Ceragon unveils new wireless platform with improved security for public safety

Ceragon Networks recently released a new wireless backhaul platform with enhanced security features that seeks to overcome what can at times be a major obstacle for public safety forces – access to a reliable and secure communications network.

Ceragon’s FibeAir IP-20 Assured Platform is geared toward helping public safety organizations, utility companies and service providers increase their operational efficiency, cut down on expenses and build reliable networks with strong security.

“Reliability in public safety and homeland security means that the forces in the field are always connected and that is associated with saving lives,” Shai Yaniv, vice president of marketing at Ceragon Networks, told Homeland Preparedness News.

In terms of its application for homeland security, the technology provided by Ceragon could help support communication between various command centers by transmitting large chunks of data, including video and voice. The connectivity of the wireless network delivers more capacity over longer distances and uses minimal frequencies in order to operate.

Ceragon is the only vendor of wireless backhaul systems, referring to the wireless connectivity between an entity’s network sites, and invests in the development of its own silicon chip sets for its modem parts and radio frequency integrated circuits, Yaniv said, resulting in greater flexibility and performance.

The IP-20 Assured Platform aims to resolve the tough challenges public safety organizations and other network operators face when building highly reliable secured networks for voice and multimedia services in an environment with scarce spectrum, as well as power and real estate constraints, the company said. The IP-20 Assured Platform operates across all wireless backhaul frequencies from 6 to 86 GHz and offers security with over-the-air encryption.

Ceragon’s network platform also offers the flexibility for customers to integrate new types of technology in the future. One key challenge public safety will face, according to Yaniv, is the integration of LTE technology.

“How do you transition from your current LMR (land, mobile, radio) technology over time to a broadband infrastructure, which allows you HD video and all the data-intensive communication over LTE technology, and do it in the most cost effective manner?” Yaniv said.

For the last 20 years, Ceragon has offered wireless backhaul solutions to various markets, including public safety, government and utilities, with mobile operators the largest market.

Ceragon has captured an approximately 10 percent market share in the U.S. public safety market, Yaniv said, and the company sees a growing opportunity in the public safety realm.

Aviat Networks Selects Software Component Ecosystem for SDN Future

Aviat Networks, Inc., one of the leading experts in microwave networking solutions, has announced strategic partnerships with software vendors and research institutions for the automation and advanced control of microwave networks.

Aviat has chosen Metaswitch Networks to provide feature-rich integrated software solutions with Carrier Ethernet, IP routing and MPLS protocols enabling a seamless transition from today's networks to SDN. 'Metaswitch is proud to be selected as the preferred control plane partner by Aviat for its SDN transformation,' says Jon Berger, vice president of engineering, network software, Metaswitch. 'Our high-performance protocol stacks, combined with our continued investment in implementing next-generation features, were key factors in forming the partnership.'

Aviat selected Tail-F to provide the ConfD Management Agent to deliver NETCONF/YANG interfaces, which are today's most efficient management protocol and model for network automation and control. These modern data model-driven network management techniques will enable lowest possible OPEX for Aviat customers. In addition, Tail-F offers predefined integration with the Metaswitch software stack enabling Aviat to bring SDN to market sooner. 'Aviat's commitment to standards-based network programmability with NETCONF and YANG by adopting Tail-f ConfD is aligned with what the industry has been demanding to help reduce the operating expense burden of proprietary interfaces,' says Fredrik Lundberg, head of Tail-f, Cisco-NFV.

On top of these commercial partnerships, Victoria University is providing research collaboration regarding the use of SDN in microwave backhaul applications. Focus areas include network performance, optimization, reliability and developing a model to incorporate unique characteristics of microwave spectrum utilization into SDN framework. Research project results and findings are currently being incorporated into Aviat's next generation of SDN-based hardware and software solutions including AviatCloud Automation and Virtualization platform.

