Q&A with Amy Barzdukas, Executive Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer at Poly

Amy Barzdukas, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Poly is a marketing and communications leader with extensive experience in setting strategy, shifting perceptions, advising customers, digital marketing, revenue marketing, integrated marketing communications, and public relations in highly competitive product arenas.

Amy is known for her ability to create and execute winning turnarounds on a global scale.

MEDIA 7: What inspired you to get into marketing?
AMY BARZDUKAS:
I was always destined for marketing, even if I didn’t know it. As a child, I collected promotional brochures. I was fascinated by how the words and pictures were used to drive action. My first job was as an advertising copywriter, and I’ve never looked back.

M7: How is Poly redefining the video conferencing experience for modern businesses?
AB:
 We’re in an unprecedented time of change in our industry. Voice and video services are moving to the cloud, and companies are changing how they approach their communications needs. Poly is the largest provider of the devices – video conferencing, audio conferencing, headphones and desk phones – you use to connect to these services so you can collaborate with your colleagues. That uniquely positions us to shape the video conferencing experience, and we’re doing so in four ways.

First, Poly has made both the Zoom Rooms and the Microsoft Teams video conferencing experience better than ever with our radically simple Poly Studio X video bars that deliver these experiences with no PC or Mac required. We’ve got decades of experience in understanding what makes meetings more human – for everyone in the room and those dialing in from other locations – and we’ve packed all of that into easy-to-install, easy-to-manage, and easy-to-use all-in-one powerhouses.

Second, we are bringing the world of AV and video conferencing into the modern app economy. Our Studio X series and Poly G7500 video conferencing devices run a common platform that can be updated and enhanced through a series of regular software updates. This Poly platform, built on Android, can run applications like a smartphone does today.

Third, Poly has introduced innovation that makes any video conference better. Our new Poly MeetingAI features use AI and machine learning to address the distractions that hit your senses in a meeting. We make it easier to hear what’s being said by blocking out the annoying noises that people make while talking, and we make it easier to see what’s going on in the room with the most advanced speaker tracking and framing, and our built-in production rules.

Finally, we are pricing our solutions in a way that completely resets the calculations on what it costs to outfit a room. The Studio X30, for huddle room and smaller spaces, costs just about $2,100, including the Poly TC8 touch controller. All you add is the cloud service and a monitor, and you have a room up and running for under $2,500. That’s easily under the cost of other solutions and with better audio and video quality.


"Baby Boomers and more than half of Gen Z say they are most productive when they were working around noise."

M7: As the CMO of Poly, what were the major challenges in rebranding and transforming two separate organizations (Plantronics and Polycom) under a single brand Poly?
AB:
One of the greatest challenges of bringing together Plantronics and Polycom was doing so in a way that honored their brand equity, history, and positive associations while establishing a new story for the new company. Plantronics was already an audio pioneer– the first headset that transmitted Neil Armstrong’s famous words during the first moon landing. Polycom was the leader in audio and video conferencing – the conference phone used by business leaders and industry captains.
We had to figure out how to build a stand-out narrative in a crowded space for the general market. For customers and partners, we found a way to carry through the legacies and histories of both companies into the new brand. And for our employees, we had to inspire them to believe in the new brand and the new combined mission. These different challenges with different stakeholders took different approaches to confront, but in the end, we brought everyone to the same conclusion that Poly was moving forward, unified and stronger.

And like any acquisition, integration takes time. We’re proud of our accomplishments since rebranding to Poly in March 2019. Since then, we’ve refreshed our video conferencing line of products, broken new ground with a mobile phone station called Elara 60 Series and showcased our continued commitment to expanding the ecosystem with partners such as Zoom, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and more. As Poly, we bring a new level of quality, simplicity, and flexibility so that every communication can easily become a place for collaboration and innovation for the enterprise.


"Gen Z and Millennials came up in an era of digitization, so they are more accustomed to the tools and technology to deal with distractions in the workplace."

M7: A recent study by Poly reveals that employees prefer noisier open offices to closed, quiet spaces. What do you think is responsible for driving these unique demands in the workplace today?
AB:
Our research shows that Gen Z and Millennials tend to prefer open offices compared to Gen X and Baby Boomers and that more than half of Gen Z say they are most productive when they were working around noise. What we’re seeing is that Gen Z and Millennials came up in an era of digitization, so they are more accustomed to the tools and technology to deal with distractions in the workplace. For example, they’re used to wearing noise-canceling headphones to block out the background noise, and similarly at home with video. They’ve been doing it all their lives!

Now that we can work from anywhere – coffee shops, airports, waiting rooms – we are more accustomed to dealing with distractions and working through them. We take that mindset into the office along with the tools we may use to address distraction, from a pair of comfortable headphones with ANC to deciding to do different types of work in different settings.

