Middleware Consulting International

ARMONK, NY (December 21, 2022) – Subscriptions have become commonplace in the digital world, and bundling is designed to help lower both pricing to the consumer and investment from the brand. To date, however, bundling can arguably be most viable when part of a larger media portfolio. The Weather Channel, part of IBM, has developed a platform solution that not only provides account management for the end consumer, but also makes bundling viable across media portfolios, creating some often-surprising collaborations between digital publishers.

The Weather Channel digital properties has expanded its premium subscription offerings, adding new packages with independent products ratings organization Consumer Reports and sustainable home products retailer MightyNest. The bundling will allow for discounted rates, helping consumers manage their multiple digital subscriptions in one place – providing convenience while on the go and offering brand awareness to The Weather Company’s more than 415 million monthly visitors served globally[1]. The platform also aims to help ease the technological backend for brands bundling with The Weather Channel. These collaborations show a compelling business case for how publishers strive to help expand reach, grow subscription membership, and enhance customer service by offering value-added services to end consumers in the U.S.

“The Weather Channel customers are accustomed to having information at their fingertips, and MightyNest gives their consumers the efficiency and transparency they are looking for when purchasing sustainable household essentials,” says MightyNest co-founder and CES Chris Conn. “MightyNest recommends products based on a customer’s specific home and lifestyle needs, and our rating system makes it easy for them to find products that suit their preferences.”

Building on co-bundled premium subscription packages already announced with Tripadvisor® and USA TODAY, The Weather Channel efforts are designed to save consumers time and money. Pairing two premium subscriptions can help consumers manage multiple subscriptions while integrating weather from the world’s most accurate weather forecaster.[2]

“Consumers are demanding convenience and ease of use when it comes to managing their subscriptions,” said Sheri Bachstein, CEO of The Weather Company, an IBM Business. “Weather impacts everyone, everywhere, every day. Offering bundled subscriptions is another way we can provide added value that helps people make more informed decisions in daily planning.”

According to an IBM Watson Advertising study, 82% of respondents check the weather daily.[3] It’s become a daily habit to check weather information, and a bundle helps a consumer access the latest weather along with news, ratings or shopping information in one convenient location to help save them time and effort.

The Weather Channel Premium Pro subscribers gain access to deeper weather insights, such as 72-hour future radar and eight days of hourly forecasts, all in an ad-free environment. Consumers now have the option to pair The Weather Channel Premium Pro digital subscription[4] with another subscription, all while managing both subscriptions in one place.

Consumers can subscribe to the information they want in one place on The Weather Channel website. Bundling options include top names such as:

Consumer Reports Digital Annual Membership – On-the-go access to trusted ratings on thousands of products and services, expert shopping advice, and members-only savings to help shoppers buy confidently with unbiased testing and research.
MightyNest Shop Sustainably Membership – Receive personalized product recommendations for sustainable living. Members receive free monthly shipping, exclusive member benefits and up to 35 percent off top sustainable brands such as Mrs. Meyers, Seventh Generation, Stasher and more. Know what you’re buying with sustainability scores from MightyNest showing every product’s ingredients, materials and waste impact.
Tripadvisor Plus – Receive members-only prices and perks on travel experiences, hotels and more from the world’s largest travel guidance platform, to enhance the trip planning experience.
USA TODAY’s Digital All-Access plan – Access subscriber-only content and newsletters, exclusive conversations with the newsroom, and the eNewspaper, a digital replica of the print edition, from the largest local-to-national digital media organization representing the voice of an entire nation.

HCL was a proud sponsor of the Agile DevOps East 2022 conference, which was held on the 9th and 10th of November, 2022, in Orlando, Florida. HCL’s Secure DevOps portfolio is industry leading, and this was an awesome opportunity for us to meet engineering and business teams who are looking for the right solutions to solve their DevOps pain points.

