Technology Reseller - v08

Blue LED pioneer honoured by IET The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has awarded the 2017 Mountbatten Medal for outstanding contribution to technological innovation to Nobel Prize winner Professor Shuji Nakamura for his pioneering work in developing blue LEDs and lasers. Professor Nakamura holds the patent for novel InGaN growth processes, which enabled the commercialisation of blue LEDs as high efficiency, low power light sources, and was the first to demonstrate group III nitride-based high brightness blue/ green LEDs and violet laser diodes. These inventions paved the way for the use of LEDs in TV and mobile phone screens and the development of the Blu-ray DVD. Professor Nakamura said: “It is my great honour to receive the Mountbatten Medal. Since the invention of the blue LED in 1993, many researchers have joined the field and created many applications for solid state lighting, such as mobile phone screens, LED TV and large displays. But the application with the greatest impact on the world’s energy consumption is that of general illumination, recognising that one quarter of all the world’s electricity is used for lighting. “LED Light bulbs are more than ten times more efficient than incandescent bulbs, and they last for 50 years!  At current adoption rates, LEDs, by 2020, could have reduced the world’s need for electricity by the equivalent of nearly 60 nuclear power plants.” www.theiet.org/achievement Growing choice and complexity in the portfolios of cloud service providers could result in the emergence of cloud dealers with simple fixed price offerings, claims 451 Research. Its most recent Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Transformation survey shows that cloud is now mainstream, with 90% of organisations surveyed using a cloud service. Its analysts expect 60% of workloads to be running in some form of hosted cloud service by 2019, up from 45% today, and for 69% of organisations to have a multi-cloud environment. 451 Research forecasts the size of the cloud computing as a service market to almost double over the next five years, from $28.1 billion in 2017 to $53.3 billion in 2021. Infrastructure software as a service (ISaaS) will account for more than half (57%) of this total. However, it warns that this growth is likely to be accompanied by greater complexity, pointing out that AWS already has more than 320,000 SKUs, with 53,000 new ones added in the first two weeks of November 2017. Dr. Owen Rogers, Research Director at 451 Research, said: “Cloud buyers have access to more capabilities than ever before, but the result is greater complexity. It is a nightmare for enterprises to calculate the cost of computing using a single cloud provider, let alone comparing providers or planning a multi-cloud strategy. The cloud was supposed to be a simple utility like electricity, but new innovations and new pricing models, such as AWS Reserved Instances, mean the IT landscape is more complex than ever.” 451 Research believes there is a market opportunity for cloud dealers that can resolve this complexity and give users simple and low-cost prices – similar to the way consumer energy suppliers remove the complexity of global energy markets. Workers call for more IT automation and artificial intelligence Two thirds of workers (66%) believe resolving an IT issue at work should be as simple as asking Siri a question, according to a survey by IPsoft. Nearly half (49%) feel their IT requests go into a black hole and they want to be kept better informed of progress. Chetan Dube, CEO of IPsoft, said: “These findings show that business users want an altogether different experience from their interactions with IT. Business users want to be able to talk to their IT applications and have the applications solve their problems or requests, thereby disintermediating large segments of classic IT operations and ticket generating systems.” To address these issues, IPsoft has launched 1Desk, an intelligent interface with a digital agent that can diagnose problems, fulfil requests and execute tasks across shared services functions including IT, HR and finance. www.ipsoft.com BULLETIN : TRENDS 01732 759725 4 Cloud complexity opens door to new type of dealer Why am I so unproductive? Nearly a quarter (23%) of UK employees rate themselves as ‘unproductive’ at work, according to a new Vodafone study. This rises to 28% of employees aged 18-24. Half (51%) blame inefficient processes, 47% too many meetings and 42% cite poor technology and stress as reasons for their low productivity. www.vodafone.co.uk/business/solutions/ The price of failure British workers lose 262 hours and 43 minutes every year due to faulty technology, according to a survey by IT provider Probrand .co.uk . Over a third of workers (35%) say they turn to a colleague for help before contacting an IT support provider, with 32% preferring to search online for a solution. www.probrand.co.uk Chetan Dube Professor Shuji Nakamura