Compulink Technologies, Inc. Vice-President of Sales, Denise Arboleda Awarded City & State Responsible 100 for Second Straight Year

We are pleased to announce that for the second year in a row, Denise Arboleda, VP of Sales at Compulink, has been recognized as one of New York City’s Responsible 100 by City & State.

Each year, City & State puts a spotlight on 100 exceptional individuals who are quietly putting in the time and effort to help address and overcome these and other challenges – and, fundamentally, to assist their most vulnerable neighbors. These business, government, nonprofit and advocacy leaders, carefully selected from hundreds of nominations, display both the idealism that underpins the belief that change is possible and a realistic understanding of the dedication required to effectuate real and enduring change. In short, this is a group that illustrates what it means to be socially responsible.”

When asked what social responsibility mean to her, Denise had this to say – “Through my work I am faced with challenges that call on me to display social responsibility. At times it may be through our annual internship program we open up for high school students, giving an eye-opening experience of what it means to work in the IT industry. In other cases, it may mean going above and beyond for a customer and delivering a solution that will truly benefit their organization rather than push the latest IT trend. It also means contributing to and giving back to our community. By participating in our local community, we are able to help share a brighter future for those just starting out.

Denise, from everyone at Compulink, we are extremely proud of you and your impact on the NYC community. This award is not only a testament to your leadership and expertise, but your compassion and drive to help others succeed. 

Read More

Higher Ed’s Top 10 IT Issues

In a packed ballroom at Educause’s annual conference on Thursday, Susan Grajek, the organization’s vice president for partnerships, communities and research, laid bare higher education’s top 10 technology issues for 2023.

“The pandemic sparked a great rethink that upended previous models of management and working,” Grajek said. “In 2023, institutional and technology leaders are ready for a new approach.”

Grajek’s speech was peppered with technology concepts such as “cybersecurity” and “privacy,” while also including numerous references to “empathy” and “humanity.”

Educause’s 2022 IT issues panel and higher education institutional and technology leaders identified the trends along with their implications for colleges. The report is scheduled to publish Monday. Here’s a sneak preview that highlights higher ed’s need to move from data insight to data action, develop learning-first strategies, and lead with humility.

Ensure IT Leadership Is a Full Strategic Partner

Chief information officers need a seat at college leadership tables to “facilitate a dialogue between institutional aspiration and digital possibilities,” Grajek said. When CIOs are involved in institutional decision-making from the start, they can help guide digital transformation in business and academic matters in a proactive, rather than reactive, way. They also learn more about the college’s mission, operations and culture and, as a result, are better equipped to support it.

Evolve, Adapt or Lose IT Talent

As unemployment dropped to record levels, industry has outcompeted higher education for IT talent in terms of pay, benefits, flexible work options and, in some cases, work-life balance. Moving forward, college hiring managers may need to offer compensation that may not be in line with internal standards, Grajek said.

 

Click here to view the full article

Read More

Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2023

artner, Inc. today announced its list of 10 top strategic technology trends that organizations need to explore in 2023. Analysts presented their findings during Gartner IT Symposium/Xpoâ„Ē, which is taking place here through Thursday.

“To enhance their organization’s financial position during times of economic turbulence, CIOs and IT executives must look beyond cost savings to new forms of operational excellence while continuing to accelerate digital transformation,” said Frances Karamouzis, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. “The Gartner strategic technology trends for 2023 are built around three themes — optimize, scale and pioneer — where technologies can help organizations optimize resilience, operations or trust, scale vertical solutions and product delivery, and pioneer with new forms of engagement, accelerated responses or opportunity.” 

“However, in 2023, delivering technology will not be enough. These themes are impacted by environmental, social and governance (ESG) expectations and regulations, which translate into the shared responsibility to apply sustainable technologies. Every technology investment will need to be set off against its impact on the environment, keeping future generations in mind. ‘Sustainable by default’ as an objective requires sustainable technology,” said David Groombridge, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. 

The top strategic technology trends for 2023 are:

Sustainability
Sustainability traverses all of the strategic technology trends for 2023. In a recent Gartner survey, CEOs reported that environmental and social changes are now a top three priority for investors, after profit and revenue. This means that executives must invest more in innovative solutions that are designed to address ESG demand to meet sustainability goals. To do this, organizations need a new sustainable technology framework that increases the energy and material efficiency of IT services, enables enterprise sustainability through technologies like traceability, analytics, renewable energy and AI, and deploys IT solutions to help customers achieve their own sustainability goals.

