Charles “Chuck” Geschke, the co-founder of Adobe and the co-creator of the portable document format (PDF), has died at the age of 81. 
 
Together with John Warnock, Geschke set up Adobe in 1982 and helped to develop many software innovations that are still in use today, almost 40 years later. 

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The current CEO of Adobe, Shantanu Narayen, sent an email to employees announcing Geschke’s passing. 

“It is with profound sadness that I share that our beloved co-founder Dr Chuck Geschke, has passed away at the age of 81, leaving an indelible mark on our company and the world,” Narayen wrote. “This is a huge loss for the entire Adobe community and the technology industry, for whom he has been a guide and hero for decades.”

Imaging Science Laboratory

Geschke was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1939 and enjoyed a successful career in maths and technology long before co-founding Adobe. He taught mathematics at John Carroll University in the 1960s before completing a PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in 1972. 

After his studies, Geschke began working at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), building a mainframe computer and developing programming tools for the Xerox Star workstation. In 1978, he started the Imaging Sciences Laboratory at PARC and researched graphics, optics and image processing. While working at the labs he hired a computer scientist called John Warnock with whom he formed a strong working partnership.

Warnock and Geschke developed interpress – a paged description language (PDL) – but were unable to convince Xerox management of its commercial value. The two men left to form their own company, with PDL eventually forming the basis of PostScritpt. 

Adobe Creek

Like a number of today’s biggest tech firms, Adobe was founded in a garage – John Warnock’s, to be precise – but the startup was originally called “Adobe Creek”. PostScript was developed on Apple computers and resulted in one of the first desktop publishing systems – users could see their documents on screen, exactly as they would appear in print. This was known as WYSIWYG, an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, and helped to create a whole new industry within printing and has led to one of the most popular software suites of all time. 

Geschke was Adobe’s COO from 1986 to 1994 but retired in 2000. In 1992 he was kidnapped at gunpoint and held captive for four days by two men who tried to demand ransom from his wife, Nancy “Nan” Geschke. He was found, unharmed, and the two men were sentenced to life terms in state prison. 

In 2009, Geschke was awarded the National Medal of Technology by Barack Obama, but despite this and his contribution to the modern world, Geschke remained a very grounded man. 

“He was really a humble, humble man – I can say that, as his wife,” Nan Geschke told Mercury News. “He was very proud of his success, of course, but he was very circumspect about how much he had to do with that.”

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People working from home during the pandemic spent more time at their job and were less likely to be promoted or receive a bonus, but their average pay was 20% higher.

That’s according to the ONS, which has been studying the shift to remote work throughout the pandemic. It found that there’s been a 9.4% increase of people who have completed some work at home, rising to 35.9% of the working population, between 2019 and 2020.

According to the study, those who completed any work from home did six hours of unpaid overtime on average per week in 2020, compared with 3.6 hours for those that never work from home. 

Homeworkers were more likely to work in the evenings too and were less than half as likely to be promoted than all other workers between 2012 and 2017. Moreover, those who worked from home were around 38% less likely to receive a bonus compared to those who never worked from home between 2013 and 2020.

Despite this, the average gross weekly pay of workers who had recently worked from home was about 20% higher in 2020 than those who had never worked from home in their main job, something the ONS explained continues a long-running trend.

The sickness rate was also 0.9% on average in 2020, compared with 2.2% for those who never worked from home. The working day of homeworkers is longer but also more flexible than those who work away from home, with later and more varied starts and more frequent breaks that are longer too.

The union Prospect told IT Pro that the research matches with the experiences of its own members, and highlighted that remote working has been instrumental in providing flexibility and keeping people safe during the pandemic.

“But for many it has also meant an always-on culture with longer unpaid hours and fewer opportunities to get on at work,” said Mike Clancy, the general secretary.

“This is a revolutionary moment for the future of workplaces, but there are too many in business and government rushing into decisions without thinking about long-term consequences and without listening to what workers actually want. 

The results of the ONS study come after Prospect called for a legal requirement to be put in place to bring about a “right to disconnect” policy that stipulates when companies can contact their employees when working from home. Prospect said that including this right in the Employment Bill would be a big step in redefining blurred boundaries and show the government is serious about taking on the “dark side” of remote working.

