Digital Bulletin - Issue 10 - November 2019

Issue 10 | Nov ’19

IT’S NOT EASY BEING GREEN Engie Impact is on a mission to make transformations sustainable

ON THE RIGHT TRAX Digitising the world of retail, one shelf at a time

THE NEW

BT

Leigh Feaviour explains why intelligent automation is a pillar of digitalisation at the world’s oldest telco

The Bulletin

HIGHLIGHTS

CISCO NAMED AS GLOBAL TECH PARTNER TO CITY FOOTBALL GROUP Cisco has been named as the new global technology partner of City Football Group. Cisco said the new partnership aims to use technology to drive innovation for soccer fans and enhance connectivity for clubs, players and fans. The City Football Group is comprised of Manchester City; New York City FC; Melbourne City FC; Yokohama F. Marinos (Japan) and Sichuan Jiuniu FC (China).

18/10/19 MORE ON THIS STORY

The Bulletin is our stream of the most relevant enterprise technology news, aggregated from highly-respected sources and packaged in a short, digestible format, delivering a simple yet indispensable read.

A one-stop shop for all of the newest major developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, The Bulletin, available at digitalbullet.in, is a vital and dependable resource for technology professionals.

L

eigh Feaviour has seen it all at BT. This month’s cover star joined the world’s first telecoms company as an apprentice software tester over 30 years ago. Now he is steering one of its most ambitious technology change programmes.

Digital Bulletin was lucky enough to be invited to Adastral Park, BT’s centre for innovation in the United Kingdom, where we learned more about Feaviour’s latest assignment: to release the potential of automation and, in turn, revolutionise the experience of employees and customers.

BT is at the beginning of this journey, with its first RPA (robotic process automation) deployment only going live in 2017.

Through our feature-length article and exclusive videos, Feaviour explains his transformation methodology, plots BT’s course to intelligent automation and speaks candidly about the challenges faced.

“BT - when in five to ten years, when we’ve achieved and exceeded our automation ambitions - will be a more

efficient organisation, it will be a better organisation to work in,” he says. Turn to page eight to read this absorbing case study in full.

Further automation insights can be found in our interview with ABBYY’s Neil Murphy. ABBYY supports many leading RPA vendors with its document capture and optical character recognition software, but Murphy helps us look at the people angle of automation strategies and how creating the right culture is essential to their success.

Elsewhere in this edition, we discover how computer vision technology is digitising shelves in our largest retailers and what is behind the resurgence of 2FA security, while Engie Impact’s CEO Mathias Lelievre delivers the blueprint for sustainable transformation. That’s not all either; head to our contents page for a full run-down.

We hope you enjoy the newest issue of Digital Bulletin.

PUBLISHED BY BULLETIN MEDIA LTD, Norwich, UK Company No: 11454926 www.DigitalBullet.in TALK TO US editorial@digitalbullet.in business@digitalbullet.in

PUBLISHING

MEDIA PRODUCTION

DIGITAL MARKETING

INSIDE VIEW

Digital Bulletin descended en masse to BT’s offices in Ipswich, England, last month to put the company’s Principal Solution Architect, Intelligent Automation, Leigh Feaviour, under the spotlight

CONTENTS

4 08

CASE STUDY BT The Intelligent Automation of BT

AI TRAX Digitising the retail sector

28 36

DATA & SECURITY RSA SECURITY The resurgence of 2FA

66

44

FUTURE

PEOPLE

ABBYY Promoting a holistic approach in RPA

ENGIE IMPACT Enabling sustainable transformations

74 52 EVENTS

NETWORKS

UHURU Joining up IoT to the cloud

58

SERVICES CPA GLOBAL Raising standards in IP tech

The biggest and best technology events for your diary

82

CLOSING BULLETIN

An exclusive column from Teradata’s Atif Kureishy

CASE STUDY

8

DIGITAL BULLETIN

BT

THE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION OF

BT

Leigh Feaviour is upgrading tens of thousands of hours of employee time at one of the oldest and largest telcos in the world.

Digital Bulletin finds out how

PROJECT DIRECTOR: Richard Durrant AUTHOR: Romily Broad PHOTOGRAPHY: Krystian Data VIDEOGRAPHY: Adam Turner, Joe Murray

ISSUE 10

9

CASE STUDY

I

n 1846, in a modest office nestled in the smoggy shadow of the Bank of England in London, the world’s first telecoms company sparked into life. William Fothergill Cooke had abandoned his career as a doctor to combine with brilliant experimental engineer Charles Wheatstone to bring his revolutionary signalling system to the public. The telegraph had gone mainstream.

Their company, the Electric Telegraph Company (ETC), would go on to utterly transform the way society communicated.

Via railways, overhead cables and paddle-steamers, ETC networked the nation with mutton-chopped Victorian vigour before expanding across the waves into continental Europe, and all before it was old enough to buy a drink. It was the social media unicorn of its day.

10

DIGITAL BULLETIN

ETC would go on to form the centrepiece of a nationalised telecoms monopoly in the UK, part of the General Post Office, which spent the next 100 years innovating new technologies and digging telecoms infrastructure into the fabric of the land. Eventually, 138 years after its entrepreneurial beginnings, the GPO decided to carve off its telecoms operation. British Telecom was born - a fresh new privatised enterprise possessed of a heritage longer and richer than any other in the world.

Leigh Feaviour, a young apprentice software tester, joined the company five years later. He would go on to take a front row seat as the company - now called simply BT - rapidly expanded, digitised, and unleashed itself onto the world stage.

BT

I see BT becoming a more interesting place to work.

We’ll be a much more responsive organisation.

We’ll be able to do what we do faster, which will lead to hugely improved customer experience and ultimately shareholder value” Feaviour quickly ascended the ranks at BT, moving from testing into project management and ultimately onto leading major transformation programmes. There were many such endeavours within the organisation, grappling as it was with the structural hangovers of privatisation and the challenge of preparing the national infrastructure it maintained for the internet age.

Feaviour recalls: “I’ve done lots of different jobs in the company in the last thirty years. One of the great things about BT is the diverse nature of all the different roles in the company. There were some very big, complex transformational programmes that I managed there.

“Now I find myself here, doing this role, looking at the technologies required to support our automation ambitions in the company.”

Feaviour sits amongst his team in an openplan office beneath BT’s Pegasus Tower, a 1970’s era monolith overlooking the company’s sprawling Adastral Park research campus. Situated on the coastal edge of eastern England, the park was built before privatisation on the site of a former experimental aircraft base. It now boasts companies such as Fujitsu, Cisco and Juniper Networks amongst its tenants.

While Feaviour is humble in introducing his team’s work within BT’s central Technology division, as Principal Solution Architect for Intelligent Automation he is in fact overseeing fundamental technology-driven change for a 100,000-strong workforce serving customers in 180 countries.

The overriding objective of Feaviour’s team is to release the potential of automation technologies to both transform the experience of working at BT for the better and provide a continuously improving experience for BT’s customers around the world “Robotic process automation - or RPA is where we take simple, repetitive, mundane tasks that humans do and we train software robots to perform those activities instead. The benefits to the employee are a more interesting job with fewer mundane tasks and more time to deal with customers or more complex issues” explains Feaviour.

BT’s first RPA application went live relatively recently, in April 2017. Its chosen partner to deliver the work was UK-based ISSUE 10

11

CASE STUDY

Blue Prism, recognised as the original pioneer of back-office process automation.

Just two-and-a-half years down the road, BT has already leveraged Blue Prism’s platform to automate 163 individual processes using 266 robots, or digital workers, which together amount to more than 20,000 hours per month of manual effort saved. This is being used to facilitate growth in certain teams who can now take on more varied work, and it’s an enabler for bringing call centres back into the UK - something BT’s customers have said they’d like to see.

The goal is to drive exponential growth in the number of menial hours saved by BT’s employees to further improve both customers’ and employees’ experiences.

Feaviour uses the application of RPA to his own department as a benchmark.

12

DIGITAL BULLETIN

“We started to automate the processes in the CFUs (Customer Facing Units; Consumer, Enterprise and Global) first, so we are later in our automation journey within the Technology division, where we are currently saving approximately 1,800 hours per month, every month. The ambition is by the end of this year to move that up to 4,000 hours per month. By the end of next year to be 10,000 hours per month, and by the end of the following year, 23,000 hours per month. So effectively for the next three years to double, double, and then double again. Key to success with such a bold ambition is a strong pioneering delivery arm which is ably led by my colleague Christian Smart.”

“We have a huge growth ambition, and where we support the rest of the business,

BT

Martin Stevenson Account Director at Blue Prism ISSUE 10

13

Secure, Intelligent Connected-RPA for Enhanced Creativity and Insight “BT always looks to use the best-in-breed. Of those on our shortlist, Blue Prism had the most robust security and audit wrap and was, by far, the best at convincing us they had the most secure platform�

LEIGH FEAVIOUR PRINCIPAL SOLUTION ARCHITECT, INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION AT BT

About Blue Prism

    Â

� � �   � ­€  � ‚

blueprism.com

CASE STUDY

In order to move from automation to intelligent automation, we need to be constantly reviewing the systems we’re applying. I have a number of irons in the fire” the idea is that by showing the art of the possible within Technology, they will similarly step up and accelerate their own automations so we can really drive value for our employees and customers across the business.”

