Oracle’s chief executive Mark Hurd is stepping down from the company on a temporary basis for health-related reasons, as the software giant released its quarterly earnings earlier than expected.

The co-CEO, who shares his role with fellow chief executive Safra Catz, requested a leave of absence to address health-related issues, the company announced yesterday, following nine years at the company.

The news was announced in conjunction with the latest financial results, and has been disclosed just a few days before the company’s annual OpenWorld conference is set to kick off in San Francisco next week.

«To all my friends and colleagues at Oracle, though we all worked hard together to close the first quarter, I’ve decided that I need to spend time focused on my health. At my request, the Board of Directors has granted me a medical leave of absence,» said Hurd. 

«As you all know, Larry, Safra and I have worked together as a strong team, and I have great confidence that they and the entire executive management team will do a terrific job executing the exciting plans we will showcase at the upcoming OpenWorld.»

Hurd’s announcement overshadows the company’s roughly flat financial results for the first quarter of the 2019/20 financial year. Oracle declared revenues of $9.2 billion last quarter; the same figure year-on-year versus the first quarter for 2018/19.

Cloud services and license support revenue, meanwhile, climbed slightly to $6.8 billion versus $6.6 billion year-on-year, while cloud license and on-premise license revenue slumped to $812 million from $867 million.

«Autonomy is the defining attribute of a Generation 2 Cloud,» said Oracle’s CTO Larry Ellison. «Next week at our OpenWorld conference, we will announce more Autonomous Cloud Services to complement the Oracle Autonomous Database.»

As for the company’s leadership, Catz will continue on as sole CEO, while Ellison, who co-founded the company, will handle Hurd’s responsibilities. The company hasn’t announced how long Hurd will be away from his post.

Telstra has launched a platform to give customers the capacity to seamlessly share data from their Internet of Things (IoT) devices using Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

The two companies have teamed up to co-develop the Telstra Data Hub, a modular system which aims to reduce the barriers that businesses face when it comes to sharing data, including the costs involved.

The technology will allow organisations, initially within the connected supply chain, water management and agribusiness industries, to share and exchange data securely.

The thinking is that by allowing businesses to harness their data through the platform, it’ll lead to productivity gains.

«Our heritage is in building national infrastructure that benefits generations,» said Telstra’s group executive for product and technology Christian von Reventlow.

«We see more than $100 billion in incremental value to customers and the economy through digitisation and data-driven collaboration.

«We are excited to be partnering with Microsoft and unveiling this new innovation today at Telstra Vantage and we look forward to sharing further news as we continue to develop this exciting product.»

The telecoms firm outlined a case study centred on the connected supply chain, in which one of Australia’s largest supermarkets has used the system to track and monitor shipping containers to reduce the cost of missing cargo.

The supermarket, and its partners, can in future use data accessed via the hub to respond to ongoing operational problems, as well as understand chokepoints and improve efficiencies within the supply chain.

Telstra identified several problems it aims to solve, including a reluctance to share data for fear of losing control, high costs in setting up platforms, a lack of data standardisation and having to integrate various systems together.

The partnership is part of a wider effort across the industry to give business customers far more power to access and exploit the vast amounts of data gathered.

Salesforce and Amazon Web Services (AWS), for example, bolstered their existing partnership in September last year to simplify data sharing, and give customers better access to data to drive digital transformation.

The majority of security professionals now consider single-cloud technology to be just as safe, if not safer, than on-premise storage – while multi-cloud environments are deemed the riskiest setups, according to research. 

Cloud technology has seen an explosion in adoption rates among businesses in recent years but has been traditionally considered a riskier option for businesses than on-premise storage.

The majority (61%) of chief information security officers (CISOs), however, have indicated that while security concerns remain, businesses running single-cloud configurations are at no more risk than they would be powering their organisations through on-premise data centres.

There’s also a strong appetite for cloud adoption, with 88% of respondents to a Nominet survey reporting their organisations are either currently engaging in, or have plans to, adopting Software as a Service (SaaS) products.

The research questioned almost 300 CISOs, CTOs and CIOs from large organisations with more than 2,500 employees directly responsible for overseeing cyber security practices.

Some 71% of respondents said they were either moderately, very or extremely concerned with the risk of cyber attack in cloud technology, but these concerns are generally matched by anxieties with on-premise systems.