Zoom has announced a $100 million (£71.5M) venture fund that aims to “stimulate growth” of the video conferencing platform’s ecosystem of Zoom Apps, as well as their integrations, developer platform, and hardware. 

The newly launched fund will invest in developer partners with “an early market traction” who propose viable products with the potential to benefit the experience of Zoom users.

Chosen companies will be awarded initial investments of between $250,000 (£179,000) and $2.5 million (£1.8 million) to develop the new solutions to be used by Zoom customers.

The company announced that, at the time being, “dozens” of Zoom Apps are being developed and are “an important component in building the future of video communications”.

Although the announcement can be seen as an effort by the company to remain relevant in the face of the post-pandemic return to the office, Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan hinted that the fund was inspired by his own experience in launching the video conferencing platform back in 2011.

“Without the support of early investors, Zoom would not be what it is today. What I’ve learned over the past year is that we need to keep meetings productive and fun. My hope is that the Zoom Apps Fund will help our customers meet happier and collaborate even more seamlessly, and at the same time help entrepreneurs build new businesses as our platform evolves,” he said.

The announcement of the fund comes less than a month after the company launched new tools for developers to help them build video-based applications and websites with fully customisable, native user interfaces, called Video SDK. Developers can also access APIs, webhooks, chatbots, and even an analytical platform that provide real-time data on their builds, such as customer engagement and performance figures.

As one of the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic, Zoom experienced a 355% rise in adoption in the second quarter of 2020 as consumers and businesses adopted video conferencing platform following the mass shift to remote working. However, the gradual reopening of working spaces and offices means that Zoom might be cast away in favour of traditional face-to-face meetings.

This has prompted the company to reveal new features aimed at hybrid workforces, including new updates to its Zoom Rooms video conferencing hardware suite.

IBM’s first-quarter earnings for 2021 beat analyst expectations with modest revenue growth of 0.9% ending four consecutive quarters of decline.

The company’s revenue for the first three months of the year came in at $17.73 billion, still some way off the $21.8 billion it recorded in Q1 of 2020 just before the pandemic spread to Europe and the US. 

For the first three months of 2021, IBM’s Global Technology Services – the unit that handles managed services and outsourcing – brought in revenues of $6.37 billion. Its Cloud and Cognitive Software Division, which includes Red Hat, was up 4% with revenues $5.44 billion, with Red Hat on its own reporting impressive growth of 17%.

IBM’s Global Business Services, which includes consulting, contributed $4.23 billion in revenue, a 2% increase year-on-year. System sales, such as mainframe computers, was also up 4% with revenue coming in at $1.43 billion. 

“Strong performance this quarter in cloud, driven by increasing client adoption of our hybrid cloud platform, and growth in software and consulting enabled us to get off to a solid start for the year,” said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna. 

“While we have more work to do, we are confident we can achieve full-year revenue growth and meet our adjusted free cash flow target in 2021.”

Krishna has now completed a full year at the helm of IBM and this is the company’s best quarter under his leadership. While a number of other cloud firms have seen revenues increase throughout the pandemic, IBM turned out to be one of the few that saw consecutive declines. In the fourth quarter of 2020, its revenues dropped 6%, its sharpest fall for five years. 

IBM is currently undergoing a major shift by splitting its business in two; IBM is transitioning into a full cloud firm and its infrastructure segments will fall under a new company called Kyndryl. With more and more companies turning to the cloud or accelerating digital transformation plans, IBM hopes its two units will be better placed to capitalise. 

Google Cloud and Siemens have announced a new partnership that will see AI and machine learning brought to factory floors.

Siemens is planning on integrating Google Cloud’s data cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning (ML) technologies with its factory automation tools.

With this partnership, the companies hope manufacturers will be able to harmonise factory data, run cloud-based AI/ML models from that data, and deploy algorithms at the network edge. This could produce applications that visually inspect products, for example, or predict the wear-and-tear of machines on the assembly line.

The ultimate goal, said the companies, is to make the deployment of AI in connection with the Industrial Edge easier. They hope this will empower employees as they work on the plant floor, automate mundane tasks and improve overall quality.

“The potential for artificial intelligence to radically transform the plant floor is far from being exhausted. Many manufacturers are still stuck in AI ‘pilot projects’ today – we want to change that,” said Axel Lorenz, VP of Control at Factory Automation of Siemens Digital Industries.

