A new video and phone conference service from Amazon aims to compete with the likes of Microsoft's Skype for Business. Amazon Web Services unveiled its new Amazon Chime service today to provide unified communications tools to enable companies to host or join meetings as well as chat online, while sharing content and screens across their devices.

"In a world where meeting attendees are often not in the same city, much less the same office building, unified communications has become increasingly more important," the company said in a statement. "Amazon Chime takes frustration out of meetings, delivering very high quality video, voice, chat, and screen sharing."

Push-Button Conferencing

Amazon is pitching the new service as a way to bring high-end quality to an aspect of enterprise technology often seen as a source of frustration for companies due to clunky or hard-to-use interfaces, bad sound and audio quality and complicated login procedures. Chime aims to deliver high-end video and audio quality while making the process of hosting or joining a meeting as simple as the push of a button.

Chime calls all participants listed for a meeting when it starts so joining is as easy as clicking a button in the app, according to the company. It also provides a visual roster of all attendees, taking the mystery out of knowing who is on the call.

The new service also comes with its own mobile and desktop apps that can be synchronized across multiple Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows devices. Amazon said Chime can also be integrated into existing corporate directories, and also allow IT administrators to manage identities and control access across their organizations.

Easy Deployment

Perhaps most attractive for IT departments, Chime doesn't require deployment or upfront investments, since enterprises can just download the app. Additionally, Amazon said it costs about a third as much as competing solutions.

"It's pretty hard to find people who actually like the technology they use for meetings today. Most meeting applications or services are hard to use, deliver bad audio and video, require constant switching between multiple tools to do everything they want, and are way too expensive," said Gene Farrell, vice president, enterprise applications, AWS, in the statement.

The service is now available in three versions. Amazon Chime Basic is free and lets a user attend meetings, call another person using voice or video, and use its messaging and chat capabilities. Amazon Chime Plus adds user management, such as the ability to manage an entire e-mail domain, disable accounts, or configure Active Directory, as well as 1 GB per user of message retention, for $2.50 per user, per month.

And Amazon Chime Pro adds the ability to host meetings with screen sharing and video for up to 100 users and also includes support for mobile, laptop, and in-room video along with unlimited VoIP support for $15 per user, per month.

Image credit: Amazon.

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Amazon Unveils New Conference Call Service To Take on Skype - Top Tech News

YotaScale, a graduate ofAlchemists enterprise accelerator, is announcing a $3.6 million venture round today from Engineering Capital, Pelion Ventures and angels Jocelyn Goldfein, Timothy Chou and Robert Dykes. The startup employs machine learning to help balance performance, availability and cost for enterprise cloud computing.Competitors CloudHealth Technologies and Cloudability have raiseda combined $80 million in the hot space.

Cloud computing has rapidly become integral to businesses in just about every industry. But the quick pace of innovation has made it hard to monitor ever-evolving cloud infrastructure. Rather than dump the responsibility on humans,YotaScale is automating performance management itself.

The companycombs over amyriad cloud data toensure thata companys infrastructure is optimized for its overarching business priorities. These priorities can be really simple, like minimizing cost, or they can be highly complex, involving multiple projects with different end-goals.

Anybody can do the simple stuff and tell you your machine is running low on utilization and youshould shut it down, explainsAsim Razzaq, CEO ofYotaScale.

Razzaqssystem is able to combine usage data with billing and log data. This informationserves as the underpinnings for anomaly detection against a baseline. Though it might not sound like a lot of data, its enough to extrapolate out things likeresource consumption and CPU utilization.

But the tricky part of anomaly detection is defining normal, because normalcy is highly contextual. A spike in use might not be an anomaly at all for an e-commerce company onBlack Friday. To this point,YotaScale isnt just concerned with historical data, it actually makes forward projections. This makes it possibleto contextualize data fluctuations. Instead of flagging every single change, the system compares expected performance against actual performance.

Different types of cloud infrastructure data are created in different time intervals; some hourly, others daily, etc. The challenge becomes optimizing across that differentiation.Ensemblemachine learning techniques are used to improve the accuracy ofanalysis and to manage the many dimensions of captured data.Regression models serve as the foundation, with other semi-supervised models coming in for specific uses.