M7: What features have made Poly Studio win the 'Best of Enterprise Connect' award in the '2019 Communication/Collaboration Device'?
AB: 
Poly Studio is our answer to the need for easy-to-use video conferencing devices for smaller spaces called huddle rooms. Poly Studio is a video USB bar with premium audio and video capabilities. Its standout features include NoiseBlock, which mutes distracting background noises, Automatic Group Framing and Speaker Tracking, which zooms in to focus on the speaking participant. This board-room like audio and video transforms small meeting rooms into a center for collaboration. We’re also pleased that it was recently certified for Zoom Rooms and Microsoft Teams. The device also works with Skype for Business, Google Meet, Cisco WebEx and Amazon Chime, and virtually any cloud-based video collaboration service.


"Poly combines legendary audio expertise with powerful video and conferencing capabilities to help our users overcome the distractions, complexity, and distance, making communication in and out of the workplace challenging."

M7: What traits make Poly a global leader in communications and a leading choice for every kind of workspace?
AB:
Our in-depth expertise, tireless innovation, and emphasis on partnership make Poly a global leader in communications and a leading choice for every kind of workspace.

Poly combines legendary audio expertise with powerful video and conferencing capabilities to help our users overcome the distractions, complexity, and distance, making communication in and out of the workplace challenging. When the world was on a race to space in the ’60s, NASA approached us—Plantronics back then—with a seemingly impossible task: create a headset that would equip astronauts to communicate with Mission Control from the earth to the moon, and back again.

Fifty years later, we share the same mission today: to create powerful connections that unify people the world over. We’re designing technology for the different ways people work – open offices, remote locations, mobile-first workers. We are the largest provider of headsets, video and audio-conferencing devices that you use to communicate and collaborate for your work, whatever that may be. And we continue to innovate with products like Poly Studio X that change how people collaborate.
Through partnerships with industry leaders like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Zoom, Poly takes an open-architecture approach that allows users to seamlessly connect across all the best technologies. Whenever and wherever people connect with these services, we will be there to provide the best-in-class audio, video and voice technology to make the experience that much better.

M7: What’s your superpower or spirit animal?
AB: 
My superpower is the ability to read amazingly quickly, thanks to the experimental elementary school I attended. I don’t know how anyone gets through their workload without it, honestly. My spirit animal? I told my husband the other day that I think it is Tom Petty. I’m a huge fan. If you have a problem, there is a Tom Petty song that can solve it, or at least make it more fun.

ABOUT POLY

Plantronics, Inc. (“Poly” – formerly Plantronics and Polycom) (NYSE: PLT) is a global communications company that powers meaningful human connection and collaboration. Poly combines legendary audio expertise and powerful video and conferencing capabilities to overcome the distractions, complexity, and distance that make communication in and out of the workplace challenging. Poly believes in solutions that make life easier when they work together and with our partner’s services. Our headsets, software, desk phones, audio and video conferencing, analytics and services are used worldwide and are a leading choice for every kind of workspace.

More C-Suite on deck

Q&A with Andrea Lechner-Becker, Chief Marketing Officer at LeadMD

MEDIA 7 | December 5, 2019

Andrea Lechner-Becker, Chief Marketing Officer at LeadMD is an experienced Marketing and Sales Executive with a demonstrated history of working in the marketing and advertising industry. Skilled in Business Process, Marketo, Sales, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and IT Service Management, Andrea is also a strong business development professional and a storyteller. MEDIA 7: What inspired you to get into marketing? ANDREA LECHNER: Frankly, not having better options. I originally attended the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse thinking I’d major in Archaeology. I wanted to be Indiana Jones! But, after visiting the archaeology building – i.e. the cold, dark basement of the science building – where a girl sat to piece together pieces of an old Native American vase, I knew archaeology was not going to be the right path for me. And so, without being good at science and a major in art or art history was unlikely to pay my bills, I decided to go into “business”. I originally registered as a management major, but took my first marketing class and thought it was more interesting and switched my sophomore year. That was pretty much it. I’d never been involved in business classes or DECA in high school – I didn’t really know what to do or what jobs in marketing were even possible. I dumb lucked myself into it really. M7: As a storyteller, do you relate the brand to a story or story to the brand? AL: Both? Neither? I think there are stories in every brand, because there are people working on the brand and people engaging with the brand and people using what the brand creates. People, most often a single person, are at the heart of great stories. You can start with the “point” of the story you’re trying to tell. Say you have a software that help accountants better create reports for board meetings. It’s likely you’ll want to tell a success story about an accountant getting promoted to CFO in part because your software helped better communicate their work product to the board. You could have the idea for that and go looking for that story in your customers. OR, you could hear that story, and say, “That’s amazing!” and share it with customers, partners and internal people. Stories are all around us – the most important thing is to keep your ears and eyes open for finding them.