Pioneer
Metaverse

Gartner defines a metaverse as a collective virtual 3D shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical and digital reality. A metaverse is persistent, providing enhanced immersive experiences. Gartner expects that a complete metaverse will be device-independent and won’t be owned by a single vendor. It will have a virtual economy of itself, enabled by digital currencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). By 2027, Gartner predicts that over 40% of large organizations worldwide will use a combination of Web3, AR cloud and digital twins in metaverse-based projects aimed at increasing revenue.

Superapps
A superapp combines the features of an app, a platform and an ecosystem in one application. It not only has its own set of functionalities, but it also provides a platform for third parties to develop and publish their own mini-apps on. By 2027, Gartner predicts that more than 50% of the global population will be daily active users of multiple superapps.

“Although most examples of superapps are mobile apps, the concept can also be applied to desktop client applications, such as Microsoft Teams and Slack, with the key being that a superapp can consolidate and replace multiple apps for customer or employee use,” said Karamouzis.

Adaptive AI
Adaptive AI systems aim to continuously retrain models and learn within runtime and development environments based on new data to adapt quickly to changes in real-world circumstances that were not foreseen or available during initial development. They use real-time feedback to change their learning dynamically and adjust goals. This makes them suitable for operations where rapid changes in the external environment or changing enterprise goals require an optimized response.

Optimize
Digital Immune System

Seventy-six percent of teams responsible for digital products are now also responsible for revenue generation. CIOs are looking for new practices and approaches that their teams can adopt to deliver that high business value, along with mitigating risk and increasing customer satisfaction. A digital immune system provides such a roadmap.

Digital immunity combines data-driven insight into operations, automated and extreme testing, automated incident resolution, software engineering within IT operations and security in the application supply chain to increase the resilience and stability of systems. Gartner predicts that by 2025, organizations that invest in building digital immunity will reduce system downtime by up to 80% – and that translates directly into higher revenue. 

Applied Observability 
Observable data reflects the digitized artifacts, such as logs, traces, API calls, dwell time, downloads and file transfers, that appear when any stakeholder takes any kind of action. Applied observability feeds these observable artifacts back in a highly orchestrated and integrated approach to accelerate organizational decision-making

“Applied observability enables organizations to exploit their data artifacts for competitive advantage,” said Karamouzis “It is powerful because it elevates the strategic importance of the right data at the right time for rapid action based on confirmed stakeholder actions, rather than intentions. When planned strategically and executed successfully, applied observability is the most powerful source of data-driven decision-making.”

AI Trust, Risk and Security Management 
Many organizations are not well prepared to manage AI risks. A Gartner survey in the U.S, U.K. and Germany found that 41% of organizations had experienced an AI privacy breach or security incident. However, that same survey found that organizations that actively managed AI risk, privacy and security achieved improved AI project results. More of their AI projects moved from proof-of-concept status into production and achieved more business value than did AI projects in organizations that did not actively manage these functions.

Organizations must implement new capabilities to ensure model reliability, trustworthiness, security and data protection. AI trust, risk and security management (TRiSM) requires participants from different business units to work together to implement new measures.

Scale 
Industry Cloud Platforms
Industry cloud platforms offer a combination of SaaS, platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providing industry-specific sets of modular capabilities to support specific industry business use cases. Enterprises can use the packaged capabilities of industry cloud platforms as building blocks to compose unique and differentiating digital business initiatives, providing agility, innovation and reduced time to market, while avoiding lock-in.

By 2027, Gartner predicts that more than 50% of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives.

Platform Engineering
Platform engineering is the discipline of building and operating self-service internal developer platforms for software delivery and life cycle management. The goal of platform engineering is to optimize the developer experience and accelerate product teams’ delivery of customer value.

Gartner predicts that 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams by 2026 and that 75% of those will include developer self-service portals.

Wireless Value Realization
While no single technology will dominate, enterprises will use a spectrum of wireless solutions to cater for all environments, from Wi-Fi in the office, through services for mobile devices, to low-power services and even radio connectivity. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 60% of enterprises will be using five or more wireless technologies simultaneously. 

