Tech means Business

The technology press is full of references to "stampedes to the cloud" and other, assorted hyperbole. What's undeniable is that although cloud may not be ideal for your use-case, all the latest DevOps tooling is focused towards cloud. If you want hybrid, multi-cloud or vanilla on-premise deployments and still need all the latest and greatest K8s, Rancher.io and S3-styled storage, then perhaps cons...

In addition to the private and public sectors, there's the charity sector. Giving to needy causes is getting easier online and in person, thanks to technology like TapSimple's. In this episode of the Tech Means Business podcast, we talk to Tom Montague, co-founder of the company. After graduating in Bristol (Hybrid News Group's home city), Tom started TapSimple with a friend and a friendly develop...

This podcast is produced in conjunction with Cisco Cybercriminals never let up. Even schools and hospitals remained targets at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. For most people, working at home was the reality of their year, and as Kerry confirms, most organizations will be adopting a much more generous working-from-home stance from 2021. There are practical pointers in this episode on how t...

Buy a computer chip with some serious "grunt" and you go for Intel, right? Or AMD, perhaps more likely, these days. In whichever case, it's x86 architecture. That's what data centers and clouds run on, after all — these are the serious computers for grown-ups. The little voice you hear, however hails from Cambridge, UK, a little company called ARM, recently acquired by NVIDIA for beelions of dolla...

Nuance Communications is on a mission to put the human voice at the heart of every organization! Forget what you think you know about voice assistants and those hopelessly dumb 'bots you run into when you call into some companies. Nuance is a company that pretty much invented voice recognition and voice-to-text back in the days when such tech was so new and amazing it was like magic to mere mortal...

Just a few short years ago, technologists were predicting that smart algorithms could determine our tastes and perhaps suggest other goods or services we might buy! Now, with that type of technology a reality, what's the next logical step, and where does that leave our rights to privacy? Who owns our data? Is privacy a human right? How do companies work with each other, with governments and with n...

Imagine a 3D model of your industrial facility with objects (or people, controversially) tracked in real time. Perfect for manufacturers, engineering companies, warehouses and anywhere where it's good to know where stuff is. Our guest is Logan Maxwell of WISER Systems, who's at the sharp end of putting this type of cutting edge tech into places that would make a desktop PC or average laptop quake...

Many enterprises run IT systems that are necessarily complex. So complex, sometimes, that the number and variety of services, applications and connections comes as a shock, even to the IT Department. Finding the cause of an outage or slow-down, therefore, can be frustrating and time-consuming. Additionally, it can lead to all sorts of internal "politicking" (to put it nicely). But even once there'...

We just can't get enough Red Hat! After talking to Stefanie Chiras in S02 E01, we turn again to what's now the core of IBM, the open-source juggernaut of RHEL and chums - here represented by Ben Henshall, General Manager for the Southeast Asia market. The financial institutions of the area just about define conservatism, but Red Hat and open-source are changing the face of the industry: open, inte...

The recent months of lockdown and the reliance on the internet for some of life's basics has shone the spotlight firmly onto online payments. The methods of digital interchange of money began back with the humble COBOL routines of early banking mainframes, have moved through plastic cards, and now onto the mobile phone. With Ben Gilbey of Mastercard, we talk about trends in money, and the geograph...

Every time you connect to the internet (you're probably connected in several ways simultaneously right now), are you aware of the intricacies of what's actually happening in terms of data moving across the worldwide networks? Most people aren't, and that's where Thousand Eyes comes in. It's a company whose technology can tell you exactly what's happening, where, and creates (literally) a picture o...

The headlines are often full of how organizations' priceless data and intellectual property has been hacked by bad actors impersonating individuals. But what about machines being spoofed? How do you know that your e-commerce payment provider's servers are what they claim to be? When your API calls get re-routed behind the scenes, your company's data — and therefore its livelihood — are at stake. T...

In this episode, Joe is joined by Mette Søs Gottlieb from LMS365, a company that's putting learning materials right into your everyday workflow. Mette talks about her own passion for education, self-improvement, learning, keeping the grey matter active, and how she's lucky enough to be able to take that attitude to her own workplace. This episode looks at the LMS365 method, which is to integrate c...

