SpaceX and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) have struck a partnership that’ll see the two companies deliver data management, cloud services, and applications to enterprise customers across the world.

The agreement will combine SpaceX’s flagship Starlink low-orbit satellite system with Google Cloud’s data centres to provide high-speed broadband to customers on the network edge.

Starlink, a low latency broadband system comprising roughly 1,500 satellites, will base its ground stations within Google’s data centres, with GCP’s high capacity private network supporting the delivery of the global satellite internet service.

The aim is to connect businesses and consumers to the internet and to cloud computing services regardless of where they’re based, and with the highest possible levels of connectivity.

“Applications and services running in the cloud can be transformative for organisations, whether they’re operating in a highly networked or remote environment,” said senior vice president for infrastructure at Google Cloud, Urs Hölzle.

“We are delighted to partner with SpaceX to ensure that organizations with distributed footprints have seamless, secure, and fast access to the critical applications and services they need to keep their teams up and running.”

Combining Starlink’s broadband system with Google’s infrastructure will offer organisations across the world networking availability and speeds that they should expect in the modern age, SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell added.

SpaceX began developing Starlink in 2015, and the system has undergone deployment tests over the last few years. The objective has been to deploy roughly 1,500 satellites by 2021 in order to launch the networking service for enterprise customers, which SpaceX has almost achieved.

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) also submitted filings in 2019 for approval of up to 30,000 additional satellites to complement the 12,000 Starlink satellites that the FCC had already approved, according to Space News.

SpaceX previously struck a partnership with Microsoft in October 2020 to allow the computing giant to launch a fleet of satellites to host its Azure Space platform. This services the space industry’s mission needs while also claiming to offer high networking speeds with low latency for public and private organisations.

The networking service, powered by GCP, will be available from the second half of this year.

IBM has been a fixture of the computing industry almost since its inception, defining various eras with products such as the Model 5150 or Watson, the AI-powered suite of business services. One of the secrets to its longevity has been a powerful ability to reinvent itself when market shifts threaten the viability of its business model. As a result, the company is just as relevant today as it was when founded in 1911. 

While we may not readily associate IBM with cloud computing, this is where the company sees its future, alongside the twin pillars of AI and quantum computing. As such, the firm has launched itself into a radical shift in pursuit of a revenue model reliant on expanding its hybrid cloud business. This is a strategy that’s seen IBM plot to cleave off its managed services business as well as make ten acquisitions within the space of a year, comprising one of the computing giant’s most comprehensive reinventions yet. It’s a process, however, that its executives feel is essential to IBM’s long-term survival.

The ‘$1 trillion hybrid cloud opportunity’

IBM’s leadership has often referenced the “$1 trillion hybrid cloud opportunity” as a key driver for the strategy, and for good reason. The market has shown a long-term move towards cloud services, Gartner VP analyst Craig Lowery tells IT Pro, with many businesses changing their strategies to help their clients achieve their cloud objectives. “Customers have been making their requirements known for many years,” Lowery says. IBM has, like many other companies, eventually had to respond to that, he adds, saying that its leadership “has taken the appropriate actions, as they see it, to align with customer needs”.

This explosive cloud growth coincides with the continued success of businesses such as AWS, Google Cloud and Alibaba, with a wave of digital transformation projects triggering an acceleration in cloud adoption. “Overall, these trends have maintained growth in cloud spending,” says Blake Murray, research analyst at Canalys. “However, increased spending is now happening across almost all industries, with the need for digitalisation, app modernisation, content streaming, collaboration software, online learning and gaming. This is likely to continue, as an increasingly digital world becomes a ‘new normal’.”

State of decline

Just as the fortunes of major cloud giants have surged, the financial power of IBM as a wider entity has dwindled over the previous decade.

Delving into specific business units, we can see that performance declined on all fronts between 2011 and 2016, but especially the Systems and Technology segment. Like for like comparisons beyond this point are difficult, as IBM underwent two internal restructures, once in 2015 then again in 2018, but these moves failed to stem the long-term trend, and revenues continued to decline. At the same time, IBM’s cloud operations – spread across all divisions – began to spark into life, mirroring wider industry trends. 

