The National Settlement Depository (NSD), Russia’s central securities depository, and Waves Platform, have started to develop a blockchain platform to support digital assets.

The new platform architecture will securely host and store tokenised and crypto assets, settling transactions and providing identification for owners of cryptocurrency wallets.

Development of the platform is already under way and the first prototype will be presented during 1st half 2018. Project implementation depends not only upon technical development but on the development of a legislative framework that mitigates the risks of crypto asset ownership and ensures that the service is user-friendly.

Eddie Astanin, Chairman of the Executive Board, NSD, commented: “The crypto-asset market is rapidly growing and rightfully attracting enormous attention from traditional institutional investors, post-trade infrastructure and financial regulators around the world. In partnering with Waves, our goal is to create a secure and user-friendly accounting infrastructure for digital assets. We consider the platform would not only provide technological and legal protection of all parties involved, but also extend variety of post-trade services for investors, custodians and new institutions emerging in this sector of economy. It is also important to synchronize our efforts with the work of regulators in this field”.

Sasha Ivanov, a founder and CEO of Waves Platform, pointed out: “The ability to work with new types of financial instruments will be of interest to a wide circle of market participants, including banks, pension funds and retail investors. Collaboration with NSD is important for us with regard to all new and existing instruments, allowing us to ensure a high level of reliability, technological efficiency, and risk protection. NSD’s expertise and deep knowledge of market infrastructure will allow us to create a unique product for crypto asset record-keeping, meeting the requirements of a broad spectrum of market players.”

Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), the International Financial Centre in Abu Dhabi and UAE Exchange, the leading global remittance, foreign exchange and payment solutions brand, have entered into partnership, to support, develop and promote the FinTech ecosystem in Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates. The Memorandum of Understanding was signed by Mr Promoth Manghat, Chief Executive Officer of UAE Exchange Group, and Mr Richard Teng, Chief Executive Officer of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) of ADGM.

The partnership will see UAE Exchange collaborate with FinTech participants under ADGM’s Regulatory Laboratory (RegLab) to develop and deploy promising FinTech solutions in the remittance, foreign exchange and payments space.

ADGM RegLab allows FinTech entrepreneurs to test their solutions in a safe controlled environment without facing an undue regulatory burden at the onset, and progressively better their understanding of regulatory know-how and controls as they scale their business. ADGM will work closely with UAE Exchange to identify industry challenges which innovative FinTech solutions may be able to address and deliver an overall enhanced customer experience.

Through this collaboration, UAE Exchange and ADGM will participate in joint innovation programmes for the deployment of new offerings in areas such as emerging payments, blockchain and distributed ledgers, artificial intelligence, and P2P solutions, amongst others.

Mr. Promoth Manghat, CEO of UAE Exchange Group, said, “Collaboration between established financial services providers and FinTech start-ups is necessary to build a sustainable innovation ecosystem. Our partnership with ADGM will nurture local FinTech innovation through incubator, accelerator and academic programmes. UAE Exchange is pleased to share its industry expertise, understanding of global markets and customer preferences, and its robust appreciation of the commercial and regulatory landscape with the start-up community in the UAE. Such partnerships will add greater depth to the financial services industry, creating additional value for customers through digitally delivered services.”

Mr Richard Teng, CEO, FSRA of ADGM said, “We are pleased to partner with home-grown industry leaders such as UAE Exchange to build up the FinTech offerings and infrastructure in Abu Dhabi and the UAE. This strategic partnership dovetails well with ADGM’s vision to establish a vibrant and well-functioning FinTech ecosystem that bolsters innovation, facilitates investment flows and supports greater growth of financial services activities. In addition to delivering solutions that would benefit the financial services sector, the collaboration with UAE Exchange will create a feedback loop for ADGM as a financial services regulator to fine-tune and enhance its rules and regulatory approach to financial innovation. ADGM will continue to actively engage FinTech stakeholders and forge partnerships with them to bolster the FinTech ecosystem in Abu Dhabi and the UAE.”

 Excelero, a disruptor in software-defined block storage, announced that its NVMesh® server SAN product was named a 2017 Best of Show award winner at the Flash Memory Summit in San Jose last night. Recognised as the Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology in the software-defined storage category, NVmesh allows enterprises to build hyperscale data centre architectures by delivering shared NVMe at local latency and performance.

