Author: Nick Farrell

Microsoft and Google rake in billions in AI craze

Posted on January 31, 2024 by - News

Tech giants Microsoft and Google have splashed out on generative AI, with their cloud computing arms seeing a surge in demand as clients fork out for the pricey computing power that fuels the technology.

Microsoft has raced ahead in the AI game, pumping money into ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and pushing AI across products while others lag.

The company said sales soared to $62 billion for the October to December period, up 18 percent year-on-year and above the $61.1 billion expected by analysts.

The AI frenzy has helped Microsoft overtake Apple as the world’s biggest company by market value at more than three trillion dollars. The company’s share price is up  70 per cent from a year ago.

Microsoft’ resident Software King of the World Satya Nadella said  “We’ve moved from talking about AI to applying AI at scale.”

8×8 launches new partner tier to flog more cloud comms

Posted on January 30, 2024 by - News

Cloudy comms outfit 8×8 has unveiled a new partner tier called SellWith8.

8×8 has undergone significant changes at the top in the last year. In a few weeks, in June 2023, it will hire a new CEO, CFO, and CRO. The new tier will help tech partners sort out customer business problems.

The 8×8 Tech Partner Ecosystem programme lets customer-focused firms boost customer experiences by adding tech, such as AI skills, into the 8×8 platform with lasting data to improve business smarts, insights, and analytics.

Jamf axes 170 staff in bid to boost profits

Posted on January 30, 2024 by - News

Apple gadget software maker Jamf has revealed that it will slash six per cent of its workforce as it chases “profitable growth”.

Jamf last reported its staff numbers at the end of 2022, with 2,796 employees. If its staff size has stayed the same, the six per cent cull would hit about 170 Jamf workers.

A Jamf spokesperson said this number is “roughly right” for the staff affected.

In the document, Jamf said that its “workforce reduction plan” is “meant to cut costs, boost margins, and keep pushing the Company’s ongoing pledge to profitable growth”.

Chipzilla looking a bit sick

Posted on January 29, 2024 by - News

Chipzilla expects a ‘big boost’ for its new AI chips this year after the sales pipeline for such products grew by more than £1.5 billion.

But that’s not real money; it’s potential customers who might buy Intel’s accelerator chips, like the Gaudi 2 or the Max GPUs, instead of Nvidia’s data centre GPUs, which rule the market.

Intel’s boss Pat [kicking] Gelsinger told an earnings call that revenue for the last quarter went up 14 per cent to £11.4 billion.

That’s the first time in ages that Intel saw any growth, but it wasn’t enough to make up for the losses it suffered for most of 2023. The full-year revenue was £40 billion, which is a 14 per cent drop from 2022.

Data compliance workers are overstretched.

Posted on January 29, 2024 by - News

A new study has revealed the considerable burden on data compliance workers in the UK.

Skillcast, a company that teaches compliance online, crunched the numbers to determine how much personal data one compliance worker has to deal with.

The results are shocking: on average, one compliance worker has to look after the data of a whopping 14,315 people and businesses. That’s more than the population of some towns.

They got this figure by adding up each company’s employees, customers, and clients.

SAP axes thousands of jobs and bets on AI

Posted on January 26, 2024 by - News

The maker of expensive business software, which no one is sure what it does, SAP is implementing a company-wide restructuring this year, including job buyouts and job changes for up to 8,000 employees or more than seven per cent of the application giant’s workforce.

The restructuring is part of what SAP described as its “ambition for 2025” plan that increases its focus on “key strategic growth areas” – business AI in particular – and to “transform its operational setup to capture those difficult to hunt organisational synergies, AI-driven efficiencies and to prepare the company for highly scalable future revenue growth,” the company said in a statement.

IBM boasts about its artificial intelligence progress

Posted on January 26, 2024 by - News

A not so mobile X86 PCNot one to miss out on a year of AI-themed results presentations, the topic took up a significant chunk of IBM’s Q4 earnings call.

Big Blue delivered three per cent revenue growth over the quarter, while software revenue was up two per cent.

CEO Arvind Krishna highlighted the progress made in recurring revenue and IBM’s consulting book, which grew 5.5 per cent over the quarter.

As expected, the earnings call’s significant focus was on IBM’s progress in AI.

Krishna highlighted the successful launch of Watsonx, IBM’s flagship AI and data platform. Introduced in the fourth quarter, Watsonx governance drove a substantial portion of IBM’s book during the period.

Microsoft dodges EU rules for its search engine and browser

Posted on January 25, 2024 by - News

Microsoft’s search engine Bing, browser Edge, and advertising services might be spared from Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulation.

In 2022, the European Commission named the world’s most notorious tech giants, including Microsoft, as internet “gatekeepers,” who would be subject to special rules.

The DMA, which has been in force since November 2022, was meant to protect consumers while giving rivals more chances to survive against big tech companies.

Microsoft’s widely used services such as Windows, Bing search and the Edge browser came under the eagle eye of European antitrust regulators. As a result, the Redmond-based tech giant was added to the gatekeepers list.