Platform & Partnership As many a transformation leader has discovered the hard way, however, simply demonstrating the art of the possible isn’t enough.

A lesson quickly learned, says Feaviour, was that the success of his team’s automation deployments was dependent on forging strong stakeholder ownership across the business. For that reason, BT has what he calls a “federated delivery model”. The Technology division has its own delivery hub while owning the platform and an automation centre of excellence, with other hubs nested in BT’s 16

DIGITAL BULLETIN

CFUs, as well as Group Business Services (GBS), which deals with many of BT’s back-office functions.

“IT needs to own the platform, we need to manage the system, we need to provide standards for the delivery… but the closer the businesses are to owning the solution, the more engaged they are because they feel like we’re not taking things out of their control,” he adds.

An enabler of that approach is the Blue Prism platform itself. It was chosen in part due to Blue Prism’s impressive security credentials, but perhaps even more significant to Feaviour’s delivery model is the standout user-friendliness of the platform, which makes developing robots relatively straightforward.

Blue Prism has also enabled another important partner of BT’s automation journey, global professional services giant Cognizant, to apply RPA to its own operations in service of its client. Cognizant supports a vast swathe of the IT infrastructure at BT’s mobile arm, EE, and unilaterally proposed the move as a way of reducing costs to BT. “Cognizant basically said they’d come in at their own cost, they would perform the automation internally using our Blue Prism platform - so we retain the rights to use those robots once they’re developed - and then effectively we would gain-share the benefit,” explains Feaviour.

BT

Luis Huerta Intelligent Automation Practice Director at Cognizant ISSUE 10

17

STREAMLINE WORKFLOWS AND INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY WITH ENTERPRISE AUTOMATION

Working w the joint be outcomes time is of h I know I ca For more information visit: https://www.cognizant.com/IPA

Principa

with a partner that understands enefit and will therefore focus on s and doing the right thing at the right huge importance. From my experience an trust Cognizant to do that.

- Leigh Feaviour, al Solution Architect, Intelligent Automation at BT

Cognizant Enterprise Automation provides everything you need to maximize value from your automation efforts.

Spanning robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, smart analytics and other leading technologies—our enterprise automation offering equips you with the tools and services you need across the automation ecosystem.

Our Intelligent Process Automation solutions can make your processes smarter. You can increase workforce productivity by automating not only mundane tasks, but also end-to-end business operations, bridging the gaps within functions and across offices to accelerate productivity and achieve next level transformation.

Cognizant’s RPA implementation will be my lighthouse case and an exemplar for other in life support teams.

- Stella Henshaw, Director Design Delivery BT Wholesale & Ventures & Corporate Units, BT

CASE STUDY

“All in all, they came with a really, really compelling case and it didn’t take a lot to agree. In fact we are going to try to adopt the same model now with some of our other partners as well, using Cognizant as a lighthouse case.”

That will begin with a forthcoming partner hackathon at which Feaviour intends to highlight Cognizant’s efforts to demonstrate what can be achieved when partners proactively seize upon common business goals.

Automation Acceleration But just because you can automate, it doesn’t always mean you should. A key learning for Feaviour – an education he admits has sometimes been gained painfully – has been knowing when to hold back.

20

DIGITAL BULLETIN

“It’s very important to be quite critical about what to automate and when. So it would be quite easy to just throw them out there and say, ‘find every process that people do. Is it repetitive? Is it data-driven? Right - let’s automate it!’

“That’s not necessarily the right approach.”

In some cases, the Technology team has analysed a process and found that by making the manual tasks involved more efficient for humans then the outcome is improved to a degree that roboticising it isn’t necessary. Furthermore, simply “automating everything we see” can introduce variables and dependencies that go on to impede other strategic initiatives.

“They might put a new system in place, get ready to go live, and then suddenly

BT

they find out there’s a bunch of robots hanging off the back of it that all need to be changed before they can do anything with it. So suddenly we’ve gone from a benefit to a disbenefit.”

It’s part of an attention to detail and a conscientious robustness in stakeholder management that Feaviour identifies as perhaps the most important lesson of all.

“It might be another system that’s coming in that we weren’t aware of. It might just be an allergic reaction to automation, which can happen. So getting that buy-in at all levels before we touch anything has been a really important lesson and one that we’re going quite hard on now,” he says.

The time clawed back from employees’ valuable time so far is just the beginning

of BT’s automation journey. Longer term, Feaviour’s mission is to begin introducing the toolsets and capabilities that will transform BT’s automation efforts with layers of added intelligence.

“In order to move from automation to intelligent automation, we need to be constantly reviewing the systems we’re applying. I have a number of irons in the fire,” he says.

Currently on Feaviour’s roadmap are efforts to put robots to work overnight in service of employees’ next-day mornings, and assisting call-centre workers by intelligently loading up their access to the multiple systems they need to serve customers quickly. Then will come robots to enhance the role of BT’s existing optical character recognition capabilities, and applying ‘human-in-the-loop’ functionality – a system to sit over the top of otherwise unattended robots to trigger them on demand, or create processes that chain their activities together via critical decision-making junctions involving humans.

Yet more ambitious is a collaboration between Feaviour and other key leaders across BT to investigate intelligent business process management suite (iBPMS) tools which, importantly for Feaviour, will work seamlessly with RPA. iBPMS systems are emerging that expand upon traditional BPM tools by streamlining both the acquisition and analysis of vast amounts of data, allowing for immediateISSUE 10

21

CASE STUDY

It’s very important to be quite critical about what to automate and when. So it would be quite easy to just throw them out there and say, ‘find every process that people do. Right - let’s automate it!’ That’s not necessarily the right approach.”

22

DIGITAL BULLETIN

BT

ISSUE 10

23

CASE STUDY

ly actionable insights and fast, iterative process improvements. A hackathon was held at Adastral Park earlier this year involving a number of iBPMS vendors working on use cases presented to them

by BT. A key requirement laid down by Feaviour was that robots can be triggered from the iBPMS tool.

He explains: “Those tools are basically designed to orchestrate human processes and activities. So it’s not RPA as such, but it’s a headless solution that sits across multiple systems, and it will take data from those systems and help to orchestrate a person’s journey between them to make it far more efficient, automatically triggering robots where needed.”

Artificial intelligence is another area Feaviour predicts will become a crucial component of BT’s automation journey over time. The first steps are already being taken.

“We’re currently assessing some specific use cases about how we need to apply intelligence to our automation, and then what are the right artificial intelligence vendors and tools that would meet that,” he says.

Chatbots are a hot topic at BT – not just in a basic form to find efficiencies through quick question-and-answer conversational interfaces but extended to integrate with RPA processes so the chatbot can actually take action. Another AI use case concerns classifying incoming emails – of which 24

DIGITAL BULLETIN

there are many. BT is working with Google to run a proof of concept and Feaviour is confident that work will lead to a much deeper working relationship with Google through which an array of further AI use cases will be explored.

But he’s keen to sound a note of caution in terms of running away with any ideas of AI’s limitless usefulness. Unsurprisingly, Feaviour reveals that a lot of AI vendors are “quite interested” in BT right now, and a core focus is to corral that interest into something clear-eyed and specifically applicable to the business.

“We have a big opportunity to use some really interesting technologies to drive another step change in our automation capabilities, with all of the benefits to customers and employees that would bring, but we need to be careful to do it in a controlled and measured way,” he says.

Automatic for the People The strenuous efforts of Feaviour and his team to successfully apply intelligent automation to BT are achieving striking results.

But as any newspaper reader knows, with such endeavours come fears for the future.

In BT’s case, every effort has been made to assuage any concerns employees may have that automation is a drive aimed at reducing costs via headcount.

“It’s certainly true that automation can bring out a fear in people. People are afraid

BT

The closer the businesses are to owning the solution, the more engaged they are because they feel like we’re not taking things out of their control�

ISSUE 10

25

CASE STUDY

26

DIGITAL BULLETIN

BT

that we are trying to automate their jobs away. That’s certainly not the case, but just saying it doesn’t necessarily convince people,” says Feaviour. “One of the things that we’ve done to try to address and tackle that problem is simply the metric that we’re using: We’re very much focused on hours saved.”

The principle of an ‘hour saved’ is that it’s an hour a BT employee can use in more fruitful and rewarding ways. Ultimately, that will mean a better experience for customers as well and, in that, BT sees the powerful upside.

“BT - when in five to ten years, when we’ve achieved and exceeded our automation ambitions - will be a more efficient organisation, it will be a better organisation to work in.

“I see BT becoming a more interesting place to work. We’ll be a much more responsive organisation. We’ll be able to do what we do faster, which will lead to hugely improved customer experience and ultimately shareholder value.”

At the time of writing, BT is launching a brand refresh complete with a bold, simplified logo and an uncomplicated, uncompromising new tagline: “Beyond Limits”.

In the case of Feaviour and his team, that motto has already been taken to heart. BT’s community of employees and customers are already beginning to see the results.