Today, cloud computing is one of IBM’s most important revenue streams and will continue to grow in significance. The rising value of the firm’s cloud business is clear, and a key reason why its leadership sees cloud computing as a future moneymaker.

Sparking an internal revolution

In October, IBM announced it would carve away its managed services business into a separate entity by the end of 2021. This is a key part of the overall strategy, the company’s vice-president for Hybrid Cloud EMEA, Agnieszka Bruyère, tells IT Pro, with its AI, quantum computing and cloud operations being recast as the three main pillars of IBM’s operations. 

The origins of this strategy stretch back two or three years, she adds, when the company first pinpointed the key role cloud computing would play in its clients’ digital transformation journeys. At that stage, however, 80% of its customers’ workloads were still residing in the data centre. This is partially why IBM is pursuing hybrid cloud. The firm, Bruyère explains, doesn’t consider the public cloud alone to be a viable long-term solution for helping its customers modernise. “It cannot be only a purely public cloud transformation,” she says. “It does not meet the companies’ reality in terms of security, compliance, business model, whatever, and really the best way to respond to companies’ challenges is a hybrid cloud strategy.”

The foundational step on this path was IBM’s record $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, with the open-source giant brought in to bolster the company’s technology portfolio. Playing a key role in driving this deal forward was Arvind Krishna, who at the time was VP for hybrid cloud but was named CEO in April 2020. His promotion coincided with the recruitment of Bank of America veteran Howard Boville as his replacement. Since then, Bruyère tells IT Pro, IBM has adopted much-needed “clarity” on its hybrid cloud strategy, with the business taking more aggressive steps since.

The pair have played a key role in making a set of strategic acquisitions while paving the way for the divestiture of its entire managed services business. This follows a long history of divestments, Krishna recently commented, with IBM divesting networking in the 90s, PCs back in the 2000s and semiconductors about five years ago.

“We want to make sure we are focusing our investment in this space, and we really want to do it only in this space – hybrid cloud and AI,” Bruyère says. “Another new aspect is about the industrial offerings with the new management, and this is really important because it’s not only about building technical capabilities, but also bringing the regulation layer; the specifics for every industry.” 

The key difference since the leadership reshuffle is a strategic focus on the logistics around hybrid cloud, rather than the technology. The company has made efforts to apply its technology to the needs and requirements of particular industries, taking into account unique security, data protection and regulatory requirements, among other considerations. This was signalled with the launch of IBM Cloud for Financial Services, with specific sector-based services set to follow. 

IBM’s cloud computing ‘shopping spree’ 

The changed approach has also been expressed in the nature of IBM’s ten acquisitions since the Red Hat deal closed in 2019, one of the most recent being Taos Mountain, a cloud consultancy firm. IBM is hoping the services of each business, largely small enterprises, can give its wider cloud offering an added edge. 

Reflecting Bruyère’s assessment of IBM’s new strategic direction, Lowery highlights the importance of professional services in making cloud adoption work as the reason the company has focused on acquiring consultancies. Of course, of the ten, five are involved in consultancy. “The expertise about how to build in the cloud, how to build across clouds, how to build from cloud to your on-premises data centre – which is hybrid – most of that requires skills and expertise that are not readily available for hire, except through a professional services company,” he says. 

Red Hat, meanwhile, fits into the equation perfectly thanks to its technology for containers and container orchestration, as well as its OpenShift family of software products. “That technology is well-suited to building hybrid and multi-cloud solutions where you have one standard way for building applications,” Lowery adds. “It’s not the only way to solve hybrid and multi-cloud scenarios, but it is a valid way, and Red Hat brings IBM the technology to solve that particular set of problems in that way.” 

The rocky road to cloud success

Although the opportunity for IBM is undeniable, so too is the need for urgency. While the size of the cloud market has certainly grown in recent years, the grip of the biggest cloud companies has also tightened; as time passes it becomes increasingly difficult for a challenger to make serious inroads. 

Looking at how prospective customers plan to spend in the coming year, we can also see that IBM faces more of an uphill struggle for business than any other player in this space. 

