Major Announcements Made At Tech Conferences In 2021
Other than the exchange of knowledge and ideas, tech conferences are a great way for companies to introduce customers to new products, innovations and experiences that they are working on. Like other years, we saw big names in tech conducting conferences either virtually or offline. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest ones held this year and what announcements they made. Connect 2021 In a major decision, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook has changed its name to Meta at Connect 2021 held recently. The reach of Meta will be much beyond just social media. The metaverse will give the feeling of a hybrid structure of online social experiences expanded into the physical world. From the fourth quarter of 2021, the company will be reporting on two operating segments of Family of Apps and Reality Labs. For more details, refer here. NVIDIA GTC 2021 NVIDIA has also jumped on the metaverse bandwagon. It announced Omniverse VR, where creators, designers, researchers, and engineers can connect major design tools and assets to collaborate in a shared virtual space. It also revealed Omniverse Avatar, a new platform for creating interactive AI avatars with the help of computer vision, NLP, and simulation technologies. The company also showed us the NVIDIA Omniverse Replicator, a synthetic data generation engine to train deep neural networks. NVIDIA also announced that Omniverse Enterprise is now generally available. For more details, refer here. Microsoft Ignite 2021 It made a host of announcements across IT products. Azure Percept- It uses AI and machine learning capabilities to provide IT developers with tools for using Azure AI technologies on edge.New capabilities of Azure Arc. It believes that Ark is the first of its kind control panel extending Azure Security Governance dev tools and managed Azure services to any infrastructure, whether it is on-premise multi-cloud or at the edge. Several new capabilities to Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams such as extending meeting attendees, Microsoft Teams Connect that allows users to share channels within an organisation or externally, Microsoft PowerPoint Live in Microsoft Teams, etc. For more details, refer here. IBM Think 2021 Held in May this year, IBM announced a capability to its IBM Cloud Pak for Data– a new AutoSQL technology that uses AI to automate access, and integration and management of data for AI, without having to move it. IBM Mono2Micro, which has been commercialised into IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition, uses AI to scan and analyse enterprise applications and give recommendations on how to rewrite them for containers and microservices. Part of the announcements was the IBM Watson Orchestrate for business professionals in sales, human resources, and operations, which uses an AI engine that connects to business applications and tools like Calendar and Email. It also showed us Maximo Mobile, an easy-to-deploy mobile platform, as part of the IBM Maximo Application Suite. For more details, refer here. VMworld 2021 At the VMworld 2021 event held in October, the company announced the launch of VMware Cross-Cloud services. It said that the services will help businesses to move to the Cloud faster and provide customers with the ability to build, deploy and secure apps across any cloud. VMware introduced Cloud Infrastructure and Management for the Cross-Cloud services, advancements in the VMware Tanzu portfolio, and launched VMware Edge, among other announcements. For more details, refer here. Google Cloud Next 2021 Held in October, Google introduced a range of cloud-based features and products like: Google Distributed Cloud, a bundle of fully managed hardware and software solutions that work on edge and data centres.Google Cloud Cortex Framework and Cloud Build Hybrid– The Cloud Build Hybrid allows developers to build, test, and deploy across clouds and on-premise systems, while Google Cloud Cortex Framework allows customers to get insights and reduce time-to-value with reference architectures, packaged services, and deployment accelerators. For more details, refer here. Google for India 2021 Google conducted the 7th “Google for India” initiative recently and introduced several innovations to transform India into a leading digital economy. Some of the key ones include: Google has introduced Google Career certificates that will help fresh graduates pick up in-demand skills in IT support, IT automation, project management, data analytics and UX design.It announced the first-ever Google Assistant-enabled end-to-end vaccine booking flow in India.Teamed up with India Meteorological Department to launch weather alerts for any extreme climatic conditions.New features for payments like Groups and Bill Split on Google Pay. For more details, refer here.
Review the major announcements made by tech giants this year at conferences
Review the major announcements made by tech giants this year at conferences
["AI (Artificial Intelligence)", "Deep Learning", "Google", "Hybrid Cloud", "Meta", "Microsoft", "NVIDIA", "Omniverse", "VMWare"]
["VMWare", "computer vision", "AI (Artificial Intelligence)", "R", "NLP", "Omniverse", "analytics", "NVIDIA", "Meta", "machine learning", "AI", "neural network", "Hybrid Cloud", "microservices", "Google", "SQL", "Deep Learning", "Azure", "Microsoft"]
["AI", "machine learning", "neural network", "NLP", "computer vision", "analytics", "Azure", "microservices", "R", "SQL"]
I am a technology journalist at AIM. What gets me excited is deep-diving into new-age technologies and analysing how they impact us for the greater good.

Reach me at sreejani.bhattacharyya@analyticsindiamag.com