Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 19 | Page 57

IMTAC and SIGNIFY (Philips Lighting) sign partnership for empowering smart cities in Oman S ignify, formerly known as Philips Lighting, has signed an agreement with IMTAC, one of the largest system integration technology companies in the GCC and an IoT solution provider, to form a strategic partnership to bring the latest Smart City solutions to Oman. Goktug Gur, President and CEO of Signify for the Middle East, Turkey and Pakistan, said: “The strategic partnership we are developing with IMTAC will enable us to bring our proven Smart Lighting solutions Fareed Al Hinai, Vice Chairman IMTAC (left), and Goktug Gur, President and CEO Signify Middle East, Turkey and Pakistan (right), sign the agreement in Muscat to Oman, which will not only create significant monetary and environmental savings opportunities through optimisation of the energy usage, but also will allow public and private organisations to make informed decisions on the deployment of their resources and assets across the country, and will enable them to drive the vision and the agenda of the Sultanate of Oman.” Fareed Al Hinai, Vice Chairman IMTAC, said: “Launching IoT-based Smart City solutions is the key focus of IMTAC as it brings substantial savings in energy, water and operational costs while prioritising the citizen services in Oman and the rest of the world. Our relationship with Signify is critical to our Smart City Vision, as it addresses one of the most significant elements of the Smart City Infrastructure, which is Smart Lighting.” As part of this agreement, IMTAC will leverage over 125 years of Signify lighting experience and its newly launched Smart Lighting IOT platform, Interact, combining it with its own IoT-based Smart City software and integration capabilities to be successfully deployed in the Sultanate of Oman and India. |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ServiceNow further simplifies work with acquisition of FriendlyData S INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS Issue 19 Ÿ Ÿ Outdated customer and employee work experiences that are not intuitive and easy to use like those people experience as consumers Ÿ Ÿ Inability to act due to reliance on time- consuming manual processes Ÿ Ÿ Burdens on business analysts and data engineers who can’t keep pace with the increasing volume of requests coming from non-technical users within their company “ServiceNow is bringing NLQ capabilities to the Now Platform, enabling companies to ask technical questions in plain English and receive direct answers,” said Pat Casey, Senior Vice President, Development and Operations at ServiceNow. “With this technical enhancement, our goal is to allow anyone to easily make data- driven decisions, increasing productivity and driving businesses forward faster.” erviceNow, Forbes’ No 1 World’s Most Innovative Company, has agreed to acquire the technology of FriendlyData, which makes it easy for non-technical users to ask quantitative questions in plain English and get fast results through direct answers or data visualisations. As ServiceNow is making the world of work, work better for people, FriendlyData’s natural language query (NLQ) technology will help reduce the amount of time spent figuring out how to ask questions technically; rather, it allows users to just ask a question and then use the freed up time to act on the answer. NLQ technology will be embedded into the interfaces of the Now Platform and guide users to relevant and related performance analytics dashboards and reporting. When used in the Now Platform, the technology will reduce some of the complexity that slows down work, including: | MARKET MOVEMENT Se n io r V s, ion ice rat e p Pre d O siden t, Development an ServiceNow plans to re-platform FriendlyData’s NLQ technology, extending the Now Platform’s intelligence capabilities by making NLQ interfaces available across ServiceNow applications for IT, Human Resources, Security Operations, Customer Service Management, partner products and for developers. ˜ 57