google, IBM and ride-share company Lyft, among others, was released in 1.0 version last year. It was built to work with the Kubernetes container management platform and give DevOps pros visibility into the relationships between the containers—telemetry data, security, load balancing and service health can be measured.

SignalFx now enables Google’s Istio on GKE (Google Container Engine) implementation to plug into SignalFx monitoring tools, giving them visibility into metrics and traces (how the code is executed) along with dashboards that include performance KPIs such as service request rate, error rate and duration. Users can see how their services are performing and create alerts to quickly respond to system-wide performance issues.

Knative is set of services, developed by Google, Pivotal and others, that essentially allows serverless applications to be run as containers managed by Kubernetes. On April 9 at the Next conference, Google announced two implementations of Knative, with Cloud Run and Cloud Run on GKE. Rather than using Wrappers, SignalFx is attaching its Smart Agent technology to the containers to give the same type of visibility as the “Wrapped” Functions would get.

It is not clear how another product announced at Next—the Anthos “multi cloud platform”—fits into the current lineup of monitoring tools. Though details are scarce, Anthos promises to enable true “write once, run anywhere” portability for apps in the cloud or on-prem. Leonid Igolnik, SignalFx’s Executive Vice President of Engineering, told me that he has not seen Anthos, but since Anthos is comprised of the same fundamental building blocks such as Kubernetes, GKE and Functions, the tools should just plug in.

Scot Petersen is a technology analyst at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. He has an extensive background in the technology field. Prior to joining Ziff Brothers, Scot was the editorial director, Business Applications & Architecture, at TechTarget. Before that, he was the director, Editorial Operations, at Ziff Davis Enterprise. While at Ziff Davis Media, he was a writer and editor at eWEEK. No investment advice is offered in his blog. All duties are disclaimed. Scot works for a private investment firm, which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

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At the recent HIMSS health care IT conference, dozens of vendors showed a range of solutions that are designed to do a better job of monitoring patients once they leave the hospital and head into rehabilitation, long-term facilities or home care.

Leading the charge is Somatix, which has just launched SafeBeing, an app for a smartwatch or low-cost band that applies the same machine-learning based, real-time gesture detection technology as its earlier product, SmokeBeat, for smoking cessation monitoring.

Somatix is initially going after elder-care facilities, which includes nursing home, assisted living and independent living, and the post hospital discharge market, including rehabilitation centers, said Somatix Chief Medical Officer Dr. Charles Herman. The idea is to more closely monitor patients to avoid dreaded readmission charges and loss of reimbursements from insurance payers.

“The way value-based care is going, everyone, no matter where you are, is looking for the highest quality care in the lowest cost setting,” Herman said. “At a hospital if a patient bounces back in a readmission within 30 days, there are massive penalties. Elder-care facilities are also increasingly under the microscope for the quality of care that they deliver.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reports that nearly 20 percent of fee-for-service Medicare patients return to the hospital within 30 days of being discharged, adding up to 2 million readmissions each year that cost Medicare $26 billion a year.

Somatix’s app can run on smart watches from Apple, Samsung and others. The software uses machine learning algorithms to track specific activity or incidents, such as taking medication or falling. The wearable collects accelerometer, location and other data and from that interprets a unique signal for each type of activity. Administrators at care facilities or even family members can monitor key indicators that may require someone to intervene.

“By monitoring people remotely and passively, we can pick up on risk factors for them getting ill and having to be readmitted—things like low activity, not taking medication, not drinking enough fluid,” he said. “If we can detect them earlier, it may allow us to intervene earlier and therefore may prevent that patient from getting more ill as well as being readmitted.”

Somatix, which announced the Catholic Senior Housing and Health Care Services (CSHHCS) of Bethlehem, Pa., as its first major customer of SafeBeing, is expecting a B round of financing this year as it plans to expand into hospitals, home care and globally beyond the U.S. and Israel.

Other wearable solutions for home monitoring include CarePredict, which also utilizes machine learning algorithms and kinematics to measure activities of daily living (ADLs). The company, which is also targeting assisted living facilities, recently announced its consumer version, CarePredict Home, at CES.

Samsung had several partners demonstrating apps using the Galaxy Watch for alerts and reminders, including the HealthAssist Watch and MobileHelp Smart.