ISSUE 10

27

AI

DIGITISING THE SHOP FLOOR

Computer vision technology from Trax is helping retail’s biggest names drive both sales and savings. Martin Smethurst, Managing Director for EMEA, gives Digital Bulletin the inside line on the company’s sharp rise

AUTHOR: Ben Mouncer

O

n July 29th this year, Trax announced the full acquisition of Planorama - and in doing so, its conquering of a small corner of the business tech market was complete.

Trax is the market leader in computer vision technology for retail. By combining its solutions with advanced analytics tools, it is able to drive huge time and cost efficiencies for some of the world’s biggest CPG (consumer packaged goods) companies, including Coca-Cola and Nestlé.

Planorama was a rival in the space and the takeover keeps Trax on course 28

DIGITAL BULLETIN

to maintain its upward trajectory. It was previously in the top 25 Fastest Growing Companies on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 and its technology is now put into action in 1.5 million retail stores globally every month.

But exactly how has Trax changed the game for the brands it works with?

One of the best equipped to put the meat on the bones of this story is Martin Smethurst, an important figure in the company’s efforts across EMEA. Having held senior positions at the likes of Oracle and Cisco, Smethurst

TRA X

ISSUE 10

29

AI

IF YOU DO A SEARCH ON THE PEOPLE WHO RUN OUR R&D, THESE GUYS ARE REMARKABLE IN THE COMPUTER VISION WORLD”

combines experience from both retail and technology.

“What I have is a good understanding of technology but, more importantly, a good understanding of how technology can profoundly change how companies work and how they get results,” says Smethurst as he kicks off an exclusive interview with Digital Bulletin.

Trax’s sophisticated technology stack has certainly delivered that “profound change” for its customers. One global brewer, for example, increased revenues by between 8-16% in store through their partnership. But the complex Trax technology journey begins with a very simple 30

DIGITAL BULLETIN

first step: taking a photograph of a retail shelf.

Shelves, units and aisles are the battleground for wholesalers, with more players than ever competing for prime placement in their key retailers. In short, Trax’s proposition is to assist wholesalers with vital shelf data; after images are collected, its proprietary computer vision software pulls information on stock levels, positioning and more, with every SKU (stock keeping unit) and object accurately identified. A deep learning layer helps to recreate the shelf in digital form, uncover insights and compare data to that from other loca-

TRA X

tions. For CPGs with presence in many thousands of stores worldwide, it’s easy to see the value.

Trax calls the process ‘store digitisation’ and Smethurst breaks it down into three parts.

“It’s about data collection, recognition and reporting,” he says. “From a data collection point, we have a simple app that you download and it prompts you to take photographs and collect additional manual information. We’ve designed a lot of tech in the app but the most important thing is to make it simple because we have different users across different languages in many different regions in the world.

“With recognition, if you do a search on the people who run our R&D, these guys are remarkable in the computer vision world. We have a lot of technology around improving images and stitching images together, but a percentage of every image that we take also gets put through to humans, and they check that the machine learning is correct. We continue to retrain these engines and that’s all done in the cloud.

“Then we have reporting. We make our system open in order to deliver data into other people’s systems.

But we also deliver reports and dashboards for supervisors, salespeople and the business. This allows them to

make business decisions off the back of this.”

The process saves significant amounts of time for sales associates. Previously they could use up to an hour in each store manually recording the contents of shelves, but Trax users reduce this time spent by 90%. This results in a 33% increase in the time that staff have to engage directly with customers and build better relationships.

Across these stores, users generally also experience an increase in placings, an increase in share-of-shelf and a decrease in out-of-stocks. Trax’s powerful data engine ultimately underpins these improvements and it is the real-time reporting at scale where Smethurst believes the deepest value is found for clients.

“Most organisations are now interested in what is called a ‘perfect storm’. This is using data to figure out what their shelf should look like and to figure out the best positions for all their products. We have these millions of data points, and if

ISSUE 10

31

The Bulletin

HIGHLIGHTS

QUANTUM COMPUTING COULD REVOLUTIONISE AI DEVELOPMENT Google has released a research paper claiming to have built a quantum computer capable of handling a calculation in under four minutes that would take the world’s fastest computer 10,000 years. Google CEO Sundar Pichai told MIT Technology Review that he believes this kind of power could rapidly increase the rate of AI development. IBM, however, disputes the claims.

24/10/19 MORE ON THIS STORY

The Bulletin is our stream of the most relevant enterprise technology news, aggregated from highly-respected sources and packaged in a short, digestible format, delivering a simple yet indispensable read.

A one-stop shop for all of the newest major developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, The Bulletin, available at digitalbullet.in, is a vital and dependable resource for technology professionals.

TRA X

Trax is exploring the use of fixed cameras on shelves

we compare the track shelf data to sales data, we can tell them where every single product should be placed in order to maximise sales.”

Trax’s thirst for technological innovation has been central to its growth. It is still less than a decade old but the company is busy preparing for its next decade and beyond in the industry with focused R&D work on augmented reality (AR) and robotics.

Capturing and storage for data collection remains one of its biggest challenges. The straightforward act of taking a photo is often hindered by cultural restrictions or environments that are not conducive to easily capturing images.

Technology built into the app helps eliminate issues, and artificial intelligence is also deployed to accurately predict the content of any gaps, but Trax is still

working on alternatives to the manual process of taking a photo.

In the United Kingdom, it has collaborated directly with retailers and piloted the use of fixed cameras on shelves, meaning photos can be taken at any point and deliver data that’s not possible in any other way. In robotics, it has been trialling a solution that carries three cameras and captures photos continuously across a whole aisle, with similar experimentation underway with drones.

AR patents are also pending for its Shelf Capture Assistant and Virtual Ruler features, all designed to refine its mobile app.

“Innovation is in Trax’s DNA. We are constantly trying to push the limits of computer vision and its application within retail. By leveraging the immersive user experience of AR, alongside our computer vision, data science and machine ISSUE 10

33

AI

learning technology, we can help every sales rep or store associate do their job more efficiently than before,” says Dr Yair Adato, its Chief Engineering Officer.

The company is headquartered in Singapore but its development takes place at its centre of excellence in Tel Aviv, Israel. The country is well known as a tech startup hub - high technology is now its main industry, accounting for 35-40% of its GDP via exports, taxes from IPOs and successful exits.

This means Trax is able to tap into a steady stream of talent and Smethurst is not afraid to laud the capabilities of his colleagues. Even the CEO, Joel Bar-El, was previously a university lecturer in computer vision “We have some unbelievable talent in Tel Aviv,” explains Smethurst. “I’ve worked in this industry for many years and I’ve met some of the brightest people I’ve ever met at Trax. Not just bright, but they can explain some very complex technologies in a very simple way.

“Obviously skills and talent is the biggest challenge for every tech business but we have the centre of excellence in Israel and a great culture as a business.

We attract great people and we’re in a very cool technology space. When I speak to candidates, it’s not hard to excite them about what we do.”

In 2019, Trax’s headcount has dou34

DIGITAL BULLETIN

MOST ORGANISATIONS ARE NOW INTERESTED IN WHAT IS CALLED A ‘PERFECT STORM’.

THIS IS USING DATA TO FIGURE OUT WHAT THEIR SHELF SHOULD LOOK LIKE AND TO FIGURE OUT THE BEST POSITIONS FOR ALL THEIR PRODUCTS” bled from 400 to 800, mainly due to the Planorama acquisition. It has been a busy period for the company, also finalising the buyouts of crowdsourcing data firm Quri and, in June, Shopkick, the leading shopping rewards app in the United States. Both of those acquisitions point to Trax’s three-point strategy, which Smethurst expands upon.

“The first thing was to conquer the CPG space and deliver fantastic benefits to our CPG customers,” he says. “Number two was to move directly into the retail space. We started two years ago and

TRA X

while we’ve got a long way to go, we’re working with a small number of large retailers across the planet in order to continue to build a solution in that space.

“The last part of the journey will be around the consumer space. How could we use this shelf-based data to deliver insights for consumers? We have a million subscribers to Shopkick. Every time a consumer goes into a store and performs a task, they get a discount or some loyalty points from that retailer.

That acquisition shows we want to be part of our consumer journey.

“Crowdsourcing (Quri acquisition) uses shoppers to take photographs on our customers’ behalf. There’s a whole economy around crowdsourcing and we’ve acquired some great tech. What this does for our customers is give them reach into some store formats where they can’t possibly get to with their sales team.”

Smethurst finishes by revealing Trax’s big ambition - to be the Google Maps of the retail shelf. “We want to digitise every shelf on the planet, that’s our grand aim.”

ISSUE 10

35

DATA & SECURITY

36

DIGITAL BULLETIN

RSA SECURITY

X

THE

-FACTOR IN IDENTITY ASSURANCE AUTHOR: James Henderson

J

im Ducharme is a man who knows about identity assurance; he has spent the last seven-and-a-half years carrying out the role of Vice President of Identity and Fraud & Risk Intelligence Products at RSA Security, having previously worked in various high-level identity jobs at Netegrity, Computer Associates and Aveksa.

All of which means Ducharme is well placed to reflect on the trends that have shaped the identity industry. So,

A rise in mobile working and the cloudification of enterprise is driving the resurgence of 2FA

when in the midst of a wide-ranging interview with Digital Bulletin, he says that in his two decades working in the sector he has never seen such a resurgence of a product area than he is currently seeing with two factor authentication (2FA), it comes as something of a surprise.