“The largest web-scale cloud providers have been enjoying hyperconverged architectures to achieve the massive scale and performance required to be successful in delivering IT solutions to marketplace,” said Jay Kramer, chairman of the awards programme and president of Network Storage Advisors Inc. “We are proud to select Excelero NVMesh® for the Best of Show Technology Innovation Award as it brings to the general commercial marketplace a new architecture and virtual SAN approach for shared NVMe that scales performance linearly at near 100% efficiency.” 

The result of 10 patents/pending patents, NVMesh allows enterprises to run unmodified applications that enjoy the latency, throughput and IOPs of a local NVMe device while benefiting from centralised, redundant storage. Distributed NVMe storage resources are pooled with the ability to create arbitrary, dynamic block volumes usable by any host running the NVMesh block client. These virtual volumes can be striped, mirrored or both while enjoying centralised management, monitoring and administration.

“Because of limitations of NVMe flash, it’s virtually impossible to level out utilisation across an entire infrastructure, which results in NVMe capacity and performance waste,” said Lior Gal, CEO of Excelero. “We’re proud to be recognised for the pioneering way that our NVMesh addresses a major limitation of NVMe, and helps enterprises achieve their flexibility, efficiency and scalability goals.”

Excelero announced that it has validated its NVMesh® server SAN software on the Broadcom NetXtreme® BCM57414 25/50Gb Ethernet network interface card (NIC). The combined solution provides enterprise IT architects with a new option for storage in hyperscale data centres – one that’s equipped with the low-latency RoCE support. This combination harnesses the latest innovations in NVMe and its blazing performance, allowing enterprises to gain greater agility, ease of deployment and manageability in scale-out architectures.

Combining Excelero’s NVMesh software with the Broadcom BCM57414 NIC enables a solution with exceptionally low-latency performance suitable for Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data analytics and Artificial Intelligence applications as well as web-scale enterprise loads.  With the availability of the Broadcom BCM58800, a new family of 100G Smart NIC SOCs, hyperscale data centre architects will be able to design an OS-agnostic, turnkey storage solution running on the SmartNIC, avoiding the need for software installs.

Broadcom and Excelero will jointly showcase their latest technologies in the Booth #729 at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California from August 8^th to 10^th, 2017. 

“We’re proud to obtain validation with Broadcom’s 25/50Gb NIC for our shared NVMe offering with its patented approach to low latency,” said Lior Gal, CEO and co-founder of Excelero.  “There’s a massive, untapped market for enterprises that want to build hyperscale data centres like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Amazon have.  The combined Broadcom BCM57414 and Excelero NVMesh solution provides a fabulous storage option for them, where they take full advantage of shared NVMe across a network at local performance.”

“Broadcom’s first exposure to Excelero’s server SAN architecture was in 2015, almost two years before the company’s commercial launch, and the performance and capabilities continue to impress,” said Dan Harding, vice president of marketing of the Compute and Connectivity Division at Broadcom Limited. “Our joint validation has proven that together Broadcom and Excelero can provide a complete solution for shared NVMe storage, which will be enhanced further as our collaboration expands on new platforms such as our BCM58800 SmartNIC.”

“This is a pioneering development in integrating silicon and software that enterprises need to expedite the deployment of NVMe-over-fabrics,” said Ryan Quick, CEO and chief architect at Providentia Worldwide, an enterprise hyperscale computing consultancy.  “As alternatives to the PCIe bus emerge that are better for scale-out use, Broadcom and Excelero are key players to watch in an important and fast-changing market.”

“Effective storage for hyperscale data centres has been a significant limitation for quite some time, making Broadcom and Excelero’s work together especially impactful,” said George Crump, president and founder of Storage Switzerland. “By using Broadcom’s new NetXtreme Ethernet NIC with Excelero’s server SAN, enterprises can make sure their applications can enjoy the latency, throughput and IOPs of a local NVMe device while getting the benefits of centralised, redundant storage.”

MindManager promotes free-form thinking and enables individuals and teams to visually organise complex ideas and information and easily transform them into strategies and plans. Many of the world's leading companies trust MindManager because it delivers a complete solution that works with the platforms, applications, and services they rely on. Enterprise ready, MindManager integrates into any corporate environment with simple network deployment, SharePoint integration, support for industry-standard authentication protocols, and a depth of functionality unmatched by other applications.

The latest enhancements to MindManager Enterprise have been acclaimed by users across the globe. They include:

Refined Gantt Chart functionality

With its enhanced Gantt Pro module, MindManager Enterprise enables organisations to take advantage of the power of Gantt charting to better plan tasks, projects, and resources. Gantt charts can now be opened in a separate window, ideal for users with two screens. Users can quickly navigate through any project and visualise days, including weekends and non-working days, to keep projects on track.