'SDN will be an essential tool for our customers to simplify operations and reduce OPEX,' says Ola Gustafsson, senior vice president and chief product officer, Aviat Networks. 'With these partnerships, Aviat is laying the groundwork for advanced automation and control of microwave networks and ability to seamlessly migrate from today's Ethernet and IP/MPLS networks to SDN.'

Huawei Gearing to Launch New Mate Smartphone

Chinese smartphone maker Huawei is no small entity. If you just look at the numbers it is number three in the world trailing only Samsung and Apple. IFA, which is the yearly trade show that happens in Berlin, Germany is likely to be the stage for its next big launch.

An executive of the company told Chinese blog – GizmoChina that a new phone will be launched which will be part of the Mate line of devices. Widely, the company is expected to launch a successor to the Ascend Mate 8 smartphone, which is its quintessential phabet like device.

That being said, the phone that the company may eventually launch could possibly be geared towards woman. There are already rumours about a phone dubbed the Nova and it could have a massive volume rocker. This phone has already been leaked a couple of times, but other than this nothing else is really known.

Recently, the company globally launched the Honor 8 smartphone which is the flagship phone of its online only Honor brand. In India, recently, the Chinese giant launched the P9 smartphone, which is basically its 2016 flagship smartphone.

The P9 is unique because it is one of the first smartphones to adopt dual-cameras on the back. More importantly, the phone was created in collaboration with iconic camera brand Leica.

Uber Cash option brings tensions in South Africa

A new service by Uber Technologies Inc. that allows riders to pay for their trips in cash has heightened tensions with traditional metered taxis in South Africa, and some drivers for the popular car-service app say they fear for their safety after a spate of violent attacks.

Uber introduced the cash option in South Africa in late May, less than three years after launching its regular credit-card based service in Johannesburg. The goal: to lure riders who don’t have credit cards or are reluctant to plug their bank details into an app, said Alon Lits, Uber’s general manager for sub-Saharan Africa. 

“When you see the market potential that cash unlocks, it’s very hard to ignore that,” he said. The Uber cash option is also available in Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania, and markets beyond Africa, including India and Singapore.

But more than a dozen Uber drivers interviewed by The Wall Street Journal said the cash payments are making their business tougher by increasing intimidation and violence from traditional taxi drivers. They also said the risk of carrying cash in a country with one of the world’s highest crime rates doesn’t make up for the limited increase in business. The tensions could spell a problem for Uber in the company’s largest African market, where the number of drivers operating doubled to 4,000 in the past year alone.

“Uber cash is putting our lives at risk,” said Collen, who has been driving for Uber in Johannesburg for the past two years. Like most other drivers, he asked that his last name not be published since he was criticizing his employer.

During a recent drop-off at a Johannesburg light-rail station, Collen said, a group of taxi drivers smashed his windshield and stole his phone and wallet, including his driver’s license. Tensions with South African taxi drivers first boiled over last summer, but Collen said things had calmed down until the cash option was introduced.

“Now that we’re collecting cash, they’re furious,” he said. Other drivers recounted being beaten and chased by taxi drivers, who often try to damage their vehicles or steal their car keys or smartphones. One said he was threatened with a gun.

But Mr. Lits played down the safety impact of the cash option. “There is no data to suggest crime is higher now than it was before cash,” he said. However, a spokeswoman for Uber said there was an uptick in incidents at popular pickup and drop-off places such as light-rail stations in Johannesburg.

To mitigate the growing risk, Uber has taken new measures in the 76 markets where it operates: deploying private-security guards around known hot spots and creating an emergency number that drivers can call if they are threatened.

Drivers, meanwhile, have developed their own coping mechanisms. Many ask riders to sit in the front rather than the back, hide their GPS when approaching dangerous drop-off spots or fix hidden pickup places with customers by phone. Others say they have stopped taking rides in areas where they know taxi drivers are hanging out.

Opposition from rivals, not to mention regulators, is something the San Francisco-based company has encountered time and again from Portland, Ore., to Paris to Beijing. In Nairobi earlier this year, several Uber cars were burned amid clashes with taxi drivers. An anti-Uber protest in Costa Rica earlier this week, blocked roads in and around the capital.

