BlackBerry Limited has announced that BlackBerry Radar will expand its distribution reach with more than 12 new channel partners having signed on in the past six months to grow the company’s monitoring solutions, the company reported on Tuesday.

“We continue to open up new business and sales channels for BlackBerry Radar that were previously untapped and we are confident that each will serve as growth engines for our business, fueled by demand for asset-monitoring technologies that provide transportation business owners with the most aggregate view of their operations,” said Christopher Plaat, SVP and GM, BlackBerry Radar.

With the expansion, BlackBerry will have significant growth opportunities for its Radar offering and the company’s intelligent, data-driven asset monitoring devices, BlackBerry will improve business automate operations and improve utilization of trailers, containers and chassis.

Of the partners, AttriX, A provider of telematic solutions for the transportation industry, will join BlackBerry. AttriX has integrated its offerings to provide fleet owners visibility to all the company’s assets. With its partnership with BlackBerry Radar, AttriX customers can manage their trucks, driver performance and now their trailers within this partnered all-in-one fleet and asset management solution.

Big Wheel Strategies, another announced partner, has worked with carriers from 50 trucks to mega-fleets. The company has helped carriers implement solutions to better utilize information to improve utilization, fuel economy, risk, compliance, and turnover. The addition of BlackBerry Radar to its toolkit now allows Big Wheel Strategies to offer tethered and untethered tracking.

Gray Box Solutions, a company that has specialized in data and system integrations with a focus on telematics, has integrated BlackBerry Radar data into Transportation Management Systems (TMS), with a view to providing clients with full visibility of their assets.

Additionally, Inroute México has partnered with BlackBerry Radar to now provide customers with trailer tracking capabilities, enabling fleet owners to have previously unavailable visibility into their operations and allowing them to better optimize their assets and improve utilization.

Sitrack, based in Mexico, will be BlackBerry Radar’s first ever international distributor. The company will now offer customers in the Mexican market the ability to track and monitor assets, giving customers comprehensive transparency into their vehicles, trailers and freight.

Targipsum, in partnership with BlackBerry, will offer end-to-end tracking solutions for customers looking to optimize fleet performance, and the Owl Solutions will work with BlackBerry Radar to give its customers access to trailer and asset data to complement its existing solution.

BlackBerry Radar will serve as an asset monitoring solution that provides information, including location, motion, mileage, temperature, humidity, door open/close status, and cargo status on an intuitive on-line dashboard.

The solution will collect data than conventional GPS-based track and trace solutions and uses this information to build a 360-degree visualization of a customer’s assets. All data will be transmitted and stored securely on a cloud platform, which will maintain the privacy of user information at all times.

About BlackBerry

BlackBerry (NYSE: BB; TSX: BB) provides intelligent security software and services to enterprises and governments around the world. The company secures more than 500M endpoints including 150M cars on the road today.

Based in Waterloo, Ontario, the company leverages AI and machine learning to deliver innovative solutions in the areas of cybersecurity, safety and data privacy solutions, and is a leader in the areas of endpoint security management, encryption, and embedded systems.  BlackBerry’s vision is clear – to secure a connected future you can trust.

IBM has announced a broad range of new AI-powered capabilities and services to help CIOs automate IT infrastructures, achieve resiliency against future disruptions and to help reduce costs, the company reported on Tuesday.

“In this new era of remote work, securely sharing and accessing files anytime, and across all your apps, is more important than ever before,” said Aaron Levie, CEO of Box. “We’re thrilled to expand our partnership with IBM to deliver content and collaboration across Watson AIOps, enabling IT organizations and businesses to get work done faster, simpler, and more securely.”

IBM will launch IBM Watson AIOps, a new offering that will integrate AI to automate how enterprises self-detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies in real time. The solution will also enable organizations to introduce automation at the infrastructure level and will help CIOs better predict and shape future outcomes, focus resources on higher-value work and build more responsive and intelligent networks.

The offering will be built on the latest release of Red Hat OpenShift to run across hybrid cloud environments and will work with technologies within distributed work environments. It also will collaborate with providers of traditional IT monitoring solutions, such as Mattermost and ServiceNow.

In addition to Watson AIOps, IBM has also released Accelerator for Application Modernization with AI, within IBM’s Cloud Modernization service. The capability will help clients reduce the overall effort and costs associated with application modernization.