Turning the tide commercially will be IBM’s most pressing challenge, although we can start to see these efforts pay off with a turnaround in IBM’s financial results for the first quarter of 2021. As far as Murray is concerned, the company is certainly on the right track with the actions it’s taking, especially the decision to spin off its managed services business into an entity named Kyndryl.

“It allows IBM to become much more nimble and responsive,” he explains, “increasing its relevance in a multi-cloud, hybrid world, and reducing competition with the largest systems integrators that will be critical partners for its hybrid cloud and AI offerings. The most important move it has made recently is establishing a new, simplified global sales structure and go-to-market model, giving partners ownership of all but its largest enterprise customers and removing compensation for IBM sales selling into any other accounts.”

Success will very much depend on IBM’s commitment to its new ecosystem and channel model, with a need to reduce complexity and refresh its rules of engagement, he adds. “In the past, IBM has made similar promises but failed to follow through. It now has an opportunity to establish itself as a vendor of partner choice.”

Four years after the global WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware attacks, two-thirds of companies still haven’t patched the vulnerabilities that caused them, according to cloud network detection and response company ExtraHop.

The company investigated data from its Reveal(x) security platform in the first quarter of 2021 to determine which protocols its customers were running. It found that 88% of them were still running at least one device using SMBv1, which was a pivotal attack vector for the EternalBlue exploit used in the two ransomware attacks. 

Although a single device could mean a company is maintaining it just for use by an attack team, a more worrying statistic was that 67% of companies are running over 10 SMBv1-enabled devices. Over two-thirds (37%) were running more than 50, and 31% of companies checked had over 100 SMBv1 devices on their networks.

The report also highlighted heavy use of two other protocols in Windows servers. The first, called Local Loop Multicast Name Resolution (LLMNR), is an alternative to DNS for resolving basic names within a private network. It has a similar problem to Windows’ old NetBIOS naming service, in that it communicates with all clients on the network rather than a specific server. 

That enables an attacker to listen for and reply to access requests, creating a race condition to harvest the client’s hashed credentials if it establishes a conversation quickly enough. It can then decrypt those credentials, giving an attacker access to a client’s network account, or use them in a pass-the-hash attack.

The other protocol, New Technology LAN Manager (NTLM) v1, is a decades-old network authentication mechanism that has long been obsolete. Nevertheless, over a third (34%) of companies have over 10 devices using it, ExtraHop said. Almost one in five (19%) had over 100 devices using the protocol, despite Microsoft advising people to stop using it altogether in favor of the more secure Kerberos system.

The report also found that few companies had embraced using TLS encryption over HTTP (HTTPS), which browser vendors have aggressively enforced. It found that 81% of enterprise environments were still using HTTP to send access credentials in plain text.

ExtraHop said it analyzed over four petabytes of traffic each day in its investigation of online protocol usage.

Microsoft’s Azure Blockchain Service is set to be retired on 10 September 2021, with users being asked to migrate their ledger data to an alternative offering.

Although the platform still supports existing deployments, it’s no longer accepting new members or projects.

The decision to sunset Azure Blockchain Service after only two years was confirmed earlier this week, with Microsoft announcing its deprecation on 10 May.

With a deadline for the retirement set for 10 September, users are being requested to opt for an alternative platform.

The tech giant also provided a thorough migration guide which aims to guide customers, including GE, J.P. Morgan, Singapore Airlines, Starbucks, and Xbox, through the process, and recommended that they migrate their data to the ConsenSys Quorum Ethereum service.

“Based on your current development state, you can either opt to use existing ledger data on Azure Blockchain Service or start a new network and use the solution of your choice,” stated Microsoft. “We recommend creating a new consortium based on a solution of your choice in all scenarios where you do not need or intend to use existing ledger data on Azure Blockchain Service.”

Blockchain is a form of distributed ledger technology, made famous because it is the system on which Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are built upon. However, there is more to blockchain than just digital money, with the technology also being used by banks to digitise the transaction records of private placements, or by jewellery companies to help track the origin and ownership of precious gems.