As networks move beyond pure connectivity, they will provide insight using built-in analysis and low-power systems will harvest energy directly from the network. This means the network will become a source of direct business value. 

This year’s top strategic technology trends highlight those trends that will drive significant disruption and opportunity over the next five to 10 years. Gartner clients can read more in the Gartner Special Report â€œTop Strategic Technology Trends for 2023.”

About Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo
Gartner IT Symposium/Xpoâ„Ē 2022 is the world’s most important gathering for CIOs and other IT executives. IT executives rely on these conferences to learn how to meet the moment and make a difference by providing the vision and results needed to lift their organizations to the next level. Follow news, photos and video coming from Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo on the Gartner Newsroom, on Twitter using #GartnerSYM, Instagram and LinkedIn.

About Gartner for Information Technology Executives
Gartner for Information Technology Executives provides actionable, objective insight to CIOs and IT leaders to help them drive their organizations through digital transformation and lead business growth. Additional information is available at www.gartner.com/en/information-technology

Read More

The Compulink Team Attends TD SYNNEX Inspire in Greenville, SC

The Compulink Team had a wonderful time last week at the #tdsynnexinspire conference in Greenville, SC!

We learned from some amazing speakers about the future of #tech, met some wonderful people and had an all-around great time!

Check out some of our photos from last week. Can’t wait for next year!
#team

Read More

Powering Hybrid Work

This article was originally published on Cisco. Click here to view the original article. Compulink is a certified Cisco partner. 

As organizations hammer out their strategies for a hybrid future of work that’s fast becoming the present, there are still many unknowns.

For many, hybrid work is going to be hard. It’s going to be messy. Strategies and solutions will have to evolve through trial and error.

But there are some things we do know. Leadership and culture will play key roles, and digital infrastructure will form the very foundation of the hybrid-work experience.

At Cisco we believe work is not where you go, it’s what you do. That’s why we’re flexible on the numbers of days in — or out — of the office. In fact, pre-pandemic only a third of our employees were in the office full time, so we’ve long been a hybrid-first company. This puts Cisco, and our technologies, in a unique position to help other organizations advance their hybrid work strategies.

We view powering hybrid work in two distinct ways: enabling a Hybrid Workforce and transforming Hybrid Workspaces. Enabling a Hybrid Workforce means providing secure access and collaboration from anywhere, anytime. Transforming your Hybrid Workspace only happens when networking, security, and collaboration tools come together to enhance health and well-being, safety, and efficiencies.

As Cisco helps organizations reimagine and redesign their workforces and workspaces, a central question emerges: What are the infrastructure imperatives for powering hybrid work today and into the future?

We believe customers will benefit most from focusing on three areas:

  • Powering Teams
  • Securing your Enterprise
  • Transforming your Infrastructure

Powering teams and hybrid work through inclusive experiences

In any approach to hybrid work, people need to connect with seamless, secure, and smart technology. Without it, hybrid work simply doesn’t happen.

We’re on the threshold of a new world. The phrase “return to office” is a misnomer because the office is forever changed. The workforces that use offices will be different from those of 18 months ago. And they’ll use the physical space differently.

According to a recent survey of our own employees, about one in four Cisco employees wants to work in an office three or more days a week once offices reopen (compared to two-thirds who worked in an office with that frequency before the pandemic).

In the future of work, every employee will be hybrid — and equally deserving of the same experience no matter where they work, be it in the office, at home, in a car or a coffee shop. People-first and flexible are the collaboration watchwords of the moment. And for us, that starts with embedding inclusion into our collaboration platform.

Cisco’s powerful Webex tool is a cornerstone of the hybrid-work future, and since last year, it’s incorporated more than 800 new innovations. To name but a few, these include real-time translation from English into 108 languages; background-noise reduction; gesture recognition; and insights to help employees manage their well-being and productivity and to ensure that every voice is heard and valued. Many of these new features incorporate AI and machine learning to create an entirely new experience for the user, one that’s simple, seamless, and inclusive.  

Hardware innovations such as the Webex Desk Pro and Webex Desk Camera play a key role as well; among many other features, they are harnessing AI to reduce meeting fatigue for frontline employees working from home.

Secure by design, private by default

Without security, the hybrid-work future will never succeed. With it, we can create a future of work that’s more inclusive, more connected, and more collaborative than anything that came before.

