Last week in enterprise tech news: Oracle, Microsoft, and machine learning.

Is Oracle being dropped by both Amazon and Salesforce?

Last week rumors circled that both Amazon and Salesforce are moving away from Oracle’s Technology and have been looking for alternatives. If true, this could be a big hit for Oracle by losing possibly it’s two biggest accounts. An unknown source stated that both have made “significant progress” toward moving away from Oracle’s database.

Salesforce has been developing its own alternative to Oracle, and Amazon is moving to more of an open-source technology called NoSQL. If both Amazon and Salesforce move away from Oracle, other big companies may realize they could do the same and break away from using Oracle’s services which in turn could be a huge blow for them.

Oracle’s technology has been an industry standard for many companies for at least 20 years as one of the first databases to support “http’’ technologies online. But as more companies are using cloud based systems to store their data, AWS has become a more popular option.

Currently Oracle has not come forward to make any statement on the issue. But to learn more click here for the full article.

Are bots going to take over customer service jobs?

Because of the rise of machine learning, its possible that bots could gain a competitive edge over humans in customer service roles.

2018 might just be the year of the bots for customer experience and AI bots will provide customer service better than human to human chat exchange. There has been a surge of messaging services that has completely altered the way they interact with their customers.

Big companies have been heavily investing in AI-enabled bot systems to give a better experience for their customers. Facebook alone has more than two billion messages that are exchanged between people and companies on a monthly basis.

Because of common misunderstanding of human to machine interaction, companies might fall short in creating the customer experience they want when it comes to bots. However companies that learn to use AI powered bots, supported by humans, will in turn create a vastly better option than a standalone human-to-human exchange.

Bots will be able to respond immediately, and combine prompt buttons with visual cues andsupporting “textual conversations” to offer a much better option than human-to-human chat. Personal Chat is limited due to its limitations and open ended conversation. AI bots can learn, and as it learns it will scale and apply its knowledge base much more efficiently and the algorithms will only improve each time its in use. With humans, there are more inconsistencies, they need to be trained, and there is an emotional aspect that can often get in the way of effective customer service every conversation.  

Even though replacing customer service reps with bots can be more efficient and can offer a much better customer experience, there is still a human touch that companies can’t ignore. Many companies will still give their customers the option to speak with a human when and where the bots might fall short. To learn more click here for the full article.  

Microsoft announces last week that their Accelerated Networking technology for Azure virtual machines is ready for production.

Last week Microsoft announced the general availability of its Accelerated Networking technology for Azure virtual machines. General availability means its ready for production use. They have made it clear that the use of Accelerated Networking will provide up to 30gbs in networking output with no additional cost to its customers.

Microsoft thinks with this release is just on time to help with some possible performance hits that may occur when operating system updates are applied that aim to address certain CPU issues. Mostly with the Meltdown and Spectre which are the two information-disclosure attack mechanisms that use more traditional functions performed by CPUs. The OS updates are said to slow down the overall system performance, however the Accelerated Networking technology for Azure should help with this issue.

To learn more about this announcement, click here for the full article.