“Combining AI/ML technology from Google Cloud with Siemens’ solutions for Industrial Edge and industrial operation will be a game changer for the manufacturing industry.”

Google Cloud has forged a number of partnerships, including one with Intel which focused on developing integrating services for network providers to develop 5G innovations across various platforms. The collaboration highlighted Google Cloud’s ambitions in the 5G world, as well as Intel’s goal to develop 5G with software-defined infrastructures.

A month after that announcement, Google Cloud hired Uri Frank, an Intel engineering veteran, to ramp up in-house chip production. This was part of the company’s new server chip design efforts as part of its increasing investments in custom silicon. Frank was VP of Platform and Silicon Engineering at Intel and had been appointed corporate VP of Intel’s Design Engineering Group but chose to leave.

Ocado has invested £10 million into Oxford-based self-driving car startup Oxbotica that includes a partnership to develop autonomous vehicles for curbside deliveries.

The investment came as part of a funding round for Oxbotica and forms the basis of a multi-year collaboration that ultimately aims to reduce costs for Ocado.

The deal is an extension of an existing partnership between the two companies and will focus specifically on developing new hardware and software interfaces for autonomous vehicles that will be used in and around Ocado’s Customer Fulfilment Centre (CFC). This includes a range of logistical drones for use across its factories and loading areas.

Both firms are also interested in “last mile” delivery drones that take goods from vans to front doors.

Data sharing agreements have also been signed as part of the deal, which includes the fitting of “data capture capabilities” inside Ocado delivery vans that will be used by Oxbotica to train and test its technologies. The idea is that the data will highlight which Oxbotica technologies will suit Ocado’s needs.

“We are excited about the opportunity to work with Oxbotica to develop a wide range of autonomous solutions that truly have the potential to transform both our and our partners CFC and service delivery operations, while also giving all end customers the widest range of options and flexibility,” Ocado’s chief of advanced technology, Alex Harvey said.

The partnership could also lead to new jobs with Ocado, which is creating new engineering teams to work specifically with Oxbotica. While no figures have been provided, we do know these roles will be within Ocado’s Advanced Technology division, which is already separate from the team that develops the Ocado Smart Platform.

Logistical costs make up a large part of Ocado’s overall expenditure, the firm said. Approximately 1.5% of sales in the UK are lost due to the cost of moving finished orders from the fulfilment centre to delivery vans, while 10% of sales are lost when delivering goods from the van to the door. Labour also represents 50% of these costs, according to Ocado.

The grocery firm expects to see the first prototypes of some early use cases for autonomous vehicles within two years.

Google’s Project Zero team has updated its vulnerability disclosure policies to introduce a 30-day cushion for businesses to apply patches to the flaws it discloses before revealing any precise exploit mechanisms.

Currently, the security research team adheres to a disclosure windows lasting 90 days, which lasts from the point a vulnerability is reported to a vendor to when they make it public, in order to give software vendors enough time to develop a patch behind the scenes.

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Project Zero’s new trial, however, will see the team tack on an additional 30 days to the original window before publishing any technical details, including details behind zero-day vulnerabilities. This will be cut to a period of seven days for bugs that hackers are actively exploiting.

Project Zero is making these changes to encourage faster patch development, to ensure that each fix is correct and comprehensive, and to shorten the time between a patch being released and users installing it.

The team also wants to reduce the risk of opportunistic attacks immediately after technical details are revealed. Flaws in F5 Networks’ BIG-IP software suite serves as a recent example for this phenomenon, where hackers began scanning for vulnerability deployments shortly after technical details behind a handful of critically-rated flaws were published.

The trial is significant as many security research teams across the industry seek to mould their own disclosure policies around those adopted by Project Zero. The success of this trial, therefore, could pave the way for industry-wide changes.

For example, when Project Zero first introduced an automatic 90-day disclosure window in January 2020, a host of other teams shortly followed suit, including Facebook’s internal researchers in September that year.

“Much of the debate around vulnerability disclosure is caught up on the issue of whether rapidly releasing technical details benefits attackers or defenders more,” said Project Zero’s senior security engineering manager, Tim Willis.

“From our time in the defensive community, we’ve seen firsthand how the open and timely sharing of technical details helps protect users across the Internet. But we also have listened to the concerns from others around the much more visible “opportunistic” attacks that may come from quickly releasing technical details.”