In this opener to series two of the Tech Means Business podcast, we were delighted to speak to Stefanie Chiras, the Vice President and General Manager, RHEL Business Unit at Red Hat. With a skew of qualifications that would make a recruitment professional weep (Harvard, Princeton, UCSB), Stefanie was a career IBM-er until two years ago, when she shifted up a gear into Red Hat, post-acquisition of...

Looking back at series one of the Tech Means Business podcast. Rather than go through and ferret out the most pithy comments, the deepest insights, or even the best jokes, instead, we're recircling around to pull in the main themes dominating business and technology: Artificial intelligence with Darktrace Big data and Splunk IoT with Ubuntu/Canonical The Linux effect with Positive Internet Career...

A short announcement The last 12 weeks or so have seen some trying times for Tech Means Business's guests, and for us too. But we're happy to announce that Series Two is now in production, so watch this space.   In the meantime, come back in a few days' time for a bonus "Best Of" podcast, that's being 'cut' as you're reading this. All the best bits, hand-picked, remastered, and delivered via your...

What's the view from the top of a digital-first company? In this episode of the Tech Means Business podcast, we're joined by Kirsten Wolberg, the CTO of DocuSign, whose stellar career included spells at PayPal and Salesforce. Having lived and worked through the first dot-com bubble, Kirsten gives us her unique insights into how the technology services that businesses rely on have transitioned over...

In this podcast, Joe Green is joined by two representatives working at Ubuntu (or Canonical, if you like) on that organization's Ubuntu Core and Ubuntu Mobile Embedded projects. With IoT and its much older sibling, IIoT, ever-present as buzzphrases at the moment alongside 5G, self-driving cars and AI, we get the lowdown on what IoT really means. From early days of hobbyists knocking together mobil...

In conversation with Nick Mailer, founder of The Positive Internet Company, a company that's been in the free and open-source camp ever since its start. We discuss why every desktop's a Linux desktop, how the "potting shed" mentality of the British psyche led to ARM's world domination, and the fact that Positive's green credentials are usually an afterthought for many of its clients, but a central...

Mapping business processes and then developing software to suit those processes: that's the ethos behind the open-source Camunda platform, which can be extended further by paid-for proprietary functionality. Low-code, loadsa code and no-code development, robotic process automation, the cloud and the ways that companies are connecting and automating their legacy and new systems are just some of the...

The application programming interface (that's API, acronym fans) is what's allowing breaking down of monolithic programmed structures, and making DevOps a nicer place for microservices. But what happens if we extend the API concept out further? In time, Uri tells us, we'll see customer- or user-focused technology interactions, not ones that are dictated by app vendors, private companies or large o...

The database that's making waves in enterprise settings is PostgreSQL (often called Postgres), which would be romping up the database popularity index, if such a thing existed. Why is that the case? An open-source system that runs on Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure and ARM alike, you can download it, run it on your virtual or real tech, from 60-core x86s to Raspberry Pi, and it'll happily mince your dat...

The term "AI" is all too readily applied to just about everything today, including phone cameras, washing machines and voice-activated assistants. Can we confidently describe cyber-defences as "leveraging" AI? Because artificial minds can't predict the future (so can't spot zero-day attacks per se), it's in the specifics of cyber protection that self-learning algorithms are proving their value. Da...

What are those challenges specific to the education sector for technology to work, or even to find a decent use-case? Is the ed-tech market so very different from the business market for software, hardware, the cloud and all things technological? With distinct "sectors" in an averagely-sized college or university, and discrete business units acting as independent entities, how can technology vendo...

Definitions of big data vary, but for the sake of argument, let's just say it means "lots and lots and lots of information," data that's produced in ever-increasing amounts by every online interaction we undertake. Can big data be put to use, or is it just a stream of zeros and ones that move so quickly our minds are overwhelmed? The answer is that there are, without doubt, nuggets of amazing insi...