For its part, AT&T is partnering with vendors such as OneLife Technologies, which is using AT&T’s LTE-M Low-Power Wide-Area network for an untethered solution for monitoring heart rate, location, movement and sleep at the wrist.

AT&T is also partnering on LTE-M with Bodyport, maker of a smart scale that can measure cardiac signals, such as heart rate, and other biomarkers simply by a user standing barefoot on the scale. The makers use machine learning to intuit overall health trends or conditions, including diabetes and kidney function, said Corey Centen, founder and CEO of Bodyport. It can even measure your weight.

Scot Petersen is a technology analyst at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. He has an extensive background in the technology field. Prior to joining Ziff Brothers, Scot was the editorial director, Business Applications & Architecture, at TechTarget. Before that, he was the director, Editorial Operations, at Ziff Davis Enterprise. While at Ziff Davis Media, he was a writer and editor at eWEEK. No investment advice is offered in his blog. All duties are disclaimed. Scot works for a private investment firm, which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

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The good news is that there are signs that health-care organizations are better prepared for such incidents and are spending more money on security and staff training, according to Rod Piechowski, Senior Director of Health Information Systems for the HIMSS. Organizations are doing a better job of making “everyone believe they are part of the solution,” he told eWEEK. “Too often security is viewed as an IT-only responsibility.”

More good news is found in the work of the Food & Drug Administration, vendors, provider networks and volunteer groups who are working to establish standards for securing medical devices as well as developing plans for mediating the next big cyberattack along the lines of WannaCry, which decimated businesses and health-care organizations across Europe in 2017.

FDA Offers an Update on Medical Device Security

For instance, here at HIMSS, Suzanne Schwartz, Associate Director for Science & Strategic Partnerships at the FDA, presented an update on the FDA’s work on its Medical Device Safety Action Plan, Premarket Guidance for vendors, and Medical Device Cybersecurity Sandbox.

The FDA has become more involved in the past two years, at least in part to mediate disputes between device makers and hackers, such as the one that was disclosed at last summer’s Black Hat conference involving vendor Medtronic. Among those advising the FDA is the hacker cooperative I Am The Cavalry, which is co-sponsoring the Biohacking Village at this summer’s Def Con conference.

The parties are looking to avoid incidents in which vendors threaten hackers with legal action for discovering and publishing vulnerabilities and “help decrease the friction and come to the ground truth quicker around some of these issues,” said Dr. Christian Dameff, a practicing emergency doctor and lifelong hacker. “How do we protect security researchers? How do we help device manufacturers through this process better? And then how do we focus most of the energy toward the patients?”

Part of the FDA’s pre-market recommendations is that vendors include a software “bill of materials” (BOM) and cybersecurity BOM, which would also include hardware, in order to be able to find or trace vulnerabilities. Another part is the CyberMed Safety Expert Analysis Board (CYMSAB), which is being led by MITRE. In concert with that, Massachusetts General Hospital this month received a $950,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security to develop a medical device cybersecurity data repository.

Securing Access While Simplifying Workflows

Security vendors including Imprivata and Cylance are also are working on ways to keep computers and devices safe from unwarranted access while at the same time trying not to interfere with clinical workflows. At HIMSS, Imprivata unveiled Proximity Aware, a version of its card-based access and authentication solution.

Instead of a card, Proximity Aware uses a smartphone as the token along with Bluetooth connectivity to the machine. Once the phone is set up as a secure token, providers need only walk up to a terminal for the machine to log the user on. Once the user walks away from the machine it will automatically be logged off. Such functionality is critical for Electronic Prescription of Controlled Substances (EPCS) services, which will be required as of Jan. 1, 2020.

“In the case of most two-factor authentication, which you need for EPCS and some more workflows to come, you would use a token on your phone and enter a number. That’s inefficient,” Imprivata CEO Gus Malezis told eWEEK. “We automatically read that token, and that sign-on becomes completely invisible. It’s hands-free 2FA, where you don’t have to take the phone out of your pocket.”

