Samsung is developing AI ScaleNet capability, enabling seamless, high-resolution 8K streaming

As the world enters the era of 8K TVs with sales of 8K displays steadily increasing, TV manufacturers are constantly adding more offerings to the mix, the 8K market is expected to continue to grow. 

There are, however, a few challenges that need to be addressed before viewers around the world will be able to enjoy 8K’s stunning visuals in their entirety. First, more 8K content will need to be produced, and second, network connections need to be made capable of supporting the seamless streaming of 8K movies and shows.

To address these issues, researchers from Samsung Research, an advanced R&D hub within Samsung Electronics’ SET Business, have developed an AI Codec known as AI ScaleNet. First introduced at SDC19, this capability enables delivery of 8K content on networks that typically support only 4K speeds, without the need for additional infrastructure.

To learn more about AI ScaleNet’s development process and potential applications, Samsung Newsroom interviewed Kwangpyo Choi and Youngo Park – researchers from Samsung Research’s Visual Technology team, and the first individuals to suggest and develop this type of innovative technology.

AI ScaleNet utilizes deep learning technology to minimize data loss during compression and enable 8K content to be streamed on networks with lower bandwidth capabilities.

Here’s how it works, in a nutshell: 8K content is compressed to 4K quality using an AI downscaler and transmitted to the user’s TV, which utilizes AI to upscale the content back to 8K quality. When asked to describe the inspiration for the technology, Kwangpyo Choi, a researcher from Samsung Research’s Visual Technology, specified a need for a new video compression and transmission technology in order to accommodate the evolving media landscape, and to address related technical challenges.

“Multimedia content is rapidly moving online, so figuring out how to overcome bandwidth limitations for UHD content transmission has become a major task,” said Choi.

“With AI ScaleNet, users will be able to enjoy 8K-quality content, even at lower bandwidths,” added Youngo Park, another Samsung researcher. “In fact, during periods of high network traffic, when speeds tend to drop, viewers can still expect content to be presented at a relatively higher quality.”

AI ScaleNet addresses bandwidth limitations within modern network infrastructures with what’s known as an adaptive AI Codec. “AI Adaptive Bit Rate Streaming refers to AI technology that adapts to various bandwidths and adjusts the resolution to enable seamless streaming,” said Choi.

The difference the technology makes is especially clear when using over-the-top (OTT) services, where viewers typically notice changes in picture quality. As Choi explained, however, Samsung’s AI Codec and AI ScaleNet technology utilize AI that adapts to changes in bandwidth and optimizes quality, so users enjoy the highest-quality streaming experience possible.

Visure Solutions releases easy-to-use web interface for Requirements Management ALM offering

Visure Solutions Inc., a requirements Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) company, has launched Visure Web Reviewer 5.0, an intuitive and easy-to-use web interface. Allowing users to review and approve requirements, test and design specifications through an easy-to-use, the web interface reduces the challenges many teams face in the entire product-to-market process. 

The web-based version will allow any type of stakeholder (technical and non-technical users) of RM – including, but not limited to marketing teams, management teams, customers and suppliers – to navigate the sometimes complex ALM process. 

 As companies become increasingly aware of the importance of managing risk and improving their development process, Requirements Management (RM) will play a more crucial role in coordinating with different stakeholders and customer needs.

However, many of today's RM tools pose technical challenges for several of those stakeholders, creating bottlenecks and frustration in the product development lifecycle. 

Visure Reviewer web-based interface will also help increase efficiency and optimize processes while speeding the product development process by saving time, strengthening alignment, and ensuring quality and compliance.

"Visure Reviewer's web release is simpler and easier to use and will basically bridge the gap between technical and non-technical teams that have been isolated in the past," said Dr. Moustapha Tadlaoui, Visure's CEO. "This new version will enable better communication between teams and help them collaborate in a much tighter way, which will improve productivity, address the causes for project delays and failures and contribute to project success, and help them deliver a better-quality product." 

"Requirements management is an intensive undertaking. We designed the platform to make it easier to track, test, analyze, visualize, and communicate to all stakeholders," said Visure CTO Fernando Valera. "Visure's new Reviewer web-based tool empowers cross-functional collaboration and alignment between business, compliance, and technology stakeholders throughout the product development lifecycle."

The platform – which comes on the heels of the launch of Visure's comprehensive ALM platform – is expected to open new vertical markets for the company, including banking, administration and insurance.

"Requirements management tools are becoming more approachable and better integrated with daily development activities, empowering organizations to succeed with agility at scale across many industries," Tadlaoui said. "By expanding to other vertical and geographical markets, Visure plans to help our growing customer base achieve compliance and improve their lifecycle processes."

SnapLogic harnesses AI to build end-to-end integrations; improve connectivity with Salesforce, Coupa, and Delta Lake by Databricks

SnapLogic introduced a new breakthrough AI capability to help citizen and expert integrators complete integrations faster and more easily, boosting user productivity and enabling IT and development teams to focus on more strategic, high value tasks. 

