It’s almost kickoff time! Join us as we post daily content highlighting the vendors sponsoring Climb’s 2024 SKO on February 21st! #ClimbWithUs
Join us as we post daily content highlighting the amazing vendors that will be at our 2024 Sales Kickoff on February 21st! These highlights will get you excited for what’s in store at this event! Today’s post will highlight Bronze Sponsors SolarWinds, Bluebeam, Bitdefender, and SmartBear! Keep reading to see what’s on the horizon in 2024 for these sponsors…
All credit for the excerpts below belong to featured vendors 2/14: SolarWinds, Bluebeam, Bitdefender, SmartBear
SolarWinds Predicts Key Trends and Themes That Will Define Enterprise IT in 2024
SolarWinds recently released its predictions for the IT trends and themes that will dominate in the year ahead. In 2024, enterprises are likely to further embrace artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and automation to meet their efficiency, service delivery, and productivity goals.
As digital environments have become more modern and mature with the adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, they’ve also become infinitely more complex to migrate, monitor, and manage. With constrained resources, limited time, and mounting workloads, IT teams have embraced AI-powered automation to provide a critical lift.
In 2024, SolarWinds forecasts these themes—powered and accelerated by AI and machine learning—will shape the enterprise technology landscape:
- Observability across the full tech stack will become a priority. According to SolarWinds research, the typical enterprise loses more than $13M annually to costs associated with the nine brownouts or outages experienced each month. Despite this, nearly half of IT professionals surveyed lack visibility into the majority of their organization’s apps and infrastructure. AI-powered observability solutions address this by collecting data to provide information on what’s not performing as expected and why—allowing teams to take a proactive approach to eliminating downtime, innovating, and exceeding customer expectations.
- Organizations will prioritize getting to the root of database issues. One-third of IT professionals surveyed manage upwards of 300 databases. In 2024, teams will embrace AI and automation to ensure the health, stability, and scalability of their services. In addition to the ability to identify issues at their root cause, IT teams will benefit from real-time issue remediation, understanding database implications as new code is deployed, and even avoiding costly outages.
- Organizations will embrace Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) to support busy teams. With AIOps, organizations can integrate data from across complex hybrid IT environments and receive the actionable, predictive intelligence they need to optimize performance, resolve issues quickly, and relieve pressure on IT teams. Furthermore, AIOps are paving the way toward autonomous operations, which will require little to no human intervention.
- IT Service Management (ITSM) will support faster, more successful IT outcomes. On average, research shows that organizations surveyed who adopted AI-powered tools to meet their ITSM needs were able to reduce system downtime by 21% and decrease time spent resolving incident and service requests by 23%. Features such as virtual troubleshooting agents and guided incident resolution will continue to support the workload of IT teams in 2024. In fact, SolarWinds Service Desk customers surveyed reported saving 23 hours per week due to reduced ticket volume—nearly the equivalent of adding an extra employee to their team.
Throughout 2023, SolarWinds retained its position as an industry leader by continually developing modern IT and software solutions that evolve in lockstep with the challenges faced by today’s enterprises as they attempt to compete, scale, and innovate. SolarWinds solutions are rooted in the company’s deep connection with tech professionals. The company engaged directly with customers through THWACK®, its community of over 180,000 users, to develop and test the new AI capabilities and ensure they make it easier for IT pros to do their jobs.
Read the Press Release
Reach out to Climb about SolarWinds!
Bluebeam Harnesses the Power of AI and Customer Passion to Drive Innovation in the Built World
Bluebeam is introducing two new AI features in the works for early 2024 and Bluebeam Labs, a collaborative, co-creation workspace in Bluebeam Cloud.
Bluebeam has invested in AI for more than a decade in its flagship product Bluebeam Revu and has a rich history of delivering innovation for AEC professionals. These newest AI innovations build on existing features like visual search, text recognition and batch processing to elevate how Bluebeam solutions increase productivity, augment creative problem-solving, and automate tedious tasks for its customers.
Bluebeam’s latest product release planned for April 2024 will include two new AI-enhanced features:
Auto Align for drawing overlays and comparisons in Revu 21. Auto Align will reduce the tedious, error-prone steps of manually aligning three points on each drawing revision, so users can understand the differences between them faster. Bluebeam customers currently use the Overlay and Compare features more than five million times a year. While powerful, the process takes several clicks and up to two minutes per drawing. With the Auto Align option and a revamped feature interface, this can be streamlined to as little as 15 seconds, helping users understand the differences up to 80 percent faster.
Automatic title block recognition when importing drawings to Bluebeam Cloud. The title block of a drawing holds valuable information that users shouldn’t have to waste time or risk mistakes entering manually. Aided by AI, Bluebeam Cloud instantly extracts the key drawing information as metadata that can be leveraged throughout the project, saving time and increasing accuracy.