AI-based endpoint protection vendor Cylance is also working on a technology that applies AI models to the concepts of “continuous authentication” on health-care workstations, eliminating the need for password reentry, said Rob Bathurst, Worldwide Managing Director at Cylance for Healthcare and Embedded Systems. The technology, which is about to enter early-adopter stage, is tentatively called Persona.

Ensuring That Users Are Who They Say They Are

“If you look at your typical health-care environment, you’ve got hundreds of people logging in to these systems, and they may move from one system to another, or the credentials may get stolen or might get passed around,” Bathurst told eWEEK. “And the point of it is to ensure that the person who is logged into that system is actually that person.”

Bathurst explained that Cylance is building user-behavior models that look at how users type on a keyboard, what types of applications they use and when they perform tasks or open applications. In short, what does a normal “routine” look like?

If the machine detects behavior out of the norm, it uses a “process of gradual friction that gets more incredulous about the user as time goes on as it differs from the model,” Bathurst said.

Scot Petersen is a technology analyst at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. He has an extensive background in the technology field. Prior to joining Ziff Brothers, Scot was the editorial director, Business Applications & Architecture, at TechTarget. Before that, he was the director, Editorial Operations, at Ziff Davis Enterprise. While at Ziff Davis Media, he was a writer and editor at eWEEK. No investment advice is offered in his blog. All duties are disclaimed. Scot works for a private investment firm, which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

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Technology can and must play a role, they said at the CHIME CIO Forum—part of HIMSS19 pre-conference activities here this week. But according to speakers that included former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, more elemental things—such as human emotion and social connectedness—play as big a role in determining the health and well-being of people as any lab diagnostic or surgical procedure.

Despite all of the technology now at the disposal of health-care providers, the U.S. spends twice as much as other OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) member countries, but also delivers “poor outcomes”—industry jargon for “not very good health care.”

For example: The U.S. spends 17 percent of its GDP on health care, yet the country is 31st out of 34 countries in infant mortality rates; the U.S. also ranks 40th in the world in life expectancy, said Dr. Claire Pomeroy, CEO of the Lasker Foundation, a medical research organization.

Life Expectancies Going Down?

More concerning, she said, is that life expectancies are going down overall and vary wildly within the country—even within the same city.

“If you are black in the United States, you live on average 10 years less. Health care is a half answer if the living conditions that cause those diseases prevail,” Pomeroy said. “Your zip code is a more powerful driver of health status than genetic code.”

Pomeroy calls these factors the “social determinants of health,” and they include education, housing, race, ethnicity, gender, occupation and job security, and other factors. “We must redesign the system around health equity and move from a medical model to more inclusive social determinants model,” she said.

One of the technology culprits around this issue is the electronic health record application, which has already created a lot of unnecessary divisions between doctors and patients. Each of these social determinants should be included in a patient’s medical record, Portnoy said, but most of the time they are not. If such data were collected in a record, patients could be identified and prioritized differently as well as offered different treatments or services.

New Players Entering the Market

On the bright side, she said, things are changing as new players enter the market, such as the CVS/Aetna tie-up and the Amazon.com, JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway partnership, who are looking to change the game.

“You had better have a sense of urgency,” she told the CIOs. “There are a lot of new players out there and they are using the social determinants of health. If you think that Amazon, JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway aren’t figuring out how to collect data about social determinants of health to beat traditional providers at their game, then you are fooling yourself.”

The most important social determinant may be “social cohesion and community support,” according to Surgeon General Murthy. He cited loneliness and the breakdown of human connections for a myriad of health problems, including heart disease, addiction, depression and suicide.

Chronic emotional pain is rampant across the country, Murthy said. It creates a void people seek to fill to assuage the pain.

“It’s not a sign we are broken,” Murthy said. “It’s more like hunger or thirst. Emotional connections are in short supply.” Exercise and a better diet can be effective, but when we reach for alcohol or drugs, the results can be disastrous, he said. “Self-destruction is happening everywhere.”

Murthy made a call on the CIOs to do more to be leaders in their community and local hospitals to create programs that can treat the whole individual. In addition, more data needs to be collected and shared regarding public health issues, such as the opioid crisis, to better track and treat the disease.

Data, Data Everywhere

Data is the key, they all said, and perhaps the new rule proposal issued this week by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) will help. The proposal calls for improving patients’ access to their own health data, enabling them to access information including insurance claims, hospital and doctor records to digital devices.

