ManageEngine Introduces Causal Intelligence and Autonomous AI to IT Operations for Faster Incident Response

Egypt, Cairo, Feb 18 – ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corporation and a leading provider of enterprise IT management solutions, today added new causal intelligence and autonomous AI capabilities in Site24x7, its full-stack observability platform. These enhancements transform how enterprises handle outages, shifting from firefighting to autonomous resilience. By drastically reducing mean time to recovery (MTTR) and ensuring service-level agreement (SLA) compliance, Site24x7 helps IT teams safeguard the customer experience and retain trust.

Modern IT environments are increasingly fragmented across hybrid clouds, microservices, and dynamic networks, generating massive volumes of telemetry and predictive anomaly signals every second. When an incident occurs, this complexity turns troubleshooting into a needle-in-a-haystack search, often leading to prolonged downtime. IT teams struggle to correlate anomaly signals and events across these layers, delaying the critical fix to restore normalcy, jeopardizing brand reputation.

“Hybrid and cloud-native architectures have made IT operations highly interconnected, while IT managers are under constant pressure to resolve incidents quickly amid growing complexity,” said Srinivasa Raghavan, director of product management at ManageEngine. “By combining predictive anomaly detection, intelligent event correlation, service dependency context, and AI-driven causal insights, Site24x7 cuts through alert noise to show not just what is broken, but what caused it and what it impacts, helping teams identify the true fault faster and significantly reduce MTTR while minimizing service disruption.”

“Triaging and resolving incidents in hybrid environments with growing infrastructure complexity can quickly become a nightmare, especially when SLA commitments are on the line,” said Pravir Kumar Sinha, IT leader at Synechron, a global IT services company and one of the early customers to access the feature. “With Site24x7 AIOps , we’re able to filter out nearly 90% of alert noise, pinpoint issues faster, and accelerate resolution. This helps us achieve stronger SLA adherence, reduce MTTR, and ultimately deliver reliable digital experience for customers.”

The introduction of autonomous AI in Site24x7 represent a practical step toward more autonomous IT operations by analyzing observability data, reducing cognitive overload, and turning insights into clear, actionable guidance. “With MCP providing the control and governance layer, we ensure this intelligence is applied securely and within enterprise guardrails. This empowers IT leaders move toward agentic workflows with confidence, stay ahead of the AI adoption curve, and strengthen the resilience of their critical digital services,” said Raghavan.

Key capabilities include:

• Domain-aware causal correlation with predictive anomaly detection: Detects anomalies and correlates related signals across applications, infrastructure, and networks into a single, context-rich problem—so teams can quickly understand what is connected and where to start.
• Customizable AI Agents with governed, task-driven automation: Enables customers to create and tailor AI Agents, set approved guardrails using solution documents, and assign tasks that guide agents from analysis to guided action—making response workflows more consistent across teams.
• MCP-enabled agentic foundation for customers: MCP provides the enabling layer for customers to build and operationalize agentic use cases on top of observability data—standardizing how agents access data, follow approved guidance, and execute tasks within enterprise-ready controls and auditability.
• Orchestrated remediation with Qntrl: Co-ordinates downstream actions through structured workflows and repeatable runbooks, powered by Zoho’s workflow and orchestration platform Qntrl, with approvals and traceability built in to support controlled automation.

These AIOps capabilities are now available for all users in Professional and Enterprise plans.

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Seco® High Feed SP07 reduces inventories and maximizes productivity

Capable of handling a wide mix of materials, Seco® High Feed SP07 excels in all machining strategies and allows you to push productivity levels, particularly on complex components.

A positive cutting rake angle ensures optimal chip formation, while the stable insert design and constant lead angle deliver predictable cutting behavior, paramount for unmanned production.

Reduce the need for skilled labor

The SP07 addresses common industry challenges: frequent tool changes, unpredictable results, and high costs due to rapid wear. In one reliable solution, it simplifies tool management and reduces the need for skilled labor. Digital traceability via Data Matrix codes further streamlines operations, making the SP07 ideal for high-volume and unmanned production.