Read More

Q&A with Ed Breault, Chief Marketing Officer at Aprimo

MEDIA 7 | November 28, 2019

Ed Breault, Chief Marketing Officer at Aprimo is a marketer with over 18 years of industry experience. At Aprimo, Ed is responsible for the global brand and growth which includes all Paid/Owned/Earned media, Brand Experience, Product Marketing, Industry Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Strategic Communications, Content Marketing, Analyst Relations, Alliance Marketing, Public Relations, Events, Demand Generation and Account-Based Marketing. MEDIA 7: What’s your superpower? ED BREAULT: I would say it’s applying the full spectrum of art and science that is required in marketing today. Not just left or right brained, but whole-brained strategy. Being human yet data-driven and really understanding numbers and (the right) metrics to make connections to business drivers. Add storytelling to that, so I can effectively communicate to my team, the CEO and CFO as well as my Board of Directors on those metrics, and connecting all that we are doing in marketing to the mission of the business. Then quickly shifting gears to the art and creative aspects of marketing that are required to engage an audience and tell great commercial stories that take complex concepts and craft them in a way that is interesting for people to pay attention to. I have to be the ultimate point of truth for the brand. M7: At Aprimo, how have marketing leadership roles and responsibilities evolved over the past few years? EB: There are so many dimensions needed by marketing leaders today. There are several elements driving this evolution, it’s the new experience battlefront that is emerging and also marketers themselves driving changes. From a market perspective, there is a clear appetite for disruption and consumers are wanting more experiential elements to their buying experience and interactions with brands. Take a few direct to consumer disruptions like trialing products in-home, purchasing directly from a brand or even wanting to ensure that the producer’s trade practices are in line with the buyer’s or even a regulator’s for that matter. Then we want to try before we buy, and we emotionally care about the supply chain of products. Do we TRUST this brand to do business with them? Behind all of this is a story that needs to be told, and it is those marketers who know their audience well and make connections that will win the commercial game. Back to the marketer, there are so many diverse backgrounds that marketers bring now and I’m really intrigued by those who have unconventional backgrounds because they contribute something uniquely new to the field. I love hearing about the marketer’s journey.

Read More

Q&A with Sangram Vajre, Co-founder & Chief Evangelist at Terminus

MEDIA 7 | January 9, 2020

Sangram Vajre, Co-Founder & Chief Evangelist at Terminus is also an author and host of the podcast FlipmyFunnel. He is one of the leading minds in B2B marketing. MEDIA 7: What are you passionate about? SANGRAM VAJRE: Three things: Lead professionally. Grow personally. Love family. M7: Terminus has been recognized as one of Georgia’s 40 fastest-growing companies by ACG Atlanta. What factors contribute to this pace? SV: One of our core values is #OneTeam – which means we think and act as one team and know that if we treat our team right, they will treat our customers amazing. There are no great companies, only great people that make those companies.

Read More

Q&A with Andrea Lechner-Becker, Chief Marketing Officer at LeadMD

MEDIA 7 | December 5, 2019

Andrea Lechner-Becker, Chief Marketing Officer at LeadMD is an experienced Marketing and Sales Executive with a demonstrated history of working in the marketing and advertising industry. Skilled in Business Process, Marketo, Sales, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and IT Service Management, Andrea is also a strong business development professional and a storyteller. MEDIA 7: What inspired you to get into marketing? ANDREA LECHNER: Frankly, not having better options. I originally attended the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse thinking I’d major in Archaeology. I wanted to be Indiana Jones! But, after visiting the archaeology building – i.e. the cold, dark basement of the science building – where a girl sat to piece together pieces of an old Native American vase, I knew archaeology was not going to be the right path for me. And so, without being good at science and a major in art or art history was unlikely to pay my bills, I decided to go into “business”. I originally registered as a management major, but took my first marketing class and thought it was more interesting and switched my sophomore year. That was pretty much it. I’d never been involved in business classes or DECA in high school – I didn’t really know what to do or what jobs in marketing were even possible. I dumb lucked myself into it really. M7: As a storyteller, do you relate the brand to a story or story to the brand? AL: Both? Neither? I think there are stories in every brand, because there are people working on the brand and people engaging with the brand and people using what the brand creates. People, most often a single person, are at the heart of great stories. You can start with the “point” of the story you’re trying to tell. Say you have a software that help accountants better create reports for board meetings. It’s likely you’ll want to tell a success story about an accountant getting promoted to CFO in part because your software helped better communicate their work product to the board. You could have the idea for that and go looking for that story in your customers. OR, you could hear that story, and say, “That’s amazing!” and share it with customers, partners and internal people. Stories are all around us – the most important thing is to keep your ears and eyes open for finding them.

