Application Infrastructure

Nigeria’s Largest Telco, MTN, Launches RCS Business Messaging with Google and Dotgo

Dotgo | December 23, 2021

Nigeria’s largest mobile network operator (MNO), MTN, is all set to launch RCS Business Messaging (RBM) Services in partnership with Google and Dotgo, a Gupshup company and a leading cloud communications provider of RBM Solutions.

RBM uses the rich and interactive features of Rich Communication Services (RCS)—the next generation SMS that allows sharing of audio, video, images, location, and a lot more—to enable branded business messaging. RCS messages are securely delivered to native messaging apps such as Google Messages and Samsung Messages on Android phones. Available on 3G and 4G networks, RCS is the default messaging standard for 5G networks. As of today, RCS is available globally with over 700M monthly active users.

Dotgo’s MaaP (Messaging-as-a-Platform) is integrated with the Google Jibe RCS platform for business messaging, the world’s most advanced RCS platform that provides a high degree of scalability. As a partner, MTN would leverage the services provided by Dotgo such as the RCS APIs, chatbot directory, billing, payments, reconciliation, and more, to drive monetization from RCS.

“As Nigeria’s largest carrier, MTN is all set to onboard brands that can reach out to a vast majority of Nigerian customers and delight them with a user experience like never before, to boost lead generation and conversion rates. This is a great opportunity for brands to connect with the end consumers of Nigeria for sales and support,” says Lynda Saint-Nwafor, Chief Enterprise Business Officer at MTN Nigeria.

Srinivas Rao, Chief Digital Officer of MTN Nigeria added, “We are proud of our technical collaboration with Google and Dotgo. The superior technology design, robust service operations, optimum business processes, and 24x7 support are key to delivering the Next Generation Business Messaging experiences to our Brands & Business Partners at the most affordable rates. With this generational shift we aim to further aid & accelerate Digital Transformation amongst the institutions, commerce & industry in Nigeria.”

“We are delighted to work with MTN to help bring RBM to their customers. With the highest number of subscribers in the region, RBM services on MTN will be a game changer. Dotgo has excelled once again as one of our top partners for monetising RBM with mobile operators,” says Juliet Ehimuan, Country Director, Google Nigeria.

“The launch of RBM by MTN, the largest operator in Nigeria, will accelerate adoption of RBM by brands in Nigeria. With the launch done, we will be working with MTN and Google to help CPaaS providers and brands in Nigeria to upgrade and incorporate RBM into their business applications,” 

Dr. Inderpal Singh Mumick, CEO, Dotgo

About MTN Nigeria
MTN Nigeria is Africa’s largest provider of communications services, connecting over 68 million people in communities across the country with each other and the world. Guided by a vision to lead the delivery of a bold new digital world, MTN Nigeria’s leadership position in coverage, capacity and innovation has remained constant, since its launch in 2001. MTN Nigeria is part of the MTN Group – a leading emerging market operator, connecting more than 200 million subscribers in 21 countries in Africa and the Middle East.

About Dotgo
Dotgo, a Gupshup company, is a global leader in RCS. Dotgo is the provider of the Bot Store®, world’s first and largest directory of RCS bots, Dotgo MaaP, RichOTP®, RichSMS™, and the RBM Hub. Dotgo is a Google partner and a member of the Mobile Ecosystem Forum. Visit www.dotgo.com. Gupshup enables better customer engagement through conversational messaging, powering over 6 billion messages per month. With Gupshup, businesses have made conversations an integral part of their customer engagement success.