Interestingly, US respondents were almost twice as likely than CISOs based in the UK to suggest they were «extremely concerned» – 21% versus 13%. This could be based on a host of reasons, including differing compliance regimes, threat landscapes and media coverage of security breaches, the report suggested.

«Security has traditionally always been cited as a barrier to cloud adoption, so it is significant that the perceived risk gap between cloud and on-premise has disappeared,» said Stuart Reed Nominet’s vice president of cyber security.

«It is evident that security concerns are no longer an insurmountable barrier to cloud deployments given the high adoption rate of cloud services.»

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He added: «And, as we move into the ‘cloud era’, arguably security teams need to channel their concern into finding solutions that work with the cloud, just as they have been doing in an on-premise environment.»

Adopting a multi-cloud approach, meanwhile, is generally seen as more risk than hybrid and single-cloud approaches.

CISOs adopting such a configuration within their organisations were twice as likely to have suffered a data breach over the past 12 months; 52% versus 24% of single-cloud and hybrid-cloud users.

Organisations adopting a multi-cloud approach were also found to generally suffer a greater number of data breaches, with 69% of respondents reporting 11-30 breaches compared with 19% for single-cloud adopters and 13% for hybrid cloud adopters.

«When it comes to ensuring resilience and being able to source ‘best-in-class’ services, using multiple vendors makes sense,» Reed continued.

«However, from a security perspective, the muti-cloud approach also increases exposure to risk as there are a greater number of parties handling an organisation’s sensitive data.

«This is exactly why an eye must be kept on integration and a concerted effort be made to gain the visibility needed to counter threats across all different types of environments.»

The desktop version of Firefox will block cookies and cryptocurrency mining by default as part of sweeping changes to the web browser aimed at safeguarding user privacy.

Mozilla will enforce Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) as standard practice for all users as part of the default Firefox configuration, from today, and will block known third-party tracking cookies, the company has announced.

The cookies will be cross-referenced with the ‘Disconnect’ list of known third-party trackers that comprise websites that collect and retain data regarding users’ activity across multiple sites or applications.

This feature has been widely-anticipated since Mozilla outlined its plans in January, and has been available for new users since June this year. The feature now, however, concerns a fresh approach to anti-tracking the firm outlined recently based on testing and revision.

Mozilla also previously teased a subscription-based version of Firefox with additional privacy-centric features, which also reportedly featured ETP available as standard.

«Currently over 20% of Firefox users have Enhanced Tracking Protection on. With today’s release, we expect to provide protection for 100% of our users by default,» Mozilla said.

«Enhanced Tracking Protection works behind-the-scenes to keep a company from forming a profile of you based on their tracking of your browsing behaviour across websites – often without your knowledge or consent.

«Those profiles and the information they contain may then be sold and used for purposes you never knew or intended. Enhanced Tracking Protection helps to mitigate this threat and puts you back in control of your online experience.»

The ETP functionality will also work in the background to prevent illicit cryptocurrency mining scripts from draining users’ CPU usage and battery power on their devices. This feature has existed in previous beta versions of Firefox but is now available as standard to all.

Users will know ETP is switched on by the appearance of a purple shield icon in the far-left corner of their address bar. This will show when users visit websites on which third-party tracking cookies are being actively blocked.

Firefox will also block fingerprinting scripts – which harvest a sampling of details from users’ devices when visiting a particular website – by default. This snapshot of information can then be used to track users across the web.

Users can block fingerprinting scripts if they turn on ‘strict mode’, with Mozilla also suggesting this protection will be bundled into the default settings in future releases.

Google is shutting down its dedicated recruitment tracking service Hire from next year in order to focus resources on other areas of its cloud portfolio.

Aimed primarily at SMBs, Hire serves as a job application tracking app that integrates functions like applicant search and scheduling interviews into the wider G Suite.

Google has decided to discontinue the service from 1 September 2020, however, despite describing the app as «successful» in an official notice.

This announcement has also been made just shy of six months since the HR automation platform fully launched in the UK.

Customers will continue to receive support throughout the duration of existing contracts, and no additional charges will be levied for usage once contracts expire up until the end-of-life date. Contracts can also be terminated without penalty.

Meanwhile, there will be no new features developed for the service and all experimental features that have not been officially launched will be switched off within the next month.

A host of the features included recruiters contacting potential hires via Gmail, scheduling interviews and induction days through Google Calendar, and tracking progress through Google Sheets.