Enhanced SharePoint integration

MindManager Enterprise offers dramatic new improvements to its SharePoint support with Task Synchronisation that now includes Categories in addition to task name, priority, progress, resources, start date, and end date. Users can also import resources from SharePoint into MindManager, simplifying the process to create projects, and assign tasks that are synchronised and tracked in SharePoint. Plus, users can now take advantage of support for Office 365 Authentication, Azure ADFS/On Premises Authentication, and Multi-Factor Authentication.

More robust sharing & export

MindManager Enterprise now makes it easier than ever to share maps with anyone. Users can break down barriers by exporting maps to an interactive HTML5 file which can be shared and viewed on any modern browser. And MindManager Enterprise's new Reader applications enable everyone in an organisation to access the power of teams' data on Windows and Mac.

Tech Data Corporation (Nasdaq: TECD) today introduced AccessEMM^™, a portfolio of enterprise mobility managed services offerings now available to its U.S. partner community. AccessEMM enables partners to leverage best-in-class managed services expertise and offerings from Tech Data without the risk and cost involved in building and executing a managed service provider (MSP) practice from the ground up. Specific offerings include mobile device management-as-a-service, cloud Wi-Fi, augmented reality services, and wireless services.

"Consumption of technology in subscription-based, operational expenditure and ‘as-a-service' models are on the rise as companies strive to achieve better efficiencies, lower costs, and increase flexibility," said Harish Sathisan, director of Mobility, Americas at Tech Data. "As managed services consume increasing portions of customer IT budgets, it is critical for partners to recognize this trend to remain relevant and profitable. End users need solution providers that can offer a complete set of offerings, including subscription-based managed services, and this is exactly what AccessEMM provides for our partners."

Specific benefits of AccessEMM include:

• Recurring revenue: the ability to build predictable, recurring revenue streams.
• Portfolio expansion: provides new mobility offerings or strengthens existing ones.
• Protection of customer base: as customer buying patterns shift towards subscription-based models, partners can meet their customers' mobility needs.
• Greater profitability: the potential for higher margins to increase revenue and profitability.
• More opportunities: by adding managed services to their portfolios, solution providers create opportunities for new conversations using managed services.

"The challenge for our organization is that it takes substantial time, effort and resources to build managed services that meet the mobility needs of our customers," said Dan Sytsma, vice president and general manager, Melillo Consulting, a technology solutions integrator and Tech Data partner. "Tech Data's AccessEMM provides the expertise and offerings that allow us to deliver leading-edge solutions that will delight our mobility customers."

The AccessEMM portfolio of enterprise mobility managed services further enhances and builds upon Tech Data's current cloud and security managed services offerings, as well as application development offerings in conjunction with Kony, Inc., a leading enterprise mobility and digital applications company. Tech Data's approach to mobility helps partners excel through specialization while capitalizing on the high-growth, next-generation technologies that are redefining the future. In addition to mobility, partners can leverage in-depth expertise in complementary technology market segments, including cloud, cognitive computing, the data center, data analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), security and enterprise networking, and training and education.

- Williams Lea Tag, the leading provider of marketing and communications services, today announced that Toby Codrington, previously client officer APAC has been selected as Williams Lea Tag's new chief executive officer, APAC and chief marketing officer. Toby will assume his new role on 7 August 2017 based in Singapore.

"I am privileged to have been selected as the new chief executive officer, APAC. I am looking forward to the journey ahead and believe that we have a great team in place to help us achieve our growth ambitions in the region," said Toby of his appointment.

Toby Codrington has spent over a decade growing new business for Williams Lea Tag having worked across the entire business in both the APAC and EMEA regions. He has delivered strong growth and led some of our largest global accounts, owning client engagement and service delivery across a number of our most prestigious clients in multiple sectors and markets.

Prior to joining Williams Lea Tag in 2006, Toby has worked within the commercial and marketing side of sport, owning the commercial strategy and execution at Saracens and the Oval. Toby started his career in the sponsorship team at the Rugby Football Union. He is a member of the Chartered Management Institute and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in History.

Commenting on Toby's appointment, Ken Allen, Interim CEO & CEO DHL Express said, "Toby has made a substantial contribution to the development of our business in his previous roles for Williams Lea Tag. His leadership as CEO APAC and CMO will be pivotal to continuing to drive growth across the APAC region."

Microsoft Corp. on Thursday announced the Coco Framework, a first-of-its-kind innovation that will advance enterprise adoption of blockchain technology.