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Application Infrastructure, Data Storage

Aryaka Hits the Road to Celebrate New PoP Launches in the USA and Europe

prnewswire | August 29, 2023

Aryaka®, the leader in Unified SASE solutions, today announced that it is organizing a global roadshow to coincide with the launches of its newest hyperscale Points-of-Presence (PoP) locations across the United States and Europe. The roadshow events are designed to educate CIOs, CISOs, IT professionals, and others who can benefit from Aryaka's services, giving them an opportunity to engage with Aryaka's leadership, explore its network expansion plan, and network with like-minded professionals. It is also a chance for Aryaka to connect with industry professionals on a hyperlocal level to gain a deeper understanding of the pain points they are facing and ways Aryaka can continue enhancing its offerings. Aryaka's roadshow will begin in Denver, Colorado on Wednesday, August 23 at Happy Camper from 3-5pm. Aryaka will also be hosting an event in Atlanta, Georgia on Thursday, August 24 at the Mill Kitchen and Bar from 5-7pm. Additionally, there are events planned at the U.S. Embassy sites in Madrid and Lisbon in October, with events at other locations to be announced later. "Our continued investment in our global PoPs help us deliver the essential foundation that our customers depend on to thrive in this accelerating era of distributed workforces," said Renuka Nadkarni, Chief Product Officer at Aryaka. "As a customer-first organization, Aryaka is constantly looking for new ways to connect with IT professionals to better understand where their biggest challenges are, as well as what's working best for them. Our global roadshow gives us an opportunity to connect with customers and prospects on a local level, so we can ensure we're serving everybody – from big corporations to SMEs – with customized SD-WAN and SASE offerings that are right for their businesses." Aryaka's PoPs are strategically located to provide customers with fast, reliable connections, and deliver cloud-based network, security, and observability services. As part of Aryaka's larger mission to redefine the future of connectivity and security, these new PoPs will help accelerate users' network and security services deployments and ensure seamless operations for enterprise and SME customers. About Aryaka Aryaka is the leader in fully managed SD-WAN and Unified SASE solutions. Aryaka meets customers where they are to help them overcome their network and security challenges with an absurdly great customer experience. Aryaka's flexible architecture and all-in-one service are designed to modernize enterprises of any size, enabling them to defy convention and future-proof their businesses. The company's customer base is comprised of hundreds of global enterprises, including several in the Fortune 100.

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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