Microsoft first started reselling blockchain as a service (BaaS) in 2015, but only launched the fully-managed consortium network, Azure Blockchain Service, in 2019, allowing users to build, govern, as well as expand blockchain networks at scale.

Microsoft has not provided a succinct reason as to what motivated this decision, although it’s suspected that the platform wasn’t performing as well as its rivals.

The process of the shutdown can also be followed on Twitter through @AzureEndofLife, which was created by Codit Azure architect Tom Kerkhove as a way of monitoring the process.

The news of the sunsetting of Azure Blockchain Service comes months after IBM and R3 announced that they were working together to provide clients with new options to scale blockchain technology while ensuring performance, compliance, and data privacy.

VMware has promoted executive VP and COO Rangarajan “Raghu” Raghuram as its new CEO, with the change taking effect at the beginning of June.

Raghuram replaces current CEO Zane Rowe, who took over as  “interim” CEO while the firm searched for a long term successor for Pat Gelsinger.

A number of analysts predicted a new CEO would come from within the company, with chief operating officer Sanjay Poonen thought to be the most likely candidate. However, Raghuram’s promotion came with the news that Poonen had decided to leave the company after seven years.

Raghuram is an 18-year veteran of VMware and is currently in charge of its products and cloud services. He was part of the team that helped to develop its core virtualisation business and since 2003 and is said to have played a “pivotal” role in the company’s mergers and acquisitions strategy and a key driver of its partnerships with Dell Technologies.

“Congratulations to my good friend @RaghuRaghuram on your well-deserved promotion to CEO. With his tenure of 18 years at VMware, Raghu is practically a founder. I know he will take the company to new heights in the years to come, I am cheering on,” Poonen posted on Twitter.

As CEO, Raghuram will be tasked with leading VMware as it is spun off from Dell Technologies. The latter has an 81% stake in the cloud company but plans to separate in order to generate more revenue and ultimately reduce its debts.

“I am thrilled to have Raghu step into the role of CEO at VMware,” Micheal Dell, chairman of the VMware Board of Directors, said. “Throughout his career, he has led with integrity and conviction, playing an instrumental role in the success of VMware. Raghu is now in position to architect VMware’s future, helping customers and partners accelerate their digital businesses in this multi-cloud world.”

The UK government has unveiled a new policy and funding programme which aims to ensure that all adults have equal opportunities to learn new skills such as coding.

Announced as part of the Queen’s Speech on Tuesday, the legislation is aimed at supporting the UK’s post-pandemic recovery by providing people with the chance to upskill and retrain regardless of their age. This includes facilitating access to student loans, providing employers with a statutory role in planning publicly-funded training programmes, as well as granting the Secretary of State for Education increased influence in monitoring whether colleges meet local needs.

The new policies are part of the recently unveiled ‘Lifetime Skills Guarantee’, which last month launched 400 free qualifications ranging from engineering and digital skills to social care.

Available to any adult who has not already achieved a qualification at Level 3, the digital qualifications offer digital skills boot camps in computer science, software deployment, systems infrastructure, cyber security, and coding. The courses have already managed to train 3,000 people, with another 14,000 signed up to attend later this year.

According to the government, the ‘Lifetime Skills Guarantee’ will allow adults to “change careers, upskill regularly, and stay up to date with changing knowledge and technologies”.

BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT described it as “a significant step in the right direction to address the digital skills gap”.

BCS head of Apprenticeships, Annette Allmark, said that the government’s plans “will allow more people to access the training in digital skills they need for their careers – and to develop the skills the economy needs to flourish and ‘build back better’ after the pandemic”.

“Hopefully, this funding will also increase the diversity of people learning digital skills now and in the future. It’s important that the government continues to build on the many excellent training opportunities already available, such as the wide range of popular digital apprenticeships,” she added.

Allmark also stated that “there’s never been such a significant demand for digital skills – not just for an increasing number of digital occupations, but across all occupations as a result of businesses having to digitally transform during COVID”.

