In this edition of the No Jitter Roll, we look at announcements around digital workspaces, artificial intelligence (AI), network, monitoring, and video from providers Citrix, Redbooth, Savvius, Apcela, Aryaka, and Polycom -- as diverse as ever.
Citrix Aims to Unify Experience and Apps
This week at its Synergy event, Citrix announced Citrix Workspace, a unified digital workplace app that allows employees to access all the applications and content they use across any device, with built-in security and single sign-on (SSO).
"Maintaining productivity in an era where new workstyles and applications are dynamically and increasingly complex requires a new approach to delivering the user's workspace, one that is focused on people, and how they use technology to get their jobs done," said Citrix chief product officer PJ Hough, in a prepared statement.
With Workspace, users can start work at home on their tablet, for example, continue working on their smartphone during their commute, and pick up where they left off when they arrive to the office and sign on to their laptops or desktops. Because Workspace includes Citrix networking and file-sharing capabilities, the same experience and capabilities are available across all devices, with integrated search, enabling content collaboration no matter where files are stored, the company said.
Among other announcements made at Synergy, Citrix now offers a Slack integration for its Secure Mail app, enabling users to convert email messages into Slack conversations and send Slack messages from within Secure Mail. Additionally, through Citrix Cloud services, enterprises can now move workloads between clouds -- AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, or private clouds -- as business needs dictate.
Redbooth Homes in on AI for Task Management
Redbooth, workstream and task management software provider, this week announced Smart Redbooth, artificial-intelligence powered project management built into its latest release. Smart Redbooth incorporates machine learning technology to provide predictive task assignment and scheduling, and is aimed at helping enterprises maximize project resources and increase efficiency, as well as meet their needs "to do more with less," as Ryan Crosbie, Redbooth director of product, said in a prepared statement. "Organizing your work and being efficient are the keys to increasing productivity."
More than 600,000 teams have used the Redbooth platform to work on more than 1.8 million projects, Redbooth reported. Through analysis of accumulated task and project data, Redbooth identifies patterns and commonalities that Smart Redbooth leverages to predict which resources will need to be assigned to a task and to estimate an approximate date for task completion.
Other enhancements available in the latest release include a redesigned workspace that organizes information to better match the way people are working; revised task details that enable users to prioritize, categorize, search, and sort tasks to see task statuses; and a new activity feed, delivered in a collapsible panel. The feed shows when somebody has joined a team or created or completed a task, for example, and lets users send and receive instant messages for answering quick questions.
In addition, Redbooth reported record signups and the highest month in company history for new paying customers since it merged with collaboration software provider AeroFS in September 2017.
Apcela, Savvius: Monitoring Takes the Spotlight
Several network and application performance management players have announced new or enhanced capabilities.
For starters, Apcela announced the availability of AppMon, a software-defined monitoring solution aimed at helping enterprises identify application-specific performance problems and reducing time to diagnose and repair issues across clouds or in hybrid configurations. It integrates with Apcela's Enhanced Analytics Platform, and AppMon and SD-WAN performance data can be analyzed together to help identify targets for improvement.
"Greater visibility is key for customers to better understand the performance of cloud applications and networks, so they can easily and quickly pinpoint and resolve issues," said Apcela CEO Mark Casey, in a prepared statement.
Separately, network visibility provider Savvius released Spotlight 2.0, an enhanced version of its network performance monitoring solution. With Spotlight 2.0, enterprises now have the ability to view and engage with network traffic that is generated by key business applications, including popular SaaS apps like Office 365, Salesforce, and Webex, as well as custom applications, the company said.
The release also features new "user-defined" dashboards providing IT pros with real-time views of network segments and traffic types that are most important to them. Users can drill down on packet-level analytics, and via more flexible filter capabilities, set up customized dashboards and view factors like server ports, protocols, and server IP addresses. Additionally, the 2.0 release provides more specific information about worst TCP and VoIP quality, with information like connections refused, retransmissions, zero window, worst jitter, and more, Savvius said.
Aryaka Goes After SD-WAN QoS
SD-WAN provider Aryaka this week unveiled new capabilities for enhancing real-time quality of service (QoS) over WAN connections for mission-critical business applications.
Integrated with the company's SmartConnect SD-WAN services, Aryaka's Application Driven Adaptive QoS is aimed at enabling enterprises to share and optimize access resources between business applications. It provides extra bandwidth on shared links to Internet-bound traffic when the bandwidth is not needed by mission-critical business apps. Additionally, it allows precision link control and improves network bandwidth use, as enterprises are able to "re-balance" their network environment according to changing bandwidth requirements, Aryaka said.
"Cloud service models have revolutionized how enterprises consume IT resources and applications globally," said Aryaka senior director of product management Mouli Radhakrishnan, in a prepared statement. "Businesses embarking on global expansion and cloud transformation journeys will access the world over an elastic network driven by application and business intent."
Polycom Shows Healthcare Use Cases, Enhances EagleEye Director II
Out of the American Telemedicine Association's conference in Chicago last week, Polycom's Healthcare team demonstrated how healthcare providers are leveraging Polycom technology to improve the way they collaborate on medical cases. Specifically, as shown below, healthcare providers are using the Polycom Pano wireless content-sharing system to compare and annotate over X-ray images, videos, or documents. In addition, to meet the needs of an increasingly mobile network of healthcare providers, Polycom leverages mobile solutions like RealPresence Desktop on iPad and Polycom Trio with Visual +.
Outside of the healthcare vertical, Polycom has also rolled out a new cascading feature for its EagleEye Director II intelligent camera system, which allows two tracking camera systems to connect to each other. Then, utilizing intelligence and analytics, the system will determine which camera provides the best view of the active speaker, even if that speaker is not in room, Polycom said.
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