He added that despite continuing to believe that quick disclosure outweighs the risks, Project Zero was willing to incorporate feedback into its policies. “Heated discussions” about the risk and benefits of releasing technical details, or proof-of-concept exploits, have also been a significant roadblock to cooperation between researchers and vendors.

Project Zero will, in future, explore reducing the initial 90-day disclosure window in order to encourage vendors to develop patches far quicker than they currently do, with the aim of one day adopting something closer to a 60+30 policy. Based on its data, the team is likely to reduce the disclosure window in 2022 from 90+30 to 84+28.

Although vendors often do release patches in a timely manner, one of the biggest challenges in cyber security is encouraging customers to actually apply these updates to protect themselves against potential exploitation.

There are countless examples of patched vulnerabilities that are still being actively exploited because organisations have failed to apply the relevant updates.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), for instance, revealed in 2020 that many of the top-ten most commonly exploited flaws were those for which patches have existed for years. As of December 2019, hackers were even exploiting a vulnerability in Windows common controls that Microsoft fixed in April 2012.

As the trial unfolds in the coming months, Project Zero has encouraged businesses keen to understand more about the vulnerabilities being disclosed to approach their vendors or suppliers for technical details.

The team won’t reveal any proofs-of-concept or technical details prior to the 30-day window elapsing unless there’s a mutual agreement between Project Zero and the vendor.

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According to research from Virtana, 72% of enterprises have moved one or more applications from the public cloud back on-premises. 

The top reasons for the change included the applications should not have been moved to a public cloud in the first place (41%), technical issues associated with public cloud provisioning (36%), degradation of performance (29%), and unexpected cloud costs (20%).

As the cloud has become a vital component of almost every business’ IT infrastructure – especially since COVID-19 took hold – many enterprises that rushed their expansion of hosted applications are now re-evaluating how they create, manage and deploy cloud services.

Speaking to IT Pro on the publication of the report, Kash Shaikh, President and CEO of Virtana, explains how a cloud deployment should be handled. “Critical applications should never be rushed to the cloud,” he says. “There is really no reason to do it when there are partners and platforms that can help ensure applications will run smoothly in the public cloud and for the right cost.

Creating a multi-cloud environment that can meet the challenges businesses face today and how their IT infrastructures will need to support their processes and remote staff in a post-COVID-19 landscape, is critical to get right.

Taking a step back and evaluating how cloud services are bought and integrating into a business should be a priority for all CTOs. After weathering the initial COVID storm, now is the time to closely audit how cloud services may have proliferated and how these can be rationalised moving forward.

Repatriating data

How applications and the data they rely upon are used is now very different than it was before remote mass working has become the norm. In its 2021 Hybrid Cloud Report, NTT encapsulates the current drivers behind the hybrid cloud, stating: “Business continuity, resilience, and agility are the priority business objectives.” The pandemic’s practical impact  is, in some cases, an underestimation of the network infrastructures needed to support the rapid changes enterprises had to cope with.

The security of data at rest and in motion has never been more critical. Cloud services, by their nature, offer consumption-based flexible environments, yet the visibility of these services can be opaque in some instances. This lack of transparency can lead to a loss of control and low-levels of security. As digital transformation continues, it is essential to increase visibility levels to ensure data security is robust.

How any given business uses data can be a practical guide when decisions have to be made whether more public cloud services are used. If large quantities of data will be in motion across several network endpoints, there is a case for moving it out of the public cloud.

As the quantity of data businesses will have to manage expands thanks to IoT, for instance, focusing on the unique requirements this data needs to deliver efficient value will be the core guide to whether on-prem, public or hybrid cloud deployments will be required. It’s no surprise that this re-evaluation of cloud deployment had given rise to new services such as HPE Greenlake.

Tracy Woo, a senior analyst with Forrester, believes the HPE model could offer the secure flexible cloud services all businesses will need. “Most datacentre purchases are heterogeneous or under one brand, [products] like Greenlake offer folks a ‘capacity on demand’ model that is primarily a financing and contractual vehicle to enable incremental purchases. As hyperconverged systems gain traction, full-stack infrastructure solutions for compute, storage, and network become inseparable and are subject to subscription- or consumption-based pricing paving a future for businesses like Greenlake and also Dell’s Project Apex.”