2FA is not a new or especially complex technology, so what exactly is driving such strong interest? Ducharme says that there is a combination of changes ISSUE 10

37

DATA & SECURITY

taking place within the enterprise that are fueling this growth.

“What we are increasingly seeing is workloads moving from on-premise data centres that had all these layers of protection to the cloud, while at the same time the workforce is becoming more diverse. We’re seeing a shift from just from individual workers at desks or on-site, to a more diverse workforce that is increasingly mobile, which is supplemented by third-party workers,” he comments.

“That’s really increased the number of personal devices that are being used, which has a lot of advantages, but means that enterprise cannot count on them from a security perspective, because the corporate controls aren’t going to be there. What it means is that the way we used to do things with 2FA really needs to evolve.”

What has certainly evolved is the sophistication of cyber attackers; whereas previously the weapons of choice have been Trojans or malware, criminals have pivoted to a simpler strategy, one which Ducharme captures as “walking through the front door”.

“For years as an industry, we have trained enterprise users to use the same password everywhere. We’ve invested in a technology from single sign-on solutions where you have one password to 38

DIGITAL BULLETIN

rule them all. You type in one password and it takes you to any corporate asset, and it reminds you to change it every 60 days.” he says.

“The problem with that is people are also likely to use those passwords on their personal or social accounts, so if I’m an attacker and I can grab your credentials from Instagram, where there are fewer security controls, then there’s every chance I have your enterprise information as well. So, what customers now want is a modern approach to make sure people are who they claim to be.”

Central to that effort is mobile, with many in the enterprise having more than one in their possession, with substantial effort and investment being

RSA SECURITY

made to leverage the technology we carry around in our pockets to help us prove we are who we say we are.

Key to that has been the leading mobile manufacturers such as Apple and Samsung spending hundreds of millions of pounds to develop integrated authentication solutions such as Touch ID and Face ID. “These biometrics are giving us some great entropy and proof that somebody is who they claim to be, which is a really important piece of the puzzle,” says Ducharme. “The other piece is that there are new standards that are evolving with things like FIDO, which stands for fast identity online, which is a new open protocol to help with the integration of identity solutions with backend services.

“Yubico is a great example of a company that created new FIDO-based authenticators. It has a hardware device that you can plug into a laptop or phone that helps prove you are who say they are. Companies like RSA are invested on the backend of FIDO, where we can actually be on the backend to integrate that authentication attempt.

“These new protocols are making the integration of this new spectrum of authentication options easier to integrate into the backend solutions.”

For years as an industry, we have trained enterprise users to use the same password everywhere” Jim Ducharme, Vice President of Identity and Fraud & Risk Intelligence Products at RSA Security

ISSUE 10

39

The Bulletin

HIGHLIGHTS

UK CYBERSECURITY FIRM SOPHOS GOES PRIVATE IN BIGGEST TAKEOVER OF THE YEAR UK cybersecurity firm Sophos has been taken private by private equity firm Thoma Bravo, in a deal worth $3.8 billion. The sale becomes the year’s largest takeover in the UK. Sophos’ CEO, Kris Hagerman said that Thoma Bravo’s “experience with software and cyber security” makes for a “compelling fit”.

Hagerman said the company is likely to continue with a similar strategy under their new ownership. 16/10/19 MORE ON THIS STORY

The Bulletin is our stream of the most relevant enterprise technology news, aggregated from highly-respected sources and packaged in a short, digestible format, delivering a simple yet indispensable read.

A one-stop shop for all of the newest major developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, The Bulletin, available at digitalbullet.in, is a vital and dependable resource for technology professionals.

RSA SECURITY

Biometrics are giving us some great entropy and proof that somebody is who they claim to be, which is a really important piece of the puzzle” As somebody with a background in fraud detection and risk intelligence, Ducharme has seen how the financial services market has used artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques to pinpoint fraudulent credit card transactions.

Fraud departments have long been sold on the capabilities of AI and ML, says Ducharme, but the identity enterprise market has traditionally not been so sure. That is beginning to change.

“One of the things the market is allured to right now is something called conditional access,” he reveals. “If I’m standing here in my office in Bedford, Mass, when I access something, it’s very likely to be Jim Ducharme. If it looks like Jim’s in St. Petersburg, Russia, that’s a little more suspect. In the same way, if I’m using a corporate-owned device then I’m probably okay, but If I’m logging in from a kiosk in Florida then that rings alarm bells.

“Over time we’ll see that maturity evolve to letting the machines detect patterns, but customers still want to know why we allow some users through and not others.

We used to deal with these questions over a decade ago in the financial market, about why some transactions were flagged, but others weren’t.

“So, what we have to do is unlock some of the mystery, to provide some visualisation, some insights out of there to help people understand how the black box works, how that AI, ML-based machine is making decisions as well as helping our customers understand how they can improve it.”

Ducharme breaks off mid-stream – “… it’s always great to use a real-life example, right? I always use this example of travel, and this is absolutely a true story,” he says.

“I saw our CTO [Zulfikar Ramzan] one day in an airport in Chicago – where I never go – and it was an interesting ISSUE 10

41

DATA & SECURITY

example of how an identity solution should work. I was walking through the airport and I see someone, and I instantly thought ‘that looks like our CTO’ but I wasn’t sure. That might sound ridiculous because I see him every week, but the point is that it was out of context.

“I’m not usually in Chicago, neither is he, which means there is doubt. I said: ‘Zuli, is that you?’ and obviously he said ‘yes!’ But then he looks and me and says ‘Jim?’ So, he’s equally confused. There was a piece of data - the location - that lowered our confidence.

42

DIGITAL BULLETIN

Us asking each other raises the confidence.

“AI and ML works the same way. It’s looking at input and the more it has the more it can be sure of what is right. In the airport, I first did a facial recognition of the CTO, then looked at his clothes, his walk and as the more input it takes in, the more can make sense of it if this input is right. My brain had all that information, but that location meant there was some doubt, which is why I had to get more information.”

In the world of identity assurance, great efforts are being made to move

RSA SECURITY

There’s no reason why, if I knew your Apple ID and password, I couldn’t use my face to establish me as your identity”

towards a passwordless world. Indeed, the addition of face and fingerprint recognition technology to high-end smartphones has been used to suggest we are already living in a post-password world. But while Ducharme says “great advancements” are being made, he says this is not yet the case.

“These techniques are all still rooted in a password, what they are doing is providing a facade over your existing password. For example, when you lose an iPhone you can recover your identity with a simple username and password. So, there’s no reason why,

if I knew your Apple ID and password, I couldn’t use my face to establish me as your identity.

“The last mile here that we need to make sure that we’re cognisant of is that these new biometric capabilities, these new authentication schemes, while they provide a passwordless experience, they do not actually get rid of the password yet.

“We’ve got to now focus our attention on all those other ways from credential enrolment and credential recovery to really get rid of the password in all aspects and create a passwordless world.”

ISSUE 10

43

PEOPLE

BUILDING A CULTURE FOR CHANGE ABBYY’s Neil Murphy believes enterprises must take a holistic view for their technology initiatives to work, especially in the clamour for automation AUTHOR: BEN MOUNCER

44

DIGITAL BULLETIN

ABBY Y

I

ntroducing potentially transformative technologies into a business can throw up all manner of different challenges.

Cost, security and regulatory compliance are just a few of the topics decision-makers must assess when technologists are pushing for their solutions to be considered. It is the complex impact such integrations have on an organisation’s workforce, however and that organisation’s approach to overall culture in this area - which must be priority zero.

That is the view of Neil Murphy, a global VP for ABBYY. In his three years with the company, Murphy has had a ringside seat for some bold technology deployments by its clients, mainly in the automation space. From his experience, prosperity comes when businesses give thought to culture and people at the very beginning of their technology journeys.

“There needs to be a big circle of education - and in education, the whole angle is the culture,” Murphy outlines in an exclusive interview with Digital Bulletin.

“In automation, for example, some people straight away think that it puts their job at risk. Consequently, there can be pushback to automation that’s been suggested or is already being implemented.

“It’s a big issue but those that are successful are those that acknowledge that up front and have programmes in place to help with culture adoption and the need to embrace these technologies. For those that don’t adopt the right culture, the technologies can actually have a minimal impact.”

ISSUE 10

45

PEOPLE

THOSE THAT ARE SUCCESSFUL ARE THOSE THAT HAVE PROGRAMMES IN PLACE TO HELP WITH CULTURE ADOPTION AND THE NEED TO EMBRACE THESE TECHNOLOGIES” As Murphy highlights, culture is all-important in the contentious field of automation. ABBYY’s portfolio of AI-based technologies - including its established document capture software and its newly-acquired process mining solutions - are used by eight of the 10 leading RPA (robotic process automation) vendors, providing a critical link in the automation chain.

RPA gives businesses the opportunity to hand repetitive, computer-based jobs from human employees over to software robots, greatly speeding up the completion of those tasks and freeing up workers to use their skills elsewhere. One of the fastest-growing segments in enterprise software, Forrester predicts the RPA market to be worth $12 billion by 2023; when Murphy started at ABBYY in 2016, that figure was a mere $250 million.

