Google Cloud plans to reduce the amount of revenue it keeps when customers buy software from other vendors via its cloud marketplace. 

The cloud arm of the tech giant is cutting fees it takes from 20% to just 3%, according to CNBC sources. 

The company has confirmed it is planning to make a change to its marketplace revenue fees but said it isn’t yet ready to release the exact figures. However, it’s the latest in a series of efforts under CEO Thomas Kurian to make Google a bigger player in the cloud services industry in a bid to catch the likes of AWS and Microsoft Azure. 

The fees that large tech firms charge for selling on their platforms have been under heavy scrutiny of late, whether that’s consumer apps or business products. Some tech giants have been forced to revisit their fees due to regulatory action; Apple, for example, recently reduced the percentage it takes from app developers that sell apps from its Play Store, following its court battle with Epic Games.

However, Google Cloud’s planned reduction is about attracting more companies to its marketplace and, ultimately, boosting its competitive advantage. 

«Our goal is to provide partners with the best platform and most competitive incentives in the industry,» a Google Cloud spokesperson told CloudPro. «We can confirm that a change to our Marketplace fee structure is in the works and we’ll have more to share on this soon.»  

Google Cloud, is still an unprofitable segment of the Alphabet business, according to its most recent earnings report, but it has made changes under Kurian to enable future growth, according to Forrester cloud analyst Tracy Woo.

«Thomas Kurian brought to Google what they needed, which is more enterprise experience,» Woo tells CloudPro. «He very quickly built out their vertical-specific solutions which is something that other cloud providers are doing as well. This was a good move as it will likely help lower the barrier to adoption by some of the major enterprises. They’ve also very aggressively pursued the hybrid cloud space both in services as well as in management. It’s been an important area that still has no ‘killer app’ and if they’re successful can help them to win more of the market share.

«Other areas that he’s helped streamline are its sales teams and process to require less overhead and approval to provide customers with better pricing or discounting. And within his time there he’s managed to grow the cloud business revenue. Culturally, there may have been concerns about Kurian being not ‘Google’ enough but his presence has shown to have a positive impact on the organisation.»

AWS has revealed plans to open a new data centre region in New Zealand by 2024, investing NZ$7.5 billion (around £3.9 billion) over the next 15 years and creating 1,000 jobs.

The company said that its new Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region will help more of its customers run their applications by serving end users locally, providing even lower latency, and ensuring customers can choose to securely store their data in New Zealand.

The Auckland region, which will be owned and operated by a local AWS entity, will be made up of three availability zones, joining the existing 81 zones across 25 geographic AWS regions at launch.

AWS estimates this will create 1,000 new jobs as part of a NZ$7.5 billion investment, which the company also believes will generate approximately NZ$10.8 billion (around £5.6 billion) over the next 15 years.

“Our investments reflect AWS’ deep and long-term commitment to New Zealand,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS. “We are excited to build new world-class infrastructure locally, train New Zealanders with in-demand digital skills, and continue to help local organisations deliver applications that accelerate digital transformation and fuel economic growth.”

Globally, the company said that it has plans to launch 24 additional data centre sites across eight regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Spain, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, as well as the new AWS Region in New Zealand.

AWS set up its first local entity in New Zealand in 2014 and opened new offices this year in Auckland and Wellington to support a team of over 100 employees. Customers previously had to rely on the AWS region in Sydney, which was launched in 2012, although it announced in December it was going to open its second infrastructure region in Australia in Melbourne by 2022.

In July, Google Cloud announced it would also open a new cloud region in Melbourne, its second in Australia and 11th in the APAC region overall. The company said that cloud customers in Australia and New Zealand are set to benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data.

Google also announced that it would open a new Google Cloud Dedicated Interconnect location in New Zealand as part of its new investment in the region. The company has said it hopes both its Melbourne and Auckland sites would deliver geographically distributed and secure infrastructure to customers across New Zealand.

Facebook has unveiled a Portal for Business device management suite that allows businesses to deploy and oversee a fleet of Portal devices across their business. 

Aimed primarily at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), Portal for Business allows organisations to manage Portal+ devices across their workforce, so users can collaborate, communicate and manage workflows on a separate display to their workstations.

With this service, IT admins can manage devices that have been set up by employees who have access to Portal for Business. The platform allows them to deploy and manage the hardware, control work accounts, manage device settings, check device status and reboot devices remotely, regardless of where the workforce is based.

Portal is a family of smart displays that launched in 2018 as a means for people to engage in video calls independently of their PCs, laptops or tablets. Portal for Business represents an evolution into the realm of productivity, with Portal complementing Facebook’s existing Workplace collaboration suite.