But the troubles encountered by Uber and its drivers in South Africa point to the broader challenges faced by the company as it pushes into poorer markets where fewer people have credit cards and existing operators are defending a business that has seen little competition from public transportation.

On why the option was launched in Lagos, Uber general manager Nigeria said, “Paying with cash is really important for people in Nigeria so this is an exciting experiment for us. We want everyone to enjoy the hassle-free convenience of ordering a safe, reliable ride at the touch of a button. This cash experiment in Lagos will give us some great insights and help us develop our technology to best meet the needs of the local consumers.”, said Ebi Atawodi, General Manager for Uber Lagos.

Real Reasons why Oracle acquired NetSuite

On July 28, Oracle surprised investors by announcing that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Netsuite, the very first cloud company. In fact, analysts expected Oracle to continue to buy small and mid-sized cloud companies, but NetSuite is a mega acquisition valued at about $9.3 billion.

According to Oracle, it expects the acquisition to be immediately accretive to earnings on a non-GAAP basis in the first full fiscal year after closing. The transaction is valued at $109 per share in cash, or approximately $9.3 billion, a premium of 19% to NetSuite's closing stock price of $91.57 on the day before the announcement.

As seen by Arie Goren of AmigoBulls.com, "the acquisition of cloud business application software company NetSuite is a smart move by Oracle, and it is not paying an excessive price for the deal. The acquisition fits well into Oracle's strategy of promoting its cloud products at the expense of on-premise products. NetSuite has developed a single system for running a business in the cloud for 18 years, and the deal will give Oracle a better access to the mid-market fast-growing commercial software-as-a-service (SaaS) sector, and strengthen its line of SaaS applications. What's more, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison personally owns almost fifty percent of NetSuite, and NetSuite runs on Oracle databases. NetSuite has more than 30,000 customers in about 100 countries, most of them small and mid-sized business customers. As such, some possibility may arise in selling Oracle products to NetSuite customers and more so in the sale of NetSuite products across Oracle's extensive worldwide customer base."

After a spate of acquisitions in the CRM market by Microsoft and Salesforce, Oracle following suit with the purchase of NetSuite, even though Oracle has its own CRM and ERP offerings, the NetSuite acquisition may flesh out the Oracle portfolio by including e-commerce capabilities. SAP has Hybris and its Customer Experience Suite; and Salesforce recently purchased Demandware in a similar move to flesh out e-commerce capabilities to make it easier for sales and marketing to reach customers by understanding their customer service needs and by enabling customer service agents to upsell to customers. "The walls between sales, service and marketing have come down," said Keith Block, Salesforce's chief operating officer, about the Demandware acquisition.

Brent Leary, a principal at CRM Essentials, a CRM consultancy, said that the NetSuite acquisition helps Oracle flesh out its portfolio, particularly by having different components adjacent to CRM, including ERP and commerce functionality that works seamlessly with its platform.

"Oracle has looked at ways to compete more heavily and leverage their strengths in the CRM market," Leary said. "And their strengths are in having these other pieces to the puzzle and being able to pull them together. NetSuite adds an interesting component from an ERP perspective because, over the past couple of years, they have been driven into combining commerce into their CRM solution."

Finanlly, other reasons include the fact that there’s been a 10-year collapse in infrastructure hardware and software pricing due to open source and cloud. Oracle has been insulated because of its lock on mission critical apps – but it’s not immune. Many workloads in Hadoop, Mongo, Cassandra and emerging AWS databases like Aurora, Redshift and Microsoft SQL on Azure are chipping away at the periphery of Oracle’s database franchise.

Oracle’s response in situations like this has typically been to shift the game – in this case moving aggressively into cloud and SaaS. A previous example of Oracle chasing profits versus higher growth revenue is its acquisition of Sun where Oracle shed Sun’s lower margin server business, shrinking the former company, and instead building a suite of integrated high margin appliances.