According to a recent study, the majority of surveyed HR decision-makers in the UK said they believed reliance on advanced digital skills was going to increase over the next five years. Despite this, participation in A-Level and further education IT courses has declined, with the number of students taking IT subjects at GCSE level falling by 40% since 2015.

However, there is always time to retrain: the new legislative measures aim to assist adults in gaining the competencies required for better-paid employment, which often require candidates to prove that they have the necessary skills. These jobs were found to be notoriously understaffed, with employers unable to fill a quarter of their vacancies due to a lack of employees with the right skills even prior to the pandemic, according to the government.

Allmark said that the areas dealing with “significant shortages of skilled people” are “vital sectors” including artificial intelligence, cyber security, and software development. 

“In addition, the digital transformation in the NHS has accelerated during the pandemic with technology being widely used across the service,” she added.

IBM unveiled a suite of new artificial intelligence (AI) services on Monday ahead of its virtual IBM Think 2021 conference. 

The new features include software that teaches AI how to translate code, a cloud migration service, and more functions for the firm’s Watson Assistant. 

The most interesting of the announcements was a Rosetta Stone-like service for programming code called ‘CodeNet‘, which is an expansive dataset designed to teach AI and machine learning systems how to translate code. It comprises some 14 million snippets and 500 million lines of code spread across more than 55 legacy and active languages, such as Cobol, Java, C++, and Python. The dataset is constructed in a way that allows for bidirectional translation, enabling Cobol legacy code to be translated into Java, for example. 

“Given its wealth of programmes written in a multitude of languages, we believe Project CodeNet can serve as a benchmark dataset for source-to-source translation and do for AI and code what the ImageNet dataset did years ago for computer vision,” the firm said. 

AI featured heavily in the updates, with new features for Cloud Pak for Data, an SaaS integration platform called ‘Watson Orchestrate’, and a Watson Assistant collaboration with healthcare providers handling increased workloads due to the pandemic. The tech giant also revealed ‘Maximo Mobile’, a mobile platform based on IBM’s Maximo asset management service. 

The updates also included a new cloud migration service called ‘Mono2Micro’ that also uses AI to analyse large enterprise applications and provide recommendations on how to best adapt them for the move to the cloud. IBM said it can simplify and speed up an error-prone process, which can reduce costs and maximise returns on investment.

Beyond artificial intelligence, the announcements included a hybrid cloud-based financial services platform, built with Red Hat OpenShift. There was also a $1 billion investment to support IBM’s partner ecosystem which includes skills training, and a streamlined service for quantum computing called Qiskit Runtime.

NHS Digital has been accused of a potential conflict of interest over contracts given to IT service Accenture, where two of its board members previously worked. 

David Rowland, the director of the Centre for Health and Public Interest (CHPI) told The Financial Times that the close links between the two firms were “concerning”.

The digital body, which provides data and IT systems for the NHS, handed over 15% of its yearly budget to Accenture, with contracts worth around £33 million out of its total £218 million operating expenditure, according to its own 2018-2019 accounts. 

What’s more, the family of another non-executive, Deborah Oakley, is also listed as owning shares in Accenture, according to a ‘Declarations and Conflicts of Interest Register’ that was published on 30 June last year. Oakley has said the shares were held by her husband and she herself has never worked at the consultancy. However, the large sums of public money that have been exchanged has caught the attention of the CHPI think tank. 

Rowland told the FT that it is “concerning that there are a number of close links between the two organisations which give rise to potential conflicts of interest and opportunities for undue influence”. 

In a statement given to IT Pro, Accenture said its contracts with NHS Digital “were awarded following a competitive public tender process.

“We are proud of our work supporting major NHS projects including the delivery of Microsoft Teams during Covid and significant improvements to NHS Mail, Office 365 and cyber security services for all NHS users,” it added.

Accenture is already facing criticism for charging high fees for its services during the pandemic, including its work on the government’s £37 billion test and trace programme. The consultancy firms received 18 contracts related to the UK’s pandemic response, according to the research firm Trussell.

Since the start of 2016, it has also won a total of 94 contracts from public authorities worth around £480m. 