However, from December, Facebook is also adding support for Microsoft Teams for all Portal devices, in a bid to entice more prospective customers, and entire organisations, who don’t buy into Facebook’s core collaboration platform. This also hints at more integrations with third-party services later down the line.

The expansion of Facebook Portal into the productivity sphere comes alongside two new additions to the hardware family, including Portal Go and Portal+. 

Portal Go is a 10in portable system that’s designed for people who move around their home or workspace frequently. This includes a 12MP camera and an ultra-wide field of view, as well as doubling as a portable speaker.

The 14in Portal+ device, meanwhile, features a 12MP smart camera with an ultra-wide field of view alongside stereo speakers. Facebook is touting this iteration as the ideal workplace companion to dial into work calls, take notes, view a presentation or multitask, aided by the fact this display is larger than many conventional business notebooks.

Facebook’s launch of Portal for Business comes only shortly after it announced its Horizon Workooms hybrid work virtual reality (VR) product, which involves distributing Oculus headsets to a team and beaming them into a digital office. 

This is quite different, however, from its latest Portal hardware and SMB service, which rather resembles Zoom’s strategy of releasing hardware and services so users can build the ‘ultimate home office’.

Nutanix and Citrix are joining forces to provide both the infrastructure and software to support customers as they transition to hybrid working arrangements.

The two companies will offer secure, on-demand and elastic access to apps, virtual desktops and data across all kinds of devices, from any location, and at any scale, Citrix and Nutanix have announced. 

This partnership sees Nutanix providing hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) with the virtualisation firm Citrix bringing desktop as a service (DaaS) and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments to the table. 

Under the agreement, Nutanix will become a Citrix preferred choice for HCI hybrid and multi-cloud deployments through the Nutanix Cloud Platform. This will support Citrix’s Virtual Apps and Desktops services on top of these cloud environments, with customers able to take advantage of Nutanix’s HCI, whether on-prem or in the public cloud.

Citrix will, in turn, become the preferred enterprise end-user computing system on the Nutanix Cloud Platform. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, which is part of the flagship Citrix Workspace productivity suite, allows businesses to access their systems, information and tools in a singular experience, with contextual security policies layered on top. 

The two companies claim that customers will be able to take advantage of a unified digital workspace platform that delivers both applications and security, as well as IT efficiency and productivity across a variety of sectors.

This venture means Citrix and Nutanix are the latest firms to attempt to enact a hybrid work strategy in the products and services on offer. This effort sees the companies throwing their weight behind desktop as a service (DaaS) and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) as a means for workers to access essential tools and services in a secure manner across all kinds of environments, including the office, the home, and otherwise.

In the delivery of these services, Citrix and Nutanix will also collaborate on go-to-market programmes and enablement, as well as product roadmaps and customer support.

Earlier this month, both Google and Microsoft independently announced their own hybrid work products through a reconfiguration of their core Workspace and Teams platforms.

Facebook, too, is trying to tackle hybrid work through its Horizon Workrooms virtual reality (VR) experience, which beams workers into a cartoonish office-type environment where they can socialise and collaborate with their colleagues.

Oracle has announced its a artificial intelligence (AI)-powered marketing automation solution called Fusion Marketing.

Available as part of Oracle Advertising and CX, Fusion Marketing helps marketers automate lead generation and qualification from start to finish.

“CRM has become the system that both sellers and marketers love to hate, due to disconnected workflows, too much manual administration, and siloed data often preventing sales and marketing teams from working with each other to engage customers and drive revenue,” explained Oracle.

Addressing roadblocks in conventional marketing, Fusion Marketing helps brands create campaigns with consistent messaging across customer touchpoints.

The platform guides marketers through the entire campaign creation and execution process and helps businesses generate targeted audience profiles, identify relevant customer references, plan advertising budgets, and more. A built-in dashboard enables marketers to view campaign performance in real-time.

But that’s not all. Following the launch of an advertising campaign, Oracle’s Fusion Marketing automatically generates and qualifies leads. 

In addition to directing customers to an automatically generated landing page, each campaign includes customer references tailored to the industry and interest of the customer. Fusion Marketing also allows enterprises to track engagement across multiple campaign channels, including emails, online ads, and microsite visits. 

The platform uses AI to analyze leads at the account level, predict when consumers are ready to speak with a salesperson and generate a qualified sales opportunity within any CRM system.

«It is time for our industry to think differently about marketing and sales automation so that we can transform CRM into a system that actually works for both the marketer and the salesperson,» said Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience. 

