Interest and activity around communications and networking solutions that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to enable agility and greater efficiency continues to build. That’s why TMC is launching three new AI-focused events under the banner of The New Intelligence.

The below briefs highlight some recent industry AI development. The table illustrates arreas of AI innovation.

In its new IT Operations Readiness Index, Cisco looks at where the more than 1,500 senior IT leaders it surveyed are in their IT operational transformation journeys. The index says that:Cisco Assesses IT Readiness

• 28 percent of survey respondents’ IT budgets are spent optimizing and remediating IT operations,

• 68 percent expect to increase that budget over the next 12 months,

• 40 percent rely “heavily” on IT operational data for business decision-making,

• 88 percent say investment in IT operations over the past 12 months has improved external customer satisfaction,

• 89 percent noted improvements in innovation,

• just 14 percent have reached the highest level of IT operations capabilities,

• 26 percent are still at the lowest level, where IT events are reacted to as they occur, and

• 42 percent said AI was the emerging technology that will have the biggest impact on their ability to automate.

“Through analytics and automation, CIOs can evolve from blindly reacting to events – such as outages – to continuously monitoring and optimizing their infrastructures based on predictions of future needs,” says Joseph Bradley, Cisco’s Global Vice President of its IoT, Blockchain, AI, and Incubation Business. “As a result, they can deliver strategic outcomes for their business partners, with change moving from being surprising and threatening to becoming something to control.”

ScienceLogic Raises Funds

AIOps outfit ScienceLogic today announced it has secured $25 million in funding, which means it has surpassed $100 million in total capital investment. The growth financing comes courtesy of Square 1 Bank, a division of Pacific Western Bank. ScienceLogic plans on using the money to fuel its global expansion, move into new market segments, and product development. ScienceLogic, which is cash flow positive and debt free, provides the SL1 AIOps automation engine.

Freshworks Introduces Freddy

Customer engagement software company Freshworks late last month unveiled Freddy. This AI engine is based on Google Assistant and “branded with a canine look and feel.” It aims to enhance business marketing, sales, and support efforts. “Freddy offers channel agnostic contextual self-service to customers,” Freshworks explains. “The Freddy AI engine also enables agent assist to help new agents onboard a team with relative ease by proactively and systematically troubleshooting customer queries. Sales executives using Freshworks’ CRM product powered by Freddy will be able to stay on top of their sales pipeline by auto calibrating the available leads.”

Marketing Analytics Firm Garners $5.5M

Zylotech has raised $5.5 million from Glasswing Ventures, Geekdom Fund, Revel Partners, and Rubicon Ventures. It will use the money to expand its development, marketing, and sales efforts. Rudina Seseri, founder and managing partner of Glasswing Ventures, has joined the Zylotech board of directors as part of the funding relationship. Zylotech, a player in the customer data platform product category, sells an AI-driven customer analytics solution for marketers. “Enterprises use Zylotech for customer lifecycle automation, B2B account-based intelligence, customer ad-targeting, personalization, cross-selling, and up-selling,” the company explains. “After providing data unification, cleansing, and enrichment, Zylotech uses prediction and recommendation engines to develop customer profiles for micro-segmentation, with rich integrations across all information platforms, including Salesforce, Shopify, Adobe, Magento, Eloqua, Marketo, and others.”

NetApp Unveils New Solutions

NetApp has announced ONTAP 9.5, MAX Data, StorageGRID SG6060, NetApp Solution Support for FlexPod, and Flash Performance Guarantee. “With the speed and volume of data now generated and managed across IoT devices and sensors, on-premises data centers, and in hybrid cloud environments, having a data fabric that spans edge, core, and cloud is essential to AI success,” says Joel Reich, NetApp’s executive vice president of storage systems and software. “With today’s new data services and solutions, integrated through the NetApp Data Fabric, organizations can accelerate data pipelines across an entire enterprise to train deep learning models and power AI applications with the simplicity, choice, and scale necessary to achieve real impact.”

Nokia Rides the Wave

Nokia has come out with WaveSuite, modular applications that allow large enterprises, service providers, and wholesalers to virtualize their optical networking infrastructure and support network-as-a-service business models. Nokia says that will enable network operators to expedite service deployment, monetize their networks, and optimize network capacity and performance. WaveSuite also should help spur carrier adoption of SDN control software and open programming interfaces, Nokia adds.