The Candidate Discovery function, in which hiring managers can trawl through several information sources to learn about potential recruits, was also considered one of the biggest draws.

Hire was initially released in 2017 following the $380 million acquisition of Bebop, founded by the former Google Cloud CEO Diane Green. The app’s closure will also be made just a few months after Green’s departure from Google’s cloud computing arm.

Despite targeting SMBs in the main, Hire is also used by a number of larger companies such as Cloudera and Atom Group.

The app’s closure doesn’t mark Google’s withdrawal from the recruitment tech sector entirely, however, with the company still committed to its Google for Jobs search tool, which is intended to rival the likes of Indeed.

Cloud Pro approached Google for comment but the firm did not respond at the time of writing.

Microsoft is previewing an ‘Azure Dedicated Host’ service for enterprises looking to run their Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs) on their own physical servers, alongside a set of changes to licensing costs.

The dedicated host service will target enterprise customers which prioritise the security benefits of physical hosting over shared cloud hosting, as well as the isolation of their sensitive information.

These servers will not be shared with any other customer, and businesses which opt for one will retain full control over how services run on the machine.

The Azure Dedicated Host is available in two iterations. The first type is based on the 2.3GHz Intel Xeon E5-2673 v4 processor and has a maximum of 64 virtual CPUs available. This can be chosen in a 256GiB and 448GiB RAM configuration, priced at $4.055 per hour and $4.492 per hour respectively.

The second version, meanwhile, is based on the Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 processor with 72 virtual CPUs available and is priced at $4.039 per hour in a 144GiB configuration.

Moreover, several can be grouped together into larger host groups in a particular region, so businesses can build clusters of physical servers.

The dedicated hosts will be subject to automatic maintenance by default, although administrators can defer host maintenance operations and apply them within a 35-day window. It’s possible, during this window, to retain full control over the server maintenance.

This has been announced in conjunction with a set of key changes to the pricing of software licenses, which sees a separation between on-premise outsourcing services and cloud services. Customers will need an additional ‘software assurance’ to run Microsoft software on public cloud services from 1 October this year.

Businesses using rival cloud providers, like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) should, therefore, expect the cost of running Microsoft software to increase.

The introduction of Azure Dedicated Host, on the other hand, has also seen Microsoft roll out an Azure Hybrid Benefit licensing option, which allows customers to use software without the need for a ‘software assurance’.

Both Google and Amazon have launched similar dedicated physical services in recent, years, with Azure the latest major cloud provider to follow suit.

Google, for instance, launched sole-tenant nodes in its Compute Engine last June, which allowed businesses to run instances on their own dedicated architecture as opposed to sharing hosting with other customers. These are similar to AWS’ EC2 dedicated hosts.

Elsewhere, Microsoft has increased the bug bounty rewards as part of a big security push that has also seen the launch of the Azure Security Lab.

The highest bounty will be doubled to $40,000, while those with access to the lab can attempt a set of scenario-based challenges with a maximum award of $300,000.

The new lab itself is a set of dedicated cloud hosts that offers security researchers a secure space to test against Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) attacks.

Organisations are invited to apply to join the new security-focused community by requesting a Windows or Linux VM, with successful applicants given access to campaigns for targeted scenarios and added incentives.

Google has extended its advanced security programme to enterprise customers using its G Suite, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Cloud Identity products, giving IT administrators the ability to set stronger internal controls.

Organisations can enrol senior executives and those employees at high-risk of cyber attacks into Google’s Advanced Protection Program (APP), which will bring their level of security up to the standards of Google’s own employees.

Within the next few days, IT administrators can select the members of their organisation who they assess as needing stronger protections, and Google will automatically apply a set of stricter cyber security policies to their activities.

There are several changes to how those enrolled in the programme can access Google’s products, including enforced FIDO keys, blocking access to non-trusted third-party apps automatically, and enhanced scanning of incoming emails.

These changes will come alongside making Titan security keys, Google’s own FIDO key, available for purchase in Japan, Canada, France and the UK, as well as using machine learning to improve security alerts for IT administrators.

The use of such FIDO keys will be mandatory for those enrolled in the advanced security programme, meaning access to critical Google apps may be disrupted for users without them. Third-party apps will also be automatically blocked for APP users unless explicitly whitelisted.

The use of machine learning, meanwhile, will be directed towards analysing activity within the G Suite to detect unusual behaviour. In practical terms, IT administrators signed up to the service will receive a stream of anomalous activity alerts on a security dashboard.