«This is not about forecasts and rollups or a reporting tool to see how the sales force is performing, but instead about turning CRM into a system that helps sellers sell. A huge part of that change is bringing marketing and sales teams together and eliminating the low-value, time consuming tasks that distract from building customer relationships and closing deals. That’s why we have invested so much time engineering a system that will help marketers fully automate lead generation and qualification and get highly qualified leads to the sales team faster.»

Google Cloud and Wipro have launched the Wipro-Google Cloud Innovation Arena in Bangalore, India, hoping to increase cloud capabilities and build new products across industries.

The cloud collaboration space aims to provide in-house technical expertise, ensure seamless cloud adoption, and accelerate innovation to drive business transformation for customers.

The companies said that by combining Google Cloud with Wipro FullStride Cloud Services, the jointly developed innovation centre will offer a range of people, processes, and platforms to customers around the world. The centre will showcase the talent, tools, and best practices required to develop and deploy applications on Google Cloud.

“Innovation and business differentiation are key drivers of cloud adoption, which is why innovation labs where customers can brainstorm, design, and pilot innovation use cases with the help of industry experts have become increasingly important,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, corporate vice president of Partner Ecosystem at Google Cloud.

“We are pleased to be furthering our partnership with Wipro to provide our customers with the resources they need to take their cloud journey to the next level.”

Jason Eichenholz, senior vice president and global head of Ecosystems & Partnerships at  Wipro, said that the new Innovation Arena was the latest example of the company’s commitment to providing customers with world-class resources and support, and a vision for their cloud future.

“We are excited to strengthen our partnership with Google Cloud, and look forward to leveraging the Wipro-Google Cloud Innovation Arena to increase cloud capabilities, build solutions across industries, and help our customers simplify their processes and workflows,” said Eichenholz.

In August, Wipro added a new studio to its Technology Center in Plano, Texas, to support customers’ digital transformation efforts as part of a collaboration with ServiceNow. The studio, named @now Studio, was set to draw upon ServiceNow’s simplified processes and digital workflows to create custom products. Wipro’s Texas Technology centre houses the firm’s US cyber defence unit and is an incubator for developing advanced analytics and cloud technologies.

The UN high commissioner for human rights has called for a moratorium on AI systems that threaten human rights until governments can set up safeguards.

AI applications that violate human rights law should be banned, said High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet, in a statement issued on Thursday.

Her comments coincide with the release of a UN report warning of existing human rights abuses involving AI systems across various sectors, including law enforcement.

The report warned of potential abuses through the irresponsible use of AI, including the erroneous assumptions by AI algorithms that could miscategorize people as terrorists or fraudsters, for example.

The report also voiced concerns about the inability for most AI models to explain their results, which it called the ‘black box problem’. Machine learning algorithms are not based on rules, instead using matrices of numbers, or ‘weights’, between large numbers of digital neurons.

The UN’s document also raised privacy concerns, arguing that AI tools don’t need to train themselves on personal data to infer results about a person’s behaviour.

«AI tools can make far-reaching inferences about individuals, including about their mental and physical condition, and can enable the identification of groups, such as people with particular political or personal leanings,» it warned.

The report suggested several measures to mitigate adverse effects on human rights. These include legislation and regulation, collaboration between the public and private sector, and due diligence when implementing AI systems. It also called for transparency about the nature of systems used, who is using them, and what for, along with what data they are using.

Transparency is something that the Federal Trade Commission has also advocated, but the UN has now gone further, advising governments to create registers containing this information.

“Artificial intelligence can be a force for good, helping societies overcome some of the great challenges of our times,» said Bachelet. «But AI technologies can have negative, even catastrophic, effects if they are used without sufficient regard to how they affect people’s human rights.»

The UN has been outspoken about the use of technology in the past, calling in August for a moratorium on the sale of surveillance technology and pointing out the use of spyware tools to tap smartphones.

The engineering teams at Google Cloud are set to be shaken up in a bid to improve the company’s standing in the wider market.

The organisation’s CEO, Thomas Kurian, alluded to a number of technical leadership changes, in an internal email seen by CNBC.

It includes the replacement of engineering lead Eyal Manor, a 15-year Google veteran who was a key part of developing a number of the firm’s cloud products, such as Anthos. Manor is not entirely leaving Google, however, as the emails suggest he will look for another role within the company.

Google Cloud will be replacing Manor with Brad Calder, the company’s current VP of engineering of technical infrastructure, but in a more expansive role that will also oversee security and data analytics, according to CNBC sources.

Calder will report directly to Kurian, according to the CEO’s email, as the change will allow the technical teams to «work more closely» with the Cloud leadership team, as well as Google CEO Sundar Pichai and the wider Google leadership team, on its longer-term strategy.​​

Kurian added that Calder’s 15-years of cloud experience meant he had the «proven expertise» to take on a broader role at the company and shape its entire strategy.

