Latest News from Channel Post MEA
Channel Post MEA
16 hours ago
- Business
- Channel Post MEA
Kaspersky Announces Kaspersky eSIM Store To Make Global Travel Simple
Kaspersky eSIM Store is a new connectivity solution for international travel. Designed to make it easier for leisure and business travelers to stay online globally, it empowers users with easy internet access across 150+ countries and regions, with a choice of over 2,000 affordable data plans. The production of eSIM-compatible devices has increased tenfold in the last five years according to the GSMA. By 2028, it is expected that half of all mobile connections worldwide will use eSIM technology. This rise in popularity is driven by eSIM's convenience and ease of use – eliminating the need for physical SIM cards and enabling a hassle-free experience wherever you go. To meet this growing trend, Kaspersky eSIM Store provides access to eSIM plans from local telecom operators all over the world – with an easy interface and simple management. A New Way to Always Stay Connected Kaspersky eSIM Store lets users to enjoy affordable and easily accessible internet connections around the globe without the hassle of physical SIM cards. Users can seamlessly access eSIM plans from local telecom providers in 150+ countries and regions worldwide, providing favorable rates and transparent conditions without any roaming fees. While traveling, an eSIM can help users avoid high roaming costs on a primary SIM, remove the need to search for a local SIM kiosk and share personal data with them, as well as avoiding the use of unsecured public Wi-Fi networks. Instead, eSIM ensures that leisure travelers can focus on the joyful moments of their trip and instantly share them with friends and relatives, while business travelers have continuous access to important messages, working documents and video calls. Seamless Connection in a Few Taps Kaspersky eSIM Store features a user-friendly interface for plan selection, purchase, top-ups, and data usage management. Travelers can choose their preferred activation date, allowing them to set up their eSIM in advance and be connected the moment their trip begins — all in just a few taps. To match the needs of any traveler, there are many flexible ways to choose and manage data plans. Options are available based on destination, including plans for specific countries, global plan 122 destinations, or mini-global plans tailored to specific regions. For trip duration, travelers can select between expiring plans valid for a fixed period or non-expiring plans that remain active until the data is fully used. This ensures convenience whether the trip is short or long. Additionally, users have control over when their plan starts. They can either schedule activation for a specific date or begin using the data immediately, providing flexibility to align with their travel schedule. To ensure users never run out of GB unexpectedly, Kaspersky eSIM Store provides real-time data usage monitoring and alerts when a balance is near zero. The user profile (on the webpage or in the app) allows quick top-ups and supports multiple countries on a single eSIM – install once and use for a lifetime. Kaspersky eSIM Store is launched in partnership with award-winning provider BNESIM Limited, which has been delivering global eSIM services since 2017. 'At Kaspersky we are constantly keeping up with latest trends shaping our digital habits, and eSIM is definitely one of them. eSIM technology greatly simplifies traveling abroad, allowing people to stay connected and not worry about issues like roaming charges. We know from our own experience how important it is to stay in touch with your family or colleagues when you are on a trip, so we designed Kaspersky eSIM Store for all types of travelers to ensure instant access to eSIM data plans wherever they go, as well as to provide a safe and positive digital experience,' – Mikhail Gerber, Executive Vice President, Consumer Business, Kaspersky. Kaspersky eSIM Store is now available on the official website and as a mobile app in App Store and Google Play. Kaspersky eSIM Store complements Kaspersky's wide range of industry-recognized solutions, such as Kaspersky VPN Secure Connection and Kaspersky Premium. Together they cover all modern connectivity needs and enhance digital freedom – ensuring safe, worry-free connectivity across the world.
