​Dell EMC has taken the wraps off PowerStore, a new line of mid-range servers that bring Dell and EMC technologies together in a single appliance, on what would have been the first day of parent company Dell Technologies’ annual conference.

Speaking to journalists ahead of the launch, Travis Vigil, SVP of product management at Dell EMC, said it was the first new product introduced since the 2016 merger between Dell and EMC that used expertise from across both sides of the storage and server business, as well as from other arms – notably VMware.

Caitlin Gordon, VP of marketing at Dell EMC Storage, added that the company has been working on this project for “a number of years”.

Explaining the development of PowerStore, Gordon pointed to the fact that data has never been more valuable for businesses than it is today, but noted that it’s also incredibly diverse and difficult to manage. At the same time, organisations are also under pressure to carry out digital transformation, which IT is expected to support.

“What we found in our conversations with customers over the last number of years is they felt like their infrastructure investments require them to prioritise either the needs of their data, or the needs of their operating model in their operations,”” she said.

Upon realising there was nothing in the Dell Technologies portfolio – nor, the company claims, anything in the market more generally – that met that dual need in a single server, the decision was taken to build a new product “from the ground up”.

Scalable, programmable, autonomous

PowerStore is an Active-Active HA dual node appliance, with end-to-end NVMe and the ability to support either NVMe-based flash or dual-ported Optane storage class memory (SCM) drives from Intel. This, Dell claims, makes it 7x faster with 3x lower latency than its previous lead mid-range all-flash product.

The company also says that PowerStore can support any workload, traditional or modern, including containers, files, and virtualised or physical apps and databases. It also offers the ability to scale up and scale out up to 2.8 petabytes effective and 11.3 petabytes effective per cluster respectively, as well as having always-on inline deduplication.

It also has built-in machine learning to help optimise system performance, cloudIQ storage monitoring software and is programmable, allowing administrators to treat the infrastructure “as code”.

PowerStore is available immediately. 

The current global COVID-19 pandemic has had a “mildly positive impact” on cloud sales, the latest analysis from Synergy Research has revealed.

As other industries have suffered at the hands of the virus and subsequent containment measures, cloud service providers have recorded significant growth as many businesses switch to remote working.

During Q1 2020, spending on cloud infrastructure services hit $29 billion, marking a 37% increase from the first quarter of last year. Although this was in line with expected market growth rate, the research firm said there were no signs of a meaningful negative impact and “anecdotal evidence” suggested positive market tailwinds.

Synergy also estimated that market revenue for the last 12 months totalled $104 billion, with public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) increasing by 39% during Q1 2020.

“While COVID-19 is having a devastating impact on communities and economies around the world, indications are that it is having a mildly positive impact on the cloud infrastructure services market,” commented John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group.

In terms of the big market providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) continued to mirror the overall market trend with a global market share of 32%, while Microsoft increased to 18% following a strong year of growth.

Key players Google, Alibaba and Tencent were also found to be significantly outpacing the market and gaining market share, Synergy added, with all three firms seeing revenue increases of 45% or more year-on-year.

“For sure the pandemic is causing some issues for cloud providers, but in uncertain times the public cloud is providing flexibility and a safe haven for enterprises that are struggling to maintain normal operations,” Dinsdale added.

“Cloud provider revenues continue to grow at truly impressive rates, with AWS and Azure in aggregate now having an annual revenue run rate of well over $60 billion.”

​IBM has launched a slew of new AI services that aim to help chief information officers (CIOs) to predict and tackle IT problems before they occur. 

Watson AIOps, unveiled at the company’s Think Digital Conference, are designed to provide automated protection for IT infrastructures that make them more resilient to future disruptions. 

Unforeseen IT incidents and outages can cost businesses in both revenue and reputation, according to IBM, while tech hub Aberdeen.com suggests that the average cost of an outage across businesses is $260,000 an hour. 

Artificial intelligence is being widely tipped as the solution to this; analysts at IDC have predicted that, by 2024, enterprises that are powered by AI will respond to customers, competitors, regulators, and partners 50% faster than those that are not using AI.

AIOps is IBM’s answer, a service that can automate how enterprises self-detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies in real-time. 
 