UsingYotaScale, enterprises like Apigee and Zenefits can ideally rely on machines to managetheir cloud computing needs, taking a load off cloud and DevOps teams. Not to mention,machines have a pretty strong compute advantage when it comes to real-time analysis.

Read the rest here:
With $3.6M in fresh funding, YotaScale optimizes cloud computing for enterprises - TechCrunch

Telecommunication experts estimate the amount of data stored "in the cloud" or in remote data centers around the world, will quintuple in the next five years. Whether it's streaming video or business' database content drawn from distant servers, all of this data is -- and will continue in the foreseeable future to be -- accessed and transmitted by lasers sending pulses of light along long bundles of flexible optical fibers.

Traditionally, the rate information is transmitted does not consider the distance that data must travel, despite the fact that shorter distances can support higher rates. Yet as the traffic grows in volume and uses increasingly more of the available bandwidth, or capacity to transfer bits of data, researchers have become increasingly aware of some of the limitations of this mode of transmission.

New research from Nokia Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey may offer a way to capitalize on this notion and offer improved data transfer rates for cloud computing based traffic. The results of this work will be presented at the Optical Fiber Communications Conference and Exhibition (OFC), held 19-23 March in Los Angeles, California, USA.

"The challenge for legacy systems that rely on fixed-rate transmission is that they lack flexibility," said Dr. Kyle Guan, a research scientist at Nokia Bell Labs. "At shorter distances, it is possible to transmit data at much higher rates, but fixed-rate systems lack the capability to take advantage of that opportunity."

Guan worked with a newly emerged transmission technology called "distance-adaptive transmission," where the equipment that receives and transmits these light signals can change the rate of transmission depending on how far the data must travel. With this, he set about building a mathematical model to determine the optimal lay-out of network infrastructure for data transfer.

"The question that I wanted to answer was how to design a network that would allow for the most efficient flow of data traffic," said Guan. "Specifically, in a continent-wide system, what would be the most effective [set of] locations for data centers and how should bandwidth be apportioned? It quickly became apparent that my model would have to reflect not just the flow of traffic between data centers and end users, but also the flow of traffic between data centers."

External industry research suggests that this second type of traffic, between the data centers, represents about one-third of total cloud traffic. It includes activities such as data backup and load balancing, whereby tasks are completed by multiple servers to maximize application performance.

After accounting for these factors, Guan ran simulations with his model of how data traffic would flow most effectively in a network.

"My preliminary results showed that in a continental-scale network with optimized data center placement and bandwidth allocation, distance-adaptive transmission can use 50 percent less wavelength resources or light transmission, and reception equipment, compared to fixed-rate rate transmission," said Guan. "On a functional level, this could allow cloud service providers to significantly increase the volume of traffic supported on the existing fiber-optic network with the same wavelength resources."

Guan recognizes other important issues related to data center placement. "Other important factors that have to be considered include the proximity of data centers to renewable sources of energy that can power them, and latency -- the interval of time that passes from when an end user or data center initiates an action and when they receive a response," he said.

Guan's future research will involve integrating these types of factors into his model so that he can run simulations that even more closely mirror the complexity of real-world conditions.

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Materials provided by The Optical Society. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Optimizing data center placement, network design to strengthen cloud computing - Science Daily

A new video and phone conference service from Amazon aims to compete with the likes of Microsoft's Skype for Business. Amazon Web Services unveiled its new Amazon Chime service today to provide unified communications tools to enable companies to host or join meetings as well as chat online, while sharing content and screens across their devices.

"In a world where meeting attendees are often not in the same city, much less the same office building, unified communications has become increasingly more important," the company said in a statement. "Amazon Chime takes frustration out of meetings, delivering very high quality video, voice, chat, and screen sharing."

Push-Button Conferencing

Amazon is pitching the new service as a way to bring high-end quality to an aspect of enterprise technology often seen as a source of frustration for companies due to clunky or hard-to-use interfaces, bad sound and audio quality and complicated login procedures. Chime aims to deliver high-end video and audio quality while making the process of hosting or joining a meeting as simple as the push of a button.

Chime calls all participants listed for a meeting when it starts so joining is as easy as clicking a button in the app, according to the company. It also provides a visual roster of all attendees, taking the mystery out of knowing who is on the call.