Google Cloud and its technical infrastructure business have more than doubled in the past few years, according to Kurian’s email, which also said: «the demands of shaping long-term strategy while focusing on day-to-day operations have continued to accelerate. As a result, we felt that it was the right time to unify the broad portfolio under Brad Calder.»

The changes are thought to be about improving Google’s chances in the hotly contested cloud services market. The company currently has a 10% share, according to analyst Synergy, far behind both Amazon Web Services (33%) and Microsoft (20%).

«We have an enormous opportunity to continue to grow the business by expanding our total addressable market in new ways,» Kurian said in his email. «As the market changes, the needs of our products continue to evolve, and it’s important that we evolve our organisation to support this growth.»

Citrix is considering finding a buyer for itself to rejuvenate its fortunes after a shaky 2021 in which its share price has fallen to levels not recorded since mid-2019.

The virtualisation and workplace collaboration software firm is working with advisers to consider the benefits and drawbacks of selling itself, according to Bloomberg, with plans to approach potential buyers within weeks.

A final decision hasn’t been made on whether to proceed with a sale, regardless of whether the company finds a buyer, however. Citrix might also yet remain a standalone firm.

The firm has, in recent months, struggled to capitalise on a catalogue of successes over the last couple of years, with share prices dropping sharply in April 2021. Citrix encountered supply chain issues in the first three months of the year, which led to the company missing its revenue targets. 

These supply chain issues affected hardware shipments and the company also generated a lower-than-expected duration of on-premise licenses. This is despite the company handling a much higher demand for its software and services during the pandemic than Citrix otherwise would have expected.

Exemplifying this decline was the fact its flagship Workspace suite of tools and services recorded declining year-on-year revenues of 11%, while its app delivery and security revenues also fell by 6% against the first three months of 2020.

It was a similar story for the second quarter of the year, with shares falling further thanks to a “mixed” financial performance. CEO David Henshall pinned these difficulties on “sales execution challenges” caused by complexity in managing a rapid transition to the cloud among customers while managing different license model types.

The company has also had to endure a rocky few months due to a string of security issues, most notably in May 2019 in which an attack saw hackers seize 6TB of sensitive data. Since then, there have been a number of minor incidents, with cyber criminals taking advantage of flaws in Citrix systems.

The potential move comes after Elliot Management recently took more than a $1 billion stake in Citrix, as of last week, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

The firm has previously explored the option of selling itself in 2017, Bloomberg adds, although discussion with potential buyers stalled at the time due to differences in opinion over the valuation of the company.

Citrix has yet to respond to CloudPro’s request for comment. 

Google has announced that its undersea cable connecting the US with Europe has arrived in Bude, Cornwall.

The fibre-optic network cable is estimated to be around 6,000km long and is named after the American computer science pioneer Grace Hopper.

First announced in July 2020, the Google-funded cable runs from New York and splits off in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to arrive in Bilbao, Spain and Cornwall. 

Google Cloud strategic negotiator for Global Infrastructure, Jayne Stowell, described the Grace Hopper cable as an example of Google’s “ongoing investment” in the UK’s tech sector.

“Grace Hopper represents a new generation of transatlantic cable coming to the UK shores and is one of the first new cables to connect the US and the UK since 2003,” she announced in a company statement. Google has recently rolled out other subsea cables known as Curie, Dunant, Equiano, and Firmina.

The cable will use a technology known as “fibre switching,” allowing Google to manoeuvre traffic around outages and increase the reliability of its network. It will power popular Google services such as Meet, Gmail and Google Cloud – which all saw a surge in new customers due to last year’s mass shift to remote working.

“Moreover, with the ongoing pandemic fostering a new digital normal, Google-funded subsea cables allow us to plan and prepare for the future capacity needs of our customers, no matter where they are in the world. Grace Hopper will connect the UK to help meet the rapidly growing demand for high-bandwidth connectivity and services,” added Stowell.

The second European arm of the Grace Hopper cable landed on the Bilbao shoreline on 9 September, as the “first ever Google-funded route to Spain” which will integrate an upcoming Google Cloud region in Madrid. 

The entire cable is set to become operational in 2022. 

Earlier this year, Google announced that its other subsea cable connecting the US and Europe, Dunant, is ready for service. First announced in 2018, the Dunant cable runs 6,400km (3,977 miles) between Virginia Beach, Virginia and Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez in the Pays de la Loire region of France. Google says it has 250Tbps of bandwidth, meaning it can transfer the entire digitised Library of Congress three times every second.