Category: News

The UK government is jolly pleased about ChatGPT creator OpenAI’s decision to to open its first office outside the United States in London.

The California-based software outfit behind the chatbot announced that it had chosen the British capital for its expansion plans.

UK science, innovation and technology minister Chloe Smith called it a “vote of confidence for Britain as an AI powerhouse”.

“Our AI sector already employs more than 50,000 people across the country, and we will continue to foster an approach which unlocks opportunity and cements our place as a global destination for artificial intelligence,” she added.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak met the chief executives of OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic at Downing Street last month.

The meeting was designed to discuss joint action to ensure the safe and responsible development of artificial intelligence, as well as governance.

Sunak has called AI “the defining technology of our time”.

On a visit to Washington earlier this month, he announced a first AI summit, seeking a leading role for the UK in limiting potential doomsday risks.

The British leader wants a future global AI regulator to be based in London, angling for a place at the table as the United States and the European Union seek to establish an AI code of conduct.

OpenAI chief Sam Altman backs long-term institutional oversight but has warned that “heavy regulation” could hamper the rapid development of the technology.

 Integration platform-as-a-service outfit Celigo partnered with Bring IT to further expand its best-in-class automation technology into the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Latin American (LATAM) regions.

Celigo claims the collaboration will help customers adapt to evolving market conditions.

Built on Celigo’s iPaaS, and delivered by Bring IT’s team of consultants and architects, 360° Integration allows customers to tackle more complex problems such as data transformation, data cleansing, adding logic into data, and segmentation– none of which could be done prior to adopting the Celigo platform.

Celigo VP Partnerships Fred Stemmelin said: “As we look to the future of our partner programme, Bring IT has been leading the way in helping us develop strategies and programmes that bring true value to our joint customers. They are not only using our platform, but looking for ways to replicate successes from one country across the globe, using the ability to create templates based on specific regional needs.”

“By working with Bring IT, our customers benefit from the functionality of a leading iPaaS and the expertise of a company who has done thousands of implementations,” he said.

The programme involves three hubs in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil will represent initial activity in LATAM, while European offices in Netherlands and Spain will round off the initial period of growth.

Bring IT is already building a customer base in LATAM with healthcare specialist, FarmaciasGP, online florist, Rosaprima and apparel retailer, Candher signed in the last year. In EMEA, the company has landed premium cigar giant, Tabacalera and European search engine, Yandex.

After initial expansion, Bring IT plans to “templatize” automation by creating templates based on industries and regions that they can put in the Celigo Marketplace to be used by other companies with similar integration needs. They are already working on templates for renewable energy and healthcare based on their key industry focus.

Bring CEO Omar Palacios said: “Having a partner like Celigo has been fundamental to Bring IT’s success and sustained global growth. Without advanced offerings like Celigo’s iPaaS and our expertise in automation, we wouldn’t have a competitive advantage. “

Scalable Neural Processing Unit (NPU) semiconductor designer Expedera  today announced the opening of its new European regional engineering development centre in Bath.

This is the company’s fourth design centre focusing on edge AI inference, with additional locations in Santa Clara (USA), Shanghai, and Taipei.

Expedera head of business development and product Wendy Wu said Europe was a growing market for edge AI hardware due to the increasing adoption of AI technologies across automotive, IoT, and consumer device industrie.

“The United Kingdom is a key hub in this region, making it an ideal choice for Expedera and numerous other AI companies that have made it their home base,” she said.

The European Artificial Intelligence (AI) hardware market is expected to grow at a 15.2 per cent CAGR through 2026, according to IDC in a February 2023 report.

Opening a regional office enables Expedera to market its world-class AI edge inference processing engines to regional companies developing and deploying a wide range of visual, audio, and text-based neural networks.

Expedera CEO Da Chuang said he was proud and excited about the new location, which offers a mix of premier talent and proximity to customers.

“As our first European design centre, our presence in the UK enables us to establish closer ties with European clients. It positions us to introduce our IP offerings to local silicon designers, allowing the company to continue to grow.”

Security outfit Veracode launched its new Veracode Velocity Partner Programme in the EMEA region.

It claims that the newly structured programme will empower partners to grow their security practices quickly and profitably using Veracode’s intelligent software security platform, enabling accelerated deal closures, expanded market share, and revenue growth.

The Velocity Partner Programme combines the capabilities of Veracode’s cloud-native platform with the support of dedicated practitioners and demand-generation offerings to drive the growth of their services to customers.

It includes new demand-generation campaigns, on-demand sales and technical enablement content, and a new role-based partner training and certification programme. Partners can take advantage of these assets to add increased value to their respective customers, improve collaboration, and increase win rates.

The Veracode Velocity Partner Programme into EMEA was rolled out in North America in 2022. The region has since seen an 89 per cent uplift in channel partner-initiated revenue annually and recently announced its “Land with Channel” sales strategy to fuel the next stage of Veracode’s growth in North America.

Veracode Chief Revenue Officer Andre Cuenin said that since launching the Velocity Partner Programme in North America in summer 2022, its partners have seen significant benefits, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

“We are thrilled to extend this structured and collaborative model into EMEA as we expand our global channel footprint. Our trusted partners are key to helping us in scaling our mission to move business forward with secure software and we look forward to empowering them to expand their security practices with this model.”

