VIRTUAL DESKTOP TOOLS
businesswire | April 27, 2023
Elliptic Labs, a global AI software company and the world leader in AI Virtual Smart Sensors™ currently deployed in over 500 million devices today, has announced the launch of its AI Virtual Proximity Sensor™ INNER BEAUTY® with a new smartphone customer, Vivo, a global top-5 smartphone company. The Vivo Y78+, a mid-end high-volume smartphone, is being launched for the China market. Elliptic Labs’ partner Qualcomm is driving the Vivo Y78+ with its Snapdragon 695 chipset. The contract for this launch was previously announced by Elliptic Labs.
“Launching with a new smartphone company, Vivo, a top-5 global smartphone maker, shows that our AI Virtual Smart Sensor Platform™ continues to drive innovation for the smartphone market,” said Laila Danielsen, CEO of Elliptic Labs. “We are driving more adoption of our AI Virtual Smart Sensors with the largest smartphone manufacturers in the world, carrying on our push to make devices greener, smarter, and more human-friendly. ”
Elliptic Labs’ AI Virtual Proximity Sensor detects when a user holds their phone up to their ear during a call, allowing the smartphone to turn off its display and disable its screen’s touch functionality. This keeps the user’s ear or cheek from triggering unwanted actions during the call, such as hanging up or dialing numbers. Turning off the screen also helps conserve battery life.
Proximity detection is a core capability that is used in all smartphones, but Elliptic Labs’ AI Virtual Proximity Sensor is a unique, software-only solution that delivers robust proximity detection without the need for a dedicated hardware sensor. By replacing hardware sensors with software sensors, the AI Virtual Proximity Sensor reduces device cost and eliminates sourcing risk.
About Elliptic Labs
Elliptic Labs is a global enterprise targeting the smartphone, laptop, IoT, and automotive markets. Founded in 2006 as a research spin-off from Norway’s Oslo University, the company’s patented software uses AI, ultrasound and sensor fusion to deliver intuitive 3D gesture, proximity-, presence-, breathing- and heartbeat-detection experiences. Its scalable AI Virtual Smart Sensor Platform™ creates software-only sensors that are sustainable, human-friendly and already deployed in hundreds of millions of devices around the world. Elliptic Labs is the only software company that has delivered detection capabilities using AI software, ultrasound, and sensor fusion deployed at scale. The company joined the Oslo Børs main listing in March 2022.
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VIRTUAL DESKTOP STRATEGIES
businesswire | April 21, 2023
Veeam Software, the leader in Modern Data Protection, today announced that RC Willey, a leading American home furnishings company, selected Veeam Data Platform Advanced Edition as the core platform for its new data protection strategy. With Veeam, RC Willey is able to keep pace with thousands of items of inventory in constant motion between its suppliers, distribution centers, stores and customers by providing the top backup and recovery solution to ensure the business never has to suffer from downtime or data loss.
Over its 90-year history, RC Willey has grown from a one-person business to a major player in the western United States, with the mission to become America’s home store of choice, now operating 10 stores and three distribution centers across California, Idaho, Nevada and Utah. With the company passing $1 billion in sales for the first time in 2021, its steady growth reflects the continued importance of its core principles: integrity, hard work and going the extra mile to satisfy each customer. Delivering on these involves a complex choreography of supply and demand, with customer orders flowing in through RC Willey’s store network and online platform, and inventory items in constant motion from suppliers to distribution centers to stores and customers’ homes.
Today, RC Willey embodies this mindset with a modern, technologically empowered organization that prioritizes efficient operations and excellent customer service. With the company’s strategic shift towards virtualizing its infrastructure, the IT team quickly realized that the total number of virtual machines they needed to manage — and protect — would start growing rapidly. Concerned that the existing backup tools wouldn’t scale to support this new landscape, the team began looking for a more powerful and versatile solution.
“The whole data protection process must be totally reliable from end to end,” said Chris Weiss, Senior Systems Administrator at RC Willey. “It doesn’t matter how fast your backups are if you can’t recover your systems within a reasonable time. And, it doesn’t matter how quick your recovery process is if the data wasn’t backed up successfully in the first place.”
After evaluating multiple solutions, RC Willey selected the Veeam Data Platform Advanced Edition (Veeam Backup & Replication™ and Veeam ONE) as the core platform for its new data protection strategy. Now, RC Willey is guaranteed scalable, versatile data protection with straightforward disaster recovery in any environment. Veeam stores rich metadata with each backup, which means systems can be recovered easily in any environment, on any server, and at any location. This portability means that in the event of a catastrophe at the company’s production data center, RC Willey can be confident in restoring its systems quickly at any disaster recovery site. On top of this, Veeam provides a five-second recovery point objective [RPO] for Tier-1 systems.
“Veeam helps us recover data from almost any recovery point in almost no time. We can successfully recover files from tape backups made months ago and restore corrupted virtual machines (VMs) in 20 minutes. But the jewel in the crown is Veeam’s Continuous Data Protection (CDP). For Tier-1 systems, our RPO is just five seconds, and we can fail over to an alternate site within minutes — so we can be confident that our business-critical inventory management systems never miss a beat,” said Chris Weiss. “Visibility is great, too. Veeam ONE™ gives us real-time insight into what’s happening with our backups. It gives us richer information than other reporting tools that cost significantly more.”
The company has since expanded its use of the solution far beyond its original deployment. In addition to over 500 VMware VMs, Veeam now also protects more than 50 physical servers, and provides an air-gapped tape backup solution for long-term archiving. Most recently, RC Willey used Veeam to create a tiered backup infrastructure, using CDP features to safeguard its most critical services and virtually eliminate the risk of data loss. In addition to CDP, the company runs full backups every weekend and incremental backups on a nightly basis, protecting around 2PB of data per week.