“We want to arm every CIO in the world to use AI to predict problems before they happen, fix problems before they happen and if they still happen to occur, they can quickly address problems within their IT infrastructure,” Rob Thomas, IBM’s senior VP for Cloud and Data Platform, said during a press conference. 

“Complexity is increasing, certainly things like COVID-19 is driving us to a distributed work environment. A CIO needs a powerful AI – think of it as metaphorically sitting on their shoulder, helping them run the operation and do that in a really elegant way.”

Along with AIOps, IBM also announced edge computing services, launched in partnership with Red Hat. It starts with IBM Edge Application Manager, which is for remote management of AI, analytics and IoT workloads.

IBM Telco Network Cloud Manager, which runs on Red Hat OpenShift, automates virtual and container network functions for 5G applications, and there is also a new dedicated IBM service team for edge computing and telco networks.

By 2015, Manny Medina had reached a point where he felt the only way he could save his failing business was to sell all his office equipment. His company, Outreach, was struggling to find buyers for its recruitment software and after just one year of operation, it didn’t have enough cash left to cover legal fees. 

Out of desperation, Medina and his small team began tagging things on eBay, calculating how much they could get for their computers. They quickly realised the answer was “not much”.

“It was one of those moments where everybody is shaken and freaking out and not thinking rationally,” Medina, who co-founded Outreach and remains the CEO, tells Cloud Pro. “Nobody wants to do it, but we’re all thinking ‘what? We fold and then go get jobs at Microsoft?’ No one wants to do that. That’s when we sat down and talked through giving it another shot.”

What happened next is the startup version of the phoenix from the flames – or unicorn from the flames, if you will – as Outreach moved to a new business model and, five years later, is worth over a billion dollars.

The pivot

Originally Outreach was an online recruitment business using used technology to search the marketplace for IT and digital talent. While the tech side of it worked, according to Medina, both the sales and the marketing teams struggled to get the company going and within a year it was almost out of money.

“We were about two months away from being out of cash,” Medina explains. “The co-founders turned to each other and were like, ‘we shouldn’t be using tech to solve the marketing problem, we should be using tech to just drive more demand’. 

“I have a background in sales, so I voted for using direct sales as a way to generate traffic. We decided if we drove 10 times more meetings per representative we could dig ourselves out of the problem.”

The company didn’t have the resources to throw more people at the problem, however, and its three employees needed to sell as much as a team of twenty to bring in enough cash. To help, Medina and his team built an AI engine that could send out emails with personalised messages and then follow up on any response it got. Before long, they realised the automated call system was generating ten times more potential job interviews and pulling in a reply rate of almost 50% on cold emails. 

“That was pretty unheard of at the time,” Median explains. “The problem with that is we didn’t have the capacity to follow up on all those meetings and actually close business. So I started talking to agency recruiters, telling them, ‘look, I can sell you meetings instead of candidates’.”

The agencies Medina reached out to were sceptical at first, questioning why he would do that, but also curious as to how he was able to generate so many? When he explained the AI engine and how it worked, no one was interested in paying for the meetings – they wanted the software. 

Venture capitalists  

The initial business model struggled to attract investment. Although Medina managed to source enough to get going, there was a lot of rejection from potential backers. Rajeev Batra, a venture capitalist from Mayfield, was one of those who weren’t keen on the idea and suggested it wouldn’t work based on his experience of the market – but he was left impressed by Medina. 

Batra was even more impressed after Outreach pivoted, but by then, the company had grown profitable so quickly that Medina considered not raising capital at all. Batra was persistent, sensing that the team was onto something with lots of potential and eventually wore Medina down in August 2015. 

“I convinced Manny to accelerate the product roadmap and GTM of the company by capitalising it properly and partnering with us to go for it,” Batra tells IT Pro. “I felt they could build a platform company. We made a compelling offer to him and the company with the promise that we would do everything we can to help them succeed.”

For Batra, partnering with Outreach was one of the best, and luckiest, decisions he ever made. For Medina, getting rebuffed for the initial idea turned out to be a financial blessing in disguise. 