Read More

Q&A with Ed Breault, Chief Marketing Officer at Aprimo

MEDIA 7 | November 28, 2019

Ed Breault, Chief Marketing Officer at Aprimo is a marketer with over 18 years of industry experience. At Aprimo, Ed is responsible for the global brand and growth which includes all Paid/Owned/Earned media, Brand Experience, Product Marketing, Industry Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Strategic Communications, Content Marketing, Analyst Relations, Alliance Marketing, Public Relations, Events, Demand Generation and Account-Based Marketing. MEDIA 7: What’s your superpower? ED BREAULT: I would say it’s applying the full spectrum of art and science that is required in marketing today. Not just left or right brained, but whole-brained strategy. Being human yet data-driven and really understanding numbers and (the right) metrics to make connections to business drivers. Add storytelling to that, so I can effectively communicate to my team, the CEO and CFO as well as my Board of Directors on those metrics, and connecting all that we are doing in marketing to the mission of the business. Then quickly shifting gears to the art and creative aspects of marketing that are required to engage an audience and tell great commercial stories that take complex concepts and craft them in a way that is interesting for people to pay attention to. I have to be the ultimate point of truth for the brand. M7: At Aprimo, how have marketing leadership roles and responsibilities evolved over the past few years? EB: There are so many dimensions needed by marketing leaders today. There are several elements driving this evolution, it’s the new experience battlefront that is emerging and also marketers themselves driving changes. From a market perspective, there is a clear appetite for disruption and consumers are wanting more experiential elements to their buying experience and interactions with brands. Take a few direct to consumer disruptions like trialing products in-home, purchasing directly from a brand or even wanting to ensure that the producer’s trade practices are in line with the buyer’s or even a regulator’s for that matter. Then we want to try before we buy, and we emotionally care about the supply chain of products. Do we TRUST this brand to do business with them? Behind all of this is a story that needs to be told, and it is those marketers who know their audience well and make connections that will win the commercial game. Back to the marketer, there are so many diverse backgrounds that marketers bring now and I’m really intrigued by those who have unconventional backgrounds because they contribute something uniquely new to the field. I love hearing about the marketer’s journey.

Read More

Q&A with Sangram Vajre, Co-founder & Chief Evangelist at Terminus

MEDIA 7 | January 9, 2020

Sangram Vajre, Co-Founder & Chief Evangelist at Terminus is also an author and host of the podcast FlipmyFunnel. He is one of the leading minds in B2B marketing. MEDIA 7: What are you passionate about? SANGRAM VAJRE: Three things: Lead professionally. Grow personally. Love family. M7: Terminus has been recognized as one of Georgia’s 40 fastest-growing companies by ACG Atlanta. What factors contribute to this pace? SV: One of our core values is #OneTeam – which means we think and act as one team and know that if we treat our team right, they will treat our customers amazing. There are no great companies, only great people that make those companies.

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AppViewX Digital Trust Platform Named IoT Security Product of the Year

AppViewX | January 12, 2024

AppViewX, the leader in automated machine identity management (MIM) and application infrastructure security, today announced the AppViewX Digital Trust Platform has been named IoT Security Product of the Year in the 8th annual IoT Breakthrough awards program, which showcases technologies and companies that drive innovation and exemplify the best in IoT technology solutions across the globe. IoT Breakthrough is a leading market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global IoT market. The mission of the IoT Breakthrough Awards program is to recognize the innovators, leaders and visionaries from around the globe in a range of IoT categories, including Industrial and Enterprise IoT, Smart City technology, Connected Home and Home Automation, Connected Car, and many more. This year's program attracted nominations from companies all over the world. “Unmanaged machine identities for IoT devices can create critical security vulnerabilities, but for most organizations discovering, maintaining visibility into and controlling them has become manually unfeasible,” said Gregory Webb, CEO of AppViewX. “The AppViewX Digital Trust Platform automates IoT identity management at scale across the largest, most complex and distributed customer environments, allowing customers to achieve significantly stronger security posture and meet compliance requirements.” All IoT Breakthrough Award nominations were evaluated by an independent panel of experts within the IoT industry, with the winning products and companies selected based on a variety of criteria, including most innovative and technologically advanced products and services. About AppViewX Digital Trust Platform Out of the box, AppViewX provides instant value to customers by discovering all certificates across complex enterprise environments, building and maintaining inventories, provisioning both private and public trust certificates from any CA, alerting to expiring certificates and fully automating renewals and revocation to eliminate outages and security weaknesses across machines, applications, services, and security infrastructure. About AppViewX AppViewX is trusted by the world’s leading organizations to reduce risk, ensure compliance, and increase visibility through automated machine identity management and application infrastructure security and orchestration. The AppViewX platform provides complete certificate lifecycle management and PKI-as-a-Service using streamlined workflows to prevent outages, reduce security incidents and enable crypto-agility. Fortune 1000 companies, including six of the top ten global commercial banks, five of the top ten global media companies, and five of the top ten managed healthcare providers rely on AppViewX to automate NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps. AppViewX is headquartered in New York with offices in the U.K., Australia and three development centers of excellence in India. For more information, visit https://www.appviewx.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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Enterprise Iot