Digital Realty Announces Its First NVIDIA DGX H100-Ready Data Center

prnewswire | July 11, 2023

Digital Realty, the largest global provider of cloud and carrier-neutral data center, colocation, and interconnection solutions, announces KIX13, its newest data center in Osaka, Japan, has been certified NVIDIA DGX H100-ready as part of the NVIDIA DGX-Ready Data Center program. KIX13 was awarded the accreditation for its ability to provide a dedicated, robust, and resilient environment optimized for intensive computing systems deployments at scale. DGX H100, the fourth generation of NVIDIA's purpose-built artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, is the foundation of NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD™ that provides the computational power necessary to train today's state-of-the-art deep learning AI models and fuel innovation well into the future. With it, enterprise customers can devise full-stack solutions that accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) deployments, allowing for data localization while meeting the global coverage, capacity and connectivity needs that come with deploying AI at scale. AI is swiftly becoming a driving force behind modern technologies across multiple industries with applications in areas such as optimization, preventive maintenance, virtual assistants, fraud detection, and anomaly detection. Expected to help solve the world's most challenging problems, the success of AI deployments is dependent on data centers that can provide the high-performance cooling, layout and connectivity required for AI to operate highly effectively. As modern enterprises adopt AI, leaders in the technology are increasingly seeking access to real-time data as a core strategy to enable instantaneous changes and decision-making. Digital Realty's highly connected PlatformDIGITAL® community enables customers to access vast data volumes, allowing them to confidently run AI workloads in an NVIDIA-accelerated environment to innovate and solve the world's most challenging computational problems, while overcoming Data Gravity barriers. With ServiceFabric™, Digital Realty's global service orchestration platform, customers can streamline management of their hybrid IT infrastructure while gaining access to a growing, open community of partners to which they can connect and utilize for managed services – all on a single, centralized platform. Thanks to the scale and sophistication of its offerings, broad customer base, and significant technical resources, Digital Realty also provides the precision-engineered power and cooling digital infrastructure that can support the high-power computing needs of AI. At higher workload densities, liquid cooling becomes an attractive option for AI deployments for its more efficient heat dissipation. Digital Realty's rich pedigree in data center engineering allows Digital Realty to provision a future-ready data center environment that can handle the evolution from air to liquid cooling. This also contributes to Digital Realty's and its customers' progress towards reducing their Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions by 68% and Scope 3 emissions by 24%, by 2030. The KIX13 certification marks another milestone in Digital Realty's and NVIDIA's collaboration. Digital Realty was one of the first data center providers to be awarded the "DGX-Ready Data Center" certification at the launch of the program in 2019 and currently operates DGX-Ready data centers in more than 20 markets worldwide, including six sites across Asia Pacific. "Organizations looking to implement enterprise AI are investing in accelerated computing infrastructure – including hardware and software purpose-built for AI – to deploy their models into production quickly," says Charlie Boyle, Vice President, DGX systems, NVIDIA. "With the certification of Digital Realty's new KIX13 facility in the DGX-ready data center program, customers have access to a flexible, simple option for deploying the world's leading AI platform." "Digital Realty understands the impact AI will have on the way businesses drive digital transformation in the years to come. However, business breakthroughs made possible with AI can only be realized if enterprises are able to integrate the technology into their operations, and that is where we come in," says Chris Sharp, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Realty. "With Digital Realty's KIX13 DGX-Ready Data Center certification, we remain focused on delivering a meeting place that allows our customers to accelerate innovation and growth." He added, "AI is poised to have a dramatic impact on digital transformation initiatives, and it is critical to have a foundation in place to remove the Data Gravity barriers that inhibit innovation. PlatformDIGITAL® provides an ideal location for the data aggregation, staging, analytics, and management that are critical for optimizing data exchange and maintaining data compliance." About Digital Realty Digital Realty brings companies and data together by delivering the full spectrum of data center, colocation and interconnection solutions. PlatformDIGITAL®, the company's global data center platform, provides customers with a secure data meeting place and a proven Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx ®) solution methodology for powering innovation and efficiently managing Data Gravity challenges. Digital Realty gives its customers access to the connected data communities that matter to them with a global data center footprint of 300+ facilities in 50+ metros across 27 countries on six continents.

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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, Data Storage

Ermetic Releases CNAPPgoat Open Source Project for Assessing Multi Cloud Security

businesswire | August 03, 2023

Ermetic, a leading cloud infrastructure security company, today announced CNAPPgoat, an open source project that allows organizations to safely test their cloud security skills, processes, tools and posture in interactive sandbox environments that are easy to deploy and destroy. CNAPPgoat supports AWS, Azure and GCP platforms for assessing the security capabilities included in Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP). The CNAPPgoat project will be officially presented at DEF CON Demo Labs in Las Vegas on Friday, August 11 from 12:00pm-1:55pm by Noam Dahan, Research Lead and Igal Gofman, Head of Research for Ermetic. On Wednesday, August 16 at 10am PST/1pm EST, Ermetic will present a webinar on using CNAPPgoat, to register visit thislink. Unlike projects that illustrate possible attack paths, CNAPPgoat provides a large and expanding library of scenarios that security teams can execute to create a customized cloud environment for simulating unsecured and vulnerable assets and validating their defenses. The ability to easily provision a vulnerable environment with a broad range of risk scenarios provides the following benefits: Create a sandbox for testing an organization’s security posture by assessing security team capabilities, procedures and protocols Use vulnerable environments for hands-on workshops to train team members on new skills and techniques Provision a “shooting range” for pentesters to test their skills at exploiting the scenarios and developing relevant capabilities Benchmark CNAPP tools against known environments to evaluate their capabilities “Compared to existing open-source projects that create ‘capture the flag’ scenarios where participants are expected to follow a certain path, CNAPPgoat spans the leading cloud provider platforms and CNAPP capabilities while providing a modular and granular approach for provisioning specific categories of risks and vulnerabilities,” said Igal Gofman, Director of Research for Ermetic. “This breadth and depth allows pentesters and defenders to precisely isolate the elements they want to explore for training, new skills acquisition, prevention and security posture assessments,” added Noam Dahan, Research Lead. CNAPPgoat enables security teams, trainers and pentesters to provision and run vulnerable scenarios from the following modules that make up the CNAPP specification defined byGartner: Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) - covers risks associated with identities and entitlements, such as the unintended ability of an identity to escalate its privileges Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) - includes the exposure of workloads to vulnerabilities such as running vulnerable/end of life software or OS versions Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) - spans the misconfiguration of cloud infrastructure components, such as publicly exposed storage resources Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scanning - will be added soon for finding misconfigurations directly in the code CNAPPgoat is an open community initiative designed to be used by anyone for commercial, technical and educational purposes. See today’sblogfor implementation details. Additional artifacts including deeper technical dives and guides will be released soon. Contributions are encouraged including new scenarios, scenario proposals, issues, suggestions, feature requests or simply sharing feedback. To learn more and access CNAPPgoat visit thislink. About Ermetic Ermetic reveals and prioritizes security gaps in AWS, Azure and GCP and enables organizations to remediate them immediately. The Ermetic cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) uses an identity-first approach to unify and automate cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), cloud security posture management (CSPM), cloud workload protection and Kubernetes security posture management (KSPM). It unifies full asset discovery, deep risk analysis, runtime threat detection and compliance reporting, combined with pinpoint visualization and step-by-step guidance. The company is one of America’s Best Startup Employers according toForbesand led by proven technology entrepreneurs whose previous companies have been acquired by Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks and others. Ermetic has received funding from Accel, Forgepoint, Glilot Capital Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Qumra Capital and Target Global.