But in the hybrid-work environment, employees and devices can be anywhere, moving in and out of company networks. And complexity mounts when managing security across an expanded attack surface of users, devices, applications, and data.

Cisco’s strategy is to make powerful security simple for our customers. And we put security at the forefront of every discussion, design, and strategy — whether we’re focusing on privacy, collaboration, or application performance.

Cisco’s solutions unify user and device protection at scale, making it easy to verify, enable secure access, and defend remote workers. And we build a unified platform, SecureX, into every security product. This helps  customers connect our integrated security portfolio and existing security infrastructure to provide simplicity, visibility, and efficiency.

We are also bringing networking and security technologies to the cloud. Our goal is to help customers seamlessly and securely access the applications they use every day, from whatever device they choose to use, and from wherever they choose to work. Cisco is delivering on our secure access service edge (SASE) vision to combine best-in-class networking, security, and more into a single subscription service with observability to the edges of the network.

Our customers benefit from having security built-in — not bolted on — to every product and solution we offer. That, of course, includes Webex. In a collaboration-industry first, we recently introduced zero-trust security into Webex. This demands certification from every meeting participant and device before gaining entrance to a call. And we’re taking the friction out of security with passwordless and multifactor authentication, adding to our existing end-to-end encryption.

At Cisco, we believe that privacy is a basic human right. That philosophy informs all our technology and products from highly secure networking tools to Webex. Our new People Insights platform, for example, shares metrics and productivity goals with the individual Webex user, never the organization. And Webex noise reduction and virtual backgrounds can ease the stress of working in sensitive home situations.

Transform your infrastructure through a modern network

The in-office experience isn’t the only thing that’s changed forever. Before the pandemic, IT would sometimes balk at addressing work-from-home issues. It wasn’t really their responsibility, and many wondered why workers didn’t just return to the office.

No more. In the world of hybrid work, the home office needs to be just as connected. And the virtual experience needs to be as good or better than in-person. Employee productivity depends on their interaction with applications, and the application experience depends heavily on network performance.

That’s why, no matter where employees are, Cisco uses the same solutions to monitor network and application performance. These include tools like ThousandEyes, which provides end-to-end visibility from user to application whether connections are over home broadband or the corporate network.

It’s also why offerings like Meraki teleworker gateways are so key to hybrid work. They can provide seamless, secure connections extending an enterprise network into the home, while providing cellular backup delivering real redundancy for mission critical work.

Our partnership with communication service provider (CSP) customers around the world is also fundamental to transforming the network. We are helping them to maintain the health of the internet and deliver quality connectivity to as many people and businesses as possible.

And with our innovations and guidance, CSPs draw closer to their goals of guaranteeing connectivity speeds (potentially zero data caps) during congested times; delivering trusted connection options with built-in security services to protect IP; robust consumer grade SD-WAN solutions (home internet via always-on wireline connection through DSL, cable, or fiber); and always-on mobile connections (LTE, 5G).

Modern networking equipment is also transforming the in-office experience — for example, by ensuring compliance with health and safety policies.

Technologies like Cisco’s wireless access points, DNA Spaces (our location and Internet of Things platform) and Meraki IoT devices, cameras, and sensors all contribute to a safer working environment. They can monitor temperature, lighting, humidity, and ambient noise levels, and control these areas with integrations to HVAC and other office systems. At the same time, they can track the real-time occupancy of workspaces and issue alerts when occupancy thresholds are reached.

Webex can also help you find available desks and meeting rooms. Upon entering a room, Webex automatically awakens to launch a meeting, without a single push of a button or swipe of a touchpad.

The smart, sustainable office of the future

The hybrid future of work demands that we reimagine the hybrid workforce and the hybrid workspace.

In addition to ensuring a safe return to office, we enable customers to rethink how they use space by identifying which workspaces are overused or underused and enabling real-time adjustments accordingly.

For example, IOT technology can make offices more efficient for workers and more power efficient. Environmental sensors can help control HVAC usage, cameras can help us better utilize square footage efficiently and technologies like POE lighting can help us control energy usage while delivering a better overall employee experience.

Looking further, we will merge hybrid work and sustainable building design for customers. That means developing sustainable and regenerative products and designing energy-efficient and carbon-reducing buildings.

Imagine that! A hybrid future of world with sustainability at its core, leading to work experiences that are inspiring to employees and that help attract top talent.

