Ensuring that mission-critical services over broadband networks are actually mission-critical is a complex process. First responders and other users of critical communications services need to have full trust in their voice, video and data applications in what could be life-threatening situations. To ensure this trust, the Global Certification Forum (GCF) is working together with TCCA to develop an industry certification program for mission-critical products and solutions where conformance to 3GPP standards will be checked and verified and thus ensure interoperability between different solution providers.

The work on establishing this certification program will progress at a dedicated workshop on May 17, following Critical Communications World in Dubai, which takes place from May 14 -16. This workshop, the third in the series, will aim to gather input to the future development of the MCX certification programme, and due to its location and timing, will provide an opportunity to hear from local stakeholders to understand regional requirements and ensure alignment with industry. Hosted by TCCA member Airbus in Dubai, the workshop is open to all GCF and TCCA members, and to non-members subject to approval.

GCF and TCCA have established a permanent Mission Critical Services Workstream (MCS WS) within the GCF. This comprises key industry players and subject matter experts from GCF and TCCA member companies, who are in the process of developing the key requirements for testing mission-critical services, as well as defining the policies and procedures for the certification program. The team has established testing scope for both Conformance Testing and Field Trials testing and is working to develop Interoperability and Performance testing criteria.

The MCS certification program will ensure that the dependability and resilience that are core characteristics of narrowband services such as TETRA are carried forward into the 4G/5G ecosystem. In 1999, TCCA created and continues to manage the world-leading TETRA Interoperability (IOP) process that underpins the continued success of TETRA around the world. GCF has more than 25 years of best practices in managing the certification of wireless products for the telecoms industry.

Certification will be a key topic in the program at Critical Communications World, with dedicated Focus Forums taking place on May 14 -15. Focus Forums are in-depth, deep-dive sessions providing knowledge sharing and comprehensive updates in each topic area. The focused sessions will comprise multiple presentations, interactive discussions and roundtables, allowing specialists to come together to learn about developments and share their own challenges, experiences and skills.

Snowflake has announced Snowflake Arctic, a large language model (LLM) uniquely designed to be the most open, enterprise-grade LLM on the market. With its unique Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, Arctic delivers top-tier intelligence with unparalleled efficiency at scale. It is optimized for complex enterprise workloads, topping several industry benchmarks across SQL code generation, instruction following, and more. In addition, Snowflake is releasing Arctic’s weights under an Apache 2.0 license and details of the research leading to how it was trained, setting a new openness standard for enterprise AI technology.

The Snowflake Arctic LLM is a part of the Snowflake Arctic model family, a family of models built by Snowflake that also includes the best practical text-embedding models for retrieval use cases. “This is a watershed moment for Snowflake, with our AI research team innovating at the forefront of AI,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO, Snowflake. “By delivering industry-leading intelligence and efficiency in a truly open way to the AI community, we are furthering the frontiers of what open-source AI can do. Our research with Arctic will significantly enhance our capability to deliver reliable, efficient AI to our customers.”

According to a recent report by Forrester, approximately 46 per cent of global enterprise AI decision-makers noted that they are leveraging existing open-source LLMs to adopt generative AI as a part of their organization’s AI strategy.1 With Snowflake as the data foundation for more than 9,400 companies and organizations around the world2, it is empowering all users to leverage their data with industry-leading open LLMs, while offering them flexibility and choice with what models they work with.

Now with the launch of Arctic, Snowflake is delivering a powerful, truly open model with an Apache 2.0 license that permits ungated personal, research, and commercial use. Taking it one step further, Snowflake also provides code templates, alongside flexible inference and training options so users can quickly get started with deploying and customizing Arctic using their preferred frameworks. These will include NVIDIA NIM with NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, and Hugging Face. For immediate use, Arctic is available for serverless inference in Snowflake Cortex, Snowflake’s fully managed service that offers machine learning and AI solutions in the Data Cloud. It will also be available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), alongside other model gardens and catalogs, which will include Hugging Face, Lamini, Microsoft Azure, NVIDIA API catalog, Perplexity, Together AI, and more.