Nozomi Networks Delivers Industry's First Multi-Spectrum Wireless Security Sensor for Global OT and IoT Environments

Nozomi Networks | January 25, 2024

Nozomi Networks Inc., the leader in OT and IoT security, today introduced Guardian Air™, the industry's only wireless spectrum sensor purpose-built for OT and IoT environments worldwide. With 80 percent of new IoT deployments wirelessly connected, wireless is quickly becoming a preferred network. The explosion of wirelessly connected devices increases potential access points and exploitation of networks. This puts critical infrastructure at risk of cyberattacks and disruptions to operations. Guardian Air provides much-needed visibility into wirelessly enabled devices which until now were only detected once connected to the wired network. Guardian Air monitors several prominent wireless frequencies, not just Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, to provide security teams with immediate visibility of connected sensors, devices, laptops and cell phones. With the addition of Guardian Air, customers have a comprehensive network solution all in one integrated platform. "Nozomi Networks has once again innovated to address an unmet need for wireless-level monitoring in OT and IoT environments," said Danielle VanZandt, an industry manager for commercial and public security research at Frost & Sullivan. "From smart manufacturing to digital medicine, to building automation, to modern oil field production and more, today industrial organizations are relying on billions of wireless devices to speed production and time to market. Guardian Air gives IT security professionals and OT operators the visibility they need to get a firm handle on wireless risk management and response." With Guardian Air, IT security professionals and OT operators can: Continuously monitor prominent wireless frequency technologies used in OT and IoT environments including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular, LoRaWAN, Zigbee, GPS, drone RF protocols, WirelessHART and more, Immediately detect wirelessly connected assets and gain asset information to quickly address unauthorized installations, Detect wireless-specific threats, including brute force attacks, spoofing, and bluejacking – with the added ability to determine the location of the devices performing the attacks, Seamlessly integrate wireless data into a single OT & IoT security platform that unifies asset visibility from the endpoint and across wired and wireless networks. "Wireless is fundamentally changing the way industrial organizations operate. Unfortunately, it also massively expands the potential attack surface," said Nozomi Networks Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Andrea Carcano. "Guardian Air solves this problem by giving customers the accurate visibility they need at the wireless level to minimize risk while maximizing resiliency. Because Guardian Air integrates easily into the Nozomi Networks Vantage platform, customers can combine network, endpoint and wireless for the greatest visibility, threat detection and AI-powered analysis for real-time security management and remediation across the entire attack surface." The Nozomi Guardian Air wireless sensor will be available this spring from Nozomi Networks and its extensive global network of channel partners. About Nozomi Networks Nozomi Networks accelerates digital transformation by protecting the world's critical infrastructure, industrial and government organizations from cyber threats. Our solution delivers exceptional network and asset visibility, threat detection, and insights for OT and IoT environments. Customers rely on us to minimize risk and complexity while maximizing operational resilience. www.nozominetworks.com

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Industrial IoT

Tuya Smart Delivers IoT Best Practice Using Amazon Aurora, Leads the Direction of Cloud Database Innovation Use Cases with Amazon Web Services