But putting these eye-catching projections aside, automation vendors - and consequently companies like ABBYY 46

DIGITAL BULLETIN

- are fighting a PR war against the backdrop of a digital revolution and the suggestion that many jobs will actually cease to exist. Murphy re-emphasises his previous message: people and technology culture remain essential.

“Sometimes the statement about redeploying the workforce is met with scepticism, thinking it’s about losing headcount,” he says. “But from experience, the whole piece around delivering RPA successfully is dependant on having the skills to make the most of it and develop new ideas with it. And we definitely see that intent within organisations.

“We see the main challenge now as being how you use those workers to do more creative tasks. One client has a whole education system inside the organisation to train workers with courses around machine learning and how to understand that, for example. Or they have data scientists who they can refocus on some of the AI technologies

ABBY Y

they’re bringing in. There are big challenges around making sure there are enough people with the right skills.”

On this point, Murphy cites a recent Deloitte study with worrying implications for a jobs market increasingly dependent on digital skills.

Focused on the United Kingdom, where Murphy is based, results painted a concerning picture: just 16% of executives surveyed believe their teams can deliver their digital strategy, 88% think graduates aren’t equipped with the required skills and more than 75% experienced challenges in their digital recruitment.

“Having those with the right kind of background who understand these

technologies is pretty tough, let alone those who are supposed to be using those technologies inside organisations,” Murphy admits.

“If you went back two years, not many people had heard of RPA, for example. Now RPA is seen as the main vehicle for bringing AI into an organisation. RPA itself is not AI, but it is an enabler for AI-type technologies like ours. That rate of change challenges organisations and those that are successful are those that are investing in their own people and putting on their own courses.”

ABBYY works with Deloitte and other major consultancy firms to prepare clients as much as possible for the

ISSUE 10

47

The Bulletin

HIGHLIGHTS

GOOGLE POACHES MICROSOFT VETERAN TO LEAD G SUITE Google has hired former Microsoft executive Javier Soltero to lead its G Suite division. Soltero will help grow such apps as Gmail, Google Docs and Google Drive for enterprise and consumer customers. Soltero was previously head of Microsoft’s Cortana, but will now report to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.

Google is on course to double its revenue this year from $4 billion to $8 billion.

22/10/19 MORE ON THIS STORY

The Bulletin is our stream of the most relevant enterprise technology news, aggregated from highly-respected sources and packaged in a short, digestible format, delivering a simple yet indispensable read.

A one-stop shop for all of the newest major developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, The Bulletin, available at digitalbullet.in, is a vital and dependable resource for technology professionals.

ABBY Y

shift to automation. While workplace consultancy isn’t an outright part of its business, Murphy says it recognises the responsibility it has in helping customers understand how they’re looking to effect change.

He defines ABBYY’s overarching mission as being “to supplant the skills gap by providing ready-built skills from a technology perspective”. In other words, to provide the necessary technology skills to enable digital and non-digital workers to do their job better, easier and more efficiently, even if they don’t have the native skills themselves.

It’s easier to make sense of ABBYY’s proposition by examining its ever-expanding group of cognitive solutions.

Founded in 1989 - thus marking its 30th anniversary this year - the Russian company’s core capability has been around document capture and optical character recognition; software for organisations to automatically read the content of and extract information from almost any type of business document.

This has evolved into ContentIQ, which is ABBYY’s umbrella term for the services it now offers in this area through the Vantage platform. Vantage incorporates advanced AI to deliver unprecedented detail and insights from document capturing.

“Invoicing is where a lot of companies start, but we’re now moving into

THE WHOLE PIECE AROUND DELIVERING RPA SUCCESSFULLY IS DEPENDANT ON HAVING THE SKILLS TO MAKE THE MOST OF IT AND DEVELOP NEW IDEAS WITH IT” much more challenging areas like understanding contracts and then bridging those key details in the contract to other things like purchase orders to make sure they meet those terms,” says Murphy.

ProcessIQ is an extension of ABBYY’s services that goes beyond document capture and examines business processes. The company acquired TimelinePI in August and took a step into the market of process mining, which Gartner estimates will triple by 2023.

TimelinePI’s technology allows users to identify opportunities for improvements, ISSUE 10

49

PEOPLE

compliance issues and measure the performance of human and digital workers.

Murphy sees it as another ABBYY “building block” for enabling automation at scale for enterprises.

“We work with a major drinks manufacturer and it started with RPA at a basic level,” he adds, introducing a case study. “It began by using our capture platform to pick up emails with invoices. That was the first process it looked to automate.

“It freed up 90 workers from its central hub and it has now identified an50

DIGITAL BULLETIN

other set of processes to move on to.

The next one is purchase orders and then the next is all of its paperwork from its drink suppliers around the world. All of the organisations who are doing this now are starting with one or two processes, but then they’re looking to scale.”

An ABBYY study published in September found that almost two-thirds (62%) of those investing in content-centric process automation have seen improved efficiency, while over half (55%) of businesses using RPA have seen improved efficiency (55%),

ABBY Y

greater market share and increased revenue (52%). Eighty-two percent have also seen a return on their investment within a year.

But with more than half of organisations surveyed still not investing in such technologies, what else can ABBYY and automation vendors do to get their message across?

“We position ourselves around helping provide companies with their overall digital transformation,” says Murphy.

“We never want to the automation platform itself; we don’t want to be an RPA vendor, but we want to provide the

building blocks around that to enable automation strategies.

“With the digital skills gap, you have a workforce that isn’t expert in things like document understanding. That’s one of our main focus areas: how do we bring our technology to a level for non-expert users to go and consume this in their native applications?

“Then there’s the whole process mining and intelligence market. This gives us another strategic angle to any C-level person in the organisation where they’re looking to make these kind of investments.

“We’re looking at further developments and acquisitions in the future to form other building blocks around a digital transformation automation system. We’ve never been in such a strategic position with buyers in large organisations but there’s definitely a lot more to come.”

The debates around technology and people might rumble on for some time yet, but ABBYY - now a multinational with 1,300 employees based from Silicon Valley to Japan - looks like it’s on the right track.

And one thing is becoming increasingly evident: automation, when born into the right culture around technology adoption and the workforce, is a powerful tool for business transformation.

ISSUE 10

51

NETWORKS

CONNECTING IOT AND THE CLOUD

Digital Bulletin speaks exclusively to Uhuru’s CEO, Takashi Sonoda, about bringing together IoT devices and connecting them to the cloud

C

ould you start by introducing us to Uhuru and its place in the IoT market?

Uhuru, which means ‘freedom’ in Swahili, is a Japanese technology company with an overseas headquarters in the UK. The business, which employs more than 270 people, was founded in February 2006 and has backing from SoftBank, Salesforce, NGK Spark Plug and Dentsu, amongst other high-profile com52

DIGITAL BULLETIN

panies. Its clients include major manufacturers Honda and Yamaha Motors.

Uhuru sits at the centre of the socalled “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, with technology that connects IoT enabled devices and their associated internet infrastructure to the Cloud. Arm Holdings is one such beneficiary of its lead product enebular [a comprehensive development and operation service that supports the creation of IoT products

UHURU

ISSUE 10

53

The Bulletin

HIGHLIGHTS

ACCENTURE ACQUIRES NYTEC, WILL BECOME PART OF ACCENTURE INDUSTRY X.0 Accenture has acquired product innovation and engineering company Nytec.

Accenture said it will add deep expertise in IoT engineering and software platform development to Accenture Industry X.0. It will enable Accenture to develop IoT infrastructure and systems for connected experiences, particularly for clients in areas including the consumer tech, industrial high tech, hospitality and travel.

4/10/19 MORE ON THIS STORY

The Bulletin is our stream of the most relevant enterprise technology news, aggregated from highly-respected sources and packaged in a short, digestible format, delivering a simple yet indispensable read.

A one-stop shop for all of the newest major developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, The Bulletin, available at digitalbullet.in, is a vital and dependable resource for technology professionals.

UHURU

and services], which brings disparate IoT devices together.

Talk us through Uhuru’s close ties with SoftBank and ARM, and how they benefit your company?

SoftBank is a shareholder in Uhuru. As such, the companies are financially tied, and Uhuru has access to SoftBank’s portfolio of IoT related businesses, professional networks and knowledge base.

ARM, meanwhile, is a client of Uhuru. This means ARM chips are enebular enabled.

Historically your business has focused in Japan - what other markets is Uhuru exploring?

It makes sense that as a Japanese-based business, with Japanese-based investors, we have initially focused on Japan – one of the world’s largest economies.

However, with an international headquarters in London and with clients such as ARM, we have already made a foot-hold in the EMEA market. Our aspiration is to become a truly global business as the adoption of IoT continues to spread from country-to-country and from continent-to-continent.

We are investing a lot in R&D to improve blockchain-based methods of data authentification for IoT systems in enhanced security and efficiency”

What issues and talking points are currently dominating the IoT industry?

We have found that connectivity, namely bringing disparate IoT devices together, ISSUE 10

55

NETWORKS

is a major issue for the IoT industry.