It will also provide a variety of optimization tools to enhance the end to end modernization journey and accelerate the analysis and recommendations for various architectural and microservices options.

The accelerator leverages continuous learning and interpretable AI models to adapt to the client’s preferred software engineering practices and stays up-to-date with the evolution of technology and platforms.

“Working with IBM to apply its Watson AI technologies has helped us accelerate how we modernize our Data Science Tool Landscape. We use AI to automate processes that result in benefits such as highly responsive customer care and operational topics. In this way, we are making an important contribution to a solid start after the crisis,” said Roland Schuetz, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of the Lufthansa Group.

In addition to automating IT operations, IBM is announcing a series of new and updated capabilities designed to give CIOs a playbook for operating in this new environment, including Automate Business Planning, Automate Business Operations and Automate Call Centers.

IBM’s fully-integrated data and AI platform, Automate Business Planning, has been updated with a host of new capabilities designed to help business leaders automate the access to critical business-ready data.

The company’s Automate Business Operations has introduced an update to IBM Cloud Pak for Automation, software for designing, building and running automation apps, enables clients to more easily create AI “digital worker” automation solutions.

Automate Call Centers, which has utilized IBM Watson Assistant, an AI-based conversation platform, has also been updated to help intelligently automate the most complex, knowledge-intensive interactions and drive improved customer satisfaction while reducing operating costs.

“IBM Cloud Pak for Data brings together disparate databases from across our company and enables us to test and develop analytics models for projects ranging from inventory replenishment to transportation optimization, sales forecasting, customer return predictions, and supply chain optimization. Now, we can go from idea inception to delivery to business users much quicker,” said Erdem Eskigun, Director, Supply Chain Data Analytics and Operations Research, T-Mobile.

About IBM Think Digital

At Think Digital 2020, IBM will discuss the state of business and the role of critical technologies, such as AI and Cloud, as clients accelerate recovery and digital transformation in the wake of COVID-19.

The U.S. Air Force (USAF) has aligned all the elements of its digital modernization strategy and Bill Marion, the service’s former deputy chief information officer, said the roadmap will help his successor speed up the pace of modernization, Federal News Network reported Monday.

“Continuing along that roadmap line, all of the enterprise IT-as-a-service and related IT and digital modernization efforts are very front and center. We have to keep accelerating them and keep driving them,” Marion told the network’s Ask the CIO program. “I think we will accelerate 5G even more, and I think COVID-19 will drive unified collaboration even more. And the journey we are with the chief data officer where data is a strategic asset is another key one.”

Marion, who stepped down from his role on April 30, also discussed the Digital U program as part of the service’s digital workforce training initiative and offered updates on the service’s network modernization effort, including the Platform One and Cloud One initiatives.

“We are continuing to move forward with our bring-your-own-device program and accelerating that option,” he said. “Network-as-a-service has had some challenges, but we are seeing some good progress specifically on the Microsoft side in the work they are doing and looking at how they are starting to transform our network.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has issued a $7.5 million award for the design and development of a sensor that would quantify solar ions or energy particles, Space News reported Friday.

The University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory will produce and test the Supra Thermal Ion Sensor that would measure solar ions and notify operators if these particles generate a shockwave targeting Earth. Davin Larson, the project’s principal investigator, said these shockwaves may disrupt communications links.

The sensor would support NOAA’s Space Weather Follow-On Lagrange-1 mission that aims to provide continued observation-based space weather forecasting in alignment with the existing Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite. The agency’s Office of Projects, Planning and Analysis manages SWFO L-1.

The U.S. Air Force has commenced a program to foster industrial collaboration for further promotion of the vertical flight aircraft market. USAF said Friday that it virtually launched the Agility Prime program to promote the emerging market that the military is interested in adopting.

The vertical flight aircraft market poses the potential of flying cars to the commercial sector, and USAF seeks to apply its expertise to testing and further development of the technology. The service branch believes it can help the industry potentially reduce aircraft testing hazards.

Agility Prime’s kick-off included activities that aimed to promote USAF’s interest in expanding the market via partnerships with other federal entities, companies and investors.

“Despite COVID-19, we’re still very optimistic about the future, specifically around flying cars and how they might help the military and the world produce better logistics, better medical support and better disaster relief,” said Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics and a 2020 Wash100 Award recipient.

USAF wants to begin purchases of this new vertical flight technology by 2023. Roper announced Agility Prime’s kick-off in the middle of last month.