Last year, both Apple and Microsoft tried to get iMessage and Bing off the EU’s tech gatekeepers list, with Microsoft arguing their platforms had neither hit the set thresholds nor attained the size to qualify as a gatekeeper.

Exclusive Networks gets by with a little help from its friends 

Posted on January 24, 2024 by - News

Cloudy Exclusive Networks has been getting closer to its existing vendors in new places and deeper ways.

That plan worked well for the company last year, with the firm boasting it had kept its vendor relationships, and there is no sign of that changing as it enters 2024.

In its latest full-year figures for 2022, the distributor claimed it had gained from maintaining solid relationships, with its vendor and customer loyalty rates up by more than 100 per cent yearly.

Wasabi spices up its storage with Curio AI

Posted on January 24, 2024 by - News

Cloudy and spicy Wasabi Technologies has snapped up Curio AI from GrayMeta.

The deal includes the Curio AI software and the brains behind it, including GrayMeta’s boss, Aaron Edell, who will join Wasabi as the big cheese of AI and ML.

Wasabi will use the Curio AI tech to create a new type of smart storage for the media and entertainment industry, which it plans to launch in spring 2024.

Curio AI will make a detailed index of every second of video stored in Wasabi.

Wasabi’s top dog, David Friend, said that a video archive without proper metadata is like a library without a card catalogue.

Google loves Herts

Posted on January 23, 2024 by - News

Search engine outfit Google has invested £800 million in a new data centre in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, to boost its cloud and AI capabilities across the UK.

The tech giant has bragged that the 33-acre site will create jobs for the locals, who will be thrilled to have a massive power-hungry facility in their backyard.

The new data centre will give businesses nationwide more computing power. They can use Google’s AI tools and cloud services if they can afford it.

Google has also claimed that it cares about the environment and has set a target to run all its data centres and offices on green energy by 2030.

To help with this, Google signed a deal with ENGIE for wind power from Scotland’s Moray West farm, which will start in 2022.

Westcon-Comstor buys cloudy Rebura

Posted on January 23, 2024 by - News

Westcon-Comstor has splashed out on Rebura, an AWS cloud expert and partner, to beef up its cloud offerings and flog more services to its partners.

Westcon-Comstor’s partners reckon the deal will give them access to a range of AWS solutions, from cloud advice, moving to the cloud, FinOps, AWS Marketplace tricks and security services.

Rebura, based in London, was set up in 2017 and helps AWS cloud moves, updates, SaaS and DevOps across the UK, Nordics and central Europe.

Rebura and AWS inked a strategic deal in 2023, which shows Rebura’s worth. Rebura has seven AWS badges, including migration, Microsoft workloads, and DevOps.

As an AWS advanced partner, Rebura helps firms of all sizes build and improve their apps and workloads on AWS, boosting productivity, scalability, efficiency, and security.

ICO messes up copper’s clouds

Posted on January 22, 2024 by - News

The Information Commissioner Office (ICO) has made a mess of the legality of police forces using US-based cloud providers to process sensitive law enforcement data.

Computer Weekly exposed in 2020 that dozens of police forces are breaking the law using the cloud-based Microsoft 365 software to process more than a million people’s data.

A major Police Scotland IT system is using Microsoft’s Azure cloud despite having major data protection issues. The Scottish biometric commissioner (SBC) asked the ICO for advice about the system’s legality.

After a cosy meeting with information commissioner John Edwards in early December 2023, SBC Brian Plastow wrote a letter that said the ICO was happy to give the green light to the dodgy cloud deployments. He said the ICO believed that the UK and US governments signed a deal to share data, which overrules the UK’s data protection laws.

Here comes the sun: Snyk snaps up Helios

Posted on January 22, 2024 by - News

The security outfit which knows no vowels, Snyk, has bought a start-up that snoops on live applications, Helios.

For those not in the know, Helios is named after the Roman sun god and has developed some fancy technology to spot security bugs in running apps.

Snyk did not say how much it paid for Helios or how many staff it would keep.

Snyk said the acquisition was a “milestone” in its quest to dominate the application security posture management (ASPM) market. ASPM is a buzzword that means keeping track of all the apps in your environment and ensuring they are secure.

Helios will help it to offer “comprehensive visibility” across app environments, “more effective” prioritisation of risk, and “full-stack” runtime data. In other words, the company said that Snyk will be able to see everything, tell you what to fix, and collect a lot of data.

Red Hat launches new partner programme

Posted on January 19, 2024 by - News

Open saucy Red Hat is shaking up its partner programme to make it easier, better, and faster for partners to cash in.

The company is rolling out new tools to help partners work together and get their paws on the hottest technology, training, and resources.

A new report by IDC says that 70 per cent of tech sellers will follow a customer-led approach by 2025, meaning they have to team up with partners to offer the best solutions, services, and flexibility that customers want now.

Red Hat wants to be ahead of the game by simplifying its partner model to make it clear and fair for everyone in the ecosystem and to focus on the customer’s needs.