The new service also comes with its own mobile and desktop apps that can be synchronized across multiple Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows devices. Amazon said Chime can also be integrated into existing corporate directories, and also allow IT administrators to manage identities and control access across their organizations.

Easy Deployment

Perhaps most attractive for IT departments, Chime doesn't require deployment or upfront investments, since enterprises can just download the app. Additionally, Amazon said it costs about a third as much as competing solutions.

"It's pretty hard to find people who actually like the technology they use for meetings today. Most meeting applications or services are hard to use, deliver bad audio and video, require constant switching between multiple tools to do everything they want, and are way too expensive," said Gene Farrell, vice president, enterprise applications, AWS, in the statement.

The service is now available in three versions. Amazon Chime Basic is free and lets a user attend meetings, call another person using voice or video, and use its messaging and chat capabilities. Amazon Chime Plus adds user management, such as the ability to manage an entire e-mail domain, disable accounts, or configure Active Directory, as well as 1 GB per user of message retention, for $2.50 per user, per month.

And Amazon Chime Pro adds the ability to host meetings with screen sharing and video for up to 100 users and also includes support for mobile, laptop, and in-room video along with unlimited VoIP support for $15 per user, per month.

Image credit: Amazon.

More:
Amazon Unveils New Conference Call Service To Take on Skype - CIO Today

February 14, 2017

Telecommunication experts estimate the amount of data stored "in the cloud" or in remote data centers around the world, will quintuple in the next five years. Whether it's streaming video or business' database content drawn from distant servers, all of this data isand will continue in the foreseeable future to be - accessed and transmitted by lasers sending pulses of light along long bundles of flexible optical fibers.

Traditionally, the rate information is transmitted does not consider the distance that data must travel, despite the fact that shorter distances can support higher rates. Yet as the traffic grows in volume and uses increasingly more of the available bandwidth, or capacity to transfer bits of data, researchers have become increasingly aware of some of the limitations of this mode of transmission.

New research from Nokia Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey may offer a way to capitalize on this notion and offer improved data transfer rates for cloud computing based traffic. The results of this work will be presented at the Optical Fiber Communications Conference and Exhibition (OFC), held 19-23 March in Los Angeles, California, USA.

"The challenge for legacy systems that rely on fixed-rate transmission is that they lack flexibility," said Dr. Kyle Guan, a research scientist at Nokia Bell Labs. "At shorter distances, it is possible to transmit data at much higher rates, but fixed-rate systems lack the capability to take advantage of that opportunity."

Guan worked with a newly emerged transmission technology called "distance-adaptive transmission," where the equipment that receives and transmits these light signals can change the rate of transmission depending on how far the data must travel. With this, he set about building a mathematical model to determine the optimal lay-out of network infrastructure for data transfer.

"The question that I wanted to answer was how to design a network that would allow for the most efficient flow of data traffic," said Guan. "Specifically, in a continent-wide system, what would be the most effective [set of] locations for data centers and how should bandwidth be apportioned? It quickly became apparent that my model would have to reflect not just the flow of traffic between data centers and end users, but also the flow of traffic between data centers."

External industry research suggests that this second type of traffic, between the data centers, represents about one-third of total cloud traffic. It includes activities such as data backup and load balancing, whereby tasks are completed by multiple servers to maximize application performance.

After accounting for these factors, Guan ran simulations with his model of how data traffic would flow most effectively in a network.

"My preliminary results showed that in a continental-scale network with optimized data center placement and bandwidth allocation, distance-adaptive transmission can use 50 percent less wavelength resources or light transmission, and reception equipment, compared to fixed-rate rate transmission," said Guan. "On a functional level, this could allow cloud service providers to significantly increase the volume of traffic supported on the existing fiber-optic network with the same wavelength resources."

Guan recognizes other important issues related to data center placement. "Other important factors that have to be considered include the proximity of data centers to renewable sources of energy that can power them, and latencythe interval of time that passes from when an end user or data center initiates an action and when they receive a response," he said.

Guan's future research will involve integrating these types of factors into his model so that he can run simulations that even more closely mirror the complexity of real-world conditions.

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Optimizing data center placement and network design to strengthen cloud computing - Phys.Org