HCL provides comprehensive and robust solutions across many aspects of DevOps including continuous test automation, continuous delivery, value stream management and application security testing. We had excellent demos lined up for these as well, to share with people looking for specific solutions.

Over the two days, we had numerous excellent conversations concerning topics like optimizing flow for DevOps pipelines, overcoming the lack of visibility for siloed development teams, improving overall quality and security, and helping team realize value faster. Agile DevOps East also offered us an opportunity to gather insights into trends and challenges facing organizations and to share how our capabilities can address these challenges.

HCL also hosted a Technical Presentation at the event where we spoke about the need for organizations to go beyond adopting just Agile and DevOps practices and include value stream management taking things to that next level. Al Wagner, HCLSoftware’s DevOps Solution Architect, led this session and explained the principles behind value stream management and how it can help organizations succeed in aligning business outcomes to technical activities.

About HCL Accelerate

HCL Accelerate optimizes value cycle time from idea to realization, getting what the customer wants and needs to them as fast as possible. With HCL Accelerate you can automate the process of managing value, eliminate waste, inefficiencies, and bottlenecks from the value stream.

About HCL OneTest

HCL OneTest is our industry leading test automation platform which covers functional testing for UIs and APIs, performance testing, service virtualization, and test data generation. With HCL OneTest you can automate faster and run tests earlier and more frequently to discover errors sooner!

About HCL AppScan

HCL AppScan delivers a fast, accurate, and agile security testing platform that protects businesses, and their customers from cyber threats. It provides comprehensive security testing capabilities including DAST, SAST, IAST and SCA, and offers the right scanning technology for DevOps use cases through a well-designed and simple-to-use experience.

Our latest Sametime release, now available for download, enriches the user experience with new capabilities to deliver a frictionless meeting and chat platform at an affordable price. Our goal is to provide a more secure, private, engaging, and flexible workspace for business collaboration. Whether you need Safari browser support, faster search to locate shared information, or the ability to quickly share content with others, you will see it reflected in our new release.  

Let’s review some of our new capabilities now available: 

• Host and attend your Sametime meetings on Safari  
• Don’t misplace important information — quickly find 1:1, group, and meeting chats using our latest chat conversation filters 
• Easily add a Sametime meeting link to a calendar invitation with one click, using our new enhanced Outlook add-in 
• Share content from your mobile device — click a button to share a URL, picture, or article straight from your phone to Sametime chat 
• Stay connected and up to date — use push proxy to receive call, meeting, and chat notifications instantly for iOS and Android mobile devices 
• Receive and answer your Sametime chats from an Apple Watch 
• Keep better track of your meeting time — view meeting duration timer once meeting has started 
• Network performance indicator for each meeting participant that shows connection quality 
• Updated Keyboard shortcuts to access meeting controls while in the meeting 
• Improved microphone and camera access user experience 
• Chat updates, including ability to rename group chats, meeting chat and group chat icon updates, right-to-left language support, and much more 
• Simplify your Chat-only deployment with Kubernetes package 
• Sametime admins can now monitor their deployment and get statistics using out of the box packaged Grafana dashboards for chat and meetings 
• Embed chat and meetings features in your own apps via our APIs – download the zip file for APIs straight from the API page 

Many organizations have “cloud initiatives” to move their data centers to the cloud, in order to eliminate the legacy, on-premises infrastructure (hardware, software, management tools, etc.) acquisition and setup, reduce the technical resources to manage and maintain the infrastructure, and better align with the OpEx budget. Organizations expect to get machine resources, IT management solutions and business applications all delivered from the cloud so they can just focus on their core business functions.