High metal removal rates in shallow depths of cut

Each insert features four cutting edges, maximizing usage and extending tool life. Even with shallow depths of cut (≤0.8 mm), the SP07 maintains high metal removal rates, ensuring manufacturers stay on track with productivity goals. The result is a significant reduction in cost per part and improved operational efficiency.

“Our customers need to boost productivity and cut costs. Seco® High Feed SP07 delivers reliable, flexible performance across materials”, says Benoît Patriarca, Product Manager Copy High Feed Milling. “The four cutting edges and digital traceability simplify processes further, even when skilled labor is limited.”

With its origins in Fagersta, Sweden and present in more than 75 countries, Seco is a leading global provider of metal cutting solutions for indexable milling, solid milling, turning, holemaking, threading and tooling systems. For nearly 100 years, Seco has driven excellence throughout the entire manufacturing journey, ensuring high-precision machining and high-quality 

Brookhaven Lab Builds Successful ‘Cloud in a Box’

Feb 18: In a quiet laboratory, a team of atmospheric scientists and engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory recently gathered around a workstation to watch as little floating speckles, illuminated by a curtain of green light, swirled into a haze, then wisp of a cloud.

This instance of creation unfolded inside a programmable atmosphere they’d built from scratch.

“We saw the birth of a cloud,” said Brookhaven atmospheric scientist Arthur Sedlacek. “There was a lot of excitement and happiness, and relief, in that moment. Needless to say, we definitely weren’t quiet after that.”

Researchers will use the new convection cloud chamber, a customizable one-cubic-meter metal box, to tackle fundamental unknowns that remain about clouds.

Clouds might seem simple — white, fluffy shapes drifting overhead — but they remain one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in models of weather and Earth’s complex atmospheric system.

Scientists know that clouds play important roles in regulating Earth’s energy balance, controlling how water moves through the atmosphere, driving storm formation, and influencing how intense weather systems become. Still, researchers’ understanding of the physics underlying cloud processes is limited.

“We need repeatable, controlled experiments in order to tease out the key factors and mechanisms governing those underlying small-scale processes,” Sedlacek said. “For example, one long-standing unsolved problem in our community is how drizzle or raindrops are formed in warm clouds. Why do some clouds precipitate while others do not?”

Collecting key and abundant measurements from clouds in nature, while challenging, provides some data needed to address these questions. Brookhaven scientists and their collaborators have piloted specially equipped aircraft through clouds to collect such data. But each flythrough hits a cloud that has already changed since the plane’s first pass.

The cloud chamber will allow scientists to study clouds in a more controlled setting.

“The cloud chamber provides us with a unique environment to isolate and rigorously study important but still poorly understood cloud microphysical processes,” said Brookhaven atmospheric scientist Fan Yang. “We can use it to mimic real atmospheric clouds under well-controlled laboratory conditions and perform detailed, repeatable cloud measurements.”

Watch as a cloud forms in the chamber. Scientists use a green laser to see the process. (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

Controlled cloud making

Brookhaven Lab’s convection cloud chamber combines ingredients needed to make a cloud: air that is supersaturated with water and aerosol particles, tiny particles suspended in the atmosphere that can trigger the condensation of water vapor into cloud droplets.

Scientists first fill the chamber’s bottom baseplate with water. Then they heat it up, releasing water vapor into the chamber through evaporation. The top panel of the box is cold. As the warm water vapor from the bottom rises and mixes with cool air from the top, it builds up an atmosphere where the air is “thick” with humidity.

“Cloud formation requires the relative humidity to be greater than 100% — a condition we refer to as supersaturation,” Sedlacek said. “Such a supersaturated environment is achieved in the chamber by the mixing of warm humid air with cold humid air.”

To trigger cloud droplet formation in this supersaturated atmosphere, scientists inject aerosol particles, such as table salt, into the chamber to serve as “seeds” for cloud formation. When water vapor from the air condenses on the salt particles, it forms tiny cloud droplets. In the humidified environment, these droplets will continue to grow through additional condensation of water vapor. Eventually, this establishes a steady state between the cloud droplet particle size and the relative humidity.

