Skip to main content

Better Business Technology

Macquarie Telecom launches VeloCloud Partner Channel to assist Australian MSPs

AUSTRALIAN telecommunications innovator Macquarie Telecom – part of the Macquarie Technology Group (ASX: MAQ) – has signed a first-of-its-kind agreement with US SD-WAN technology leader VeloCloud to provide its systems to managed service providers (MSPs) across Australia.

The initial four-year agreement will be supported by an investment – worth an estimated A$30 million – by Macquarie Telecom, enabling it to offer the best commercial terms to MSPs on what it describes as “VeloCloud’s world-leading technology”.

Macquarie Telecom group executive, Luke Clifton said the new agreement would open software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technology – which virtualises and simplifies networking and optimises app performance – to more MSPs and businesses while offering the greatest discounts available, helping to offset Broadcom’s recently-enacted price rises to its VeloCloud technologies. 

Macquarie gains special partner status

The arrangement comes as Macquarie Telecom becomes VeloCloud’s only Australian ‘Pinnacle Partner’ – a feat it has achieved through pioneering SD-WAN in Australia in 2017 and since deploying the technology to more businesses in Australia than any other provider.

Mr Clifton said the agreement was a testament to the company’s bet on bringing SD-WAN to Australia in 2017 and, more recently, expanding into Security Access Service Edge (SASE), which would generate significant value for Australia’s channel.

“We’ve worked closely with VeloCloud and nearly all of our customers to harness the value of this technology while major telcos have maintained a complete lack of vision, zero innovation, and buried their heads in the sand,” Mr Clifton said.

“We see many of the same issues affecting our traditional mid-sized-enterprise customer base hitting the channel. They’re overcharged and underserved by vendors and major telcos, and we can deliver a far better experience together.”

Now, he said Macquarie would extend that SD-WAN value to the information and communications technology (ICT) channel in an offering comprising hardware, licensing, managed services, carriage, and industry-leading, net promoter score (NPS)-proven customer service.

A major advantage, he said, was that partners would be working with a local provider that operates in Australian dollars, providing better price certainty given the risk of fluctuating exchange rates and changes in vendor pricing.

Marketing changes to drive VeloCloud

Macquarie Telecom has also announced the promotion of current chief marketing officer, Tony Emmanouil to director of marketing and channel, leading the company’s VeloCloud Partner Channel and working closely with partners.

“This agreement empowers us to deploy a wide range of VeloCloud solutions, ranging from licencing to fully managed services to best suit different partners across Australia,” Mr Emmanouil said.

“This isn’t just a re-sell play, we will go to market with partners to bring the world’s leading SD-WAN technology to their customer base. We’ve got a truly unique blend of experience, expertise, commercial value and service to enable more partners to bring this technology to a greater cross-section of Australian businesses.”

Broadcom’s VeloCloud division vice president and general manager Sanjay Uppal said, “With this partnership, we can serve the needs of people who otherwise may not get access to this advanced technology.

“The world is changing, with new apps coming in, security threats, and people are really relying on their distributed networks a lot more on a day-by-day basis. This partnership together really epitomises what people are looking for in mid-to-large enterprises.”

www.macquarietelecom.com.au

ends

Australian cyber security environment short on ‘expertise’?

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

ONE OF THE BIG ISSUES with cyber security in Australia is the lack of expertise.

Jason Baden, F5’s regional vice-president for Australia and New Zealand, said the situation in Australia was so critical that cyber criminals were targeting secondary schools. He said this meant that every organisation, large or small, needed to be cyber aware, because they’re carrying personal data.

“The level of skill sets and requirements for security now has increased across all companies,” Mr Baden told Talking Business.

“Anywhere that has personal information that could be a target, with any criminal looking to get into an organisation, they’re going to look for the weakest link.

“Now what that means is that every single person will have to have a great security posture.” 

Pay attention now

Mr Baden said this was particularly pertinent now, when people were making mistakes all the time, clicking on any link and responding to emails sent out by cyber criminals.

This meant that organisations needed to prioritise cyber education for all staff.

“From an F5 perspective, we look after the application from an enterprise level but every organisation needs to ensure they’ve got great education because there are phishing links, all types of areas where they can be contacted,” he said.

This means the cyber security education needed to be across everyone in the organisations, at all levels.

“Every single person in the organisation is responsible for cyber security,” Mr Baden said.