Channel Post MEA
16 hours ago
- Business
- Channel Post MEA
Global Cloud Infrastructure Spending Rose 21% In Q1 2025
Global spending on cloud infrastructure services, according to Canalys (now part of Omdia) estimates, reached US$90.9 billion in Q1 2025, marking a 21% year-on-year increase. Enterprises have recognized that deploying AI applications requires renewed emphasis on cloud migration. Large-scale investment in both cloud and AI infrastructure remains a defining theme of the market in 2025. Meanwhile, to accelerate the enterprise adoption of AI at scale, leading cloud providers are intensifying efforts to optimize infrastructure—most notably through the development of proprietary chips—aimed at lowering the cost of AI usage and improving inference efficiency. In Q1 2025, the ranking of the top three cloud providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud) remained unchanged from the previous quarter, with their combined market share accounting for 65% of global cloud spending. Collectively, the three hyperscalers recorded a 24% year-on-year increase in cloud-related spending. Growth momentum diverged among the top players. Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud both maintained growth rates of over 30% (although Google Cloud's growth slowed slightly from the previous quarter), while AWS grew by 17%, a deceleration from 19% growth in Q4 2024. This deceleration was largely driven by supply-side constraints, which limited the ability to meet rapidly rising AI-related demand. In response, cloud hyperscalers have continued to invest aggressively in AI infrastructure to expand capacity and position themselves for long-term growth. Overall, the global cloud services market sustained steady growth in Q1 2025, as enterprises sharpened their focus on two strategic priorities: accelerating cloud migration—either by shifting additional workloads or reviving stalled on-premises transitions—and exploring the adoption of generative AI. The rise of generative AI, which relies heavily on cloud infrastructure, has in turn reinforced enterprise cloud strategies and hastened migration timelines. 'As AI transitions from research to large-scale deployment, enterprises are increasingly focused on the cost-efficiency of inference, comparing models, cloud platforms, and hardware architectures such as GPUs versus custom accelerators,' said Rachel Brindley, Senior Director at Canalys (now part of Omdia ). 'Unlike training, which is a one-time investment, inference represents a recurring operational cost, making it a critical constraint on the path to AI commercialization.' 'Many AI services today follow usage-based pricing models—typically charging by token or API call—which makes cost forecasting increasingly difficult as usage scales,' added Yi Zhang, Analyst at Canalys (now part of Omdia ). 'When inference costs are volatile or excessively high, enterprises are forced to restrict usage, reduce model complexity, or limit deployment to high-value scenarios. As a result, the broader potential of AI remains underutilized.' To address these challenges, leading cloud providers are deepening their investments in AI-optimized infrastructure. Hyperscalers including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have introduced proprietary chips such as Trainium and TPU, and purpose-built instance families, all aimed at improving inference efficiency and reducing total cost of AI. Amazon Web Services (AWS) maintained its position as the market leader in Q1 2025, capturing 32% of global market share and recording a 17% year-over-year increase in revenue. Its AI business continues to grow at a triple-digit annual rate, though it remains in the early stages of development. In March, AWS introduced a price-cutting strategy to promote adoption of its Trainium AI chips over more costly NVIDIA-based solutions, highlighting Trainium 2's 30–40% price-performance advantage. The company also accelerated the expansion of its Bedrock service, adding Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Meta's Llama 4 models, and became the first cloud provider to fully manage DeepSeek R1 and Mistral's Mixtral Large. Further underscoring its long-term commitment to global infrastructure, AWS announced a capital investment of over US$4 billion in May 2025 to establish a new cloud region in Chile by the end of 2026. Microsoft Azure remained the second-largest cloud provider in Q1 2025, holding a 23% market share and delivering strong year-over-year growth of 33%. Microsoft reported a 16 point growth rate lift to Azure from AI, marking the largest single-quarter uplift since Q2 2024. In April, Azure announced the availability of the GPT-4.1 model series on both Azure AI Foundry and GitHub, further broadening developer access to advanced AI capabilities across its ecosystem. Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft's platform for building and managing AI applications and agents, is now used by developers at more than 70,000 enterprises. The platform processed over 100 trillion tokens this quarter, a fivefold increase year-over-year. Microsoft has also focused on lowering the cost of AI adoption, reporting a nearly 30% improvement in its AI performance at constant power consumption and a reduction of over 50% in cost per token. As part of its ongoing global infrastructure expansion, it opened new data centers in 10 countries across four continents during Q1. Google Cloud, the world's third-largest cloud provider, maintained a 10% market share in Q1 2025 and delivered strong year-over-year growth of 31%. As of 31 March, its revenue backlog reached US$92.4 billion, marking a slight decline from the previous quarter. This decrease was primarily attributed to supply constraints, particularly in compute capacity, that limited Google Cloud's ability to fully meet customer demand. In March, Google introduced the Gemini 2.5 model series, with Gemini 2.5 Pro receiving widespread acclaim for its leading benchmark performance and top ranking on Chatbot Arena. With enhanced reasoning and coding capabilities, the model opens new possibilities for both developers and enterprise users. Since the beginning of the year, active usage of Google AI Studio and the Gemini API has surged by over 200%, reflecting strong developer adoption and growing demand for generative AI solutions. Google also launched a new cloud region in Sweden (its 42nd globally) and committed US$7 billion to expand its Iowa data center, further supporting its growing AI and cloud workloads.