Moving forward, we have an opportunity to build something even better: a future of work that’s more inclusive, creative, and fun than ever before. With a virtual experience that’s even better than face to face. And a hybrid workforce that blends seamlessly with the hybrid workspace, whether in the office or from thousands of miles away.

We look forward to partnering with our customers on what promises to be an exciting journey!

Read More

How automating distributed cloud infrastructure changes IT

As IT environments become increasingly distributed and complex, organizations are exploring how automation can address their evolving IT operations and infrastructure needs.

When businesses run on data, IT operations and infrastructure capabilities directly influence revenue opportunities.

In a recent survey of IT decision-makers, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) found that 74% of organizations with mature or in-process digital transformation initiatives had an active IT transformation project underway, and 65% of IT decision-makers identified infrastructure modernization as a top five priority.

Public cloud infrastructure adoption plays a significant role in infrastructure modernization. But IT environments are increasingly distributed, spanning multiple edge and remote locations, data centers, private cloud locations and public cloud infrastructure providers. This disaggregated state of contemporary IT and application environments is known as the distributed cloud.

As IT infrastructure environments become more distributed, complexity mounts. According to ESG research, 64% of IT decision-makers surveyed agree that IT infrastructure complexity slows IT operations and digital initiatives.

The pressure that infrastructure complexity places on IT execution reduces the likelihood that IT teams can accelerate operations to meet business and development team demands. More than two-thirds of surveyed IT decision-makers said they are under pressure to accelerate IT infrastructure provisioning and deployment to support developers and line-of-business teams.

In an effort to accelerate operations, infrastructure automation initiatives are becoming more prevalent, especially for on-premises infrastructure. In response to this interest among customers, IT infrastructure vendors are increasingly integrating intelligence and automation into their systems and tools. Additional focus, however, must be applied to how easily IT teams can deploy, manage and upgrade that infrastructure within an organization’s automation practices.

For decades, nearly every systems vendor vied for the title of “easiest to use,” but the goal now should be “easiest to automate.” Infrastructure automation is still too complex: In recent ESG research, 37% of organizations reported problematic skills shortages in IT orchestration and automation. Automation is put in place to alleviate those skills shortages — not add to them.

When evaluating new infrastructure systems, organizations must first ensure that selected tools can support the performance, security and availability needs of their application environments. In addition, the following three considerations should be part of the evaluation process:

Integrated intelligence. When it comes to new systems, the market is awash with terms like smart and intelligent. The key is to identify which decisions and activities the system can offload from architects, IT admins and users. How quickly can new systems be deployed and upgraded? Can they stay optimized automatically as the environment evolves?
Declarative APIs. Integrated intelligence is valuable, but to maximize that value, APIs must be designed to simplify automation implementation. Declarative APIs provide the state that the system should create but do not require developers to specify all the steps necessary to achieve that state. Declarative APIs reduce the workload of automation engineers and developers and make automation easier to maintain as infrastructure environments evolve. Vendors should also provide bindings for preferred programming languages and software developer kits, as well as integrations with automation tools, such as Terraform and Ansible.
APIs tailored to personas. The needs of IT admins tasked with deploying, configuring and maintaining infrastructure differ from those of developers or app owners who use that infrastructure. APIs that cater to different personas simplify automation activities and reduce the risks associated with scaling out automation practices to additional teams. An example of a declarative API that can be tailored to individual personas is Pure Storage’s Pure Fusion, which offers tools for storage provider and storage consumer personas.
Establishing and scaling automation practices can be a complex process. Don’t overlook the role IT infrastructure selection plays in simplifying IT infrastructure automation rollouts.

This article was originally published on Tech Target. Click here to view the original article.

Read More

Cisco Partners ‘Weathering The Storm’ Until $15B Order Backlog Is Emptied

The supply chain crisis hit Cisco hard and triggered a record-breaking order backlog. But once supply chain and component supply conditions improve, partners expect flowing revenues as orders are fulfilled.

Cisco Systems’ product demand is at a record high, but the company hasn’t been able to get these orders in the hands of customers. Now, Cisco says it’s seeing early signs of a loosening supply chain which could open the floodgates for revenue for Cisco and its partners.

The tech giant currently has an order backlog worth well over $15 billion. Once Cisco is able to recognize those revenues — which doesn’t happen until the orders are shipped — revenues will be “off the charts,” according to Cisco partners.