Google has accused Microsoft of using its dominant position to trap customers into contracts within its Azure cloud server business.

In a complaint filed with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Google claimed that Vole employs software licencing restrictions as a means to prevent customers from easily transitioning away from its cloud computing services, presumably into something more Googly

In its complaint to the competition watchdog, Google moaned that Microsoft’s dominant Windows Server and Microsoft Office products create lock-in for the firm’s extensive client base, making it challenging for them to use alternatives to Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure.

Google characterised Microsoft’s licencing restrictions as a “complex web” that hinders businesses from diversifying their enterprise software vendors.

The search giant claimed this control was a risk to national security and cybersecurity as cyberattacks often targeted Microsoft products. Read more…

CIOs are increasing investment in technologies that help drive business value and ESG performance and highlighted growing trends such as linking executive pay to ESG metrics, a Logicalis summit was told.

The summit, themed Forging a Digital Path to Sustainable IT, was designed to give CIOs insight and inspiration from experts driving sustainable innovation in their industry.

The event highlighted the vital role of IT as an enabler for sustainable transformation and the importance of CIOs actively getting behind business-wide sustainability goals. Read more…

Payments outfit Checkout.com has launched a new product t to help merchants optimise acceptance rates and grow revenues.

Dubbed Intelligent Acceptance, it is an AI-powered optimization engine, trained on billions of transactional data points from Checkout.com’s global network and insights from the business’ domain expertise after a decade at the forefront of the digital economy. Read more…

Networking giant Cisco is looking to acquire its partner Accedian.

For those not in the know Accedian focuses on performance analytics and end-user experience solutions, including seamlessly delivering 5G networks.

Cisco says the acquisition will allow service providers to deal with problems, like increasing subscriber expectations, that need real-time data and insights.

Accedian’s CEO Dion Joannou said: “We look forward to bringing our critical capabilities to a wider set of solutions within Cisco’s Networking portfolio and taking the next step in the partnership we have built with Cisco and our joint customers over the last years.”

Customers are becoming less predictable, making existing models and approaches less effective. according to a new Twilio study.

The study blames global pressures for changing customer behaviour, which Twilio says will have knock on effect on marketers trying to influence investment decisions.

The headline findings indicated that almost half of marketers are questioning the value of traditional customer segmentation models, and as a result are looking for greater budget flexibility and more opportunities for real-time personalisation.

Many felt customers were more susceptible to cost-of-living pressures and environmental concerns, making it difficult to use existing models, particularly with demographic data.

Read more…

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is under pressure from Big Tech firms to apply a lengthy appeals process under the proposed Digital Markets, Competition, and Consumers (DMCC) Bill.

Introduced in April, the DMCC Bill aims to address the excessive dominance of Big Tech in digital markets.  However, companies like Apple, Meta and Microsoft have told the House of Lords that they want the option to appeal against the DMU’s decisions in a “full merits” review.

This step would give tech firms the opportunity to contest unfavourable decisions by undergoing a complete rehearing of all the evidence involved.

The Bill aims to empower the UK competition watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), with the necessary authority to enforce a new code of conduct on some of the most influential companies globally, ensuring effective regulation and oversight.

As part of the DMCC legislation, the Digital Markets Unit (DMU), a branch of the CMA, will receive specific powers to identify large companies with substantial market influence.

Once identified, these firms must follow a code of conduct in the sectors they dominate.

The Code is designed is to prevent firms from distorting or undermining competition among their service users, by misusing their market power and strategic position.

Under the DMCC the CMA will have more resources to investigate competition issues and take action, including where companies collude to increase prices at the expense of consumers.

A new lobby group has emerged to counter Big Tech influence. The group – made up of trade associations, charitable foundations, publishing firms and smaller e-commerce websites – says the government must uphold the Judicial Review standard for appeals under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers (DMCC) Bill, as the ‘full merits’ review process tech firms are calling for could impede the entire regulatory framework. Read more…

Daisy Corporate Services has completed its acquisition of cyber security service provider, ECSC Group.

The ECSC acquisition provides highly complementary services to Daisy Corporate Services’ (Daisy) current operational resilience offerings, and provide enhanced customer proposition.

Daisy says that the acquisition will deliver significant opportunities to include cyber security services into Daisy’s wider managed service customer base, supporting their long-term corporate development strategy.

Established in 2000, ECSC provides security breach prevention, detection and response support to almost 425 customers across all sectors and including a range of corporate and blue-chip organisations.

Daisy Group CEO Neil Thompson said: “Cyber security is a major priority for organisations, as the severity of threats and vulnerabilities continues to grow. By combining Daisy’s existing capability with ECSC’s depth of experience and expertise, we can help organisations manage the growing complexity around security detection and response – delivering a new standard in cyber security services to mid-market and Enterprise organisations in the UK.”

ECSC CEO Matthew Briggs said: “ECSC has established itself as a trusted and innovative cyber security service provider over the last 23 years. Daisy shares the same ethos, and as a leader in IT services we feel the two organisations are a great fit. We firmly believe that together we will become the UK’s leading cyber security organisation.”