Channel Post MEA
17 hours ago
- Business
- Channel Post MEA
Gartner: 75% Of Analytics Content To Use GenAI For Enhanced Contextual Intelligence By 2027
Seventy-five percent of new analytics content will be contextualized for intelligent applications through generative AI (GenAI) by 2027, enabling composable connection between insights and actions, according to Gartner, the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in Sydney this week, Georgia O'Callaghan, Director, Analyst at Gartner, said, 'We're moving from an era where analytic tools help business people make decisions, to a future where GenAI-powered analytics becomes perceptive and adaptive. This will enable dynamic and autonomous decisions that have the potential to transform enterprise and consumer software, business processes and models.' A Gartner survey of 403 analytics or AI leaders, conducted between October and December 2024, revealed over 50% report their organizations use AI tools for automated insights and natural language queries (NLG) for analytics or AI development. Even with these capabilities, the static nature of current analytics often falls short of delivering in a truly dynamic and automated fashion. Gartner predicts augmented analytics capabilities will evolve into autonomous analytics platforms by 2027, which will fully manage and execute 20% of business processes. The perceptive future of analytics will deliver benefits by being proactive, collaborative, connected, contextual and continuous (see Figure 1). Figure 1: AI-Powered, Perceptive Analytics Source: Gartner (June 2025) 'Perceptive analytics will use AI agents and other GenAI-fueled technologies to continuously monitor evolving conditions and perceive the target environment, such as market shifts, customer behavior changes or supply chain disruptions,' said O'Callaghan. 'Guidance and analysis can then be autonomously adjusted in response, creating a more resilient and responsive analytical infrastructure. As these capabilities emerge and be adopted by organizations, their potential to reshape business operations and drive growth will only continue to expand.' Perceptive Analytics Overarching Risk According to Gartner research, the overarching risk that applies to perceptive analytics is the over reliance on autonomous actions without sufficient validation, which could result in unintended negative consequences, reputational damage and regulatory scrutiny. The risk of 'agent drift' is a serious concern, where a system's perceptions and actions gradually deviate from desired outcomes due to evolving data or unforeseen interactions. Guardian agents are emerging to deal with this inherent issue in AI systems, according to Gartner. These agents are specifically tasked with monitoring and enforcing policies and rules to ensure the systems operate within a set of guardrails. 'Building guardian agents will need to be a key focal point of new governance initiatives for data and analytics leaders, as agentic and perceptive analytics become the standard way of insight delivery across platforms,' said O'Callaghan.
Channel Post MEA
19 hours ago
- Business
- Channel Post MEA
JAGGAER Appoints Andrew Roszko As CEO
JAGGAER has announced the appointment of Andrew Roszko as the company's new Chief Executive Officer. Organizations stand at a pivotal moment as global supply chains grow increasingly complex and demand more resilient, intelligent, and agile solutions. Andrew's appointment comes at a time of immense opportunity to meet these challenges head-on. Andrew brings more than 25 years of executive leadership across the supply chain, SaaS, and enterprise technology sector. Most recently, he served as Chief Commercial Officer at Descartes Systems Group, where he played a pivotal role in transforming the company from a $40 million business into a global supply chain leader with over $700 million in revenue. Andrew is known for driving strategic growth, customer-first innovation, and high-performance cultures. His leadership style is grounded in clarity, collaboration, and execution—making him the right leader to guide JAGGAER into its next era of growth and impact. His vision and experience will build upon the company's strong foundation and guide JAGGAER into its next phase of growth and innovation. JAGGAER's roadmap of AI technological innovation will improve outcomes for its customers and promote growth for its people and company. A Message from Andrew Roszko 'I'm honored and energized to join JAGGAER. This is a company with a remarkable legacy, a bold mission, and—most importantly—an exceptional team. What stood out to me from the beginning is the depth of expertise and long-standing commitment to customers across the organization. That kind of dedication is rare and ultimately our strongest asset.' 'JAGGAER has a rare opportunity to redefine intelligent procurement. With our unmatched expertise, customer-first culture, and AI innovation roadmap, we're ready to unlock new levels of value, resilience, and growth—for our customers, our partners, and our people. I'm excited to partner with this incredible team and our global community of customers as we build what's next—together.' A Message from JAGGAER's Board of Directors 'We are delighted to welcome Andrew Roszko to the JAGGAER family. His proven track record and unique understanding of the intricate challenges our customers face, make him the ideal leader to steer JAGGAER's strategic vision. His focus on people and culture also resonates deeply with our values. We are confident that under his guidance, JAGGAER will further solidify its position as the leader in intelligent procurement and create unparalleled value for our customers, partners, and employees.'
Channel Post MEA
21 hours ago
- Automotive
- Channel Post MEA
NXP Completes TTTech Auto Acquisition
NXP Semiconductors has announced the completion of the acquisition of TTTech Auto, a leader in innovating unique safety-critical systems and middleware for software-defined vehicles (SDVs), pursuant to the terms of the previously announced agreement from January 2025. The open and modular offering of the NXP CoreRide platform and TTTech Auto's MotionWise safety middleware helps automakers overcome software and hardware integration barriers, while reducing complexity and development efforts and increasing scalability and cost-efficiency required for next-generation vehicles. To continue operating within an open industry ecosystem, TTTech Auto's services will remain with neutral position, supporting various System-on-Chips manufacturers, OEMs and 3rd party software partners. This will advance SDV capabilities while maintaining stringent safety and performance standards and ensuring data protection.
