Dropbox has unleashed a range of third-party extensions to help teams get more out of its collaboration and productivity platform so employees can complete tasks from within Dropbox rather than having to switch environments.

Think of them as plugins, allowing Dropbox customers to effortlessly launch workflows without having to launch a browser or open up a separate application.

Some of the partners the cloud firm has teamed up with include Adobe, Autodesk, DocuSign, Vimeo, airSlate, HelloSign, Nitro, Pixlr, and Smallpdf, covering applications including document editing, digitally signing documents and viewing and annotating videos without moving from application to application.

To launch the “micro application”, users can simply choose what to use to open up the file from a drop-down menu in their Dropbox account. When these files are saved, the changes are synced to the cloud, so anyone with access will see the changes in real time.

«We want to empower people to choose the best tools for their work by removing the friction between them,» said Quentin Clark, SVP of Engineering, Product, and Design at Dropbox.

«So we’re making it seamless for users to connect with partners that offer the right tools for the task at hand.”

This is the first series of Dropbox Extensions the company wants to introduce to business users. They will arrive for use by Dropbox Business users at the end of November, with more planned in the future, the cloud storage firm said.

This is a firm step away from the company developing its own internal applications for editing documents on the move and instead embracing the expertise of third parties. Microsoft and Google apps can already be used with Dropbox, but the launch of Extensions will open this up to a much wider collection of third-party app and software developers.

Deutsche Bank and HCL Technologies have announced a strategic partnership that will see the German bank transform its global cheque processing operations, digitising the process to benefit customers and the firm itself.

HCL will implement a cloud-based IT platform to automate the processing of cheques, significantly cutting down the resources needed to take cheque payments. At the moment, it’s a manual process to put cheque payments through, despite the payment method being vital for many of its customers.

“While cheques are still widely used around the world, the volumes across the industry are falling and processing them remains a labour intensive, highly manual task,” Shahrokh Moinian, global head of cash products, Global Transaction Banking of Deutsche Bank said.

“This strategic partnership is a great example where we are proactively responding to client needs and changing industry dynamics. We are turning a challenge of a commoditised product with declining volumes into an opportunity for innovation and creation of digital assets, which will ultimately benefit our customers.”

HCL’s digital cheque payment processing technology will also collect data that can be shared with the customer so they are able to better manage their finances.

“This is a significant milestone in HCL’s long-standing partnership with Deutsche Bank,” Rahul Singh, president of financial services at HCL Technologies added. “While banking is becoming increasingly digitised, processing cheques is still a paper-based process. HCL will leverage its engineering capabilities to build a digital, cloud-based, paperless platform which enables Deutsche Bank and other banks to benefit from efficiencies and deliver value-added services to their customers.”

EA has revealed its AI-powered development engine, designed to beam computer games to any mobile device or computer, as long as it’s got a decent internet connection.

The platform is focused on making the process of creating cross-platform games easier for developers. At the moment, creators have to spend a lot of time making sure their games work across platforms and screen sizes, making sure less powerful mobile processors can cope as well as gaming laptops, for example.

But EA’s Project Atlas will minimise this heavy lifting, so developers can instead focus on making more graphically games that just work everywhere, even on devices that would not normally be able to support them.

EA’s chief technology officer Ken Moss commented that, so far, game development has been fragmented. And even gaming innovation has complicated things, with AI, cloud, distributed computing, social features, and engines all developing individually, but not at the same rate.

«Technological disruptors — when brought together in a complementary way — will result in a truly profound unlock for game creators,» Moss said.

The technology works by using remote servers that stream the game to the device of choice using what is essentially a video feed that can adapt to the device capabilities. Because the server does all the heavy lifting, the device receiving the content merely needs to have a solid internet connection – the same as using Netflix, Amazon Prime video or any other video streaming service.

«With the unified platform of Project Atlas, game makers will have the ability to seamlessly deploy security measures including SSL certificates, configuration, appropriate encryption of data, and zero-downtime patches for every feature from a single secure source,» Moss added. «This means that they can focus on what game makers are best at — creating the best games.»

The news comes just a few weeks after both Microsoft and Google announced their own game streaming services – Project Xcloud and ProjectStream respectively.

Nutanix has updated Nutanix Beam, offering businesses full visibility across their public and private cloud environments, including on-premise set-ups. This means applications can be run in the environment most suited to them, saving businesses time and money.

The company explained that often, businesses are running applications in unsuitable environments. For example, those that carry out predictable tasks, such as data back-up, databases and enterprise applications that are cheaper to run within private cloud environments, while those that change a lot, such as mobile or IoT services are better suited to public cloud environments that are more scalable.