Vertu announces Aster Chevron luxury smartphones with canvas back

British luxury mobile phone manufacturer, Vertu has added three new phones to its Aster Collection, featuring an outer shell covered in a distinctive high-quality canvas material in blue, pink or black. The new series is called Aster Chevron. The name Chevron comes from a unique pattern that is women into Italian canvas fabric and is available on Vertu.com for 3900 Euros.

Vertu Aster Chevron maybe looks driven, but the phone is equipped with the latest in hardware and software. The phone runs Android 5.1 Lollipop on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 2.3 GHz Quad-core processor. The display on the phone is 4.7-inch with 1080p resolution and 473dpi. Aster Chevron’s has a 13MP main camera with twin LED flash and 2.1MP front camera (Skype compliant). The phone has 64GB internal memory and is powered by a 2275 mAh battery that gives up to 15 hours 30 minutes of talk time.

Vertu Chief Designer, Hutch Hutchison explains: “Fine leather is a staple of the luxury industry but it is not to everyone’s taste. While Vertu has always been able to supply man-made materials for its customers, this has formerly been exclusively through our bespoke ordering process. Aster Chevron has been developed to cater for these requests on a much larger scale.”

Vertu claims that a lot of attention to detail has been given to the phone and the fabric that covers it, so as to handle the stresses of being used throughout the day by its owner. The company leads in the market of luxury mobile phones, a market that it pioneered many years ago. All Vertu phones are handmade in England, with each craftsman responsible for making a particular unit.

The current range of Vertu phones has three models – Aster, Signature and Signature Touch, while its Audio Collection consists of the V Headphones (HP-1V) and V Speaker (SP-1V).

Vertu provides 24/7 remote access technical support for its users, a 6-month subscription to iPass WiFi, 12-month subscription to Kaspersky anti-virus and anti-theft protection and a 12-month subscription to Silent Circle encrypted communications services.

MSPmentor names Dimension Data As Top Managed Service Provider

Dimension Data, the global IT solutions and services provider, has announced that it is the top managed services provider (MSP) for the second year in a row as determined by Penton Technology's ninth-annual MSPmentor 501 Global Edition. This distinguished list identifies the world's top 501 managed service providers (MSPs) from diverse technology and business backgrounds.

Dimension Data's managed offerings are in strong demand by more than 200,000 companies globally as they seek services that provide end-to-end technical expertise, service consistency and flexibility across geographies. For the second year, this award highlights Dimension Data's growing managed service portfolio of comprehensive IT services and solutions spanning data centers, security, unified communications and collaboration and a hybrid public and private Managed Cloud Platform™. Designed to deliver transformative technologies that drive organizational agility and flexibility, Dimension Data provides clients with the latest technologies that can grow with their business and technology needs.

"Years of building a robust, multi-vendor managed service portfolio across the data center, cloud, security, collaboration and end-user compute towers has put us in a strong position to fully address the consumption and delivery need of our clients. Dimension Data remains a market innovator by bringing new functions and solutions to clients at a pace that meets their industry demands and provides them with the full value of their investment," said Grant Sainsbury, senior vice president, Strategic Services, Dimension Data Americas. "Being named top service provider for the second year in a row by MSPmentor underscores our commitment to putting our clients' needs first by providing a full-range of quality, reliable services."

The 2016 MSP 501 list is based on data collected by MSPmentor and its partner, Clarity Channel Advisors. Data was collected online from March through April 2016. The MSP 501 list recognizes top cloud service providers based on metrics including recurring revenue, growth and other factors. In addition to a ranking on the MSP 501 list, every company that participated in the study has been assigned a score reflecting its intrinsic value. The measure, known as the Total Service Provider (TSP) score, evaluates an MSP's mix of revenue from various activities, including consulting, cloud, reselling and managed services.