This raft of added security protections will bolster the security across organisations signed up to Google’s enterprise products by both demanding more of high-risk employees and adding more robust provisions.

However, the majority of these practices can be seen as essential for good cyber security hygiene, regardless, and raise the question as to why they haven’t been introduced to customers up to now. It’s especially pertinent given Google employees have adhered to the APP regime since it was launched two years ago.

Google, at the time of launch, restricted the APP to those at elevated risk of attack and who are also «willing to trade off a bit of convenience for more protection».

There is now, however, no stopping IT administrators from now enrolling their entire organisation to the programme should they deem it the best defence against cyber threats.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) will support VMware workloads as part of a partnership between the two companies to generate additional options for customers looking to run a hybrid cloud strategy.

Up to now, Google’s cloud arm was the only major public cloud provider to not support VMware. Enterprise customers will, however, from later this year be able to run VMware workloads on the platform.

The Google Cloud VMware Solution, as it’s dubbed, will use software-defined data centre tools including NSX networking, vSAN storage software provided by GCP, as well as vSphere compute. This will be governed through CloudSimple.

The partnership has not yet been formally announced, a spokesperson told Cloud Pro, but is being widely reported by a host of US titles including Bloomberg.

VMware will benefit from their customers given the flexibility to move workloads from their own servers to the public cloud, including existing Vmware tools, policies and practices, according to the firm’s CEO Thomas Kurian.

The firm’s customers will also be given access to Google’s artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and analytic tools, as well as being able to deploy their apps to regions where Google has data centres. Moreover, these enterprises will also be able to run networking tools through GCP, beyond virtualisation software.

The partnership between GCP and VMware is similar in nature to other agreements struck between the virtualisation firm and rival public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS).

These two companies, for instance, struck an agreement in late 2017 in which businesses could migrate their processes and apps to the public cloud. This was extended to Europe in March last year.

In April, meanwhile, Microsoft introduced native VMware support for its Azure cloud platform. The announcement meant customers were able to run their workloads in native environments, also through tools like vSphere, vSAN, vCenter and NSX, with workloads ported to Azure with relative ease.

VMware’s latest partnership with GCP points towards its strengthening in the public cloud arena, as it aims to offer a greater scale of flexibility for its enterprise customers.

For manufacturing companies specialising in fast-moving-consumer-goods (FMCG), the need for reliable enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is paramount. Firms look to these systems to handle many aspects of day-to-day operations, from staying on top of inventory to managing the sales process.

Sistema Plastics runs a single manufacturing site in Auckland, New Zealand, but ships worldwide through a series of third-party retailers, including Amazon and Asda. Indeed, if you peer into any kitchen cabinet you’ll likely find something manufactured by the firm, from microwavable containers to lunchboxes to reusable water bottles.

The company has grown rapidly over the last decade – a single manufacturing run now is in the region of 30-40,000 units. As a result of this rapid growth, inventory management had started to spiral out of control to the point it was being stored «almost anywhere» with no real way of tracking it, Sistema’s CTO, Greg Heeley, tells Cloud Pro.

Four years ago, the company brought in Epicor’s flagship ERP platform to handle a major transformation in its manufacturing processes.

The system can only do what you tell it to

The challenge Sistema faced at the time, Heeley says, was finding a product that could support the way inventory was configured, as well as finding and managing stock. This highly pressing issue was borne from Sistema’s rapid growth coupled with severely restricted physical floor space. Problems deepened when Sistema outgrew its first plant and began opening up several smaller sites. Being spread in such a way, across multiple locations, meant workers would regularly move parts that were needed in one plant from another and vice versa.

To compound these issues, employees neglected to feed accurate information into Epicor ERP, such as where the stock was kept and whether it had been moved, making it even more difficult to use the software.

«Putting stock somewhere and telling the system is one thing, but if you then move it and don’t tell the system – that’s something else,» Heeley explains. In light of this, the firm devised procedures around how the stock was recorded and got people trained up to follow the new system.

«There are some areas like that we struggled with; more personnel than system-driven,» he adds. «The system can’t do what you don’t tell it – and we sometimes didn’t tell it what to do.»

It was only in 2016 that a single site large enough to handle the scale of manufacturing operations was found and things finally began to click with the software. This step forward involved putting in automatic inventory systems, among other measures, to ensure all inventory problems were consigned to the past.