“Once they clear out that backlog? Billions of dollars,” said Todd Carriker, founder and CEO of Rhino Networks, an Asheville, N.C.-based Cisco partner. “In the meantime, we have to weather the storm.”

The tech giant in May revealed that its backlog was at an all-time high at more than $15 billion, up a whopping 130 percent year over year. The company didn’t disclose numbers for during its most recent fiscal quarter, which ended on July 30, but said it once again had triple-digit backlog growth that fueled the backlog to the highest level ever recorded in the company’s history, said Cisco Chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins during the company’s Q4 2022 earnings call earlier in August.

At the same time, Cisco reported Q4 2022 revenue that stayed relatively flat at $13.1 billion compared to the same period a year ago. Cisco posted non-GAAP earnings per share of 83 cents, a decline of 1 percent year over year compared to 84 cents a year ago and net income of $3.4 billion in Q4 2022, a decrease of 3 percent.

Cisco CFO R. Scott Herren said that the company isn’t “demand-constrained” but “supply-constrained.”

“If we could get more supply, we’d be growing more quickly,” Herren said.

Robbins told CRN in June that Cisco has been working behind the scenes to address supply constraints. The company has escalated certain customers and use cases — something that partners could also make a case for in the early days of the crisis — including healthcare, government, and clients with regulatory requirements. Cisco has also worked with partners to prioritize certain orders if they could agree to wait on others, Robbins said.

“In many cases, that conversation is around, ‘I need this stuff, I don’t need that—you can push it out, so don’t worry about that—but I need this stuff if you can help me.’ And so, it’s actually allowed us to, in some cases, serve other customers. It’s just been complicated. It’s a daily triage for our team to try to get this done,” he said.

Cisco tightened up its order cancellation policy once customers began placing the same order across multiple vendors in hopes of getting hardware faster and then cancelling with the other vendors when one came through with a shipping date, Rhino Networks’ Carriker said, a phenomenon that further complicated industry-wide shortages.

Cisco eventually raised prices for some of its products in line with the price increases that were happening across the networking industry with competing vendors in this space, Carriker said.

“They held off longer than most, but eventually, they had to do some price bumps for legitimate reasons, not just to try to make more margin per item. In some cases, they were offsetting the way in which they moved goods,” he said, adding that Cisco was opting to air freight some products as opposed to traditional cargo shipping methods that take much longer. “Air freight is way more expensive than cargo,” he added.

The work may be starting to pay off. Cisco’s executives said in August that it started to see an easing of supply chain constraints toward the end of July and said its component supply headwinds are also showing signs of easing.

Calgary, Alberta-based Long View Systems, a Cisco Gold partner, has been working through its own backlog of Cisco orders. The firm has been educating end customers on when to place orders since the previous 60- or 90-day ordering timeframes for new gear don’t exist right now, said Kent MacDonald, senior vice president of strategic alliances for Long View.

But the solution provider is starting to see improvements, MacDonald said.

“We’re now seeing a lot of our backlog getting assigned shipping dates over the remainder of the 2022 calendar year,” he said.

In the beginning of the supply chain crisis, Cisco was pushing out shipping dates for orders for months down the line — sometimes just days before an order was slated to ship, MacDonald said. “What’s been really been good is the committed dates are not changing to the same degree that they were — the majority of the new committed dates are being honored and now we have predictability,” he said. “With predictability, you can actually plan and execute.”

“We’re still not where we want to be, but it’s something that’s improving as time goes forward,” he said.

This article was originally published on CRN, click here to view the article.

Read More

HPE Is Betting That Cloud Computing Still Requires Help From IT

This article was originally published on Bloomberg.com, click here to view the original article. 

HPE has been aggressively moving beyond hardware to a services model. How has that changed the company?
It’s a fundamental business model change. Customers no longer want to be managing their IT infrastructure. And our service solutions are there to create a transparent relationship between them and the infrastructure. They don’t care about where the infrastructure is; they just want the outcome the infrastructure can deliver.

But won’t businesses use the cloud to bypass IT and outsourcing providers?
There still is a view that the whole world is going to move to the public cloud, but we think the world is going to be hybrid. The explosion of data at the “edge” of the cloud [on computer systems close to the data source] is warranting a much more distributed infrastructure. Every 18 months, the data produced by the world is doubling, and 80% of that data is generated at the edge. You can’t think about bringing that entire amount of data all the way onto the public cloud. It needs to be processed and analyzed and made sense of locally, so that is the whole idea that we are after.