"On behalf of Penton and MSPmentor, I would like to congratulate Dimension Data for its recognition as an MSP 501 honoree," said Aldrin Brown, editor in chief, MSPmentor. "The managed service provider market is evolving at a rapid pace and Dimension Data along with all the companies showcased on the 2016 MSP 501 list represent the most agile, flexible and innovative organizations in the industry."

NITDA to pay more attention to tech-startups, online media...as Agency gears up for GiTEX 2016

The need to create an enabling environment for the multitude of technology start-ups in the country and turning Nigeria into a tech-hub in Africa, has been described as the current focus of the new management of the National IT Development Agency (NITDA). In his maiden meet with Lagos-based online media/bloggers community today, the Acting DG of NITDA, Dr. Vincent Olatunji reiterated the commitment of his agency in projecting the image of the country using the value in the new digital economy.

Describing the intention of NITDA to be on creating ‘ ICT based SMEs’, Dr. Olatunji expressed his confidence that this is a sure way of not only helping to diversify the economy but also creating youth employment that the Nation urgently needs. “The way we live and we love and work have gone online, so there’s need for NITDA to build up capacity to sustain these online activities and ensure maximum benefits are derived from it”, says the DG.   

While enumerating the comparative advantages of having Nigeria as destination point for the growing digital economy in Africa, Dr. Olatunji listed Nigeria’s size, English language, and high rate of education as some of the key advantages potential investors in this new economy will be looking at. In addition to that, a veritable platform to expose these tech-preneurs is also being vigorously pursued by NITDA using various avenues. Some of these includes the e-Nigeria Conference and Expo, which he described as “clearing house for adopting relevant ideas and innovation for defining and accelerating national economic growth”. The conference is structured to bring key players of the Nigerian innovation ecosystem and foreign and local stakeholders together to share experiences, identify challenges and propose strategies for using ICT-enabled innovation and entrepreneurship to diversify the economy and create jobs.

In a similar vein, the Agency is also using the annual GiTEX Technology show organised by the Dubai World Trade Centre, (DWTC) to also showcase the quality and potentials of local technology startups. NITDA is facilitating Nigeria’s participation at three levels including the Nigerian Pavilion, Nigerian Startups cobs inside the Innovation Hub, and the Gitex Africa Investment Forum being co-managed by the NITDA and the DWTC.

“All these levels of participation are designed to ensure maximum exposure to ICT and other non-oil sectors which is a cardinal economic goal of the current government under President MuhammaduBuhari. Dubai has become an international hub for business engagements. The NITDA has already opened talks with several business prospects through the support of the DWTC and the Consular Office in Dubai.

Since Nigeria started participating in Gitex, which is billed to kick-off October 16- 20 this year at the Dubai World Trade Centre, this is going to be the first time it’ll be showcasing tech startups at the global show. While making a pledge to always interact with online and conventional media on NITDA activities, the DG also promised to extend all aspects of media partnership with the Agency which includes training, empowerment and access to the online media community, describing them as “veritable agents of change in the digital age”. 

Sony makes PS4 software feel more like a real operating system

Sony’s latest software update to the PlayStation 4 is now coming to beta users. Unlike the last major update, which added support for remote streaming to Macs and PCs, the 4.00 firmware beta (codenamed Shingen) is mostly focused on tweaking the PS4’s user interface. 

One of the biggest changes is the ability to create folders to organize your games and apps, instead of relying purely on Sony’s existing organizational tools. Another is that instead of taking over the whole screen, the Share and Quick menus will open as windows that don’t entirely cover your current game or app, and you’ll be able to add and remove items from the Quick menu to customize it.

Sony says the update also adds some new system backgrounds and redesigned icons, along with other tweaks to what you’ll see in various menus. There’s also an offline mode that will let you see your game trophies even when you’re not connected to the internet. The final update will have features that aren’t in the beta, and we don’t know when it will come to all PlayStation 4 users, although Sony says it will release more information in the coming weeks. So far, though, the new changes seem meant to make the console’s interface more customizable and less obtrusive — like we’d expect from a phone or computer operating system.