The skills shortage bites hard

Looking ahead, Sistema is shifting its focus to grow as a company now that the software underpinning its operations has been tamed. But the problems the firm now faces are unique to a company that both manufactures plastic goods and is based in «the middle of technically nowhere».

For a company that keeps a close eye on its carbon footprint, being based in New Zealand has proved a massive hindrance. Sistema’s environmental ranking scores must take into account shipping materials in and out, as well as the products manufactured. This is all offset against its external energy consumption, which is proving a battle. Plastics itself, meanwhile, has become stigmatised due to the effects of discarded materials on the environment.

Sistema’s need to hire more high-skilled staff, however, is chief among the firm’s concerns, and this isn’t helped by the company’s location either. New Zealand’s economy is based predominantly on agriculture and tourism, not manufacturing or engineering. Attracting people to work in «the middle of technically nowhere», therefore, is something the firm will have to look at addressing in the coming years.

There’s scope for installing human resources (HR) modules in ERP software to assist in talent acquisition. More often than not, this involves automating processes like payroll and benefits to give hiring managers more time to focus on finding talented workers. ERP can also make a difference to a firm’s sustainability goals, with greater visibility over stock allowing Sistema to gain full control over the products ordered, consumed and re-used.

Looking ahead, Sistema is seeking to further buy into document management, and automate a host of processes by implementing Epicor’s DocStar enterprise content management platform. While the firm has adopted Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), a digital exchange of business documents in a standardised format, many of its customers haven’t. This means the manufacturer often receives orders that are 50 to 60 times longer than they should be, which must be then manually entered into their systems. Epicor’s software, Heeley claims, can help the company get around this.

Automating accounts payable (AP) document scanning, as well as document record handling, are also on the horizon. Meanwhile, Sistema has ambitions to digitise standard operating procedures for the shop floor and to index visually-compelling videos that teach employees how to perform tasks. Heeley also touts robotics, predictive analytics, and edge computing as areas he’d be keen to explore, but what he does next will largely depend on what makes the most sense for the company.

«It does become a challenge of we haven’t got infinite resources, and there aren’t infinite resources in the country either,» he continues.

«So we definitely have to be selective about the projects that we take on, and [we need to] know which one’s going to produce the best results in the short term. We will get to all of them eventually, but it’s just about prioritising.»

Microsoft has invested $1 billion into an industry wide artificial intelligence (AI) partnership that will harness Azure cloud technology to develop AI for supercomputers.

The not-for-profit organisation OpenAI, co-founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, is basing its partnership with Microsoft on three key areas, largely focused on how the firm’s Azure cloud platform can integrate with ongoing work.

The two organisations will jointly build «Azure AI supercomputing technologies» while OpenAI will port its existing services to run on Microsoft’s cloud platform. Moreover, the company will become OpenAI’s preferred partner for marketing AI technologies as when they are commercialised.

The initiative will also focus on creating artificial general intelligence (AGI). This differs from conventional AI in its broad and multi-functional nature, as opposed to being developed for specific applications.

Microsoft argues generalisation, and «deep mastery of multiple AI technologies», will help address some of the world’s most pressing issues. These range from global challenges like climate change to creating more personalised issues like healthcare and education.

With its capacity to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human can, AGI is also a popular subject in science-fiction writing, as writers and futurists extrapolate this to machines experiencing consciousness.

«The creation of AGI will be the most important technological development in human history, with the potential to shape the trajectory of humanity,» said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

«Our mission is to ensure that AGI technology benefits all of humanity, and we’re working with Microsoft to build the supercomputing foundation on which we’ll build AGI. We believe it’s crucial that AGI is deployed safely and securely and that its economic benefits are widely distributed. We are excited about how deeply Microsoft shares this vision.»

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as an organisation dedicated to researching next-gen AI technologies and the applications for these. Its missions centre on developing AI that serves as an extension of individual humans, not a replacement.

It’s a similar AI vision to Microsoft’s, with the industry giant committing to developing AI grounded in an ethical framework. Its foray into automation and machine learning has largely come in the way of voice recognition and in medical contexts.

It’s a step-change from the culture that led to Microsoft launching, and later shutting down, the infamous Tay bot in 2016. This chat Twitter-based chatbot was initially designed to emulate a teenage girl but ended up parroting racial slurs and conspiracy theories after it was hijacked by trolls.