A third speaker, Neil Jacobstein, chair of the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Track at Singularity University and a distinguished visiting scholar at Stanford University, talked about how data, combined with artificial intelligence techniques, is prepared to radically transform health care. He cited more than $4 billion in health-care AI investment in the last five years and 106 startups focusing on AI in health care.

The problem is that despite advances in AI in recent years, putting it into practice is a ways off. IBM, for instance, has shown disappointing results of its IBM Watson Health venture, but Jacobstein said the jury is still out.

“IBM Watson has had problems but they are sticking with it,” Jacobstein said. “They know that this is a ‘boiling the ocean’ problem. It’s really difficult. Platforms are just coming up to speed to handle this. So stay tuned.”

A bigger issue may be the gap between AI expertise and health-care domain expertise, so he encouraged the CIOs to get their organizations to start learning about AI and problems that it may be used to solve. “Build your future organizations boldly and do it responsibly,” Jacobstein said.

Scot Petersen is a technology analyst at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. He has an extensive background in the technology field. Prior to joining Ziff Brothers, Scot was the editorial director, Business Applications & Architecture, at TechTarget. Before that, he was the director, Editorial Operations, at Ziff Davis Enterprise. While at Ziff Davis Media, he was a writer and editor at eWEEK. No investment advice is offered in his blog. All duties are disclaimed. Scot works for a private investment firm, which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

The post Health-care CIOs Told to Look Beyond IT for Better Outcomes appeared first on eWEEK.

This is often harder that it sounds. But it is especially important for today’s software vendors, who are pushing out daily code updates while also having to coordinate with the business’s marketing or sales staffs, who may be on a different collaboration platform than the developers and engineers.

Addressing this is Clubhouse, a startup that is taking on traditional developer project management leader Atlassian and its Jira and Trello products with its own solution that spans all a company’s functional silos beyond product engineering.

According to company CEO and co-founder Kurt Schrader, Clubhouse can even help address “sneaker networking,” that dreaded legacy process that requires workers to get up from their desks and have a meeting to see if a dependent project is ready for launch with the code.

“We’re trying to build something that spans more than just the product team,” said Schrader, a veteran developer team builder. “There are a lot of integrations between collaboration tools, but they are not facilitating the back and forth. There is still a lot of manual work and side conversations to make sure everyone is on the same page.”

Telling Stories

A key to Clubhouse is its “Story” metaphor, which resembles traditional Kanban type project management cards but which encompasses all departments involved in a project, and with more depth, enabling users to zoom in and out of a project to see the status of each element.

Integration with GitHub enables developers to work on GitHub projects within Clubhouse. “Developers can actually do their work in GitHub, and if you do a pull request, it automatically moves the Story to ready for review,” Schrader said. “It reduces the friction level and reflects reality as much as possible.”

Another integration that Clubhouse just launched is Slack Actions, which enables users who are discussing a project in Slack to automatically create a Story workflow in Clubhouse that inherits all the elements of the Slack discussion.

Clubhouse, which launched an Enterprise version last fall, is approaching 2,000 customers of all sizes, but specializes in small teams of 50-100 developers. That suits customer Backpack Health, which develops a health management app and platform.

“I have 26 employees on two continents,” said founder and CEO Jim Cavan. “Some live in very remote locations. Clubhouse totally makes that even more possible than before. We use it for everything. Literally every function of the company has a segregated section within Clubhouse. It’s more than just a development tool: It’s a project management tool that spans all aspects of the company.”

Slack, which recently hit 10 million users, has had success infiltrating enterprises after requests from users who began using it on their own. So too Clubhouse hopes developers will be happy with an alternative to Jira and spread the word.

“We use Clubhouse to build Clubhouse,” Schrader said. “Developers love using Clubhouse, and they have a high bar. Developers have the highest standards out there. If you can win over developers, you can practically win over the entire organization.”

Which is exactly how Backpack came to use the product, Cavan said. “I never really got a sales pitch on it. My chief engineer loved it. He said, ‘So can we try this?’ I said great.”