Snowflake’s AI research team, which includes a unique composition of industry-leading researchers and system engineers, took less than three months and spent roughly one-eighth of the training cost of similar models when building the Arctic. Trained using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) P5 instances, Snowflake is setting a new baseline for how fast state-of-the-art open, enterprise-grade models can be trained, ultimately enabling users to create cost-efficient custom models at scale.

As a part of this strategic effort, Arctic’s differentiated MoE design improves both training systems and model performance, with a meticulously designed data composition focused on enterprise needs. The Arctic also delivers high-quality results, activating 17 out of 480 billion parameters at a time to achieve industry-leading quality with unprecedented token efficiency. In an efficiency breakthrough, Arctic activates roughly 50 per cent fewer parameters than DBRX, and 75 per cent less than Llama 3 70B during inference or training. In addition, it outperforms leading open models including DBRX, Mixtral-8x7B, and more in coding (HumanEval+, MBPP+) and SQL generation (Spider), while simultaneously providing leading performance in general language understanding (MMLU).

Snowflake continues to provide enterprises with the data foundation and cutting-edge AI building blocks they need to create powerful AI and machine learning apps with their enterprise data. When accessed in Snowflake Cortex, Arctic will accelerate customers’ ability to build production-grade AI apps at scale, within the security and governance perimeter of the Data Cloud.

In addition to the Arctic LLM, the Snowflake Arctic family of models also includes the recently announced Arctic embed, a family of state-of-the-art text embedding models available to the open-source community under an Apache 2.0 license. The family of five models are available on Hugging Face for immediate use and will soon be available as part of the Snowflake Cortex embed function (in private preview). These embedding models are optimized to deliver leading retrieval performance at roughly a third of the size of comparable models, giving organizations a powerful and cost-effective solution when combining proprietary datasets with LLMs as part of a Retrieval Augmented Generation or semantic search service.

Snowflake also prioritizes giving customers access to the newest and most powerful LLMs in the Data Cloud, including the recent additions of Reka and Mistral AI’s models. Moreover, Snowflake recently announced an expanded partnership with NVIDIA to continue its AI innovation, bringing together the full-stack NVIDIA accelerated platform with Snowflake’s Data Cloud to deliver a secure and formidable combination of infrastructure and compute capabilities to unlock AI productivity. Snowflake Ventures has also recently invested in Landing AI, Mistral AI, Reka, and more to further Snowflake’s commitment to helping customers create value from their enterprise data with LLMs and AI.

CyberKnight has announced that it has become a value-added distributor for TXOne Networks. “TXOne ensures the reliability and safety of industrial control systems and operational technology environments; the company’s OT-native network segmentation and defence technologies enable organizations to mitigate the impact of cyberattacks. Based on the ‘OT Zero Trust’ principle, TXOne adapts to the unique characteristics of each OT environment, to deliver cybersecurity solutions that support secure production operations,” the company said.

During GISEC 2024, CyberKnight also unveiled its dedicated Zero Trust OT/IoT Security business unit, in which TXOne will reside. This specialized unit will focus on developing and delivering tailored solutions designed to address the unique cybersecurity challenges faced by organizations operating in OT/ICS environments, or with significant IoT assets. Other than TXOne, the Business Unit will also include Xage and Phosphorus, with new vendors coming soon.

“With IoT and digital transformation accelerating convergence across OT and IT environments, cyberattacks can now cause major operational disruptions, economic loss and even risk to human safety. TXOne Networks offers our customers leading OT-native all-terrain cybersecurity solutions that ensure the reliability and safety of ICS environments via the OT Zero Trust methodology. Through our partnership with TXOne Networks and the launch of our Zero Trust OT/IoT Security business unit, we are well-positioned to empower our clients with advanced solutions that protect their critical assets and operations from cyber threats,” commented Amr Elsayed, OT/IoT Business Unit Head, at CyberKnight.

“We are very excited to join forces with CyberKnight on our mission to maintain the stability and security of our customers’ OT environments in the region. We are proud to continue our expansion in the region and offer our platform that meets the unique needs of diverse ICS verticals in device inspection, endpoint protection, and network defence to secure organizations’ OT workforce, workload, and workplace. This partnership with CyberKnight, allows us to leverage their regional coverage, channel breadth, deep-rooted customer relationships, and cybersecurity expertise to accelerate our growth,” added Sami Ayyoub, Director MEA, at TXOne Networks.