Tuya Smart | January 24, 2024

Tuya Smart, the global IoT developer service provider, has delivered its Best Practices in using Amazon Aurora at IoT industry. Amazon Aurora is a relational database management system (RDBMS) built for the cloud with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. Tuya and Amazon Web Services (AWS) built a solid basis of collaboration in database use cases exploration while also delivering smooth operation of billions of devices requiring high concurrency and low latency. Tuya and AWS: Building a benchmark for database implementation practice Tuya is a leading technology company focused on making our lives smarter. Tuya does this by offering a cloud platform that connects a range of devices via the IoT. By building interconnectivity standards, Tuya bridges the intelligent needs of brands, OEMs, developers, and retail chains across a broad range of smart devices and industries. 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Tuya selected Amazon Aurora as core database engine for its unparalleled performance and availability at global scale. How does Tuya specifically leverage the Amazon Aurora database? Tuya currently manages billions of real-time online devices and can keep cloud message processing response times under 10 milliseconds. However, billions online devices provide a challenge. During holidays, there will be peak traffic volume, with tens of millions of devices going online and offline virtually simultaneously. Tuya used Amazon Aurora to construct a data storage solution to solve the main problem of rapid increase in short-term traffic, and to fully utilize resources. Aurora's design, which separates compute and storage and low-latency replication functionality, improves system throughput by enhancing the effect of read-write separation. Aurora provides up to 15 read replicas, setting the groundwork for Tuya's read flexibility development. At the same time, Tuya has integrated Aurora Serverless, which includes seconds-level elastic expansion and contraction, allowing Tuya to handle extremely heavy business traffic smoothly. Tuya's customers are located throughout more than 200 nations and regions, and they deal with widespread access to IoT data. Different countries and regions have different regulations on data compliance, such as GDPR and local PII. Tuya needs to adhere to each region's data security compliance regulations. As Tuya's primary business data storage provider, Amazon Aurora was among the first in the public cloud sector to enable physical encryption for database products, which significantly decreased the cost of Tuya's security compliance transformation and gave Tuya excellent basic security guarantees. In addition, Tuya is continuously testing out additional new innovation unique to Aurora, such as Enhanced Binlog, zero-ETL, and Limitless Database. Aurora's ongoing investment in innovative technologies provides more opportunities for Tuya to expand its business. Additionally, based on Tuya's comprehensive IoT developer platform architecture, both parties have collaborated to enhance Tuya IoT applications performance indicators like stability, low latency, scalability, and security in the real-world application of databases, revealing more potential and possibilities and enabling the IoT. Tuya and AWS: Continuously promoting the evolution of cloud experience Data-driven approaches will usher in a new era of innovation in tandem with the swift advancement of data applications. At this year's re:Invent conference, Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of AWS, reviewed the relational database's development history in great detail. In 2014, AWS created Aurora based on log architecture. In 2018, the release of Aurora Serverless allowed for seamless scaling of database resources through virtualization technology. 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We innovate by working backwards from customers' needs, and we appreciate the feedback that Tuya has shared. We remain committed in developing new Aurora features and capabilities so all customers can accelerate their applications' capabilities and business growth by using Aurora." "Tuya has always committed to strengthening advanced and valuable innovations, while offering open and neutral ecosystem assistance for global partners. We provide our developers with enhanced operational and maintenance control, adaptable data storage options, superior product experience, and a global business layout by utilizing the Amazon Aurora database. We will continue to work with AWS to benefit the world in the future in areas including technology, ecosystems, and cloud computing, helping customers achieve commercial success." said Eva Na, Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Cooperation, and CMO of Tuya Smart. 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IoT Security

AppViewX Digital Trust Platform Named IoT Security Product of the Year

AppViewX | January 12, 2024

AppViewX, the leader in automated machine identity management (MIM) and application infrastructure security, today announced the AppViewX Digital Trust Platform has been named IoT Security Product of the Year in the 8th annual IoT Breakthrough awards program, which showcases technologies and companies that drive innovation and exemplify the best in IoT technology solutions across the globe. IoT Breakthrough is a leading market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global IoT market. The mission of the IoT Breakthrough Awards program is to recognize the innovators, leaders and visionaries from around the globe in a range of IoT categories, including Industrial and Enterprise IoT, Smart City technology, Connected Home and Home Automation, Connected Car, and many more. This year's program attracted nominations from companies all over the world. “Unmanaged machine identities for IoT devices can create critical security vulnerabilities, but for most organizations discovering, maintaining visibility into and controlling them has become manually unfeasible,” said Gregory Webb, CEO of AppViewX. “The AppViewX Digital Trust Platform automates IoT identity management at scale across the largest, most complex and distributed customer environments, allowing customers to achieve significantly stronger security posture and meet compliance requirements.” All IoT Breakthrough Award nominations were evaluated by an independent panel of experts within the IoT industry, with the winning products and companies selected based on a variety of criteria, including most innovative and technologically advanced products and services. About AppViewX Digital Trust Platform Out of the box, AppViewX provides instant value to customers by discovering all certificates across complex enterprise environments, building and maintaining inventories, provisioning both private and public trust certificates from any CA, alerting to expiring certificates and fully automating renewals and revocation to eliminate outages and security weaknesses across machines, applications, services, and security infrastructure. About AppViewX AppViewX is trusted by the world’s leading organizations to reduce risk, ensure compliance, and increase visibility through automated machine identity management and application infrastructure security and orchestration. The AppViewX platform provides complete certificate lifecycle management and PKI-as-a-Service using streamlined workflows to prevent outages, reduce security incidents and enable crypto-agility. Fortune 1000 companies, including six of the top ten global commercial banks, five of the top ten global media companies, and five of the top ten managed healthcare providers rely on AppViewX to automate NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps. AppViewX is headquartered in New York with offices in the U.K., Australia and three development centers of excellence in India. For more information, visit https://www.appviewx.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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Enterprise Iot