Scot Petersen is a technology analyst at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. He has an extensive background in the technology field. Prior to joining Ziff Brothers, Scot was the editorial director, Business Applications & Architecture, at TechTarget. Before that, he was the director, Editorial Operations, at Ziff Davis Enterprise. While at Ziff Davis Media, he was a writer and editor at eWEEK. No investment advice is offered in his blog. All duties are disclaimed. Scot works for a private investment firm, which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

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But that has not stopped the industry from trying. Collaboration solutions are still in high demand and more important than ever as workforces get more distributed. The market for “meeting solutions,” according to Gartner, is about a $7 billion industry, and it includes cloud and on-premises video systems.

Slack is the latest collaboration darling and is widely speculated to be planning an IPO this year. Microsoft has Office and SharePoint as enterprise collaboration stables while it keeps trying to build out its Teams product, but currently that is more of a collection of collaboration tools than a complete solution. And Cisco recently unveiled a new initiative to bring its acquired BroadSoft technology together with WebEx Teams. Some observers include online storage vendors such as Box and Dropbox as collaboration tools.

But some emerging vendors are trying to take a different approach altogether. Traditional approaches are still focused on file systems rather than a better collaborative workspace. Enter San Carlos, Calif.-based Bluescape, the wholly owned subsidiary of privately held office design and workspace maker Haworth, based in Holland, Mich.

Bluescape’s software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based application, which runs out of Amazon Web Services, functions less like Google Docs and more like a “Google Maps for content,” writes Bluescape Chief Technology Officer Demian Entrekin. “Your content is a series of pinpoints or location markers on a map that is searchable, and you can zoom in and out just as you would on a digital map that’s permanently set at ‘street view.’”

Collaboration Canvas

Bluescape Enterprise’s collaboration space is an open “canvas” of virtually unlimited size, though CEO Peter Jackson puts it at about 49 virtual square miles (7 miles by 7 miles), which is big enough to lay out each high-definition frame of your average summer movie blockbuster end to end and have room to spare, yet agile enough to zoom in easily on each pixel.

Applications and content can be brought into the space for collaborative purposes, through integration partnerships Bluescape has with Adobe, Cisco WebEx, Intel and others. For instance, Bluescape user Blaine Conrad, vice president of product for lifestyle footwear brand Olukai, works with a team to design shoes and product catalogs within Bluescape, using design tools such as Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. The company’s design team is dispersed between Portland, Ore., and the corporate headquarters in Southern California and uses web-cam video conference to talk to one another while collaborating.

Prior to Bluescape, Olukai, Conrad said, would share files on a common server but did not have the ability to work on the same file at the same time—or see versions of a project and how they progressed over time.

“With Bluescape, we are mapping each level of product process from a visual standpoint,” Conrad said. “So if we start off with one design, we then we have that in Bluescape. Then we have our next design and Bluescape. And then we have our third rendition and Bluescape. And at any one time, we can go back and reference those old ones. Because it’s all in this one kind of pallet, or this one universe.”

Bluescape’s feature of persistence, or enabling users to save project versions and workspaces over time, also has helped Olukai with merchandising its products, Conrad said. “When we have a style that has five colors we can merchandise those colors with the rest of the range, because it’s all in one place. And if we want to reference a color that we did the last round of sampling, we can just simply scroll back and see what that color was and pull it forward if we need to,” he said.

All that is needed to set up Bluescape is a touchscreen for each participant and a computer with an internet connection, which could range from a laptop to a giant 65-inch screen that Olukai uses.

Growing Opportunity

Bluescape CEO Jackson sees a great opportunity at the intersection of a multiuser SaaS-based application and touchscreen technology that is rapidly dropping in price and availability. Bluescape works with touchscreen maker Avocor, and Dell Technologies is a partner and reseller of Bluescape.

“We want to be the UI/UX [user interface/user experience] control center for large touch displays,” Jackson said, adding that Bluescape is working on making it easier to bring the large canvas down to size for smartphones.

Another factor driving Bluescape’s opportunity is “democratizing” the meeting experience, Jackson said.

“A typical meeting is someone talking too much, and everybody listens or watches a PowerPoint. That’s one-to-many, and we are many-to-many.”

The Bluescape concept was originally envisioned as part of the “big budget innovation room,” he said, “but now we are moving into bigger customers with more than 100,000 employees.”