As the roll-out of 5G begins, the proliferation of IoT devices in the home and workplace will rapidly increase.

Data company IDC has estimated, for instance, that there will be 41.6 billion connected IoT devices in 2025.

Uhuru is already tackling this issue head-on with enebular, amongst other initiatives.

IoT is widely recognised as a potentially transformative technology of our age - at what stage are we along that journey?

Currently the IoT industry is at a crucial stage in its development, characterised by rapid growth and development. Bain predict that the combined markets of IoT will grow to about $520 billion in 2021, more than double the $235 billion spend in 2017.

56

DIGITAL BULLETIN

Which industries do you see changing most dramatically because of IoT? All industries will see a transformative change because of the implementation of IoT. The supply chains across the energy, manufacturing and agricultural sectors will be the first to see the benefits of an IoT ecosystem.

However, the effect of IoT should not be limited to businesses. People’s everyday lives will be most immediate and personally affected, as IoT revolutionises the way our devices communicate with one another.

What challenges have prevented a faster rise for IoT? The largest challenge for the implementation of IoT in businesses are the decisions being made by management. The lack of knowledge and understanding of the potential of IoT to transform opera-

UHURU

Softbank is a shareholder in Uhuru tions has often led to decisions to delay its implementation, or even further to reject it entirely.

Is it still reasonable to have concerns over IoT security, and what is being done in this area?

It is entirely reasonable and right to be concerned over IoT security – after all it is a complex topic. The complexity comes from two sources. First, the authentication of an incredibly large, and constantly growing, number of devices.

Second, checking the authenticity of the actual data generated by these devices.

Companies like Uhuru are working to incorporate security measures at the heart of their IoT solutions. For example,

in our case we work closely with Arm to include their Pelion/trusted Device technology in enebular IoT solutions.

Looking towards the future, we are investing a lot in R&D to improve blockchain-based methods of data authentification for IoT systems in enhanced security and efficiency.

How do you foresee the future of IoT? IoT will be a basic business and system development concept will become commonplace in industries across the globe. As such, the term ‘IoT’ may fall out of use as it becomes the generally accepted ‘standard’ way of working and living and no longer needs to be specifically referred to or discussed.

ISSUE 10

57

SERVICES

Driving an IP transformation CPA Global is on a mission to digitally transform the intellectual property sector. Its Chief Strategy Officer, Toni Nijm, is leading the charge...

AUTHOR: James Henderson

T

he convergence of a number of technologies is changing all corners of enterprise, and as a data intensive industry, intellectual property (IP) is no exception.

In the IP sector, lifecycle management is critical for success, while the data-rich make-up of IP demands the utilisation of effective digital tools to support the visualisation,valuation and the rights of IP. In addition, stakeholders rely on the information they hold on IP to be accurate and up-to-date, factors that are being 58

DIGITAL BULLETIN

aided by technology such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain and automation.

A company that knows these challenges inside-out is CPA Global, a business that aims to help its roster of clients – including the likes of Microsoft, Unilever, Western Digital and Canon – make more efficient, profitable IP decisions.

As part of that effort, CPA launched its ‘New IP’ campaign in September, which at its core is trying to communicate the message that the IP industry has

CPA GLOBAL

ISSUE 10

59

SERVICES

a chance to embrace and drive a digital revolution, leveraging a number of technologies that have collectively come to the fore in recent years.

CPA is rolling-out a global programme incorporating an industry engagement and awareness campaign - across online and offline channels including social media and events - and an online IP hub providing access to the latest thinking on digital transformation in IP from CPA and its customer base, where there is a mixed understanding of the challenges to achieve digital transformations.

“I think it’s fair to say that the corporates have always been one step ahead of law firms. Everyone is screaming that every other industry has become digi60

DIGITAL BULLETIN

talised, and that doesn’t mean just upgrading my existing software or putting something in the cloud and calling it a digital transformation,” says Toni Nijm, Chief Strategy Officer at IP technology leader CPA Global.

“We really need to rethink some aspects of the IP industry, and that message might seem quite provocative to some, but we cannot continue to just keep patching products the way as has been the case for the past 15 or 20 years.

“Whether you’re a law firm or an IP function in a corporate environment, if you want to gain a competitive advantage and better serve your customers, then you have to have a rethink.”

CPA GLOBAL

Nijm and his team have hit the road to meet with managing partners at law firms and leading figures of legal practices at corporates to deliver this message, something he says he will continue to do in the coming years.

Part of CPA’s pitch is that this change in thinking can help all areas of a business, which Nijm breaks down into four parts.

“The attorney world really has not changed for many, many years, so this campaign or rethink is about making them far more efficient, while with admin it’s about improving how files are stored, how renewals are carried out and how assets are docketed,” he says.

“There is also an innovation element to this, because it is important to identify new ideas faster, but also qualify them in a much better and efficient way, which even some of the biggest companies in the world are finding challenging.

“Finally, companies should be using big data and analytics to help them identify gaps in the market, identify competitors, licensing deals and acquisitional opportunities.”

The union of a number of technologies has led CPA to label 2020-2030 the ‘decade of digital’, a period when companies must move rapidly to a more connected, integrated, faster and more productive IP ecosystem. That future, it says, is rooted in digital transformation.

Whether you’re a law firm or an IP function in a corporate environment, if you want to gain a competitive advantage and better serve your customers, then you have to have a rethink” Nijm draws an equivalence with the rise of ride-hailing platforms like Lyft and Uber. By striking at exactly the time that technology has matured,extent that it can support the transformation of an entire sector.

“It would have been very difficult to establish that business model before 2010, simply because the infrastructure wasn’t there. Now everyone’s got a smartphone, with GPS and Google Maps,” he says.

“The same is true in terms of technology in the IP industry, yet you have a situation where a lot of big companies are still working on Excel sheets to manage IP, which is crazy. The message is that companies need to leverage new technology, it is on the agenda of every company we speak to.”

ISSUE 10

61

The Bulletin

HIGHLIGHTS

SAP AND MICROSOFT FORM A THREE-YEAR CLOUD PARTNERSHIP SAP has announced that it’s signed a three-year cloud partnership with Microsoft to help its large enterprise clients make the transition to the cloud.

The partnership, called “Embrace” will utilise SAP’s flagship S/4HANA database.

“We bundled SAP’s cloud platform services to support customers around the extension, integration and orchestration of SAP systems,” said Jennifer Morgan Co-CEO. 21/10/19 MORE ON THIS STORY

The Bulletin is our stream of the most relevant enterprise technology news, aggregated from highly-respected sources and packaged in a short, digestible format, delivering a simple yet indispensable read.

A one-stop shop for all of the newest major developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, The Bulletin, available at digitalbullet.in, is a vital and dependable resource for technology professionals.

CPA GLOBAL

Key to the technology transformation CPA expects to emerge over the next 10 years is blockchain. In recognition of its growing importance, Oxford Business School has developed a Blockchain Strategy Framework, which has six broad questions that industries or companies can pose themselves before deciding whether or not to utilise blockchain.

They include whether there is a repeatable, predictable process that leads itself well to automation, whether there are multiple stakeholders in the value chain and is there value in an immutable record.

“When you take those six questions and put them in the context of the IP industry, it takes two seconds to answer yes to all of them,” says Nijm.

“That’s because the way IP works doesn’t naturally lend itself to networks, so if you want to have patents and trademarks in 10 countries, you’ve got to go and talk to a law firm in each one of those countries to help you get it filed, registered and granted. Ninety percent of the work that is done is just coordinating networks of partners to carry out work for you.

“Let’s take Google as an example: if it wants to file a patent in the United States and 10 other countries, they’ll ask a local U.S. law firm to help coordinate filings.

Let’s say one of the countries is Japan, the local firm will send the patent to the

Companies should be using big data and analytics to help them identify gaps in the market, identify competitors, licensing deals and acquisitional opportunities” Toni Nijm, Chief Strategy Officer at CPA Global

ISSUE 10

63

SERVICES

The way IP works doesn’t naturally lend itself to networks, so if you want to have patents and trademarks in 10 countries, you’ve got to go and talk to a law firm in each one of those countries to help you get it filed”

Japanese firm it usually works with, which will in turn send it to the local Japanese patent office.

“So that information is being shared across four parties, all of which have different processes, manually docketing and company emails. Now think of that happening across all 10 countries it wants to file the patent in and how risky, costly and inefficient that process is. It is absolutely crazy.”

Nijm goes on to list off a number of other examples – misspelled names, patent renewal timings, due diligence – as evidence for the need for an industry standard blockchain, removing the need to replicate information, store permissions and automatically docket instructions.

64

DIGITAL BULLETIN

Rather than just talking about it, CPA Global has spent more than two years speaking with the world’s largest law firms and a handful of large corporates to develop a pilot solution that it is aiming to get to market in early 2020.

Nijm is reluctant to reveal too much, saying that he would prefer to let the technology speak for itself, but admits that he is excited and confident about what has been developed.

“We’ve taken our time to make sure the model is right, that we know where all the nodes are going to be in the chain, what type of blockchain we are going to have and how is it going to be integrated with existing infrastructure in the industry,” he says.

CPA GLOBAL

“With the law firms that are going to be part of the chain, we’ve spoken to them about what kind of contracts they need, what their customers need and how we ensure every transaction will be validated so to avoid confidentiality issues.