Nozomi Networks Delivers Industry's First Multi-Spectrum Wireless Security Sensor for Global OT and IoT Environments

Nozomi Networks | January 25, 2024

Nozomi Networks Inc., the leader in OT and IoT security, today introduced Guardian Air™, the industry's only wireless spectrum sensor purpose-built for OT and IoT environments worldwide. With 80 percent of new IoT deployments wirelessly connected, wireless is quickly becoming a preferred network. The explosion of wirelessly connected devices increases potential access points and exploitation of networks. This puts critical infrastructure at risk of cyberattacks and disruptions to operations. Guardian Air provides much-needed visibility into wirelessly enabled devices which until now were only detected once connected to the wired network. Guardian Air monitors several prominent wireless frequencies, not just Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, to provide security teams with immediate visibility of connected sensors, devices, laptops and cell phones. With the addition of Guardian Air, customers have a comprehensive network solution all in one integrated platform. "Nozomi Networks has once again innovated to address an unmet need for wireless-level monitoring in OT and IoT environments," said Danielle VanZandt, an industry manager for commercial and public security research at Frost & Sullivan. "From smart manufacturing to digital medicine, to building automation, to modern oil field production and more, today industrial organizations are relying on billions of wireless devices to speed production and time to market. Guardian Air gives IT security professionals and OT operators the visibility they need to get a firm handle on wireless risk management and response." With Guardian Air, IT security professionals and OT operators can: Continuously monitor prominent wireless frequency technologies used in OT and IoT environments including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular, LoRaWAN, Zigbee, GPS, drone RF protocols, WirelessHART and more, Immediately detect wirelessly connected assets and gain asset information to quickly address unauthorized installations, Detect wireless-specific threats, including brute force attacks, spoofing, and bluejacking – with the added ability to determine the location of the devices performing the attacks, Seamlessly integrate wireless data into a single OT & IoT security platform that unifies asset visibility from the endpoint and across wired and wireless networks. "Wireless is fundamentally changing the way industrial organizations operate. Unfortunately, it also massively expands the potential attack surface," said Nozomi Networks Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Andrea Carcano. "Guardian Air solves this problem by giving customers the accurate visibility they need at the wireless level to minimize risk while maximizing resiliency. Because Guardian Air integrates easily into the Nozomi Networks Vantage platform, customers can combine network, endpoint and wireless for the greatest visibility, threat detection and AI-powered analysis for real-time security management and remediation across the entire attack surface." The Nozomi Guardian Air wireless sensor will be available this spring from Nozomi Networks and its extensive global network of channel partners. About Nozomi Networks Nozomi Networks accelerates digital transformation by protecting the world's critical infrastructure, industrial and government organizations from cyber threats. Our solution delivers exceptional network and asset visibility, threat detection, and insights for OT and IoT environments. Customers rely on us to minimize risk and complexity while maximizing operational resilience. www.nozominetworks.com

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Industrial IoT

Tuya Smart Delivers IoT Best Practice Using Amazon Aurora, Leads the Direction of Cloud Database Innovation Use Cases with Amazon Web Services