“Previously with cyber security, companies would leave it to their IT teams, the networks team, to the cyber team.

“As we’ve continued on, we’ve seen much more of the business CEOs, the CFOS, they’re much more interested in what they’re spending their money on and what are they getting for that money and where is that going and will that cover them off.”

Mr Baden said one of the challenges with cyber security was locating where applications were being hosted to ensure their security. Potentially every bank, government instrumentality or telco would have their own applications.

“We manage security for multiple different companies and the way that occurs is that the major banks, the major governments, the telecommunications companies all have different ways of delivering those applications, whether it’s to pay your bills, whether it’s to get information and the most important thing is wherever that sits, you are able to make sure you’ve got that security portfolio covered across all those areas,” Mr Baden said.

Listen to cyber specialists

To address the skills shortages in cyber security, Mr Baden said, “there can never be enough” specialists, so a lot of companies are now turning to SAAS (software as a service) solutions for global threats.

“Now if you don’t have all those skills sets and you can leverage someone who’s hot on SAAS, then if there is a threat anywhere across the world, that can be replicated into your security portfolio before you can be attacked,” he said.

In Australia, Mr Baden said, there was a requirement for company directors to be aware of cyber security. That was part of the board governance today.

He said with all the brand damage now being done by cybercrime – for companies like Optus, Latitude and Medibank – companies have been investing heavily in cyber security over the last five years.

“What it does is it brings it back to the fact that these high-profile breaches have meant that nobody wants to be called on that, so everyone is investing to make sure they can avoid that,” he said.

www.leongettler.com

www.f5.com

 

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-44-interview-with-jason-baden-from-f5

 

ends

Plotlogic offers new precision mining capability – with environmental bonuses

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

IMAGINE a technology that not only preserves the life of mines, but restores discarded mines to production and ensures the metals are processed sustainably.

That sums up what’s been developed by Queensland entrepreneur and mining industry veteran Andrew Job.

Mr Job said the technology behind his company, Plotlogic, is unique. It combines sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) to go into existing mining operations and set up those mines to produce more metal off a lower carbon base.

“That makes the mines essentially more efficient, producing the metals we need to power the clean economy, but also at the same time makes those mines able to produce that off a lower carbon base,” Mr Job told Talking Business.  

Technological breakthroughs in mining

Mr Job said the technology, which he developed out of his PhD, was critical for the Plotlogic.

“The imaging aspect of what we use goes beyond the visible part of the light spectrum,” he said.

“Traditional imagery works in red, green and blue. That’s three colour channels which is what our eyes are used to seeing.

“Our technology works in the infra-red part of the light spectrum as well and goes out into things we can’t see with human eyes but are really relevant when you’re trying to determine different rock and mineral properties,” Mr Job said.

“It collects a huge amount of data. For a typical camera there are three colour channels. For our technology, there are 460 colour channels and we use that huge amount of information on every single pixel to run a whole bunch of artificial intelligence over the top of it to predict rock properties.

“Because we are able to scan and scan so many rocks real quickly, and determine those rock properties with a high degree of accuracy, it gives an unprecedented level of knowledge for mine operators to run their mines very efficiently. So, they can make accurate determinations about the ore material, the waste material, (or) if there is anything that will slow the plant down in terms of chewing up a huge amount of energy.”

Mines produce higher quality mineral levels, sustainably

Mr Job said the Plotlogic technology allows the life of mines to be extended.

It also allows mine operators to go into previously abandoned mines.

“We can now go into those operations that were previously uneconomic or (left) some sort of environmental legacy and use our technology to clean up the operation,” Mr Job said.

“It basically means new resources are unlocked that were previously tied up or considered to be uneconomic or too hard to access.”

He said the sensing technology and AI could also improve the workings of a whole bunch of other industries.

Plotlogic has also worked with tungsten producer EQ Resources in far north Queensland and lithium producers.

Plotlogic has a strong patent portfolio with its proprietary technology and it is also expanding overseas. This includes working with producers in Brazil and Indonesia,

“We see ourselves having an important role to play in the international mining industry,” Mr Job said.

“We certainly see ourselves being an international player,” he said.

“Obviously the mining industry is global in its nature, there are deposits all over the planet.