HCL BigFix on Cloud

HCL BigFix on Cloud is a new offering from the HCL BigFix team. It combines the power of BigFix endpoint management capabilities with HCL’s global cloud-based managed services to provide a hosted BigFix solution that accelerates deployment, reduces management complexity, and eliminates expensive infrastructure. Unlike other cloud-based solutions, BigFix on Cloud enables Security and IT Operations teams to manage every endpoint and remediate vulnerabilities faster, backed by HCL’s world-class, global service delivery team.
BigFix on Cloud allows organizations to cost-effectively manage and secure a variety of endpoints. It is:

Proven: BigFix is delivered on a robust, cloud services platform leveraged by more than 140 global customers and 150,000 users.
Secure: BigFix is delivered on a highly secure, cloud services platform that is compliant with industry standards for security and governance, including ISO 27001 and SOC 2.
Fast: Bring all endpoints under BigFix management rapidly, speeding time-to-value and lowering implementation costs.
Elastic: Manage a small or larger number of diverse endpoints with the ability to easily scale up, accommodating more endpoints and additional functionality as needs arise.
Efficient: Eliminate infrastructure costs by leveraging subscription-based pricing that includes hardware, software, and infrastructure management.
Flexible: Choose either the new BigFix One on Cloud solution, or one or more BigFix on Cloud solutions, to deliver the right capabilities to the organization, anywhere around the globe.
With HCL BigFix on Cloud, organizations now can respond rapidly to an ever-changing endpoint environment with unparalleled scalability and flexibility to add capacity and functionality as the business needs evolve.

It’s been said that the only constant is change — and nowhere is that clearer than in the software industry. What’s less often acknowledged, however, is that for change to be truly evolutionary, it must represent a positive transformation — one that adapts to a changing environment in a consistent, focused way and makes its beneficiaries smarter, faster, more aware, and more resilient.

At HCLSoftware, we focus relentlessly on bringing those evolutionary shifts into reality — delivering transformative solutions that will empower our customers and prospects to thrive in a rapidly changing environment. Successfully delivering these innovative solutions requires bold focus and close attention to the trends that are reshaping the technology landscape — and the expectations of the marketplace.

As we seek the pivotal trends that will determine the direction of technology and the market, we’ve identified four key factors that guide us in charting this future course:

Deep digital transformation
AI and intelligent automation
Data, analytics and insights
Enterprise security
These four trends provide a compass to orient our efforts as well as a direction for a better future.

These four forces also offer us an opportunity to rethink how we market and communicate — especially in the wake of the pandemic, which forced businesses to become more digitally focused, changing our approach to interaction and collaboration forever. This shift has driven marketers — ourselves included — toward a new reality, one that’s neither traditional nor simply digital. In this new economy it’s not enough to be a little digital. Companies — and marketers — need an extra spark. We need to be Digital+.

At HCLSoftware, we use world-leading marketing platforms, empowering our teams to be Digital+. And we’re creating partnerships on a global scale that will transform our market presence and drive engagements with radically new experiences. As we adapt and transform, we’re reshaping how we communicate to adapt to this new era of Digital+ marketing. There should be no doubt: HCLSoftware will be fueling the digital business of the future and the Digital+ economy.

The rapidly emerging nexus of technology and sports is changing how games are played and how athletes compete, improving player performance and bringing spectators closer to the game. The world is witnessing a massive change in approach and outlook towards technology adoption in sports. This change is poised to get bigger and better.

Tenets for Making the Technology and Cricket Ecosystem Work Together
As competitions worldwide ramp back up and reluctance to attend live events wanes, smart leaders are seeking high-tech solutions to create innovative, immersive, responsive and engaging experiences. HCLSoftware is leading this charge, and most recently — in partnership with the European Cricket Network (ECN) — is converting millions of spectators in the stadium and at home into active participants. This partnership merges a shared passion for cricket and innovative technology to transform the fan experience. Innovation opportunities are expected to grow through virtual engagement, targeted marketing for adoption, and new opportunities for monetization.

The experiences we created and delivered were not just digitally enhanced but extended into reality. In sports, as in everything we do, it’s not enough to be digital first — we need to be Digital+. Here’s how we did it.

