Salesforce has cancelled all physical events for the rest of the year, including November’s Dreamforce conference, due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Instead, the company will «reimagine» all conferences as virtual events. 

The spread of COVID-19 has seen nearly all major events of 2020 either cancelled or pushed to 2021, while most technology firms, such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft, have opted to turn their conferences into virtual experiences.

In March, Salesforce turned its World Tour Sydney into a virtual event, transforming what would have been a physical event for 11,000 people into an online conference viewed by 80,000, according to the company.

Dreamforce, which was scheduled for November, is a key event for the company, attracting 171,000 people last year and reportedly creating more than $240 million in revenue for the San Francisco Bay Area. The event is one of the largest in the tech calendar, usually attracting significant media attention and famous speakers, such as former US president Barack Obama in 2019.

«As the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve, our first priority is to help ensure the health and safety of our customers, partners, employees and communities,» the company said on its website.

«With this in mind, we have decided to reimagine our events through the end of the year in new and virtual ways. This will be true for all events, including Dreamforce, Tableau Conference 2020, Tableau Conference Europe, TrailheaDX India and our World Tours.»

The company said it will reimburse partners that had sponsored the event and people that had purchased tickets, though it won’t refund flights or hotel accommodation.

«We will record as much content as possible for on-demand viewing,» the company added. «Some content and experiences may only be available during the live virtual events so we encourage our community to join us live for maximum engagement.»

Microsoft beat Wall Street expectations on Wednesday following increased demand in its cloud-based services during the coronavirus pandemic, as more and more people are tapping into Teams and Xbox gaming while in lockdown.

Teams, in particular, saw another massive spike in daily active users, jumping up to 75 million, according to CEO Satya Nadella, which is almost double what the company reported a month ago. 

For its fiscal fourth quarter, the tech giant gave business forecasts that were below analyst estimates, suggesting hardware sales and services like LinkedIn would struggle.

But strong sales of its Windows operating services and also Surface hardware helped buoy the company, with shares rising 5% for the quarter. This was matched by «all-time-high» engagement on Xbox live, which Microsoft said had 19 million active users.

Since the pandemic took hold, demand for Microsoft’s cloud-services had put a strain on its data centres, forcing the tech giant to limit usage for new customers. The company has prioritised healthcare organisations and governments instead.

While the active Teams users were up, Microsoft’s CFO Amy Hood said some of the increased usage came from subscribers with access to the software as part of Office 365 that had simply turned it on for the first time. She also added that a large number came from the service being rolled out for free during the pandemic.

«In those instances, you also won’t see revenue, but seeing great usage obviously is terrific for us longer term if people want to convert that to a paying seat,» Hood said to Reuters.

«While I’m really excited about the long-term potential for revenue, you won’t see it in this (fiscal third) quarter, or really even in Q4. It’s more about people being more and more engaged with Microsoft products.»

Despite the increased demand for cloud service, Azure growth actually dropped from 62% to 58% compared to the same period last year, which company officials said was a result of how large the business had become.

Microsoft has expanded Azure Arc‘s Linux and Kubernetes capabilities to allow Red Hat customers to manage OpenShift clusters and data services on Azure.

The announcement came during the virtual Red Hat Summit where the open source giant unveiled a raft of new features for OpenShift and Kubernetes to help organisations develop and manage virtual machines, containers and serverless workloads.

Microsoft’s announcements will enable Azure Arc customers to centrally manage, secure and control Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) servers and OpenShift clusters from Azure at scale. It will also allow customers to apply their own policies and manage compliance for servers and multiple clusters.

Applications built in GitHub repositories can also be automatically deployed via Azure Policy and Azure Arc to any linked OpenShift cluster with policies that can be used to keep them up to date.

Red Hat’s own announcements start with OpenShift virtualisation, which is available now as a technology preview within OpenShift.

This has been developed via the KubeVirt open source project and enables organisations to deploy and manage applications consisting of virtual machines alongside containers and serverless. This can be done all in one unified cloud-native platform, according to Red Hat.

This update comes with Red Hat OpenShift 4.4, the latest version of Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform. Based on Kubernetes 1.17, OpenShift 4.4 is intended to offer a developer’s view of platform metrics and monitoring for application workloads. This includes monitoring integration for Red Hat Operators and costs management for specific applications across a hybrid cloud environment.