Bluebeam Labs Allows Customers to Co-Create on AI Innovations
A key factor that sets Bluebeam apart from competitors is a passionate user base that has historically helped determine the company’s product roadmap. To harness that more directly, Bluebeam is introducing Bluebeam Labs. Built to involve customers in the company’s development of new solutions, this cloud-based, collaborative workspace offers the ability to demonstrate and validate ideas and technologies before they are launched and available to all customers. Bluebeam Cloud users are invited to shape the future of early concepts before they are integrated into production software.
The first AI-based feature showcased via Bluebeam Labs will be 3D Drawings. 3D Drawings uses AI to position up to hundreds of 2D drawings in 3D space. Like digital origami, the program intuitively understands where to make the folds for the highest quality 3D visualization and increased understanding of the project. The Bluebeam Labs waitlist to test the 3D Drawings technology is currently available for sign-up via www.bluebeam.com/Bluebeam-Labs.
Read the Press Release
Reach out to Climb about Bluebeam!
Bitdefender 2024 Cybersecurity Forecast
Bitdefender’s 2024 Cybersecurity Forecast will unveil key predictions for ransomware trends, AI advancements, and attack surface challenges in the year ahead.
Ransomware’s New Tactics and Targets
In the past, cybercriminals often operated with the motive to “do it for lulz,” engaging in malicious activities purely for the sake of amusement or creating chaos. Today, they’re driven by profit, transforming into rational business entities seeking scalable, repeatable processes for a steady income. This change in motivation has made predicting their behavior somewhat easier, as their actions are now grounded in strategic objectives rather than unpredictable whims.
In 2024, Bitdefender expects the ransomware threat will continue taking an opportunistic turn—a trend that they first highlighted in 2022, gained momentum throughout 2023, and is projected to reach maturity this year.
Read the Article
AI: A Technical Deep Dive
When thinking about AI applications in cybercrime, make sure to apply Occam’s Razor principle. Remember that attackers don’t always need fancy tools, as our society still struggles with basic security practices. Attackers adjust their tools to counter defenses, and they might not bother with complex tools. They use AI to make routine tasks easier, just as we do. In 2024, the most significant risk of AI in cybersecurity may be its transformation into a buzzword. Companies might skip basic protective steps, focusing on theoretical AI threats with unproven security products. Maintain a balanced approach by focusing on proven strategies like defense-in-depth and multilayered security.
Read the Article
Changes in the Attack Landscape
Endpoints and cloud workloads will continue to be the prime targets for cyberattacks in 2024, however, we can expect to see threat actors expand how they target these assets.
• Targeting Communication Apps: 2024 will see the rise of attacks utilizing communication apps, turning these platforms into battlegrounds much like contested territories in new lands.
• Shifting User Interactions and Unmanaged Devices: As employees return to a hybrid work practice, threat actors aim to shift user interactions to less controlled environments using different devices and platforms.
• Increased Usage of Platform-Agnostic Programming Languages & Frameworks by Cybercriminals: Threat actors like to cast as wide a net as possible when developing their attacks.
• Exploiting Vulnerabilities in CPUs: 2023 saw the discovery of several important vulnerabilities in CPUs, these vulnerabilities can enable threat actors to leak sensitive information across privilege boundaries, or to even carry out DoS attacks on compromised systems.
• Global Conflicts Leading To Increased Hacktivism: With the development of conflicts around the world, we can expect an upsurge in cybercrime either directly supported or tacticity endorsed by state-sponsored actors, or unaffiliated groups with nationalist interests.
Read the Article
Reach out to Climb about Bitdefender!
SmartBear’s Strategic Acquisition of Reflect
SmartBear is thrilled about their recent acquisition of Reflect, a Generative AI-powered no-code testing platform. Here’s why:
- This aligns perfectly with their vision to transform software testing through GenAI. Reflect’s implementation of generative AI can interpret natural language test descriptions, and quickly and reliably turn them into automated tests.
- The technology also allows them to convert manual tests into automated tests at a new rate and scale. This eliminates more of the tedious manual work so testers can focus on more strategic tasks.
- Integrating and advancing Reflect’s capabilities in their Test Hub will advance the efficiency and automation of all SmartBear‘s testing products. They can reinvent the testing experience to be more intelligent and seamless. This brings tremendous value to SmartBear customers by accelerating release cycles without sacrificing quality.
- Reflect’s skilled team and advanced technology expands capacity for developing cutting-edge AI-driven development and visibility solutions. This enables SmartBear to better meet the needs of modern development teams.
- Reflect’s mission mirrors theirs own. Together they can make development faster, easier and more efficient. This allows developers to focus their energy on building great products and providing exceptional user experiences.
This is just the beginning of an exciting new chapter, and SmartBear can’t wait to see the innovative solutions they build together.
Read the Article
Reach out to Climb about SmartBear!
Join us and follow along daily as we highlight what’s on the horizon in 2024 for all of the amazing vendors sponsoring our Sales Kickoff!
Be sure to #ClimbWithUs with us and follow our LinkedIn page for more content to come.
Categories: Vendor Updates