Beam can identify these application patterns and autonomously use the platform best suited for each application and workload, offering key insights such as cloud spend patterns from a single management dashboard.

“Hybrid cloud is no longer considered a brief stopping point in the journey toward an all public cloud future. It’s a first-class destination as customers realise they want the complementary benefits of the public and private cloud,” Sunil Potti, chief product and development officer at Nutanix said.

“For this to be successful, companies need to understand how they’re using infrastructure no matter what the platform and from a single view. Nutanix Beam now provides that visibility so customers can finally make informed decisions about their entire infrastructure.”

Another update to the platform will mean businesses can see precise Nutanix licence spending metrics too, allowing decision makers to view how much each Nutanix cluster is costing them, with notifications if they need to boost their software at any time.

The Avis Budget Group and AWS have teamed up to create applications and services that they say will provide operational enhancements for Avis, as well as creating a better smart city experience for customers.

Avis will use the AWS cloud platform and its Connected Vehicle Solution to create a data analysis system that integrates machine learning, artificial intelligence and data management to track inventory, mileage of vehicles and maintenance. This means that the business will know the condition of each of its fleet and staff will be able to make sure there can be more cars on the roads rather than in the garage.

“Our connected car data is manufacturer agnostic, meaning we have the ability to analyze data across makes and models, and our worldwide footprint gives us access to all corners of the globe,” said Arthur Orduña, chief innovation officer at Avis Budget Group.

“The platform we built leveraging AWS’s connected vehicle solution gives us advanced data management and scalable analytics capabilities for our connected car platform. We now have the ability to scale up based on demand and our data is backed by AWS’s software and massive infrastructure, so we have access to new insights-driven tools, storage resources, and first-class security.”

Not only will this benefit the company, making sure it can generate more revenues by keeping cars on the road, it also means customers will be able to hire the cars they’ve booked, without having to compromise and they can rest assured the car will be delivered to them in the best possible condition.

“For public and private organizations who choose to partner with Avis Budget Group down the road, we’ll be able to provide access to anonymized connected car data through our connected vehicle platform with the support of AWS. This could help create future vehicle innovation, new products, and services for connected travelers and inform smart city planning, like road condition and traffic volume data,” added Orduña.

The Avis Budget Group explained it chose AWS’ connected car platform because it’s a secure and scalable, meaning any data collected is protected and AWS also supports the car hire firm’s quest to create a standardised virtual environment, with consistency across the operating systems, programming languages, web application platforms and databases used by the firm across the world.

Western Digital has launched the world’s first 15TB SMR hard drive, designed for use with hyperscale cloud and data centre workloads.

The company suggested it could be used to power smart city data centres where huge amounts of data, such as video surveillance and legacy information, needs to be stored for regulatory compliance.

SMR (Shingle Magnetic Recording) hard drives are able to pack in higher storage capacities compared to a similar physical-sized HDD because the data can be stored on overlapping grooves. However, they’re not really suitable for reuse and as such is a perfect solution for the problem of storing data that needs to be kept for long periods of time.

The 15TB Ultrastar DC HC620 HDD drives can be combined together in a 4U60 HDD enclosure, offering a total capacity of up to 900TB. The company said this offers an extra 60TB per rack compared to its previous highest capacity HDD (14TB).

This presents significant financial savings where businesses are charged on a watts per terabyte basis, also meaning physical space is saved because fewer HDDs are required.

“With data continuing to grow at unprecedented rates, many hyperscale and cloud storage customers know that their workloads trend toward data that is written sequentially. In these instances, customers are optimizing their infrastructures with the lowest TCO and the maximum capacity,» said Eyal Bek, vice president of product marketing, Western Digital.

“By capitalizing on our highest-capacity SMR storage solutions, our customers’ investment can not only be fully leveraged today, but for subsequent generations of SMR areal density improvements for continued infrastructure optimization.»

Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC620 HDD is already available to select customers, with general availability announced as “later this quarter”.

Western Digital has launched the world’s first 15TB SMR hard drive, designed for use with hyperscale cloud and data centre workloads.

The company suggested it could be used to power smart city data centres where huge amounts of data, such as video surveillance and legacy information, needs to be stored for regulatory compliance.

SMR (Shingle Magnetic Recording) hard drives are able to pack in higher storage capacities compared to a similar physical-sized HDD because the data can be stored on overlapping grooves. However, they’re not really suitable for reuse and as such is a perfect solution for the problem of storing data that needs to be kept for long periods of time.

The 15TB Ultrastar DC HC620 HDD drives can be combined together in a 4U60 HDD enclosure, offering a total capacity of up to 900TB. The company said this offers an extra 60TB per rack compared to its previous highest capacity HDD (14TB).

