Today’s topics include Red Hat’s release of OpenStack Platform 8, Apple’s settlement with the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute over a patent lawsuit involving the Siri personal assistant technology, Skype’s introduction of chat bots for the Mac OS and the release of Nokia’s CloudBand software platform.
On April 20, Red Hat released the OpenStack Platform 8, providing users of its commercially supported cloud technology with new features and integrated cloud management capabilities. The OSP 8 release is also at the core of the new Dell Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Version 5.0 update, a co-engineered offering with a reference hardware architecture.
Red Hat OSP 8 is based on the OpenStack Liberty milestone release that first debuted in October 2015 and not the more recent OpenStack Mitaka milestone that was released on April 7.
The plan is for Red Hat OSP 9, based on Mitaka, to be released this summer, according to Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager of virtualization and OpenStack at Red Hat.
Apple will pay $24.9 million to settle a 2012 patent infringement lawsuit over the introduction of its Siri voice-activated digital personal assistant application in the iPhone 4S smartphone in 2011.
The $24.9 million will be paid to Dynamic Advances, the exclusive licensee of a patent from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., according to an April 19 article by The Albany Business Review. The patent for the voice-activated app technology was issued four years before Siri’s arrival from Apple in 2011, which was also the same year that the university licensed the patent to Dynamic Advances, the story reported.
During the Build developer conference last month, Microsoft introduced Skype Bots that enable users to hold conversations with helper applications using the software’s text-based messaging capabilities. At the time, the bots were added to the latest versions of the Skype app for Windows, Android, iPhone and iPad. Now, users of the Mac client or the Web-based version of the software can try out the chatbots.
On the Web, the functionality is currently only available to users in the United States, Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, India, New Zealand and Singapore.
Months after taking control of Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia is unveiling the initial results of the merger of the two network technology vendors. Nokia officials this week announced a revamped single CloudBand software portfolio that combines Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand platform with Nokia’s Cloud Applications Manager and Cloud Network Director products.
The new CloudBand also is part of a larger strategy of enabling network operators to embrace network-functions virtualization technologies by giving them an open offering that enables them to adopt technologies from Nokia or a range of other vendors.