“So, we’ve done a tremendous amount of work with these parties and helping now, we’ve got a big event in New York in November to finalise most of it, and hopefully it’s in the marketplace early next year.”

As part of its ‘New IP’ campaign, CPA has warned that should companies ignore this digital imperative, the IP industry itself will become a brake on the pace of global innovation, which remains reliant on infrastructure and processes which are rapidly approaching breaking point.

“From a corporate point of view, there is a clear recognition of what needs to happen, whereas on the law side, the interpretation of what needs to happen is different to the reality,” says Nijm.

“Most of the people we are speaking to will never have seen anything like this and it challenges us a company as well.

We’re retraining and hiring people and constantly learning.

“You’ve got to show people the endto-end solution rather than talking about the specific product. Digital transformation is about the whole piece, not about a certain product. You’ve got to literally start from scratch.”

ISSUE 10

65

FUTURE

CHAMPIONING SUSTAINABLE TRANSFORMATIONS Sustainable transformation needs to be at the top of the agenda of every leading figure in enterprise and government, says Engie Impact’s CEO, Mathias Lelievre AUTHOR: JAMES HENDERSON

T

here is broad agreement that reversing the climate crisis is the biggest challenge we as a society face, and enterprise has a significant role to play. It is critical that the technology transformations reshaping industries are sustainable ones. There is no longer any doubt that things must change – that message has well and truly landed – but 66

DIGITAL BULLETIN

achieving that change is proving a far tougher nut to crack.

The figures do not make for pretty reading: in excess of 500 companies have made public commitments to sustainability targets in accord with the Paris Agreement, with an increasing amount targeting a zero-carbon objective. More than 90 of the world’s largest cities have joined

ENGIE IMPACT

C40, a network of the world’s megacities committed to climate change, and New York City recently signed the world’s most ambitious carbon reduction plan.

But achieving near-term results has been difficult, while long-term business and environmental threats remain: statistics show that just 15% of those committed companies are on track to

achieve these targets and businesses report to have identified over $1 trillion in risk related to climate change.

It is against this backdrop that Engie Impact was formed earlier this year, built from the combined forces of ENGIE Insight, Ecova UK, Red Engineering and the Advisory and Advanced Analytics division of Tractebel. Its mission ISSUE 10

67

FUTURE

We exited the oil industry to the tune of $22 billion, and between 2015 and 2018 reinvested that into renewable services and networks” Mathias Lelievre, Engie Impact’s CEO

68

DIGITAL BULLETIN

is to work with corporations, cities and governments around the world to drive sustainability strategy development, execution and tracking to accelerate sustainability transformation.

While it is a new company, Engie Impact is no startup. The amalgamation of four existing entities means that today it has a portfolio of 1,000 clients, including 25% of the Fortune 500 Companies, and sits under the umbrella of the Engie Group – one of the world’s leading energy companies.

The man charged with heading up the new company and delivering its vision of embedding sustainability from the top down is Mathias Lelievre, who originally joined the company as Director of Green Mobility and the group CEO’s Head of Staff, before taking on the position of CEO of Engie Insight.

Speaking from the company’s HQ in New York, Lelievre says it took some convincing to leave his position in the public sector, working in a senior role for the French Ministry of Economy and Finance, but was swayed by Engie’s “vision” and ambitions of its leadership team. Lelievre pinpoints three factors that he believes makes Engie uniquely positioned to spearhead an energy and sustainability revolution.

“One of the main things that makes us different is the scale. We have around

ENGIE IMPACT

The price of solar energy has declined significantly in recent years 150,000 people working all around the world for us, so that puts us in a category with very few other companies that have the global reach to make a real impact,” he comments.

“We are also able to be completely authentic in the translation of the strategy into action. The first years of the transformation of the group was really around aligning our portfolio and activities to what we believe is core to this energy revolution that is happening.

“We exited the oil industry to the tune of $22 billion, and between 2015 and 2018 reinvested that into renewable services and networks. We believe these are the pillars that need to be developed to make the world a more sustainable place.

“Thirdly, I would point to the footprint we have in the services area. We have around 110,000 people that can directly manage clients’ energy efficiency. That’s pretty unique in the energy world.”

As with any transformation, success relies heavily on unequivocal buy-in from the C-suite, which then needs to be expertly communicated to the rest of the business or organisation. And there is no doubt that more companies, cities and governments are putting sustainability at the heart of their short, medium and long-term strategies.

But the path to carbon neutrality is a hugely difficult one to navigate. Lelievre says that a key expectation for Engie Impact is to work with decision makers ISSUE 10

69

The Bulletin

HIGHLIGHTS

HYUNDAI UNVEILS A $35 BILLION SELF-DRIVING INVESTMENT PLAN Hyundai will invest $35 billion in mobility and emerging auto technologies by 2025. The motoring giant has also received government backing to further bolster its bid to become a competitive force in the market. “The self-driving market is a golden market to revitalise the economy and create new jobs,” South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in said in a speech at Hyundai Motor’s research centre.

15/10/19 MORE ON THIS STORY

The Bulletin is our stream of the most relevant enterprise technology news, aggregated from highly-respected sources and packaged in a short, digestible format, delivering a simple yet indispensable read.

A one-stop shop for all of the newest major developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, The Bulletin, available at digitalbullet.in, is a vital and dependable resource for technology professionals.

ENGIE IMPACT

in major and hypermajors to help them really understand how to make a transformation sustainable, while also ensuring the organisation thrives during the interim period.

“The kind of projects we are doing are happening at a very local level, so that’s streamlining of processes, renewable projects, water conservation, etc. and to do that effectively you have to understand local regulations and procedures, and be able to access local sites and facilities,” he comments.

“Those are really important in turning ambitions into reality, and that is something we can really help our clients with, we can help them navigate all of these complexities and help those very large corporations make sustainability happen, which is hugely valuable.”

It is a compelling proposition and one that GE Renewable Energy is betting on to help meet its aggressive zero-carbon goal by 2020, which it wants to achieve by leveraging solutions that include energy efficiency in its facilities worldwide and transitioning to 100% renewable electricity.

To help meet that goal, Engie Impact will work closely with GE Renewable Energy on strategic and technical consulting and implementation support to ensure GE Renewable Energy’s sustainable future.

“Corporations like GE Renewable Energy are leading the charge in accelerating the global sustainability transformation,” says Lelievre.

“By implementing a zero-carbon strategy, GE Renewable Energy is not only making an important environmental impact but

Businesses are struggling to successfully implement digital transformations ISSUE 10

71

FUTURE

also reducing energy costs, increasing energy efficiency and encouraging employee engagement and advocacy.”

While Engie Impact already counts many of the world’s leading companies amongst its clients, it is betting on many converging factors to swell its client base and push sustainability deeper into public consciousness.

“There are a number of reasons we are seeing this sustainability transformation taking place, including increasing pressure from stakeholders and a younger 72

DIGITAL BULLETIN

generation of people who are taking this subject very seriously. They see the speed of climate change and are demanding that something is done quickly,” says Lelievre.

“At the same time, we are seeing the maturity of technologies such as EVs, the cost of solar has declined significantly, and holistic energy is progressing well – that has all changed the way people think about sustainability. Business leaders see this and the conversation now is less about costs, but about how investments

ENGIE IMPACT

We want the words ‘sustainability transformation’ to be in the minds of every leader in the world”

can be made to drive meaningful change.

“That’s the goal of a Engie Impact, to bring all the capabilities and the digital tools to empower those leaders and make sure they are navigating that complexity, and making the right decision for their organisations.

“We believe that the momentum is increasing. We want the words ‘sustainability transformation’ to be in the minds of every leader in the world.”

ISSUE 10

73

EVENTS

EVENTS Digital Bulletin rounds up the industry events that are worth clearing your diary for...

VMWORLD 2019 04–07 NOVEMBER, 2019 FIRA BARCELONA GRAN VIA VMworld 2019 promises to capture the momentum of today’s rapidly changing IT environment and puts it within your grasp so you can accelerate your cloud journey to support your business. Transform networking and security for speed and flexibility. Deliver digital workspaces for amazing mobile experiences. Whatever you need to know, you’ll find the best information, tools, and partnerships to take IT—and your power to shape it—to the next level.

74

DIGITAL BULLETIN

NOVEMBER

MICROSOFT IGNITE 04–08 NOVEMBER, 2019 ORANGE COUNTY CONVENTION CENTER, ORLANDO, FL Attendees to Microsoft’s Ignite event will learn innovative ways to build solutions and migrate and manage your infrastructure. Over the course of the week, attendees will be invited to connect with over 25,000 individuals focused on software development, security, architecture, and IT. Explore new hands-on experiences that will help you innovate in areas such as security, cloud, and hybrid infrastructure and development.

ISSUE 10

75

EVENTS

BIG DATA LDN 13–14 NOVEMBER, 2019 OLYMPIA, LONDON DEVELOPERWEEK AUSTIN 05–07 NOVEMBER, 2019 PALMER EVENTS CENTER, AUSTIN DeveloperWeek Austin 2019 is the largest developer event in Texas and the South, with 2,000+ application developers/engineers, developer managers & executives coming together in Austin, TX, for technical keynotes, conference sessions & workshops from 100+ speakers, the 2-day Expo with 40+ exhibitors, networking events across Austin, the DeveloperWeek Austin Hackathon with 300+ hackers, a hiring mixer, parties and more.