“We see that our technology can be really beneficial, no matter where that deposit is located, whether that’s in South America, North America, Indonesia or other parts of the world.” 

www.plotlogic.com

www.leongettler.com

 

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-42-interview-with-andrew-job-from-plotlogic

ends

How creating bespoke AI-equipped digital humans is transforming business operations

By Rakan Sleiman, UNITH vice president of product >>

SMALL-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) have traditionally faced a challenge: how do you scale the essential support services that rely on good human to human contact, such as customer support, HR and onboarding, as your business grows?

Customisable digital human artificial intelligence (AI) tools can now help SMBs streamline administrative work across several crucial areas in their businesses, while personalising internal and external company interactions. 

This leads to strengthened customer support services, improved staff training, better onboarding of new employees, and enhanced sales and marketing efforts. 

Sales reps look to spend more time with their clients and potential customers, but many of them spend their time on administrative tasks. During the week, sales reps spend about 28 percent of their time selling with the rest spent on manual tasks[1].

There are also poor onboarding practices that tend to lead to higher turnover, with 69 percent of employees reporting they are more likely to stay with an organisation for three years if they experience great onboarding[2].

That gap still exists, because most employees aren’t happy with current onboarding, as only 12 percent of employees strongly agree that their company ‘does a great job’ onboarding[3].

Many organisations see the importance of personalised learning for employees, with high-growth companies twice as likely, compared with other businesses, to offer tailored training. There is room to grow for customised training, as only 17 percent of companies say they have effective training[4].

When wanting answers to queries, customers expect an immediate response from a business. Some 90 percent of customers are expecting a response in 10 minutes or less when they have a customer service question[5].

Effectively solving these issues is crucial for organisations, with 90 percent of customers regarding resolution as the most important customer service issue[6].

A digital human platform can help resolve problems

UNITH’s self-service digital human platform, interFace, can help organisations solve these business challenges.

Through interFace, users can create their own digital humans by using specialist avatars and voices in 60 different languages. There is a free version for anyone to use, but this is only suitable for individual purposes.

For SMBs, it is ideal to unlock interFace’s more bespoke features to create a digital human that reflects the company’s values.

This is done via premium subscriptions and enterprise packages. 

These enhanced digital humans provide SMBs with additional conversational sessions and text-to-videos, more digital humans and branding customisation, and face and voice cloning; or even application programming interface (API) access to provide an even deeper level of customisation and integration.

Some of the key business challenges that interFace can solve include learning and development of staff, customer support, sales and marketing, human resources, and hospitality services.

Learning and development

Fostering a connection is important in the learning and development for employees as they grow with the company. Therefore, it is important that digital humans appear to be as human as possible.

InterFace uses large language models (LLMs) to create more life-like digital humans, compared with traditional chatbots. By using LLMs to respond quicker and more naturally to the user, particularly through interFace’s appearance, voice, and interaction, it creates a better connection.

Employees also always have access to their digital humans, which ensures continuous development without relying on other resources within the company. This better access can help accelerate learning through real-time feedback and role-playing exercises that identify strengths and areas for improvement.

Customer support

Customers that have access to digital humans are not limited by time and location, and are available anytime, anywhere, on any device. InterFace can provide access to real-time information to customers anywhere in the world, given that the digital humans are kept up to date with the latest information.

The best customer support offered by interFace digital humans will be those that are personalised, ensuring that your brand’s value is effectively conveyed, along with using real life scenarios to help address the customer’s needs.

Sales and marketing

InterFace can assist sales and marketing teams in finalising sales and saving time. This means that sales reps can focus on more important tasks and improving sales. InterFace can personalise the sales process for customers and make it more relevant by creating a bespoke approach for both the customer and sales and marketing team.

The digital human AI of interFace can automate and streamline tasks and act as a part of the team by answering queries, spur sales leads by recommending products to customers, and suggest other items. Sales and marketing teams can also create personalised interFace digital humans. This can help teams keep up with the latest products and trends.

Human resources

One crucial element for human resource departments is onboarding. In many cases, the onboarding experience for new employees can determine job satisfaction and if they would leave the company sooner than planned.

InterFace can help human resources departments get onboarding right by providing a more engaging experience for new employees, as this novel digital approach can get their attention.

The interFace digital humans also provide information to new employees, so human resource departments spend less time dealing with multiple queries. Therefore, interFace helps streamline their work, so they can save time and focus on other important tasks and even create new ways through digital humans to further improve the onboarding experience.

