Miro Expands Whiteboard Capabilities, NVIDIA and Microsoft Team on AI Supercomputer, More News
Digital whiteboards have developed traction in the enterprise at a rate few other tools have emulated. And if the example of San Francisco-based Miro is anything to go by, it looks as if a major change in the market is on the way: digital whiteboards are evolving into digital hubs.
In the case of Miro, a number of new platform capabilities are driving the evolution. The company unveiled the new releases at its Distributed '22 conference. According to a company statement, the additions make it possible for teams to build data-rich environments by pulling all content streams and threads needed to complete a project into a single place.
Miro claims that a Miro board could become the single source of truth for any project. The new features — currently in public beta — enabling this include:
- Interactive Presentations: An existing capability inMiro’s whiteboard, but the update means presenters can show all content on a single board. It will also enable audience interaction with content through activity apps.
- Talktrack: This effectively offers board recordings. Using it, anyone using the board can make a walkthrough video of it. Each of the boards will be embedded in the video enabling audience interaction with the board or boards being discussed.
- Localization: The platform is now available in beta in French, German, Spanish and Japanese, with other languages to come.
- Miro Community: Miro says its principle interest has been in its community. It now has six different ways of capturing feedback from that community.
It is debatable as to whether the updates constitute a digital hub or not. Whatever you call it, the new additions reinforce the ties that hold physical and virtual teams together, which is in itself a significant development.
In a statement about the release, Miro's chief product officer Varun Parmar said the new whiteboard offering also tackles the problem of app sprawl, which digital hubs were originally designed to eradicate. Here it is worth noting that an analysis of Okta’s 2020 customer database revealed that companies employing 2,000 or more individuals maintain an inventory of 175 SaaS apps on average.
Think, for example, of the problems this kind of sprawl creates with keeping content up to date, or finding content in the dozens of silos across an enterprise.
Miro’s updated whiteboard aims to give organization leaders a handle on all this. We're likely to see further developments in workplace integrations along these lines in the coming months.
NVIDIA and Microsoft to Build ‘Massive’ Cloud AI Computer
This week there was also the news that Santa Clara, Calif.-base NVIDIA and Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft have come together to build what they term a "massive" cloud AI computer.
According to NVIDIA, the new supercomputer will be one of the most powerful AI computers in the world.
The collaboration will see NVIDIA GPUs, networking and full stack of AI software combine with Azure’s advanced supercomputing infrastructure to create a product that can train, deploy and scale AI models for enterprises, including large-scale AI models.
They will also collaborate to optimize Microsoft's DeepSpeed deep learning optimization software.
DeepSpeed is an open source deep learning optimization library for PyTorch. The library is designed to reduce computing power and memory use and to train large distributed models on existing computer hardware.
NVIDIA VP of enterprise computing Manuvir Das discussed the collaboration in a statement: “AI technology advances as well as industry adoption are accelerating. The breakthrough of foundation models has triggered a tidal wave of research, fostered new startups and enabled new enterprise applications.”
The market for AI-focused supercomputing is growing in parallel with the market for AI, and especially for computers that have the computer capability to train AI.
Frontier, the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Cray exa-scale supercomputer, currently holds the title of fastest supercomputer in the world. The US Department of Energy maintains and operates Frontier.
Earlier this week, HPE announced plans to make supercomputing accessible for more enterprises by offering scaled down, more affordable versions of its Cray supercomputers.
Box and Zoom Deepen Partnership
Meanwhile, Redwood City, Calif.-based Box is back again, this time with an app which makes it possible to save selected Zoom recordings into Box.
Using the app, customers of both brands can manage their content in a single secure and compliant location, said Diego Dugatkin, chief product officer at Box in a statement about the release. He shared Box's ongoing efforts to build integrations with third-party platforms, and its goal to make switching between apps easier from within Box.
Citing recent research published in the Harvard Business Review, Box noted the average worker toggles between apps and websites an average of 1200 times a day and spends up to four hours per week re-orientating themselves after switching to a new app.
Integration like this, according to Box, will in part address this issue by keeping "content fragmentation" to a minimum.
Learning Opportunities
The integration, announced at the recent Zoomtopia event, specifically enables users to:
- Save Zoom meetings with their entire related content straight into Box.
- Jump back into Box to share Zoom audio, transcripts and video.
- Keep Zoom content secure and compliant using the existing security and compliance features of Box.
The news follows the Box-Zoom integration unveiled earlier this year, which effectively made Box the principle content layer for Zoom meetings.
Zoom and Box together are a heady combination. Box has already established its credentials in the content services and enterprise collaboration space, while the recent Zoomtopia conference saw Zoom continue its transformation from video conferencing provider towards video content management and collaboration.
Zoomtopia also saw the company offer mail calendar services to Zoom Mail and Calendar Clients to allow customers to integrate email and calendar services into Zoom.
Verint Unveils Microsoft Teams Recording Capabilities
In other video recording-related news, Melville, New York-based Verint announced the release of a new version of its recording integration for Microsoft Teams.
Verinit Interaction Recording (VIR) is aimed primarily at heavily-regulated industries like healthcare, finance and government agencies. With it, administrators can manage and monitor the different communication modes available across Teams, including meetings and video calls.
The release addresses a major problem for organizations that have built Microsoft environments in these kinds of industries, notably the lack of a centralized recording system to track and store conversations that occur in Teams that have associated regulatory and compliance issues.
VIR is not a standalone application. It is part of the wider Verint Customer Engagement Platform and allows organizations to manage this highly sensitive data through a single application along with relevant data from other apps in the platform. All of the associated data is managed by Verint Engagement Data Management (EDM) and stored in the Verint Engagement Data Hub.
In sum, EDM, of which VIR is a part, brings together the management of disparate interaction data into one application, supporting organizations in their efforts to build compliant data strategies.
Mimecast Upgrades Email Security for M365
Finally this week, Lexington, Mass.-based email and collaboration security platform provider Mimecast has announced the launch and general availability in the U.S. and UK of its Email Security, Cloud Integrated solution.
Since its founding in 2003, Mimecast has been building solutions to increase the security of organizations. The principal objective of this release is to offer organizations a way to secure their Microsoft 365 deployments without having to add to the complexity of their existing infrastructure. This gateway-less deployment solution is engineered to provide an additional layer of security to the existing security measures within Microsoft 365.
The announcement comes soon after Mimecast announced a new integration with identify protect vendor Okta, aimed at tackling the increasing risk and complexity of insider threat attacks.
The integration is timely given that Kroll recently announced that the level of insider threats have peaked to their highest quarterly level to date, accounting for nearly 35% of all unauthorized access threat incidents.
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About the Author
David is a full-time journalist based in Ireland. A partisan of ‘green’ living and conservation, he is particularly interested in information management and how enterprise content management, analytics, big data and cloud computing impact on it.
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