“One major advantage of a convection cloud chamber, compared with other types of cloud chambers, is that we can maintain a turbulent cloud for hours in a steady state,” Yang said. “This will allow repeated measurements of cloud properties, which improves statistical robustness.”

The cloud chamber at Brookhaven Lab is made up of individual heating and cooling side panels that allow researchers to steer settings such as relative humidity, temperature, and the degree of mixing and swirling in the air, or turbulence, to create a complex structure. Rearranging the heating and cooling side panels will allow the creation of different internal chamber conditions, resulting in more complex cloud schemes to be formed. Additionally, the chamber is designed so that scientists can measure the influences of things like aerosol composition and size, temperature on cloud formation, cloud droplet size distribution, and cloud persistence.

“From an experimental perspective, there are lots of knobs we can turn to create specific atmospheric conditions within the chamber,” Sedlacek said. “We’ve started thinking about how we can incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning into the cloud chamber’s workflow.”

The unique modular design also offers flexibility for the future. For example, the structure is meant be expandable. Adding another cubic meter on top would expand the working volume, leading to increased cloud lifetime. This would open the door to even more ambitious studies of drizzle and rain drop formation, the researchers said.

Making measurements with advanced imaging

A crucial component of these studies is using tools that can take measurements inside the cloud chamber without touching and disrupting the cloud and its environment. The Brookhaven team is developing next-generation instrumentation and methods to make this possible.

“We want to be able detect the transition of aerosols to cloud droplets to drizzle without sticking instruments inside the chamber so that we don’t disrupt the air flow,” Sedlacek said. “To realize this goal, we’ll use light.”

Scientists aim to, first, detect aerosols particles that activate into cloud droplets by tagging the particles with fluorescent dye. Tagged and activated aerosols will light up when hit by a laser. Next, researchers will use time-correlated photon-counting lidar — a laser-based remote-sensing instrument — to observe a cloud’s structure at the scale of a single centimeter. Then, to detect drizzle and follow its movement within the cloud chamber, they plan to use novel THz radar that captures individual droplets and measures how fast they fall.

Powered by collaboration

What started out as brainstorming, scribbles, and long chats turned into a solid design for a successful convection cloud chamber — one of only two in the nation — thanks to close collaboration between scientists, engineers, and support staff across Brookhaven Lab.

“The expertise necessary to create something like this chamber requires modelers, observationalists, experimentalists, and engineers to pull it all together — and that is part and parcel of what national labs do,” Sedlacek said.

Engineers from the Lab’s Instrumentation Department and scientists from the Environmental Science and Technology Department began collaborating on the cloud chamber a few years ago, after a meeting that highlighted Instrumentation’s capabilities and how they could support scientific research. That discussion sparked the idea to build a cloud chamber together.

As the team formed, engineers refined the design while learning more about the scientific requirements — especially the need for precise temperature control.

“It was a very iterative process,” said mechanical engineer Nathaniel Speece-Moyer. “We have great people and resources on site, and we used our engineering judgment to weigh different design options with frequent input from the scientific staff. We converged on a final design that the group is happy with.”

The final design is modular and carefully controls temperature while ensuring that air and particles inside the chamber remain undisturbed. All of the hardware is located outside the chamber to avoid interfering with experiments.

Many of the components were fabricated in house by Brookhaven Lab’s fabrication services, which reduced costs and allowed the engineering team to make adjustments along the way, said mechanical engineer Connie-Rose Deane.

“This cloud chamber is a great example of how engineers, scientists, and technicians can collaborate together to achieve something special,” Deane said. “We also had a lot of support from budget, safety, and facilities staff. What really powered me through this work was the excitement everyone brought to the project.”

Throughout the process, the team also drew on experience gained from the Michigan Technological University’s (MTU) Pi Cloud Chamber, the only other convection cloud chamber in the United States. Raymond Shaw, a professor at MTU, has a joint appointment with Brookhaven’s Environmental Science and Technology Department and was key to developing both chambers.

“Cloud chamber science is experiencing a resurgence for several reasons,” Shaw said. “Perhaps most importantly, the atmospheric physics community has realized that there are still fundamental questions about how aerosol and cloud particles interact that directly influence how we can simulate atmospheric flows using coarse-resolution models, such as for storm or weather forecasting. The simplified, controlled, repeatable, and well-characterized conditions provided by a laboratory experiment in a cloud chamber can provide important insights.”