Hospitality

Digital humans can also act as assistance concierges for hotels in a range of administration activities. By focussing less on these tasks, hotel staff can make sure visitors are getting the best service and enjoy their vacation.

Visitors can also engage with digital humans to not only book their stay but also gather feedback after they check out. This data can then be used by hotels to create personalised digital humans that make recommendations for guests’ stay.

www.unith.ai

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR  

Rakan Sleiman is the vice president of product at UNITH, an Australian-European-based artificial intelligence business. UNITH focuses on media technology used to develop conversational commerce. UNITH’s Digital Human platform combines AI with machine learning based technology to generate digital avatars that appear visually as unique individuals.

 

REFERENCES

[1] https://www.salesforce.com/au/blog/sales-support/

[2] https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/talent-acquisition/dont-underestimate-importance-good-onboarding

[3] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/235121/why-onboarding-experience-key-retention.aspx

[4] https://qwilr.com/blog/sales-training-statistics/

[5] https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/live-chat-go-to-market-flaw?

[6] https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/be/pdf/2020/08/customer-experience-in-the-new-reality.pdf

 

Ends

Interactive gives AI a business reality check

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

WHAT ARE the big trends with artificial intelligence and business?

Fred Thiele, the chief information security officer at Interactive, said we can “expect more government regulation”.

And the big issue, he said, would be data governance.

“When you talk about AI (artificial intelligence), I think data governance becomes a huge topic.” Mr Thiele told Talking Business. 

“Is the data you‘re giving AI clean and managed well? Do people have the right access?  Does the AI have the right access to that data?” 

Mr Thiele said data management and data governance was difficult for many companies.

“It’s a discipline within cyber security and we’ve been struggling with cyber security as companies for some time, because it’s a difficult topic,” he said. “But I think, as we go more down the AI path, we want to do more with our data and help people in our enterprises find out more about our data and give AI more access to that data and it’s going to be even more important.

“This is where you’ll see more regulation come in around data.”

Legalities adjust to data-intense world

This is now more evident with changes within the Privacy Act in Australia and Internet Response mandates.

“I think you’re going to see it more as AI gets access to more data,” Mr Thiele said.

He said people sending wrong emails or disclosing the wrong MRI record have been happening before the onset of AI. It’s all data.

“AI may find that data easier,” he said.

Mr Thiele said the generative AI of today – in the form Chat GPT and Microsoft Co-Pilot – was very good at deciphering language and understanding ‘exactly what is needed’.

“They are essentially a search engine that you can type natural language into and get the response back in natural language, so it’s the next iteration of a search engine, essentially,” Mr Thiele said.

“It’s more complicated than that,  but to boil it down, with the underlying data we still have issues with that just like we do today.”

Big changes to come in AI

Mr Thiele said the AI of today was very good at dealing with language but he predicted big changes in the years ahead with images and video.

“The image generation is getting a lot better, so I think we’ll see a lot of advancement of image generation and also starting to showcase a lot of video generation,” he said.

“So, generating video that is nearly photo realistic.

“Over the next three to five years, you’ll see massive changes in that space to the possibility where movies can be generated with a prompt to an AI.”

This would not only change movies, he said, but also advertising.

And that, he said, would create a lot of work for lawyers.

“If you start thinking about ethics and compliance and who owns the copyright to that image that was generated by AI and how do the royalties get allocated, you’re going to see a lot of these things come up,” Mr Thiele said.

www.interactive.com.au

www.leongettler.com

                

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-27-interview-with-fred-thiele-from-interact

ends

Freshworks puts the art into artificial intelligence

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) has the scope to completely revolutionise the workplace and customer relations.

This AI-assisted approach is being pioneered by Freshworks, a software company that provides services for customer-facing solutions and employee solutions.

For customer facing solutions, Freshworks provides customer support as well as salesforce and marketing automation – all integrated into a single unified suite. For employees, it has ITSM (IT service management) and ESM (enterprise software management) solutions which are suitable for employee self-service functions, allowing them to monitor their applications.

Prakash Ramamurthy, chief product officer at Freshworks said the company provides its clients with AI that is easy to use.

For example, AI can help agents dealing with customers. 

“The way you respond to the customer with their angst needs to be perfect. It needs to be more empathetic,” Mr Ramamurthy told Talking Business.

“So (that could entail) even helping our agent take some basic sentences and rephrasing them in a more benevolent fashion.”

