Global shipping company Shentong Express (a/k/a STO) is China’s answer to UPS. To increase efficiency—and cut human staff—they’ve designed this rather amazing facility consisting of a huge open floor punctuated by a grid of square holes that open onto chutes. Human beings pull parcels off of a conveyor belt and place them on the robots, which then do most of the work. Check out the traffic: China’s People’s Daily states that “The company estimates its robotic sorting system is saving around 70-percent of the costs a human-based sorting line would require, ” while the South China Morning Post reports that “An STO Express spokesman [says] that the robots had helped the company save half the costs it typically required to use human workers.” The savings is massive no matter which figure is correct, and this will certainly lead to less human employment for STO. “We use these robots in two of our centres in Hangzhou right now, ” said the STO spokesman. “We want to start using these across the country, especially in our bigger centres.”
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Microsoft goes after VMware with free(ish) Windows licenses for Hyper-V converts
(credit: Wikipedia ) With the imminent release of Windows Server 2016, due to be launched some time in September with its new per-core licensing , Microsoft is making a concerted effort to win over VMware users and get them to switch to Hyper-V. Accordingly, the company is running a time-limited promotion : switch from VMware to Hyper-V and the company will give you “free” licenses to Windows Server Datacenter. The catch is that you’ll need to buy a Software Assurance subscription too, so it’s not really free. But it should save some of the costs of migrating. To help persuade companies to switch, Microsoft has offered a TCO calculator to show off the big savings (Microsoft hopes) that can be had from making the switch. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Microsoft goes after VMware with free(ish) Windows licenses for Hyper-V converts