When I first read (on The Register I think) about Microsoft’s new Skype translator I didn't really know what to believe I mean we now live in a world where even the most far-out and advanced concepts are becoming a reality - Knight Rider style Google Cars, ordering pizzas and cabs from your smart phone, Live HD video conferencing anywhere in the world (or even on a plane)!

I have played around with Apple's Siri, Bing Translate, Cortana and whilst all quite clever they lack the real understanding of the spoken word. hence, I was some what skeptical about the Skype Translator. I immediately thought about these experience, how will it deal with the complexities of language and accents?  How will it deal with homonyms?  and how can it ever be properly contextualised and therefore work in a real life real world environment?

Then..... I was lucky enough to see it in action...watching a live recording of Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella at the Worldwide Partner Conference where he demoed the product (albeit still in Beta) whereby a conversation was played out between one of his US colleagues and another German speaker.  After each person spoke they clicked a button when they had finished. THEN THE MAGIC HAPPENED....What we heard back was a near perfect full spoken (yes SPOKEN)  translation. It was incredible - and to think, I'm usually not that easy to impress!

So how does it work? Reading a bit  more about how this Translator technology works, impressed me even more. After a bit of googling (I mean Bing'ing) The Skype Translator actually works on a principle called "Deep Learning" which operates on the basis of neural networks rather than a set of language translation "rules" to deal with the complexities of languages.

This is huge and will no doubtedly have massive implications for the way we live and working the future. The full Beta is expected to land in November time so make sure you look out for it. We don't know yet how much of this will make its way into Lync - I would expect it too but as yet have not heard any clear messages about the matter.

If you havent seen Sype Translator in action, you can see aspects of it and how it works here: http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/05/27/microsoft-demos-breakthrough-in-real-time-translated-conversations/

Welcome your views/thoughts on this as always. @rquickenden or @Cisilion.

If your business has remote offices spread across the globe, you'll know that these locations require a complete set of IT services to enable employees to work effectively and productively and to keep customers engaged.

Unlike data centers, remote offices need to supplement full infrastructure stacks with bandwidth optimisation, remote file and application delivery services, plus of course security services and appliances.

There have been a number of studies in recent months by the likes of IDC and Forrester to examine converged infrastructure as a solution to address the unique needs of these remote offices.

What is relatively consistent in such reports is the business' desire to migrate away from remote office solutions based on discrete system components toward solutions based on integrated and virtualised stacks, and a continued push to centralise all management and operational tasks taking the high cost and burden away from outsourced or lower skilled IT staff from visiting branches to perform often mundane IT tasks.

The implications in selecting remote office support solutions mean that businesses should be looking at deploying integrated and centrally managed solutions that require no local IT resources beyond the initial physical installation. 

We see many of these such publications as a little one sided - often favouring the vendor that has comissioned the study (as one would expect). What we @Cisilion see in reality is a little more complex than that. What we see if businesses exploring options around

• Centralisation - moving as many IT services as they can to the Data Centre
• Application Acceleration through WAN Acceleration services
• Migration to Cloud Services - whether this be Office 365, hosted telephony, or hosted CRM for example
• Centralised or Cloud Managed Wireless Networks (with a wireless first objective)
• Flexibility through Mobility - with secure BYOD or corporate managed SmartPhones

What becomes apparent is that all of these challenges mean introducing new layers of IT or decentralising the traditional boundaries of IT and the management that goes with it.

With these extended boundaries and management often comes questions and concerns around security - who is responsible, who manages it and how good is it....

If this sounds familiar, we'd love to hear from you at info@cisilion.com or @Cisilion

In an ideal world, all of your applications and services would be delivered centrally from Public or Private Clouds and accessible anywhere, from any location, securely of course.

Whilst most businesses are generally virtualising and consolidating as many distributued applications and data to their Data Centre or Cloud platforms, for many reasons this has not been possible for every business or branch application due to bandwidth constraints, political reasons or because some applications just don’t work well across high latency wide area connections.

As such truly consolidating server, storage and application infrastructure where remote offices are concerned needs to be addressed carefully – Why? Because data centres house the compute, data and applications (and have no users), whilst branch/regional offices are usually full of people, all trying to access these applications and data over typically slow or at best heaviliy congested WAN connections.

This basic distinction has important consequences on the technology required in branch/regional  offices.

Why? Because it’s hard to modernize and centralise branch office IT without really understanding and talking into account the user performance.

What’s the Problem then?

The issues of high latency connections, application sprawl, I/O intensive applications and “concerns” over WAN failure have led to businesses buying cheaper variants of Private Cloud infrastructure (aka local bits of cheap kit)  into branches or accepting poor performance. Neither of these is ideal – local branch infrastructure means management overhead, local back-up issues, compliance issues and security concerns.

According to IDC, 50% of global companies still have more than 50% of their data still in their branches.

How do we help our customers?

At Cisilion, we help our customers to understand the cause of these problems and more importantly how they can overcome these issues throughthe use of by providing fast, fluid and secure branch office solutions with no performance compromise whilst still providing centralised IT with no or little need for local IT staff or expensive equipment.

With more than 13 years’ experience in compute, storage and networking topologies we provide design, professional services, support and management that enable:

• WAN optimisation & acceleration: With customers moving as many applications as possible to the Public and Private Cloud, business need to ensure their users can still access those applications and data as if they were local without the lag and delay often experienced by Wide Area Networks.
  
  
• Elimination of all Branch Office Storage: Accepting that some services just don’t perform across even the best optimised WAN meaning servers and storage locally at branch, IT doesn’t want to be running backups at every branch (or across the already creaking WAN). The business needs to offer the same RPO and RTO at branches as they do for centralised services,  and we can help customer have data presented locally but be managed, secured and back-up centrally as if it were central.  This means local, WAN resilient access to applications that is stored centrally
• Remote administration and support: IT can save a lot of pain (and travel costs) if by managing their entire IT (servers, storage and compute) as if were local with the need for complex and expensive management tools and replication technology

• Quality of Service and Application Delivery: Remote office users use a wide range of applications, from mission critical applications such as CRM and ERP, to latency-sensitive voice, and recreational Internet traffic. IT needs to ensure that they can intelligently identify and control this traffic and ensure predictable and guaranteed performance of critical and latency-sensitive apps.

• Bandwidth Consolidation and Path selection: With the days of a simple, single links into branch offices disappearing, branches often have a mix of MPLS and Internet broadband connections. Rather than just accept these can provide back-up and resilience, business want to ensure the right applications traverse the right links, with less important traffic going over contented lower bandwidth links and mission critical traffic going across expensive MPLS for example.

Traditionally, businesses have been simply throwing more money into expensive WAN links or simply “sticking stuff locally”. Whilst generally you can now get a lot more MB for your £, Internet connections are still typically latency heavy and never perform as well as the local LAN in terms of speed and reliability.

In our experience, IT needs to care about what causes the bottle necks and performance problems but the Business, its users and its customer simply care about Application Performance and what the User Experience is like. I spend a lot of my time working with business leaders helping them to achieve Location-independent Computing enabling them to deliver business applications to any user in any location without the need to deploy and manage silos of IT and storage at branches and remote offices.

As always we are interested in your views on this - please get in touch with us and follow what we do @Cisilion or at sales@cisilion.com

www.cisilion.com