The new feature, called Pipeline Synthesis, leverages SnapLogic’s machine learning-based engine, Iris AI, to infer user intent and organizational insight to instantly build and suggest new, complete, end-to-end integration pipelines to solve an integration task at hand. 

In addition to the new Pipeline Synthesis feature, the November 2019 release of the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform also includes additional Iris AI enhancements, new Kubernetes support, and enhanced connectivity with Salesforce, Coupa, and Delta Lake by Databricks.

New and enhanced capabilities in this month’s release of the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform advance usability, connectivity, and performance for customers. 

The update will provide an enhanced Mapper AutoLink function that simplifies source-to-target mappings and provides relevance scoring highlighting the accuracy of mappings, improving productivity for less technical users. In addition, the release includes improved algorithms to support the development of pipelines with multiple endpoints. 

Customers can now integrate the deployment of Snaplexes in their Kubernetes-based DevOps processes allowing Snaplexes to be spun up as needed to manage their infrastructure.

Organizations can now designate critical pipelines to be part of automated regression testing. Users will get a report on pipeline behavior before and after a new SnapLogic platform release, giving them the assurances they need to upgrade with ease and confidence. This release adds support for Delta Lake, the open source storage layer created by Databricks, to help data engineers build high quality, reliable data lakes for improved analytics. 

New capabilities to modify API proxies and customize the API developer portal drive productivity gains for API Managers; with enhancements made to some of the more popular Snaps, including Salesforce, Coupa, Snowflake, and PostgreSQL to help drive greater connectivity and value for customers.

The release of the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform is immediately available to all customers.

Carousel joins RingCentral’s Platinum Partner program; delivers cloud contact center and UC&C engineering capabilities

Carousel Industries announced on Wednesday that it has been named a Platinum Partner by RingCentral Inc.. A designation held by RingCentral’s partners, Carousel’s Platinum Partner status is a testament to the company’s engineering talent, services capabilities, and commitment to customer success.

Carousel customers will benefit deeply from this elevated status. The company will receive operational and technical resources and executive-level RingCentral support only made available through this Platinum Partner status. Combined with Carousel’s Net Promoter Score of 70 and unwavering pursuit of success, customers can now take advantage of an entire portfolio of solutions with the best in high touch services and support. 

Additionally, with a rich history of partnership with Avaya as a Diamond Partner, and now a RingCentral Platinum Partner, Carousel is well positioned to support all possible paths to cloud migration, and is well versed in cultivating migration strategies tailored to the individual and changing needs of the customer.

“Serving as a RingCentral Platinum Partner is evidence of Carousel’s rigorous customer success standards and technical expertise,” said Rick Houlihan, VP of Cloud Services, Carousel. “It is our honor to continue being a RingCentral preferred partner and bring cloud UC&C and contact center technology to our more than 6,000 enterprise customers who benefit from our services each and every day.”

“We’ve consistently looked at Carousel as a strong leader in delivering cloud technology solutions thanks in part to its engineering expertise and ability to exceed customer needs,” said Zane Long, SVP of Global Channel Sales, RingCentral. “On behalf of all of us at RingCentral, I am ecstatic to continue partnering with Carousel to help enterprises benefit from the power of the cloud to deliver true impact to their businesses.”

“Due to the newly formed strategic partnership between RingCentral and Avaya, Carousel is in a truly unique position to serve businesses,” continued Houlihan. “As Avaya’s U.S. Partner of the Year and now as a Platinum Partner in RingCentral’s Program, Carousel can help businesses navigate and gain incredible value from two of the leading cloud communications solutions providers in the world.”

HPE enhances program to capitalize on HPE as-a-Service opportunity; deliver customized and optimized partner experience

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced on Monday enhancements to the HPE Partner Ready Program that allow partners to customize their approach to developing enablement, achieving profitability and establishing differentiation in the market. 

These program updates optimize the partner experience and empower partners to further accelerate engagement and growth of HPE GreenLake, the differentiated edge-to-cloud as-a-Service offering from HPE. The new HPE Partner Ready Program is based on partner feedback and is designed to deliver consistency through a stable and predictable program framework, compensation model and membership acceleration.

The HPE Partner Ready Program enables partners to personalize how they engage and leverage resources with HPE in order to best meet the needs of their clients and continue winning in the marketplace. With HPE, partners can invest in what matters the most to them – pursuing new business, accelerating growth with existing customers, or both. 

The expansion of the HPE Partner Ready Program includes a full suite of programs and tools help partners close deals faster, including accessible HPE demo capabilities, competitive and instant pricing from first request with the option for differentiated pricing via deal registration, and faster time to partner onboarding.

Partners can further develop solution mastery through self-selected, progressive continuous learning paths, competency curricula, and new technical certifications. They will also receive special pricing from the day of onboarding and protect margins while selling across the whole HPE portfolio. Increased benefits are available to partners selling into new customers and/or selling solutions to existing customers. Partners will also work towards new HPE Tech Pro Community rewards and continuous learning badges.