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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, Storage Management

Digital Realty Announces Joint Venture of Stabilized Hyperscale Data Centers in Chicago

Digital Realty | July 19, 2023

Digital Realty (NYSE: DLR), the largest global provider of cloud- and carrier-neutral data center, colocation and interconnection solutions, announced today it has partnered with GI Partners to establish a joint venture for the sale of a 65% interest in two stabilized hyperscale data center buildings and their associated equipment in the Chicago metro area. Digital Realty will receive approximately $743 million of gross proceeds related to the joint venture and the associated financing, and will maintain a 35% interest in the joint venture while continuing to manage the day-to-day operations of the assets, providing a seamless customer experience. Digital Realty has also granted GI Partners an option to purchase an interest in the third facility on the same hyperscale data center campus. "With Digital Realty's unmatched global footprint and the attractive fundamental outlook for the data center sector, we are pleased with the strong institutional demand for our high-quality facilities," said Digital Realty Chief Investment Officer Greg Wright. "This transaction further diversifies Digital Realty's sources of capital and enhances our capital efficiency, in support of our strategic priorities. We are pleased to partner with a data center investor of GI Partners' caliber on this initial joint venture and we look forward to the continued execution on our capital plan for 2023." Digital Realty originally acquired the facilities in 2017 through its merger with DuPont Fabros. The two data centers contributed to the joint venture contain approximately 67 megawatts of IT capacity and are 90% occupied in aggregate, primarily by investment grade customers. Based on annualized in-place cash NOI at June 30, 2023 and the benefit of leases signed but not yet commenced, the transaction values the two facilities at approximately a 6.5% cap rate. Net proceeds will be used to pay down debt and for general corporate purposes. About Digital Realty Digital Realty brings companies and data together by delivering the full spectrum of data center, colocation and interconnection solutions. PlatformDIGITAL®, the company's global data center platform, provides customers with a secure data "meeting place" and a proven Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx®) solution methodology for powering innovation and efficiently managing Data Gravity challenges. Digital Realty gives its customers access to the connected communities that matter to them with a global data center footprint of 300+ facilities in 50+ metros across 27 countries on six continents.

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Increased complexity of Al models equals increased adoption challenges Financial institutions are looking to capitalize on opportunities presented by the adoption of artificial intelligence (Al). The rapid pace of development in areas such as deep learning, conversational, and generative Al has vastly increased the scope and app

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