The company has also addressed management challenges for running cloud-native applications across large-scale, production and distributed Kubernetes clusters with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes. This will also be available as a technology preview and will provide a single, simplified control point for the monitoring and deployment of OpenShift clusters at scale.

«While some vendors seek to protect legacy technology stacks by dragging Kubernetes and cloud-native functionality backwards to preserve proprietary virtualisation, Red Hat does the opposite,» the company said. «Bringing traditional application stacks forward into a layer of open innovation, enabling customers to truly transform at their speed, not at the whims of proprietary lock-in.»

The updates come just days after parent company IBM posted its first-quarter figures with revealed that Red Hat had seen 18% growth revenue in the first three months of 2020. As a key driver of IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy, Red Hat has helped IBM’s cloud revenues to consistently rise.

Google is reportedly in talks to acquire D2iQ, a cloud software company that specialises in application management.

The company was valued at $775 million after a Series D funding round in 2018, according to Axios, although it’s current value is thought to be considerably lower.

It’s not a done deal, and may not happen at all, an unnamed source told Axios, with at least one board member of D2iQ said to be against the acquisition. The cloud company laid off about 13% of its workforce last week to cut costs ahead of an estimated 40% drop in sales, according to Business Insider.

The company was formally known as Mesosphere but changed to D2iQ (which stands for Day-Two-I-Q) last year to better suit a change in strategy built around Kubernetes offerings.

«We chose the name D2iQ because it reflects both our legacy and future focus: to deliver enterprise-grade cloud platforms so that our customers can embrace prevailing open-source and cloud-native innovations while realising smarter Day 2 operations,» CEO Mike Fey wrote in a blog post.

It already has a relationship with Google as a Google Cloud and G Suite partner, but it’s thought that Google is interested in acquiring the firm due to its integrated Kubernetes software. The open source server management technology was originally developed by Google and the startup could be part of a strategy to help the tech giant compete with Amazon in the cloud computing market.

If a buyout goes ahead, it would be the third major acquisition for Google’s cloud business of 2020. The company announced two in February with Dutch-based mainframe migration specialist Cornerstone Technologies and data analytics firm Looker, which was subject to a review from the UK’s competition markets watchdog.

AWS has launched a service that improves machine learning model accuracy by continuously identifying and improving low confidence predictions. 

Amazon Augmented Artificial Intelligence (A2I), which is now generally available, allows for human review of model predictions using reviewers from Mechanical Turk, third-party vendors, or an organisations’ own employees.

The service aims to help developers build human review systems, structure the review process and manage the review workforce. AWS suggests that developers could use A2I to quickly spin up and manage a workforce of humans to review and validate the accuracy of machine learning predictions. 

This could be used for an application that collects financial information from scanned mortgage documents or even one that uses image recognition to identify counterfeit items online. The idea is that the review helps the predictive model get better over time. 

A2I could be used by AWS customers that use services such as Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Rekognition or Amazon Textract, which are often used in critical and sensitive cases that need often need human judgements. 

«Even with these advancements, our customers still say there are critical use cases where human judgment is required like in law enforcement investigations or times when human review can be used to resolve the ambiguity in predictions when confidence levels fall below a given threshold for less sensitive use cases, and the current human review process involves a lot of custom effort and cost,» said Swami Sivasubramanian, VP for Amazon Machine Learning.»

A2I is already being used by a number of organisations, including the National Health Service (NHS) Business Services Authority, which provides a range of support services to NHS organisations, NHS contractors, and patients. The organisation processes 54 million paper prescriptions each month, according to AWS. 

«Human judgment is critical and in fact is often required for decisions involving medical payments,» said Chris Suter, the head of cloud platforms and innovation at NHS BSA.

Slack is launching data residencies in Europe and the UK so organisations can have greater control over their data by choosing where it is stored.

The announcement follows the launch of residencies in Germany, France, Australia, and Japan in October.

Traditionally Slack stores data in the US, but to help its global customers have more control over their data, the company is opening up data residencies outside of the US, which includes one in London.

The move is designed to tap into those organisations currently not using Slack as they’re unable to store data locally and comply with industry regulations, such as those in financial services, the public sector, and healthcare.

