Babble has just written a cheque for Microsoft partner TechQuarters, as it pushes into the comms space.
The MSP yesterday announced it had acquired TechQuarters to bolster its expertise across Office 365, Sentinel and Azure.
It claimed that the deal would “accelerate Babble’s move from being the UK’s leading cloud comms player to the leading cloud service provider in comms and IT.
Gamma Communications has announced a new strategic relationship with Ingram Micro to offer its UK partners Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams.
Operator Connect, a new operator-managed programme from Microsoft Teams Phone, has been designed to enable seamless and integrated calling. There are only a few providers of the programme in the UK.
The pair want to provide partners with a new opportunity in the business voice market. Additionally, Gamma will become the first provider to offer Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams to Ingram Micro’s partners in the UK.
European players are virtually absent from the cloud market, thanks largely to bureaucracy and squabbling.
While companies have been moving to the cloud in great numbers, it has been mostly products made by US big tech. Azure was top, followed by AWS and then Google Cloud – the “big three”.
This is the last thing which should have happened. When GDPR came out in 2018 and with the collapse of the US-EU Safe Harbour and Privacy Shield data transfer regulations, many predicted a golden age for European cloud companies.
According to Synergy Research Group, fourth-quarter enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services surpassed $61 billion, a rise of 21 per cent during the same period last year.
However, the increase was substantially dampened by the strong US dollar and a severely restricted Chinese market.
Synergy said that the US Q4 growth rate was 27 per cent, which compares with an average growth rate of 31 per cent in the previous four quarters.
The market tracker explained that the shrink in growth rate was partly to be expected due to the increasingly massive scale of the market, but added there is no doubt the current economic climate also had an adverse impact.
Microsoft and OpenAI have a first-move advantage in the exploding market for AI chatbots, according to Daniel Ives, managing director and senior equity research analyst at Wedbush Securities.
Through its early and continued backing of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, Microsoft is “leading so far” in the “Al arms race,” he wrote
Last week, Vole and Google held product events this week about their respective chatbot plans, Google’s event for its forthcoming Bard chatbot was “underwhelming,” according to Ives. Additionally, a Google ad for Bard, which featured an inaccurate piece of information served up by the chatbot, was “an absolute near-term gut punch to Google’s Al credibility,” Ives wrote.
Dell Technologies plans to slash its global workforce by 6,650 jobs which represents five per cent of its entire employee base.
For those who came in late, Big Tech has been making the short-term decision to improve their bottom lines by laying off staff as recession looms. This gives them the excellent opportunity to complain about not having skilled, loyal staff in two years or have their bottom lines handed to them by more agile companies staffed by the people they laid off.
In January SAP, IBM, Microsoft, Sophos, Amazon and Salesforce revealed that significant cuts were on the horizon, blaming the “economic downturn” with managers trotting out cliches like “economic headwinds.”
Software King of the World Microsoft is a little worried about the future of its Azure product after it posted a flat top line in its latest quarterly results.
Generally, Vole’s numbers were reasonable. Revenues in the second quarter climbed two per cent to $52.7 billion during the quarter. Net income was $16.4bn GAAP, a drop of 12 per cent compared to the same period of its last fiscal year.
Sales in Azure and other cloud services grew 31 per cent, aiding revenues in Microsoft’s intelligent cloud segment to bring in $21.5 billion.
Public cloud service and infrastructure markets, operators and vendors’ revenue jumped 21 per cent to $544 billion in 2022.
New data from Synergy Research Group claims that the biggest growth was seen in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).
Annual revenue from these services grew 29 per cent to reach more than $195 billion, despite some headwinds from the strengthening US dollar and problems in the Chinese market.
In the other main segments, managed private cloud services, enterprise SaaS and CDN added another $229 billion in service revenues, having grown by an average 19 per cent from 2021.
Synergy said public cloud providers spent $120 billion on building, leasing and equipping their datacentre infrastructure, which was up 13 per cent from the previous year.
Never mind any skills gap, Vendors are firing staff who they may never see again to make a short-term cut in costs.
Google handed six per cent of its global workforce pink slips apparently to refocus on its priorities, including AI.
CEO Sundar Pichai said: “We’ve decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles. We’ve already sent a separate email to employees in the US who are affected. In other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and practices.”
Pichai said the company will be reviewing its current operations in order to make the most of its early investments in AI.
Onecom has snapped up IT services provider IMS Technology Services.
The deal adds more than 600 customers to Onecom’s books, the Vodafone, Microsoft, Google, Mitel, Samsung, Apple, Gamma and Five9 partner said.
Onecom’s revenues increased by over 80 per cent to reach £169 million in calendar 2021 primarily due to its aggressive M&A strategy. Founded in 2002, it has been backed by mid-market private equity firm LDC since 2019.
OneCom CEO Martin Flick said the acquisition builds on OneCom’s mission to extend its geographic footprint and technical capabilities.
Software King of the World Microsoft will end partner incentives using its old method way of transacting licences and services from the vendor.
Incentives for these SKUs will end 31 December and Vole has told partners they can only earn incentives through the controversial New Commerce Experience (NCE).
NCE is as popular as the Boston Strangler with the channel because of the 20 percent premium put on month-to-month subscriptions, which are popular with customers of Microsoft services-led partners. This means that customers are incentivised to buy annual subscriptions which could put the channel on the hook for paying the subscription duration should a customer go out of business, get acquired or need fewer licences.
Software King of the World Microsoft will begin rolling out the first phase of its European Union data boundary plan on January 1, 2023.
The company said the plan will allow customers to store and process their customer data within the EU. The move comes two days after the EU commission said it had officially begun approving the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.
The changes mean that companies that use Microsoft products and services can store and process their customer data within the EU. Microsoft has included Azure, Power BI, Dynamics 365 and Office 365 under the first phase.
Insecurity experts Rubrik have appointed former Microsoft chairman and Symantec CEO John Thompson as its lead independent director.
Thompson brings more than 40 years of leadership experience in the technology industry. His claim to fame is that he succeeded Sir William Gates III as chairman of Microsoft’s board and now serves as its lead independent director.
Previously, Thompson was the chairman and CEO of Symantec and currently serves as the chairman of Illumina’s board.
Rubrik co-founder and CEO, Bipul Sinha said that his outfit had built an elite leadership team of cybersecurity experts across public and private sectors to better equip our customers in the ongoing battle against data threats such as ransomware.
“Thompson is a cybersecurity pioneer. His proven leadership and experience building iconic companies will help us continue to deliver data security innovations and define the future of cybersecurity.”
Amazon, Microsoft and Google own more than 76 percent of the enterprise cloud services market in the United States and that anti-competitive state is likely to deteriorate,
IT market research firm Synergy Research Group said American enterprises’ annual spend on cloud infrastructure services was now approaching a significant milestone.
Synergy Research Group chief analyst John Dinsdale said that US spending on cloud services was approaching a $100 billion annual run rate and continues to grow by 30 percent per year, which was unusual for such a large IT market.
Over the past 14 quarters, the US year-over-year growth rate for cloud services has been between 27 percent to 34 percent and the growth is being led by Microsoft, Amazon’s cloud business—Amazon Web Services (AWS)—and Google’s cloud arm Google Cloud, he said.