Precision Marketing at Scale
To create an amazing fan experience, you need to personalize your user engagement strategy. HCL Unica, our end-to-end enterprise marketing automation platform, gave fans the exact experience they wanted before, during and after the game. The ECN leveraged Unica’s real-time interaction capabilities, best-in-class segmentation, behavioral insights, and fan journey mapping to engage fans every step of the way across all engagement channels. With Unica, they were able to communicate 120 times to 1.1 million followers and 328 thousand subscribers. And, using Unica Discover, they learned that a majority of viewers were coming to their live scores page first, so they tweaked their mobile website design in response, so users could get there with fewer clicks.

Crowdsourcing Engagement and Scale
We grew our digital footprint and social media presence through an innovative initiative to engage fans — a crickethon. Fans (and coders) could submit ideas for apps and other technology to boost the cricket games of the future — with daily and weekly winners, prizes, a trending hashtag and mind-blowing reach of almost 14 million people on social media channels (including almost 3 million video views of excerpts from the competition).

Custom, Personalized Experiences
HCL Actian and ECN let tech-savvy fans craft their own digital experience with tools leveraging real-time league, player, and tournament data. ECN used Avalanche, our cloud data platform, to scale their data infrastructure and global network to deliver breakthrough performance, concurrency, and cost savings for data-driven fan experiences. With Avalanche, they were able to ingest more than 22 million data points so they could create targeted infographics for the 130 million TV viewers.

Driving the Future
HCLSoftware’s technology encompasses digital transformation, data, analytics and insights, AI and automation, and enterprise security. Our solutions comprise an entire ecosystem that makes the sport and fan experiences of the future possible. These solutions enable various scenarios for our clients.

Fans and sports communities can increase engagement with digital experiences: live broadcasting with instant replays, social media, team and betting apps, and mobile games. There’s also e-sports, with marketplaces for signed apparel and equipment. For players, technology enables better coaching, testing, performance management and training.
Check out Volt MX, Our Multiexperience Development Platform
Centralized storage of player profiles provides fast, reliable access to data and streamlines club member communication. Athlete workloads can be monitored to analyze fitness, fatigue and game-readiness, and training improved by analyzing player workload and training intensity and monitoring heart rates and GPS data gathered through sensors and linked to reports.
Check out Our Data & Analytics Solutions
Technology also enables smart stadiums with 360-degree replays, wayfinding for stadium navigation and smart parking. Security cameras with facial recognition, automated emergency response, and real-time crowd and access control improve operations.
The future of sports mandates personalized ad-embedded environments, real-time targeted marketing, and mobile betting. It will include analytics and stats related to players and teams, VR/AR training, and precision support for umpires. New revenue streams open up as media and sponsors sell branded broadcasting, merchandise, and kits online. Automation, analytics and AI target key segments on websites and apps.

Check out HCL Unica
Technology is changing the game, literally, for all members of this emerging ecosystem of fans, sports communities, players, stadiums, media and partnerships. Let us show you how HCLSoftware can help you up your game.

NEW YORK, Nov. 9, 2022 — IBM today kicked off the IBM Quantum Summit 2022, announcing new breakthrough advancements in quantum hardware and software and outlining its pioneering vision for quantum-centric supercomputing. The annual IBM Quantum Summit showcases the company’s broad quantum ecosystem of clients, partners and developers and their continued progress to bring useful quantum computing to the world.

“The new 433 qubit ‘Osprey’ processor brings us a step closer to the point where quantum computers will be used to tackle previously unsolvable problems,” said Dr. Darío Gil, Senior Vice President, IBM and Director of Research. “We are continuously scaling up and advancing our quantum technology across hardware, software and classical integration to meet the biggest challenges of our time, in conjunction with our partners and clients worldwide. This work will prove foundational for the coming era of quantum-centric supercomputing.”