Tuya Smart | January 24, 2024

Tuya Smart, the global IoT developer service provider, has delivered its Best Practices in using Amazon Aurora at IoT industry. Amazon Aurora is a relational database management system (RDBMS) built for the cloud with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. Tuya and Amazon Web Services (AWS) built a solid basis of collaboration in database use cases exploration while also delivering smooth operation of billions of devices requiring high concurrency and low latency. Tuya and AWS: Building a benchmark for database implementation practice Tuya is a leading technology company focused on making our lives smarter. Tuya does this by offering a cloud platform that connects a range of devices via the IoT. By building interconnectivity standards, Tuya bridges the intelligent needs of brands, OEMs, developers, and retail chains across a broad range of smart devices and industries. Tuya's solutions enable partners and customers by improving the value of their products while making consumers' lives more convenient through the application of technology. As of September 30, 2023, the Tuya IoT Developer Platform has accumulated over 909,000 registered developers from over 200 countries and regions, covering industries including real estate, hospitality, residential, industry, agriculture, etc. The greater the breadth of business coverage, the more advanced technological support required. Tuya faces high-frequency reads and writes as well as enormous data storage challenges from billion-level online devices. Meanwhile, due to the commercial scenarios involving smart homes and smart industries, Tuya's operating response demands low latency in order to deliver a smoother user experience. Furthermore, Tuya's quick expansion and regular business changes have posed significant challenges to its operation and maintenance management. Tuya selected Amazon Aurora as core database engine for its unparalleled performance and availability at global scale. How does Tuya specifically leverage the Amazon Aurora database? Tuya currently manages billions of real-time online devices and can keep cloud message processing response times under 10 milliseconds. However, billions online devices provide a challenge. During holidays, there will be peak traffic volume, with tens of millions of devices going online and offline virtually simultaneously. Tuya used Amazon Aurora to construct a data storage solution to solve the main problem of rapid increase in short-term traffic, and to fully utilize resources. Aurora's design, which separates compute and storage and low-latency replication functionality, improves system throughput by enhancing the effect of read-write separation. Aurora provides up to 15 read replicas, setting the groundwork for Tuya's read flexibility development. At the same time, Tuya has integrated Aurora Serverless, which includes seconds-level elastic expansion and contraction, allowing Tuya to handle extremely heavy business traffic smoothly. Tuya's customers are located throughout more than 200 nations and regions, and they deal with widespread access to IoT data. Different countries and regions have different regulations on data compliance, such as GDPR and local PII. Tuya needs to adhere to each region's data security compliance regulations. As Tuya's primary business data storage provider, Amazon Aurora was among the first in the public cloud sector to enable physical encryption for database products, which significantly decreased the cost of Tuya's security compliance transformation and gave Tuya excellent basic security guarantees. In addition, Tuya is continuously testing out additional new innovation unique to Aurora, such as Enhanced Binlog, zero-ETL, and Limitless Database. Aurora's ongoing investment in innovative technologies provides more opportunities for Tuya to expand its business. Additionally, based on Tuya's comprehensive IoT developer platform architecture, both parties have collaborated to enhance Tuya IoT applications performance indicators like stability, low latency, scalability, and security in the real-world application of databases, revealing more potential and possibilities and enabling the IoT. Tuya and AWS: Continuously promoting the evolution of cloud experience Data-driven approaches will usher in a new era of innovation in tandem with the swift advancement of data applications. At this year's re:Invent conference, Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of AWS, reviewed the relational database's development history in great detail. In 2014, AWS created Aurora based on log architecture. In 2018, the release of Aurora Serverless allowed for seamless scaling of database resources through virtualization technology. This year, AWS announced the launch of the Amazon Aurora Limitless Database, which automatically scales to millions of write transactions per second well beyond current limits of a single PostgreSQL instance. It is apparent from Amazon Aurora's development history that AWS has always been dedicated to innovation. Customers and partners from a range of industries actively utilizes AWS to enable rapid innovation in a variety of ways, while also working together to enhance the cloud experience. Similar to how Tuya and AWS work together, Tuya's effective and user-friendly IoT developer platform and rich and varied IoT solutions have built a significant lighthouse, embracing the Amazon Aurora's innovation and accelerated the process of building a more secure and reliable IoT database use case. Amazon Aurora VP Yan Leshinsky said, "Amazon Aurora is the fastest growing service in the history of AWS and is trusted by hundreds of thousands of customers. We innovate by working backwards from customers' needs, and we appreciate the feedback that Tuya has shared. We remain committed in developing new Aurora features and capabilities so all customers can accelerate their applications' capabilities and business growth by using Aurora." "Tuya has always committed to strengthening advanced and valuable innovations, while offering open and neutral ecosystem assistance for global partners. We provide our developers with enhanced operational and maintenance control, adaptable data storage options, superior product experience, and a global business layout by utilizing the Amazon Aurora database. We will continue to work with AWS to benefit the world in the future in areas including technology, ecosystems, and cloud computing, helping customers achieve commercial success." said Eva Na, Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Cooperation, and CMO of Tuya Smart. Enhancing the partnership with AWS, Tuya delivered IoT best practice using Amazon Aurora database, giving the industry's growth additional impetus. Tuya will maintain its open and neutral stance going forward, collaborating with cloud service providers like AWS to offer global developers a more secure, reliable, and productive cloud environment, thereby advancing the innovation and development of the entire industry.

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Plantronics, Inc. (“Poly” – formerly Plantronics and Polycom) (NYSE: PLT) is a global communications company that powers meaningful human connection and collaboration. Poly combines legendary audio expertise and powerful video and conferencing capabilities to overcome the distractions, complexity, a...

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