76

DIGITAL BULLETIN

Big Data LDN (London) is free to attend conference and exhibition, hosting leading data and analytics experts, ready to arm you with the tools to deliver your most effective data-driven strategy. Discuss your business requirements with 130 leading technology vendors and consultants. Hear from 150 expert speakers in nine technical and business-led conference theatres, with real-world use-cases and panel debates. Network with your peers and view the latest product launches and demos. Big Data LDN attendees have access to free on-site data consultancy and interactive evening community meetups.

NOVEMBER

SPINNAKER SUMMIT 15–17 NOVEMBER, 2019 SAN DIEGO, CA Spinnaker Summit brings together the rapidly growing global community of Spinnaker users – an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence, created at Netflix and used by Google, Armory, Adobe and others around the globe. Spinnaker has been battle-tested in production by hundreds of teams over millions of deployments. It combines a powerful and flexible pipeline management system with integrations to the major cloud providers.

ISSUE 10

77

EVENTS

GOTO COPENHAGEN 18–22 NOVEMBER, 2019 BELLA CENTER, COPENHAGEN GOTO is the enterprise software development conference designed for team leads, architects, and project management and is organised for developers, by developers.

As software developers and architects, GOTO aims to craft the ultimate conference.

The result is a high-quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in its community, staged in an intimate environment needed to support as much learning and networking as possible.

78

DIGITAL BULLETIN

NOVEMBER

INFO-TECH LIVE 2019 19–21 NOVEMBER, 2019 THE COSMOPOLITAN OF LAS VEGAS, NV Info-Tech LIVE is the authoritative voice for IT executives making technology decisions and influencing institutional adoption. The event’s strategically developed agenda is designed by practitioners to drive business value and technological transformation while focusing on real, everyday challenges through keynotes, case studies, workshops, and one-on-one analysis. Keynote speakers include Mark Anderson, Founding CEO at Pattern Computer, Research Fellow at Info-Tech Research Group and Award-winning author and extreme adventurer Neal Petersen.

ODSC 2019 19–22 NOVEMBER, 2019 NOVOTEL WEST, LONDON Hosted in London, ODSC 2019 is one of the largest applied data science conferences in Europe. Speakers include some of the core contributors to many open source tools, libraries, and languages.

Attend ODSC Europe 2019 and learn the latest AI & data science topics, tools, and languages from some of the best and brightest minds in the field. ODSC bills itself as being “the best community data science event on the planet”.

ISSUE 10

79

EVENTS

DREAMFORCE 2019 19–22 NOVEMBER, 2019 MOSCONE CENTER, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES Dreamforce gathers the entire Salesforce community — our customers, partners, employees, and key stakeholders — for a fun family reunion. Dreamforce brings together thought leaders, industry pioneers, and thousands of your peers for four high-energy days of learning, inspiration, equality, and fun. With more than 2,700 sessions and thousands of live solutions from the world’s largest cloud ecosystem, Dreamforce has tailored content specific to every industry, role, and company size.

Whether you’re a company of five or a Fortune 500, you’re going to see success by coming to Dreamforce.

80

DIGITAL BULLETIN

NOVEMBER

THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION CONFERENCE 21 NOVEMBER, 2019 ILEC CONFERENCE CENTRE The Digital Transformation Conference returns to London on November 21st for its fourth year to dive deeper than ever before into the world of digital business, going beyond the buzz-word of ‘Digital Transformation’ and making real sense of transformation through business use cases, common challenges and inspirational ideas.

The Digital Transformation Conference brings together leaders spearheading digital initiatives in their organisations to offer insights, education and case studies on what can be a confusing environment.

ISSUE 10

81

THE CLOSING BULLETIN

THE CLOSING BULLETIN

In a column exclusive to Digital Bulletin, Atif Kureishy, Global VP, Emerging Practices, Teradata, talks about how AI and Deep Learning are changing the sports game

W

e treat athletes as if they are real-life superheroes that overcome physical challenges to achieve greatness in their respective sports. Today’s athletes are physically faster, stronger and more agile than the generation before, but something is wrong. Some recent news includes the NBA expanding its mental health programme for its players and the NFL changing its rules and procedures to better protect its stars from concussions.

The focus of any individual or team sport is to maximise player performance.

82

DIGITAL BULLETIN

In our sports culture, we are obsessed with team and player statistics using traditional measures in each sport. Player performance directly translates to increased probability of winning in individual sports. Team sports have added complexity based on interactions of multiple players in a team.

Player performance measures are usually categorised into two areas, which are physical and mental skills. Each sport measures the impact of a blend of physical and mental skills in ways that are specific to that sport, per category and

ATIF KUREISHY

position. Examples include: basketball (field goals made, field goals attempted, free throw percentage), American football (passing yards, point after touchdown, completion percentage), and soccer (shots on goal, assists, yellow cards).

Understanding the ways in which a player processes information is very helpful in terms of coaching, motivating and designing the types of practices that will be most effective in developing the athlete as an individual and as part of the team. What truly becomes interesting is the intersection of this subjective data with the objective data related to the way the athlete’s brain actually functions, which includes measurements related to mental skills.

We have an opportunity to bring a whole new breadth to the path of maximised performance. Additionally, when applied in a team dynamic or game situation, the opportunities for making sense of these interactions and how to best use it on a timely basis is a key means for success at all levels of the game.

Mental health Any top-tier professional athlete will tell you that the game is much more of a mental challenge than physical. Mental preparation is what separates good athletes from elite athletes. There is a darker side that we haven’t traditional-

Any top-tier professional athlete will tell you that the game is much more of a mental challenge than physical” ly spoken about but now is increasingly in the news. Every day we hear about the mental health crises that are affecting professional athletes that includes mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, and bi-polar illness.

The area of mental health in sports have been opaque and stigmatised due to lack of understanding. EEG, which is electrical activity of the brain collected via non-invasive means, provides a multi-channel, high-frequency, low-latency, time-series data set for an athlete. While brain research is ever-evolving, comparative baselines of EEG measurements have provided utility in diagnosing brain injury and recovery although acute vis-à-vis chronic brain injuries are still not well-understood. This area of EEG analysis is ISSUE 10

83

THE CLOSING BULLETIN

greatly uncharted but offers the next frontier in improving mental health of players due to its ease of deployment.

The brain – Combining physical and mental understanding In an effort to maximise performance while reducing player risk, we look to have a deeper understanding of the brain. The brain influences both the physical and mental skills and health of each player but remains largely unexplored in the Sports Enterprise. Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers a unique approach to understanding our own brains but is still a broad term that is a bit misunderstood, full of both promise and hype, fact and fiction. The simplest definition of AI refers to software systems that behave with intelligence without being explicitly programmed. These systems learn to identify 84

DIGITAL BULLETIN

and classify input patterns, make and act on probabilistic predictions and operate without explicit rules or supervision.

Deep learning is where we are seeing the biggest breakthroughs in the field. Deep learning detects patterns by using artificial neural networks. These artificial neural networks are modeled after the most elegant neural network, our brain, and contain multiple layers to enable automatic feature extraction from the data – something that was impossible with machine learning – with each successive layer, using the output from the previous layer as input.

Because of its architecture, deep learning excels at dealing with high degrees of complexity, forms and volumes of data. It can understand, learn, predict and adapt, autonomously improving itself over time.

For most of the last 100 years, brain exploration has been dominated by research

ATIF KUREISHY

which have derived broadly accepted measures such as P300 amplitude. Only recently, accessibility of high-quality EEG data combined with GPU-accelerated computation and advanced deep learning approaches has allowed us to move beyond hand-crafted EEG features. Within the sports enterprise, understanding of the players’ brain needs to be combined with the objectives of the organisation to provide the right context and control. In the context of professional sports, these objectives loosely translates to improving player performance and wellness, leading to enhanced fan experience, increased revenues, and a winning culture.

How AI and Deep Learning changes the game AI and Deep Learning can identify latent patterns, known as biomarkers, in EEG that change over time, and are associated with player performance and wellness. These biomarkers can be used to

measure and achieve the personalised objectives of each player and team. By combining high quality data from different modalities (e.g. EEG, sleep, heart rate variability, performance statistics) and forming a player performance and wellness profile, we can identify these biomarkers and better understand causal relationships between the physical and mental aspects of sports.

Pervasive Data Intelligence enables the automation of biomarker discovery through representation learning, i.e. finding higher order feature spaces that relate to specific phenomenon. By applying Pervasive Data Intelligence, a sports team doctor now has a path to utilise these biomarkers per player performance and wellness profile. AI and deep learning allow organisations to maximise player performance while minimising player risk through better insights from 100% of performance and wellness data, at a scale that only automation can deliver.

ISSUE 10

85

CONTACT US COMMERCIAL ENQUIRIES BUSINESS@DIGITALBULLET.IN

EDITORIAL ENQUIRIES

EDITORIAL@DIGITALBULLET.IN