At the Summit, the company unveiled the following new developments:

‘IBM Osprey’ – IBM’s new 433-quantum bit (qubit) processor
IBM Osprey has the largest qubit count of any IBM quantum processor, more than tripling the 127 qubits on the IBM Eagle processor unveiled in 2021. This processor has the potential to run complex quantum computations well beyond the computational capability of any classical computer. For reference, the number of classical bits that would be necessary to represent a state on the IBM Osprey processor far exceeds the total number of atoms in the known universe. For more about how IBM continues to improve the scale, quality, and speed of its quantum systems, read Quantum-Centric Supercomputing: Bringing the Next Wave of Computing to Life.

New quantum software addresses error correction and mitigation
Addressing noise in quantum computers continues to be an important factor in adoption of this technology. To simplify this, IBM released a beta update to Qiskit Runtime, which now includes allowing a user to trade speed for reduced error count with a simple option in the API. By abstracting the complexities of these features into the software layer, it will make it easier for users to incorporate quantum computing into their workflows and speed up the development of quantum applications. For more details read Introducing new Qiskit Runtime capabilities — and how our clients are integrating them into their use cases.

IBM Quantum System Two update – IBM’s next-generation quantum system
As IBM Quantum systems scale up towards the stated goal of 4,000+ qubits by 2025 and beyond, they will go beyond the current capabilities of existing physical electronics. IBM updated the details of the new IBM Quantum System Two, a system designed to be modular and flexible, combining multiple processors into a single system with communication links. This system is targeted to be online by the end of 2023 and will be a building block of quantum-centric supercomputing — the next wave in quantum computing which scales by employing a modular architecture and quantum communication to increase its computational capacity, and which employs hybrid cloud middleware to seamlessly integrate quantum and classical workflows.

New IBM Quantum Safe technology: As quantum computers grow more powerful, it is crucial that technology providers take steps to protect their systems and data against a potential future quantum computer capable of decrypting today’s security standards. From offering the z16 system with quantum safe technology, to contributing algorithms in connection with the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) goal for standardization by 2024, IBM offers technology and services with these security capabilities. At the Summit, IBM and Vodafone announced a collaboration to explore how to apply IBM’s quantum-safe cryptography across Vodafone’s technology infrastructure.
Client & Ecosystem Expansion: Growth of IBM Quantum Network: IBM also announced today that German conglomerate Bosch has joined the IBM Quantum Network to explore a variety of quantum use cases. Other recent additions to the network include multinational telco Vodafone to explore quantum computing and quantum-safe cryptography, French bank Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale to explore use cases in financial services, and Swiss innovation campus uptownBasel to boost skill development and promote leading innovation projects on quantum and high-performance computing technology. These organizations are joining more than 200 organizations — and more than 450,000 users — with access to the world’s largest fleet of more than 20 quantum computers accessible over the cloud.

“The IBM Quantum Summit 2022 marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of the global quantum computing sector, as we advance along our quantum roadmap. As we continue to increase the scale of quantum systems and make them simpler to use, we will continue to see adoption and growth of the quantum industry,” said Jay Gambetta, IBM Fellow and VP of IBM Quantum. “Our breakthroughs define the next wave in quantum, which we call quantum-centric supercomputing, where modularity, communication, and middleware will contribute to enhanced scaling computation capacity, and integration of quantum and classical workflows.”

Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only.

ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 3, 2022 — IBM has announced new software designed to help enterprises break down data and analytics silos so they can make data-driven decisions quickly and navigate unpredictable disruptions. IBM Business Analytics Enterprise is a suite of business intelligence planning, budgeting, reporting, forecasting, and dashboard capabilities that provides users with a robust view of data sources across their entire business. Along with IBM Planning Analytics with Watson and IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson, this suite also includes a new IBM Analytics Content Hub that helps streamline how users discover and access analytics and planning tools from multiple vendors in a single, personalized dashboard view.