With some 30 million conference rooms in the world, according to Gartner and other firms, and with only a small percentage of them connected visually, Jackson sees a world where what once was a big-ticket capital expenditure is coming down to the price of a touchscreen and a per-user license fee.

“This is going to change the behavior of people,” Jackson said.

Scot Petersen is a technology analyst at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. He has an extensive background in the technology field. Prior to joining Ziff Brothers, Scot was the editorial director, Business Applications & Architecture, at TechTarget. Before that, he was the director, Editorial Operations, at Ziff Davis Enterprise. While at Ziff Davis Media, he was a writer and editor at eWEEK. No investment advice is offered in his blog. All duties are disclaimed. Scot works for a private investment firm, which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

The post How Bluescape Puts New Spin on Collaboration Using Map ‘Canvas’ appeared first on eWEEK.

The “Casablanca” release of ONAP (Open Networking Automation Platform) contains new features to enable 5G management, cross-carrier networking and automation, as well as new resources to ease deployment and integration of the platform, said LF Networking officials.

Part of this push includes the recent release of the group’s OPNFV (Open Platform for Network Functions Virtualization) project, dubbed “Gambia,” which is expanding its compliance, verification and testing program to include ONAP and other virtual networking functions (VNFs).

Although much progress has been made on the road to 5G, including new chipsets, radios, forthcoming phones and so on, one of the most critical pieces to making 5G a reality is starting to be fleshed out with ONAP Casablanca.

Making 5G a Reality Is the Goal

“5G is a very substantial motivating factor for going to ONAP,” Phil Robb, vice president of operations, Networking & Orchestration, for The Linux Foundation, told eWEEK. “The reason operators are going to ONAP is because they must have ubiquity in this platform. You can’t roll out services if all of the VNF vendors have to do something different and eclectic. If they are porting their apps, it takes forever to on-board functions and service delivering slows to a crawl.

“There’s far too much opportunity in 5G and demand from us as consumers for what 5G is supposed to deliver to have that kind of lag.”

The roadmap for enabling 5G in ONAP, which will continue through 2019, Robb said, includes extending “zero touch” orchestration to radio access networks. In addition, ONAP is working on network optimization, real-time analytics, closed-loop automation and network slicing—or the ability to create specific paths for data through a network.

Casablanca also further modularizes the set of functions ONAP provides as containers, which is critical in creating a fully distributed platform that runs from a telco back office all the way to new small-cell antennas that will be rolled out for 5G networks.

“Having different components of ONAP being able to run out at the edge to manage those virtual network functions that are much closer to the end user—that’s all part of the distributed design,” Robb said.

Blueprints in the Works for Key Use Cases

With more than 70 network operators and partners working on ONAP, key use cases are being created to enable seamless connectivity between all the parties. For instance, Vodafone and China Mobile have rolled out a “blueprint” for cross-domain and cross-layer VPN functionality. The software-based controller in ONAP acts as a super controller over both the optical transport and internet networks, which enables an end-to-end service through multiple domains, Robb explained.

The other key pieces of ONAP’s release include “deployability” resources—installation guides, best practices, white papers and the like to get all partners up and running quickly, taking into consideration that not all networks are alike or have the same level of expertise.

“No two operators are going to work the same way; no two are going to involve their legacy systems in the same way,” Robb said. “Across the board there is significant development effort from one release to the next to accommodate deployability and deployment management of that system depending on how the operator needs to use it.

“The open-source stuff is a technology component,” he said. “It’s not a solution. This is part of a big cultural shift for these organizations, so there’s lots of opportunities for vendors to help provide solutions. LF is doing fundamental documentation and training, but to get to the point of easy consumption [of ONAP], that’s an opportunity for a vendor.”

Scot Petersen is a technology analyst at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. He has an extensive background in the technology field. Prior to joining Ziff Brothers, Scot was the editorial director, Business Applications & Architecture, at TechTarget. Before that, he was the director, Editorial Operations, at Ziff Davis Enterprise. While at Ziff Davis Media, he was a writer and editor at eWEEK. No investment advice is offered in his blog. All duties are disclaimed. Scot works for a private investment firm, which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

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