Exactly where does HPE fit in, then?
In simple terms, HPE is the edge-to-cloud company. The edge is where companies generate data, where things happen: At a retail chain, each time a transaction takes place with a customer, there is a massive flow of information that relates to that transaction. We provide connectivity to capture that interaction and can process the data from the edge all the way to the cloud.

Are customers buying your approach?
We’ve had an incredible performance with GreenLake [HPE’s edge-to-cloud platform]. It’s been three quarters in a row where GreenLake as a service grew more than 100% in orders, year over year. And there is no letting off of that demand.

 
 

Supply chains were really affected by the pandemic, and their disruptions caused big problems for companies. Is there a lesson there?
There had been a decade or two where supply chains were considered to be global. And therefore you didn’t really care about supply chain, as long as the items that you were purchasing made it to your location. You could assemble those items and deliver the goods to your customers. Those days are over, and the decoupling of supply chain in various geopolitical areas is leading people to rethink the way they procure, manufacture, and deliver.

What’s the biggest change in thinking there?
The whole IT industry has to find a new equilibrium with supply chains that are designed for speed, resiliency, and cost, as opposed to just being efficient and designed around cost.

What was one of the lessons you learned from the pandemic?
The pandemic has taught us that the enterprises who performed the best during that period were the ones who had digitized their business models.

Read More

Compulink Technologies Inc. Authorized as a Reseller on National Cooperative Purchasing Alliance Contract

Compulink Technologies Inc. Authorized as a Reseller on National Cooperative Purchasing Alliance Contract


Compulink Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of technology solutions, services and products, announced it has been authorized as a reseller on the National Cooperative Purchasing Alliance (NCPA) contract, “a leading national government purchasing cooperative working to reduce the cost of goods and services by leveraging the purchasing power of public agencies in all 50 states.”

This contract is a testament to Compulink Technologies’ consistent reliability to fulfill their clients’ needs and key strategic alliances held with manufacturers, especially now when market disruptions are common due to supply chain
shortages.

Eligible partners that work with Compulink Technologies, Inc. will be able to utilize NCPA to sell to the 90,000+ agencies throughout the United States at a national level in both public and nonprofit sectors. These agreements open up a plethora of opportunities for Compulink’s vendor partners in vertical markets, such as K-12, Higher Education, City & State, Healthcare and nonprofits.

“Compulink is very excited about this opportunity and the new doors it will open,” said President and CEO, Rafael Arboleda. “We have always been committed to providing cutting-edge technology solutions and services and now with the addition of being added as a reseller to NCPA, we can streamline the procurement process for both our partners and agencies and help bolster their technological capabilities at competitive rates as they scale their businesses.”

About NCPA: NCPA (National Cooperative Purchasing Alliance) is a leading national government purchasing cooperative
working to reduce the cost of goods and services by leveraging the purchasing power of public agencies in all 50 states.
NCPA utilizes state of the art procurement resources and solutions that result in cooperative purchasing contracts that ensure all public agencies are receiving products and services of the highest quality at the lowest prices.

Read More

Hiring Freeze hits Tech Industry for First Time in Years

For the First Time in Years, Big Tech Experiences Massive Hiring Freeze

Tech titans such as Apple, Meta (formerly Facebook), Google, Oracle and just recently this week, Robinhood, have all announced that they will either be scaling back hiring efforts or cutting their workforces amidst a slowing economy and growing signs of a possible recession. These moves signify a major turning point in an industry that has been relatively unfazed by economic and macro conditions. Leaders and key executives have been met with difficult decisions and are bracing for difficult times ahead with over 85% of decision makers stating that they will experience their business to be impacted. 

Confidence remains high, however, amongst tech talent, with over 44% surveyed saying they are confident the recent trends will not continue and they remain hopeful market conditions will improve. Tech leaders also see this as an opportunity to hire better talent and have more leverage over contract negotiations. In the past few years, executives have stated how difficult it was to fill open positions for tech talent. This recent trend has made it easier to find qualified candidates for hiring managers. 

Only time will tell whether the tech industry will continue to slow down, but all signs point to a minor lull in what is otherwise one of the largest and most important industries. 

Read More