According to an August 2022 Forrester report, advanced insights-driven organizations are 1.6x more likely to report using data, analytics, and insights to create experiences, products, and services that differentiate them within the market when compared to beginners1. However, companies are currently facing a highly dynamic operating environment where they must navigate unpredictable events such as supply chain disruptions, labor and skills shortages, evolving regulations, and more. The complexity of storing data across disparate silos can make this more challenging as teams collaborate across different analytics and business intelligence tools. To become data-driven, businesses can differentiate themselves by creating an enterprise-wide strategy that enables them to bring together their tools and put insights into the hands of decision makers.

Building on IBM’s existing portfolio of business intelligence solutions, IBM Business Analytics Enterprise includes a new IBM Analytics Content Hub. It is designed to allow users to view planning and analytics dashboards from multiple vendors, including tools like IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson, IBM Planning Analytics with Watson, and other common business intelligence tools into a single view that combines elements from each in a dashboard tailored to their unique needs. Additionally, it features algorithms that can recommend role-based content to help users surface new stories, reports, and dashboards from across the organization to aid in decision-making. As more users click through materials within the IBM Analytics Content Hub, the solution analyzes usage patterns to recommend content that aligns with their specific interests.

New Capabilities for IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson; IBM Planning Analytics with Watson expected to be available on AWS

With today’s news, IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson, an AI-powered business intelligence solution, now also includes new integration capabilities and enhanced forecasting that allows users to consider multiple factors and seasons in their trend predictions. Additionally, IBM Planning Analytics with Watson, an AI-powered solution that helps streamline financial and operational planning, is expected to be available as-a-Service on AWS later this year.

IBM Business Analytics Enterprise is designed to help break down silos so that the right teams can get the right data at the right time. For instance, an organization’s sales, HR, and operations teams each require access to data and insights from different business intelligence and planning tools for their specific needs, such as optimizing sales goals, building workforce forecasts, or predicting operational capacity. But when it’s necessary to share data and reporting across departments, complexities can arise because those teams are using multiple solutions. This can result in duplicate content across applications, which can threaten data consistency and quality. IBM Business Analytics Enterprise helps enterprise data be more easily shared, while remaining protected and avoiding data duplication by giving users across departments a single point of entry to view the data they need.

“Businesses today are trying to become more data-driven than ever as they navigate the unexpected in the face of supply chain disruptions, labor and skills shortages and regulatory changes,” said Dinesh Nirmal, General Manager of Data, AI and Automation, IBM. “But to truly be data-driven, organizations need to be able to provide their different teams with more comprehensive access to analytics tools and a more complete picture of their business data, without jeopardizing their compliance, security or privacy programs. IBM Business Analytics Enterprise offers a way to bring together analytics tools in a single view, regardless of which vendor it comes from or where the data resides.”

ALH Gruppe is a leading finance and insurance company in Germany, and with thousands of employees who need access to data insights, the majority of whom are not data scientists or highly technical users, they sought a solution to help streamline their data infrastructure even more.

“We’ve been using IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson for well over a decade now to support decision-making of all kinds across our business. We frequently use it in conjunction with other business intelligence tools, and one challenge was that those tools were always standing side-by-side with no connection between them and the data was separated,” said Bernd Oerthle, Head of Analytics Reporting and Infrastructure, ALH Gruppe. “With the new IBM Analytics Content Hub, we plan to connect internal stakeholders to multiple different BI solutions for easy access to self-service data, enabling better support for our end customers.”

The launch of Business Analytics Enterprise further builds on IBM’s strategy to provide businesses with tools to support data-driven decision-making. IBM Cloud Pak for Data and IBM’s business intelligence solutions work in tandem to help clients create a data fabric architecture that simplifies data integration, allowing them to run their analytics anywhere and take advantage of data across different environments.

Learn more about IBM Business Analytics Enterprise by reading the blog post or get started today by visiting: https://www.ibm.com/products/business-analytics-enterprise

Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.