“It could very well have been that if we were successful as the original company, we could have been like [hiring marketplace] Vettery, which was sold to [HR consultancy and hiring firm] Adecco for $100 million,” Medina suggests. “We’re now worth $1.1 billion (£883.6 million). Even if we had a good outcome, it would have been ten times lower than what it is right now. Life is perverse that way and now Rajeev thinks we should thank him for not previously investing.”

By 2015, Manny Medina had reached a point where he felt the only way he could save his failing business was to sell all his office equipment. His company, Outreach, was struggling to find buyers for its recruitment software and after just one year of operation, it didn’t have enough cash left to cover legal fees. 

Out of desperation, Medina and his small team began tagging things on eBay, calculating how much they could get for their computers. They quickly realised the answer was “not much”.

“It was one of those moments where everybody is shaken and freaking out and not thinking rationally,” Medina, who co-founded Outreach and remains the CEO, tells Cloud Pro. “Nobody wants to do it, but we’re all thinking ‘what? We fold and then go get jobs at Microsoft?’ No one wants to do that. That’s when we sat down and talked through giving it another shot.”

What happened next is the startup version of the phoenix from the flames – or unicorn from the flames, if you will – as Outreach moved to a new business model and, five years later, is worth over a billion dollars.

The pivot

Originally Outreach was an online recruitment business using used technology to search the marketplace for IT and digital talent. While the tech side of it worked, according to Medina, both the sales and the marketing teams struggled to get the company going and within a year it was almost out of money.

“We were about two months away from being out of cash,” Medina explains. “The co-founders turned to each other and were like, ‘we shouldn’t be using tech to solve the marketing problem, we should be using tech to just drive more demand’. 

“I have a background in sales, so I voted for using direct sales as a way to generate traffic. We decided if we drove 10 times more meetings per representative we could dig ourselves out of the problem.”

The company didn’t have the resources to throw more people at the problem, however, and its three employees needed to sell as much as a team of twenty to bring in enough cash. To help, Medina and his team built an AI engine that could send out emails with personalised messages and then follow up on any response it got. Before long, they realised the automated call system was generating ten times more potential job interviews and pulling in a reply rate of almost 50% on cold emails. 

“That was pretty unheard of at the time,” Median explains. “The problem with that is we didn’t have the capacity to follow up on all those meetings and actually close business. So I started talking to agency recruiters, telling them, ‘look, I can sell you meetings instead of candidates’.”

The agencies Medina reached out to were sceptical at first, questioning why he would do that, but also curious as to how he was able to generate so many? When he explained the AI engine and how it worked, no one was interested in paying for the meetings – they wanted the software. 

Venture capitalists  

The initial business model struggled to attract investment. Although Medina managed to source enough to get going, there was a lot of rejection from potential backers. Rajeev Batra, a venture capitalist from Mayfield, was one of those who weren’t keen on the idea and suggested it wouldn’t work based on his experience of the market – but he was left impressed by Medina. 

Batra was even more impressed after Outreach pivoted, but by then, the company had grown profitable so quickly that Medina considered not raising capital at all. Batra was persistent, sensing that the team was onto something with lots of potential and eventually wore Medina down in August 2015. 

“I convinced Manny to accelerate the product roadmap and GTM of the company by capitalising it properly and partnering with us to go for it,” Batra tells IT Pro. “I felt they could build a platform company. We made a compelling offer to him and the company with the promise that we would do everything we can to help them succeed.”

For Batra, partnering with Outreach was one of the best, and luckiest, decisions he ever made. For Medina, getting rebuffed for the initial idea turned out to be a financial blessing in disguise. 

“It could very well have been that if we were successful as the original company, we could have been like [hiring marketplace] Vettery, which was sold to [HR consultancy and hiring firm] Adecco for $100 million,” Medina suggests. “We’re now worth $1.1 billion (£883.6 million). Even if we had a good outcome, it would have been ten times lower than what it is right now. Life is perverse that way and now Rajeev thinks we should thank him for not previously investing.”

Office workers will be urged to continue working from home as part of the UK government’s roadmap to easing lockdown restrictions, according to reports. 