HPE GreenLake is a unique as-a-Service offering that provides customers with greater agility, flexibility, control and choice in driving their digital strategies. This differentiated offering resonates with the market – and today HPE GreenLake is one of the fastest growing businesses in HPE, with over 740 customers worldwide.

HPE first enabled partners to sell HPE GreenLake three years ago, and the channel is now a powerful and growing ecosystem that is helping HPE rapidly scale the as-a-Service business. The HPE GreenLake channel business has grown over 300 percent and 500 partners have active HPE GreenLake deals.

“HPE GreenLake is an exciting solution for us. I can now differentiate the solutions that I'm selling to my clients by being able to provide clients with a flexible model when we look at their infrastructure,” said Xara Tran, CEO & Chairman, Champions of Change. “HPE GreenLake allows us to have ongoing conversations with the clients we work with and play important roles in their digital transformation journey. We’re not just a transactional reseller; we’ve become a fully integrated technology partner.”

To further accelerate this growth, HPE is adding a full range of resources, tools and benefits in FY20 to ensure partners can navigate customer conversations, and rapidly convert HPE GreenLake opportunities.

HPE is adding sales resources and specialists dedicated to pursuing new HPE GreenLake opportunities with channel partners. This will significantly increase the accessible support from HPE sales specialists across geographies and industry verticals.

HPE has introduced HPE GreenLake Quick Quote tool to allow partners to easily adjust workloads to meet the cost and performance needs of clients, and cut the time to generate a proposal to just a few minutes.

HPE is launching new competency curricula that allows partners to go beyond validating their solution knowledge, to developing solution mastery and building solution practices. 

The HPE Master Accredited Solutions Expert (Master ASE) Hybrid IT Solution Architect certification enables IT architects to develop and validate skills to architect and deploy an optimized hybrid IT infrastructure for key industry solution workloads.

HPE Tech Pro Community continues to provide valuable technical enablement and solution selling capabilities to the channel globally. To deliver a more robust and collaborative enablement journey, the FY20 benefits and learning options for members include expanded membership, certification and training, just-in-time continuous learning, exclusive events, and targeted rewards and recognition. HPE Tech Pro Community is now open to all partners with advanced levels of the tool available as partners complete learning activities.

To complement faster and more transparent onboarding experiences for new partners, and predictable and automated pricing with simplified deal registration, HPE is enhancing a comprehensive demo program that provides a full set of offerings to meet the needs of partners, and their customers, and close deals faster. 

To provide customers with ample time with HPE offerings before installing full solutions, the updated demo program gives all HPE Partner Ready Partners discounts and easy access to equipment across the entire portfolio, both hands-on and remotely, and via HPE innovation centers.

“HPE turns up consistently. Not just when there is a big deal to be done, but to gain a deep understanding of our business, our customer focus and the value we provide to customers,” said James Hardy, Managing Director, CCS. “Coupled with a knowledge of where we are taking our organization, HPE has been both a partner and a mentor as we have radically transformed the capability of our organization and our value to serve our joint customers at the edge and through as-a-Service offerings for Hybrid IT.”

AstroNova releases TrojanLabel T5, a professional, in-line digital color label press and finishing system

AstroNova Inc., a data visualization technology company, announced global launch of the TrojanLabel T5, a larger version of its TrojanLabel T4 professional label press and finishing system, with the addition of UV flexo varnish capabilities.

The T5 all-in-one digital print and finish in-line labeling solution was demonstrated for the first time in September at Labelexpo Europe 2019 in Brussels, Belgium. The T5 is already up and running at customer sites in Europe and the United States.

The TrojanLabel T5 is built on AstroNova’s TrojanLabel T3 Digital Inkjet Label Press platform integrated with a smart, compact converter unit featuring UV flexo varnish, lamination, rotary die-cutting, slitting, and waste removal. Following the introduction of the T4 two years ago, the T5 is the company’s latest high-production label printing and converting solution for the professional printing market. 

The T5 adds several additional enhancements such as spot and SUPERgloss varnish, lamination, slit and rewind, and cold foil application for silver, gold, and metallic decorative accents, all in a single compact platform.

With the addition of the T5 to its product line-up, AstroNova continues to offer a broad range of products to suit a variety of labeling and production needs. From QuickLabel tabletop, on-demand printers to TrojanLabel full-print finishing systems, and a range of complementary solutions including software, label materials, accessories, and global technical support, AstroNova provides total peace of mind to customers and channel partners alike.

“The T5 is a great step up in our offerings, providing professional printers and large brand owners with a high-performance system that delivers great results from start to finish,” said AstroNova president and CEO Greg Woods. “We are excited about the addition of this unique, versatile solution to our TrojanLabel family of professional digital color label presses and specialty printers.”