This presents significant financial savings where businesses are charged on a watts per terabyte basis, also meaning physical space is saved because fewer HDDs are required.

“With data continuing to grow at unprecedented rates, many hyperscale and cloud storage customers know that their workloads trend toward data that is written sequentially. In these instances, customers are optimizing their infrastructures with the lowest TCO and the maximum capacity,» said Eyal Bek, vice president of product marketing, Western Digital.

“By capitalizing on our highest-capacity SMR storage solutions, our customers’ investment can not only be fully leveraged today, but for subsequent generations of SMR areal density improvements for continued infrastructure optimization.»

Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC620 HDD is already available to select customers, with general availability announced as “later this quarter”.

The growing popularity of cloud technologies has resulted in record-breaking financial results for both Google and Intel in this round of financial results.

Intel overall earnings were up 19% year-on-year, the company revealed, with its data centre operation raking in $6.14 billion in revenue, surpassing its estimates of $5.89 billion and deserving of its second-place entry in Intel’s total most profitable divisions.

The company said its cloud growth was down to cloud demand and communications service provider demand. CFO and interim CEO Bob Swan said the latter group is growing to drive a significant proportion of its cloud customer revenue as they “continue to transform their networks with Intel architecture as they prepare for 5G”.

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Google’s Cloud revenues were also on the up, giving a boost to parent company Alphabet’s earnings. However, it’s tricky to give precise results for the company’s cloud-specific revenues as its lumped together in the Google Other Revenue section, which also includes Google Play.

But nonetheless, revenues in that generic pot were up 29% and CEO Sundar Pichai said that’s thanks to the company’s investment in machine learning and commitment to open infrastructure.

“We’re very aligned with where the market is headed in the long run,” he said on the earnings call. “And this notion of supporting open architecture so that enterprises don’t feel locked in and allowing for a multi-cloud environment to develop. That’s the direction we are betting on and our indications are that the market is headed in that direction as well.”

The growing popularity of cloud technologies has resulted in record-breaking financial results for both Google and Intel in this round of financial results.

Intel overall earnings were up 19% year-on-year, the company revealed, with its data centre operation raking in $6.14 billion in revenue, surpassing its estimates of $5.89 billion and deserving of its second-place entry in Intel’s total most profitable divisions.

The company said its cloud growth was down to cloud demand and communications service provider demand. CFO and interim CEO Bob Swan said the latter group is growing to drive a significant proportion of its cloud customer revenue as they “continue to transform their networks with Intel architecture as they prepare for 5G”.

Find out how to navigate multi-cloud complexity with a software-based network in this whitepaper.

Download now

Google’s Cloud revenues were also on the up, giving a boost to parent company Alphabet’s earnings. However, it’s tricky to give precise results for the company’s cloud-specific revenues as its lumped together in the Google Other Revenue section, which also includes Google Play.

But nonetheless, revenues in that generic pot were up 29% and CEO Sundar Pichai said that’s thanks to the company’s investment in machine learning and commitment to open infrastructure.

“We’re very aligned with where the market is headed in the long run,” he said on the earnings call. “And this notion of supporting open architecture so that enterprises don’t feel locked in and allowing for a multi-cloud environment to develop. That’s the direction we are betting on and our indications are that the market is headed in that direction as well.”

Amazon has revealed plans to launch its first data centre in South Africa, with three availability zones due to become operational in Cape Town during the first half of 2020.

Although the company has a lot of business in South Africa, including the development centre it set up in 2004, it’s never run a data centre from the country. The company explained the announcement has been driven by demand in the region, recognising the tech talent of South Africans, particularly those situated in Cape Town.

AWS said its new AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will offer lower latency to local businesses – particularly those in sub-Saharan areas – so they are able to make use of data-intensive technologies such as AI, machine learning, IoT and mobile services.

Adding an extra region in Africa also means businesses are able to store information in a local facility, rather than crossing the borders. This will be particularly important for businesses wanting to comply with the upcoming Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).

“Having built the original version of Amazon EC2 in our Cape Town development center 14 years ago, and with thousands of African companies using AWS for years, we’ve been able to witness first-hand the technical talent and potential in Africa,” the company’s CEO Andy Jassy said. “Technology has the opportunity to transform lives and economies across Africa, and we’re excited about AWS and the Cloud being a meaningful part of that transformation.”

To support the cloud infrastructure, AWS has also built up local teams for businesses to communicate with, making the cloud procurement process and cloud management a whole lot easier for South African businesses.  Local account managers, customer services representatives, partner managers and solutions architects are all on hand to help companies pursuing digital transformation doctrines.