The proposal is among a list of guidelines drawn up by the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) following consultations with bosses, unions and trade bodies. 

The documents are thought to be a crucial element of an announcement from Boris Johnson on how the government plans to ease the lockdown in order to get the UK’s economy moving, which he is expected to make on Thursday, according to The Financial Times. 

UK deaths due to the coronavirus increased by 315 over the weekend to 28,446, but the government said last week that the country had “passed the peak”. 

With the public and businesses now asking when they can return to work, the government is concerned about transport systems being overwhelmed, so those that can work from home will be encouraged to continue to do so after the lockdown is lifted. Businesses will also be asked to monitor the mental and physical health of these employees. 

The daily routines of those that return to the office will change significantly, according to the guidelines. Businesses with five or more employees will have to undertake “risk assessments” before allowing anyone to return and will be asked to submit a document explaining how they’ll maintain safe working conditions.

As part of these measures, businesses will reportedly be asked to reduce hot-desking and use “staggered” shift times to minimise the likelihood of infection spreading, while employees will be told to avoid sharing stationary and to steer clear of face-to-face meetings.

The two-metre distancing protocol will be enforced by floor tape, according to the guidelines, and staff canteens will remain closed.

There was very little in the documents about the use of PPE, but the guidelines insist on high levels of deep cleaning and sanitary practices within all work environments.

​Welcome to the fourth issue of IT Pro 20/20, our brand-new digital magazine that brings all of the previous month’s most important tech issues into clear view.

Each month, we will shine a spotlight on the content that we feel every IT professional should be aware of, only in a condensed version that can be read on the go, at a time that suits you.

This month we’re taking a look at how technology is reshaping our lives, for better and for worse. While it’s something of a cliche to say, we really are at the mercy of technology. The coronavirus has pushed the majority of businesses to extreme limits, and without technology to keep us connected and productive, many would surely have collapsed by now. It’s this idea of technology continuing to reshape how we interact with the world around us that is at the core of this month’s theme.

Our lead feature takes a look at what Microsoft is doing to help repair the damage caused by the launch of Tay, a chatbot so ill-suited to its purpose that it would serve as a warning for anyone developing AI for public consumption. We also highlight how technology has influenced management styles in recent years, and how overbearing cyber security training has the potential to turn employees against a business.

As ever, you’ll also find a roundup of the four biggest stories of the month that are likely to reverberate throughout 2020.

The next IT Pro 20/20 will be available on Friday 29 May. Previous issues can be found here.

We hope you enjoy reading this month’s issue. If you would like to receive each issue in your inbox as they release, you can subscribe to our mailing list here.

​Amazon Web Services surpassed $10 billion for 2020 first-quarter revenues, putting the tech giant on a run rate of more than $40 billion.

The overall net income of Amazon was down by $1 billion compared to last year, according to its earnings report, but the company’s cloud computing arm contributed 13.5% to the overall revenues. 

Analysts surveyed by FactSet had expected the cloud giant to hit $10.33 billion for the first quarter of 2020, according to CNBC, but it fell just short of that at $10.22 billion.

According to analysts at Goldman Sachs, the sudden global switch to remote business operations has helped the company avoid big financial hits due to the coronavirus.

“Our partner checks continue to reflect the relative strength in the AWS platform, as incremental demand from customers to accelerate their migration into the cloud, provide full virtual-desktop coverage (AWS WorkSpaces), and other work from home and business continuity needs, seem to have more than offset the disruption from longer sales cycles and delays in planned migrations as IT priorities have shifted in the current environment,” the analysts wrote, according to CNBC.

Since it’s inception in 2006, AWS has become a powerful business of its own, with a growth rate of 33%, and despite slowing gradually, it’s still way out in front in the cloud market.

Its closest challenger is Microsoft, which has shown quicker growth over the last year or so. On Thursday the company reported 59% growth for Azure, beating Wall Street estimates with services like Teams and Xbox seeing surges in users. 

Despite this, AWS is still ahead, largely due to it being the first big player in the market. Its first-quarter revenues for the last six years highlights how quickly it has grown, according to a tweet from Bloomberg’s Jon Ehrlichman, with just $1.1 billion recorded in 2014.​