«We’ve listened to our customers regulatory concerns around having their data hosted outside of the country or region where they operate, and our expansion of data residency into the UK is in direct response to their requests,» Ilan Frank, VP of product, enterprise at Slack told Information Age.

«We are making data residency technically and financially accessible so that users have the freedom of where they want to store their data.»

Slack is one of a number of cloud-based services that enable remote working to see a huge spike in usage since the outbreak of COVID-19 and the UK is the third-largest global market for the company, behind the US and Japan, in terms of daily active users.

User-generated data, such as message posts, files, and searches, can now be stored within the desired region, according to the company, and regardless of whether the data is in transit or rest, it’s always encrypted.

Although existing customers can move their organisation’s data to a new residency region, the entire business must be rooted in a single region.

Amazon Web Services has launched an automated SaaS data transfer services, called AppFlow, to boost data privacy and security for its customers.

AppFlow is a fully managed service that automates the bidirectional flow of data between AWS and SaaS applications, without the need to write integration code. 

The service also works with AWS PrivateLink to route data flows through the cloud giant’s network instead of over the public internet, which results in stronger data privacy and tighter security, according to AWS. It can be used with no upfront charges and customers will only pay for the number of flows they run and the volume of data they process.

AppFlow is for customers with large datasets used for data lakes, analytics, machine learning, and IoT workloads, but it also takes the strain out of combining data from multiple sources and reduces silos and backlogs.

Rather than spending days writing code to build custom connectors and data transformations across different SaaS applications, AppFlow allows customers to configure private, bidirectional data flows between AWS services and SaaS apps without coding.

The service comes with a simple interface, according to AWS, which builds and executes data flows between sources in minutes. What’s more, it automatically encrypts data at rest and in motion using AWS or customer-managed encryption keys. This also includes controls to restrict data from transferring via the web for applications that are integrated with AWS PrivateLink.

«With Amazon AppFlow integrating directly with Salesforce Private Connect, joint customers will be able to establish a secure, private connection for passing data back and forth between the Salesforce and AWS platforms,» said Sarah Franklin, EVP & GM of platform, trailhead, and developers at Salesforce.

«And because these connections can be set up by Salesforce admins in just a few clicks, companies can cut down on costly and timely engineering resources, and begin doing more with their data faster than ever before.»

AppFlow is currently available in a number of countries across US, Asia and Europe – including the UK – with more regions being announced soon.

​The coronavirus will create a new normal based on digital processes and accelerate business transformation, according to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. 

Speaking at NetApp Insight, Kurian called the potential impact of the pandemic «shock momentum» and said the world will «reimagine and create new opportunities» for what comes after the crisis. 

Since March, businesses around the world have been forced to use remote software and quickly change their operations to accommodate employees in lockdown. For Kurian, this has separated the leaders in digital transformation from the «laggers».

«Many traditional businesses and ways of doing things will be reimagined digitally,» Kurian said. «For example, conferences and events that once were physically held together will now be complemented with digital events. 

«The business strategy operations and technology platforms of every institution will be reconsidered for the fact that agility, speed and resilience will become paramount as opposed to the traditional definitions of strength: size, scale, predictability and efficiency.»

Of course, digital transformation was a priority long before any mention of COVID-19, but the rapid impact of the pandemic will force every institution to prioritise services and products to be remote and digital, according to Kurian. 

«Schools will be complemented with much more significant online curriculum and telemedicine will bring the skills of doctors and nurses to places where medicine previously couldn’t reach,» he added.

The rapid scale of the crisis has accelerated the use of a number of technologies once thought to be the biggest disruptors to businesses and jobs. AI, automation and cloud computing have instead become tools that keep us connected to work as opposed to things to replace us. 

However, as the crisis dies down and the world goes out into the «new normal», more and more businesses will need to embrace digital technologies. According to Kurain, leaders will transition quickly from the idea of business continuity to business transformation.

«Everything will have to be about speed and agility because as we said before, speed is the new scale,» he said. ​

IBM is withdrawing its full-year guidance for 2020 due to the current coronavirus pandemic and will reassess its position when there is more economic clarity.

The company’s decision comes after reporting a 3.4% drop in revenue for the first quarter of 2020.