“RC Willey is on a mission to becoming America’s home store of choice but to keep pace with growing customer demand and committing to a positive and memorable customer experience, data must be unequivocally protected and always accessible,” said John Jester, Chief Revenue Officer at Veeam. “Veeam Data Platform Advanced Edition is an excellent fit because it provides unrivaled backup, reporting and recovery that keep the business running through built-in security, scalability, visibility and versatility for any IT environment.”
As RC Willey looks to move its core ERP applications onto Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® servers, embracing Veeam’s support for Linux agents is next on the priority list — and there’s potential to use Veeam for the company’s Microsoft® 365 environment. Looking ahead, the team is keeping a close eye on new Veeam features, such as SureBackup® to confirm that all backups are recoverable, and Veeam DataLabs™ to provide sandboxed replicas for testing and patching.
Weiss will be a featured speaker during VeeamON 2023, the community event for data recovery experts, which will take place May 22 – 25 in Miami, FL and online. Designed by and built for the backup and recovery professional, attendees will expand their skills, celebrate with the community, and share industry knowledge with exclusive content from AWS, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and more. Weiss will participate in the session Voice of the Customer: Keep Your Business Up and Running. Registration for the in-person event is now open. To learn more, visit https://www.veeam.com/success-stories.html.
About Veeam Software
Veeam is the leader in backup, recovery and data management solutions that deliver Modern Data Protection. The company provides a single platform for Cloud, Virtual, Physical, SaaS and Kubernetes environments. Veeam customers are confident their apps and data are protected and always available with the most simple, flexible, reliable and powerful platform in the industry. Veeam protects 450,000 customers worldwide, including 82% of the Fortune 500 and 69% of the Global 2,000. Veeam’s global ecosystem includes 35,000+ technology partners, resellers and service providers, and alliance partners and has offices in more than 30 countries.
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VIRTUAL DESKTOP TOOLS, VIRTUAL SERVER INFRASTRUCTURE
globenewswire | June 05, 2023
Nerdio, a premier software solution provider for organizations of all sizes looking to manage and cost-optimize native Microsoft cloud technologies, today has announced the general availability launch of a major new version of Nerdio Manager for Enterprise, version 5.0.
Nerdio Manager for Enterprise version 5.0 includes the highly anticipated Unified Application Management (UAM) functionality, which gives IT professionals the ability to consolidate and control applications delivered to their Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop virtual machines, Windows 365 Cloud PCs, and physical desktops.
With unified management across all virtualized and physical endpoints and applications, enterprises can become more agile, more efficiently leverage IT and staffing resources during the current economic conditions and provide great user and employee experiences.
“Ensuring efficient and secure cloud operations is something that is becoming more and more complex as new technologies and attack vectors are introduced into corporate environments,” said Alan Hazell, Chief Executive Officer, Nimbus DTI. “Nerdio is drastically reducing this complexity with a truly unified management platform that reduces human error and allows us to consolidate the most important aspects of our day-to-day IT operations.”
The new release introduces several major new areas of functionality including:
Unified Application Management (UAM) allows IT professionals to consolidate and control applications delivered to their Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, and physical desktop estates. They can link a wide range of application repositories, public and private, including Winget, to Nerdio’s new Unified App Catalog that simplifies the process of finding, deploying, and managing custom applications. Applications linked in the Unified App Catalog can be automatically deployed to Azure Virtual Desktop session hosts or desktop images, and Microsoft Intune-managed devices. Additionally, admins can use Deployment Policies to automatically install, uninstall, or update applications across the organization’s environment.
Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) allows Intune-managed devices such as laptops, mobile phones, and Cloud PCs, to be managed in a single pane of glass. Admins are equipped with extensive device management and device visibility features in addition to new RBAC (role-based access control) specific to endpoint management. UEM functionality is currently free to use during preview and is expected to be generally available later this year.
Nerdio Advisor is a suite of technologies to estimate cost, simplify, and automate deployment, continuously optimize costs, and recommend relevant features based on usage patterns. The first tool available in the suite, Nerdio Modeler, is now generally available for public use. Modeler is a free tool that allows enterprise organizations and partners to model and cost-predict virtual desktop environments in Microsoft Azure without any Nerdio commitment or licensing required. The next tool, Nerdio Optimizer, will be generally available later this year.
Finally, the PowerShell Module allows developers and administrators to interact with Nerdio Manager for Enterprise via PowerShell. This allows IT professionals and developers to solve issues beyond the traditional scope of the management platform by extending its value into a tool most are already using or familiar with.
“At Nerdio we have a relentless focus on how to make life easier for IT teams at organizations of all sizes. Many organizations are buried under IT tool sprawl, at the same time looking to simplify the management of virtual and physical endpoints,” said Amol Dalvi, VP, Product, Nerdio. “We have had great success accelerating Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop deployments, simplifying their management, and further optimizing costs. We are bringing those same principles and focus to other areas, specifically application management and endpoint management.”
In total, there are over a dozen new features in Nerdio Manager for Enterprise v5.0. Organizations seeking to trial the new features and functionality may install the platform directly from the Azure Marketplace and trial for 30 days at no cost.
About Nerdio
Nerdio adds value on top of the powerful capabilities in Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, and Microsoft Intune by delivering hundreds of features that simplify management, ensure efficient operations, and lower Azure compute and storage costs by up to 80% via automation.
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