Another way is for the AI to examine the data to collect insights and make these available for agents and administrators.

“If I am a customer support person and I am interacting with somebody, after that conversation I should get something saying: ‘This the quality score for you. You did well on sentiment, you didn’t do so well on crisply answering the question’.

“For us, AI is an enabler for our end users. It’s an enabler for our administrators.”

AI complements customer service

Mr Ramamurthy said AI could assist both agents and customers in situations where the customer is not getting the answers they want and they ask to speak to the manager.

“The agent can use ChatGPT to summarise the conversation in five or six bullets so that the supervisor sees the context and within a few minutes, knows what it’s about so they will respond better to the customer,” he said.

Mr Ramamurthy said AI could also help companies deal with email marketing and ‘FAQs’ in response to questions from customers. This would be absolutely crucial for marketing departments.

“It will make the agents be more productive, it will be able to help the employees get all the services that they need in their channels of choice, whether it’s Slack or Teams,” he said.

“It will make interactions with software more intuitive and therefore it makes everyone more productive all around,” Mr Ramamurthy said.

“The whole process gets better because AI brings the right insights, it guides the agents for what their next best action is and it helps them interact with information that can be brought to bear in a more productive fashion.

“We are going to move to conversations, not clicks,” Mr Ramamurthy said

“AI is going to make it more conversational, and more importantly, AI will tell you these are your top three problems.”

www.freshworks.com

www.leongettler.com

 

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-19-interview-with-prakash-ramamurthy-from-f

ends

Passwords ‘now at risk’ says IT expert

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

ROBERT WILKINSON, CEO of Cyber Marathon Solutions, is warning that passwords are now very much at risk, thanks to machine learning.

Mr Wilkinson said it had become a continual battle for IT teams to get people to better secure their passwords.

He said the traditional advice on securing passwords has been how long the password is, whether it has an expiry date and how complex it is.

Now, however, a large number of companies like Microsoft are saying that might not be the best way to secure passwords.

“In this day and age, what you might be better doing is coming up with potentially shorter passwords,” Mr Wilkinson told Talking Business.

“Microsoft recommends shorter passwords because people will remember them. They still recommend some complexity in the passwords, and they also talk about not having them expire. 

“The reason they say that is because people are people. If you have to sit there and remember a whole bunch of different passwords that are a mile long, you’re going to try to make it as simple as possible for yourself.

“So what happens is when you have those long passwords, you make them pretty simple so reasonably simple to guess, or reasonably simple for a machine to guess,” he said.

“So if you have a rule that says it has to be changed every 30 days, what people will do is have the exact same password and change the numbers which is also very obvious and makes it easy for them to be cracked.”

Passwords plus multi-factor authentication

Mr Wilkinson said passwords these days have to be part of a system which includes multi-factor authentication.

“You need to have user education to tell users why it’s important to have a password that is unique for the services they’re looking at rather than spreading it across every single thing they log into,” Mr Wilkinson said.

He said that while he suspects passwords “are not going away” there are other security options to passwords.

These include biometric identification from the phone, like finger prints or face scans, multi-factor tokens that can be put on key rings – and some companies issue people with digital certificates on their computers that authenticate them.

Mr Wilkinson said Microsoft ATP (Advanced Threat Protection), for example, includes vulnerability assessments in addition to anti-virus protection and built-in AI that allows users to spot threats that are emerging. This is a subscription service that comes with Office 365.

Microsoft prepares businesses with ‘ATP’

Microsoft ATP can also help IT and security staff by keeping track of what happens on a machine and categorising some of the things it detects.

“You can imagine if you’re a business owner and you have 100 machines trying to force feed stuff to your IT teams, you can start missing things,” he said. “What ATP can do is start prioritising those things and make it easier and quicker to respond to them.”

Mr Wilkinson said ATP incorporates a lot of automation and it can be integrated with other applications such as security or IT ticketing systems.

He said companies can deal with cyber security by having a plan to start with and implementing user education.

“That’s what most companies skip to their detriment,” Mr Wilkinson said.

“You need to make sure the users have an understanding of the types of issues they may face because not everyone is an IT person,” he said.

“It’s going to be a surprise for some people to see how easy it is to breach an organisation by working through a user.”

www.cyberms.net

www.leongettler.com

 

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business-37-interview-with-robert-wilkinson-from-cyb

 

ends

More Articles …