Oracle has won a contract with Premier League to provide it with technology to power new in-match statistics that aim to give a deeper understanding of live action on the pitch.

Starting with the 2021/22 season, “Match Insights – Powered by Oracle Cloud” will present advanced player performance data and statistics during global broadcast coverage, and across the Premier League’s social channels.

This includes the tracking of player positions, a live win probability scale, and a momentum tracker that measures the likelihood of the team in possession scoring a goal in the next 10 seconds.

Machine learning models are also set to be developed to generate immediate results based on live data streams, real-time tracking data, and facts collected on each of the League’s players and from thousands of previous matches.

“We are always looking at new ways to bring the Premier League to life and enhance the analysis of the competition,” said Premier League chief executive, Richard Masters. “Oracle is a global brand with a great track record of driving innovation, and we look forward to working together to bring new levels of engagement to fans around the world.”

Oracle’s deal follows similar efforts by tech companies to offer technical expertise to the footballing world, including AWS’s partnership with the Bundesliga last year. Germany’s top football league signed up to a range of machine learning, analytical, and storage services to build a statistical platform that provides viewers with real-time data on player statistics, game outcomes, and predictions on future play.

Meanwhile, the sports industry was urged to reform its cyber security last year after the managing director of a Premier League football club narrowly avoided losing out £1 million to a phishing scam. According to a report from the National Cyber Security Centre, the managing director entered his credentials into a fake Office 365 page operated by hackers.

Dell has unveiled more details surrounding its Apex services platform as part of the first day of its annual Dell Technologies World event.

First announced by the company in October of last year, the Apex Project aims to consolidate Dell’s ‘as a service’ cloud products as well as facilitate the process of acquiring, managing, maintaining, and servicing physical IT infrastructure by its customers.

Less than three months after launching a private cloud platform, Apex Cloud Services now also includes hybrid cloud and deployment, the latter of which was found to be up to 86% faster than a do-it-yourself hybrid cloud model, according to a recent Storage Review report, commissioned by Dell.

Apart from the addition to its Cloud Services, Dell has also unveiled Apex Data Storage Services, Apex Custom Solutions, as well as the Apex Console.

Apex Data Storage Services offers three performance tiers of block and file enterprise storage, with capacity starting as low as 50 terabytes. Available as one or three-year subscriptions, the new offering lets businesses “focus on data, not drives”, according to Dell CMO Allison Dew.

Apex Custom Solutions, described as “the industry’s broadest infrastructure portfolio to customers as-a-Service”, is comprised of Apex Flex On Demand and Apex Data Center Utility, which allow enterprises to customise their aaS experience based on their “specific technology needs, operational model, and consumption habits,” said Dew. While Flex On Demand provides Dell Technologies servers, storage, data protection, and hyperconverged infrastructure as-a-Service, the Data Center Utility suite supplies custom metering and managed services applied across customers’ data centres.

“You can pick any infrastructure from Dell Technologies, and any level of management you would like. We then deliver it to you on an aaS basis. From storage or server racks, all the way to a complete data centre, APEX custom solutions can help you turn your IT infrastructure into a custom solution to meet your individual needs,” said Dew.

Lastly, Dell unveiled the Apex Console, which lets customers monitor and manage Apex services using actionable insights and predictive analytics. Described by Dew as a “real-time access to system health and performance of your services”, the console provides usage and spending reports which help businesses adjust their Dell services to their needs and budget.

According to the CMO, staying on top of current tech trends and advancements can make managing digital transformation “a complex undertaking” for businesses.

“Enter Dell Technologies Apex, a breakthrough portfolio of aaS offerings that help simplify your digital transformation by increasing IT agility and control,” she said, adding that the new offerings are available starting 5 May.

Speaking at an introductory panel of Dell Technologies EMEA executives, SVP Claire Vyvyan highlighted the differences between Apex and the public cloud.

“It’s very different because we can bring it at scale, we can bring it to the edge of your infrastructure, we can bring it to your data centre, (…) we can work with your preferred service providers rather than in big global data centres,” she told Dell Technologies World attendees. “And I think that’s going to be really important in the future, when the proliferation of data is at the edge.”