Disruption from COVID-19 is the first real test of Arvind Krishna’s leadership since taking over from Ginni Rometty as CEO. The tech giant reported revenues of $21.8 billion (£16.7 billion) shortly before Rometty announced her retirement. On Monday it reported $17.6 billion (14.2 billion) for the first three months of 2020.

The company said it will reassess this position based on «the clarity of the macroeconomic recovery at the end of the second quarter».

Despite the drop, other elements of IBM’s business performed well. The firm’s cloud and cognitive software saw a 5% increase, with total cloud revenue up 19% to $5.4 billion (£4.4 billion). Similarly, Red Hat revenue also saw an increase of 18%.

«I believe that what we are going through today, with the shift to remote work, automation … will accelerate our client’s shift to hybrid cloud,» Krishna said on a call with Wall Street analysts Monday. «This gives me immense confidence in our future.»

Since its $43 billion acquisition of Red Hat, and the subsequent shift in focus towards hybrid cloud, IBM has seen continued growth in that particular market.

After five consecutive quarters of declining revenue, the final three months of 2019 saw a 0.1 increase largely based on its cloud success. Total cloud revenue for the final quarter of 2019 hit $6.8 billion (£5.5 billion), a rise of 21%.

In the grand scheme of things, IBM is still far behind the likes of AWS and Microsoft for cloud computing revenues, but it is one of the first to release quarterly performance since the pandemic, which could have a big impact on all the major market players.

An internal investigation by the Department of Defence (DoD) has found that the decision to award the JEDI contract to Microsoft was administered fairly, despite widespread reports of political interference.

The DoD’s Inspector General sought to review whether the decision to award Microsoft with a $10 billion cloud computing contract had been handled fairly and legally, as well as investigate reports that the White House pressured officials to reject a proposal from Amazon Web Services.

The report found that the process met the DoD’s standards, however, it was unable to review the deal in its entirety due to restrictions imposed by a «presidential communications privilege».

Since it was first announced, the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) project has been marred in controversy. From its single-vendor nature, to accusations of bias, the bidding process has resulted in extensive legal action. Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched an appeal shortly after Microsoft were announced the winners, citing political influence, particularly that of US President Donald Trump which has been heavily reported.

Oracle, meanwhile, launched legal action in November after it claimed AWS itself had sought to influence the decision, claiming that two DoD officials had been offered jobs at AWS during the process, while a third was a former consultant for the company.

Although the DoD report said that the process had been handled properly, it revealed that several DoD witnesses were instructed by the General Counsel (OGC) of the agency to not answer questions about potential communications between White House and DoD officials regarding JEDI, according to the report.

«As a result, we could not be certain whether there were any White House communications with some DoD officials which may have affected the JEDI procurement,» the report stated.

«However, we believe the evidence we received showed that the DoD personnel who evaluated proposals and made the source-selection awarding Microsoft the JEDI Cloud contract were not pressured about their decision on the award of the contract by any DoD leaders more senior to them, who may have communicated with the White House.»

Media «swirl»

The report states that DoD witnesses were aware of media reports about the JEDI award, but they said they considered it «lobbying,» and «media swirl». These refer to statements reportedly made by Trump that criticised Amazon and its owner Jeff Bezos. However, the report said that these comments had no effect on the work of each witness.

Instead, the findings suggest that «inaccurate media reports» and stories of «lobbying» from competing cloud companies may have created «the appearance or perception» that the award process was biased.

The report uses the infamous «screw Amazon» quote as an example. According to Guy Snodgrass’ book ‘Holding the Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon with Secretary Mattis‘, the President directed defence secretary Mark Esper to review the JEDI procurement. According to the DoD, the book speculated that he tried to influence Esper and other DoD officials not to select Amazon. The report also suggests that media reports, singling out CNN, contributed to speculation that Trump may have attempted to influence the procurement against Amazon.

However, the investigation could not corroborate or disprove Snodgrass’ account. Mattis told the investigation he could «not confirm» Snodgrass’ statement and said he did not recall talking to the President about JEDI. Other DoD officials said they «did not recall any meeting like» the one that Snodgrass describes in the book.

The investigation was also unable to fully corroborate or contradict Snodgrass’ account of the small group meeting, as the officials named by Snodgrass were instructed by the OGC to not answer any questions about communications with the President. The report concludes, however, that whether or not the meeting happened as described, it did not influence Mattis’ actions toward the JEDI bidding process.