A hybrid future?

Post-pandemic, it’s clear more distributed resources will be used to support remote working and, critically, secure resources. Here the rush to expand cloud services to keep vital networks operating often meant securing these services was not a priority. Post-pandemic, this must change. 

NTT found that 93% of organisations agree cloud is critical to meeting their immediate business needs, while 88% agree it’s also essential to meeting their future business needs. The hybrid cloud has become the foundation onto which these new services will be built. But the hybrid cloud must be thoroughly evaluated to ensure this structure can meet the needs of the workers using these systems.

As work has changed, so must the cloud services that support the networks business use today and will need in the near future. In the face of an increased desire to use data-intensive technologies such as machine learning, and continuing and expanding cyberthreats, it’s not surprising many IT professionals are evaluating whether the public cloud can deliver the performance and visibility they need at an affordable cost.

Some of the core reasons for data repatriation identified in IDC’s multi-cloud survey include security ( 25% of respondents) and performance (22% of respondents). Additionally, 12% of European organisations stated that their migration of business applications to the cloud was unsuccessful.

Carla Arend, senior program director for Cloud Research Europe at IDC, comments: “Cloud strategy and data strategy need to converge, and organisations need to have a good understanding of their data estate when crafting their cloud strategy. Data classification is critical to make sure which data can be moved to the cloud and which data should stay on-premises, for example for regulatory compliance purposes.”

No one is arguing for data and applications to move wholesale back on-prem. What is being highlighted, especially now that businesses have gained some perspective on their cloud deployments during the last year, is that a more strategic approach is needed to their cloud strategy.

Shaikh believes a more nuanced and integrated approach is needed. “Although IT applications can be strategic, business owners look for SaaS, PaaS, or even IaaS as options to reduce capital expense, labour, utilities, and accounting. They are in the business of selling products, not running data centres,” he says. “The reason why on-premises data centres will linger around is the time and investment to the critical infrastructure that runs the critical applications that are very difficult to uproot.”

No CTO can ignore the cloud. However, with a working landscape in flux and an expanding need to further embrace hosted applications, a new strategic approach is needed to ensure the cloud services created are fit for purpose. 

The hybrid approach is still an option most businesses will choose. However, re-evaluating their application, data access and network needs, might just reveal new approaches to hosted services that could offer the cost-savings, security and efficiency gains needed for their business to thrive post-COVID-19.

Salesforce will begin welcoming employees back into its US offices, starting with vaccinated members of staff in the middle of May. 

The tech giant’s San Francisco headquarters, Salesforce Tower, along with its Palo Alto and Irvine offices will allow cohorts of 100 people or fewer, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.   

UK ministers are being urged to include a ‘right to disconnect’ policy in the forthcoming Employment Bill to address the boundaries between work and home life.

Tech workers union Prospect wants a legal requirement put in place to force companies to discuss when they can contact their employees while working from home. 

Around two-thirds of UK workers want to see a ‘right to disconnect’ policy put in place, according to a Prospect poll commissioned by Opinium. The organisations interviewed 4,005 UK nationals over the first week of April and found that 66% would support the policy if it was brought in. This was a strong stance across all age groups and political affiliations, according to Prospect, with 53% of Conservative voters in favour. 

Including a right to disconnect in the Employment Bill would a big step in redefining blurred boundaries and would show that the government is serious about tackling the “dark side” of remote working, according to Prospect’s research director Andrew Pakes. 

“People’s experience of working from home during the pandemic has varied wildly depending on their jobs, their home circumstances, and crucially the behaviour of their employers,” Pakes said.  

“It is clear that for millions of us, working from home has felt more like sleeping in the office, with remote technology meaning it is harder to fully switch off, contributing to poor mental health. Remote working is here to stay, but it can be much better than it has been in recent months.”  

Mental health problems featured in the survey with 35% of participants suggesting their ‘work-related mental health’ had gotten worse during the pandemic. 42% said it was partly due to the inability to switch off from the jobs with 30% stating that they were working more unpaid hours than before the pandemic – 18% suggesting this was at least four hours of additional work.

A number of other countries, such as France and Ireland, have some form of the right to disconnect enshrined in law which is also supported by the European Parliament.