At the same time, additional advances now make it possible to simulate these processes in great detail, enabling direct comparisons between experiments and computational models, Shaw said.

Yang added: “The cloud chamber at Brookhaven Lab is the outcome of more than 10 years of experience. We’ve learned a lot from the Michigan Tech Pi Cloud Chamber group and from a multi-institution research activity jointly funded by DOE and the National Science Foundation aimed at exploring ideas for a larger-scale cloud chamber facility. We want to shout out all the work that led to this very smart design.”

Scientists, engineers, and technicians worked together to assemble Brookhaven Laboratory’s convection cloud chamber. (Timothy Kuhn/Brookhaven National Laboratory)

Looking beyond the clouds

The potential of Brookhaven Lab’s new “cloud in a box” testbed stretches beyond just studying clouds. Its creators encourage suggestions for other research areas it can support. 

Ideas floated for potential uses so far include investigations into how atmospheric conditions impact the performance of energy and information infrastructure, as well as the movement of bioaerosols — tiny natural particles such as pollen and pathogens.

“The environment we create inside this chamber opens up other applications,” Sedlacek said. “We welcome the opportunity for ‘out-of-the-box’ ideas that this brand-new capability at Brookhaven Lab can provide.”

This work was supported by Brookhaven’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.

 Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

ELCIA Unveils New Leadership Team to Drive Electronics & Semiconductor Growth

Bengaluru, Feb 18 : Electronics City Industries Association has announced a leadership transition as it prepares to scale up its role in strengthening India’s electronics manufacturing and semiconductor ecosystem.

As part of this change, V Sriram Kumar has been appointed Chief Executive Officer of ELCIA. He previously served as President of the association and brings over three decades of industry experience. Sriram spent a significant part of his career at FANUC India, Japanese Automation and Robotics company, and has also been associated with ELCIA for more than 25 years in various honorary roles.

In his new role as CEO, Sriram will focus on driving ELCIA’s strategic initiatives, strengthening industry collaboration, and building long-term institutional capabilities aligned with national priorities in electronics manufacturing and semiconductors.

The leadership transition comes at a time when ELCIA is expanding its scope beyond industry representation to active ecosystem enablement. With India placing strong emphasis on electronics manufacturing, semiconductors, and deep technology innovation, ELCIA has launched several initiatives aimed at supporting industry, startups, and academia.

One of the key initiatives is the Electronics Centre of Excellence (e-COE), which has been envisioned to enable sensor development in India. Through this initiative, ELCIA aims to act as a catalyst for indigenous IP creation while enabling companies to design, develop, and commercialise sensors for domestic and global markets.

ELCIA is also strengthening its focus on talent and innovation infrastructure through the Electronics Skill Development Centre (ESDC) and the ELCIA Tech Hub. The Tech Hub follows a cluster-based approach to support co-development, prototyping, and collaboration among industry players, startups, and research institutions.

Alongside this transition, Sujaya Shashikiran, Executive Chairperson of Hical Private Limited, India’s leading manufacturer of electro-mechanical systems for global aerospace and defence platforms, has taken over as President of ELCIA. She will be supported by the Executive Committee and the association’s operational team, providing strategic direction and governance as ELCIA scales its initiatives.

Commenting on his appointment, V Sriram Kumar said,

“ELCIA is entering a phase where execution and impact are critical. India’s push towards electronics manufacturing and semiconductors presents a significant opportunity. Our focus will be on building platforms and partnerships that help the ecosystem innovate, develop capabilities, and scale sustainably.”

Sujaya Shashikiran said,

“ELCIA has played a pivotal role in shaping the Electronics City ecosystem. As President, I look forward to working with the Executive Committee and the CEO to strengthen ELCIA’s initiatives and ensure they deliver tangible value to industry and the larger ecosystem.”

With this leadership transition, ELCIA signals its intent to take on a larger role in India’s electronics and semiconductor journey by moving from advocacy to active ecosystem building and long-term capability creation.