Monthly Archives: January 2020

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How to pick the best cloud accounting software


Cloud Pro

5 Sep, 2019

​Cloud accounting software is one of the many types of cloud-based software that can help businesses both big and small process their accounts without having to buy costly perpetual licenses for on-prem packages that need updating and patching regularly.

Amid all the different services on offer, it can be difficult to determine which is the best cloud accounting software for you. Here we run down some of the things you should consider before deciding on one service or another – including Making Tax Digital – as well as some of the options that are available to you.

How much does cloud accounting software cost?

For microbusinesses and SMBs, cloud accounting software is a blessing. Most providers have tiered offerings with prices based on criteria such as the number of users or the amount of data you process.

For example, Xero’s base level plan is 10 per month, allowing you to send five invoices and quotes, enter five bills and reconcile 20 bank transactions each month.

Zoho Books, meanwhile, has an entry-level tier that costs 6 per month, allows two users, five automated workflows and 50 contacts, as well as Bank reconciliation, custom invoices, expense tracking, projects and timesheets, recurring transactions and sales approval.

Most providers also offer a free trial period, which may help you make up your mind as to which service to choose – just don’t forget to cancel before the time’s up if you decide it’s not for you!

Does cloud accounting software replace normal accounting software?

Yes. Cloud accounting software is a standalone product and doesn’t require you to keep any software you have already.

There are several advantages of this type of software versus normal buy-once products too. First, you can scale up or down to fit the needs of your business – as you grow, you can move up tiers depending on your needs. Or, should you need to scale back, you can move back down tiers too.

Second, you don’t need to create independent backups of your data. The beauty of the cloud is that everything is stored off site with redundancy built in. So if all your computers suffer from a ransomware infection, for example, or the building you work from floods and your IT hardware is destroyed, at least your accounts will be safely held off site.

Third, if you decide the service you’ve chosen isn’t right for you then you can move over to a different one without the burden of knowing you’ve sunk a lot of money into your initial purchase and will have to do so again, as is the case with traditional software.

Does cloud accounting software replace my accountant?

No. Cloud accounting software helps you manage your accounting workflow and keep track of transactions. A professional accountant helps you make sense of all this information and make sure it’s all in order before you submit it to the tax authorities or take it to your bank if you’re seeking a business loan, for example. So it’s best for you to retain the services of the person who deals with your accounts now, as you would with any other accounting software.

Is cloud accounting software good for larger businesses?

That largely depends on how large your business is and how many users you would like to add. Some offerings cap out at around a dozen users even on the most expensive plan, which might not be enough for a large business, or even organisations sitting at the top end of medium-sized.

Other products, however, offer unlimited users, although they may have other limitations that make them unsuitable for your needs. Whatever size business you are, it pays to shop around, but this is especially the case for bigger organisations.

Will cloud accounting software help with Making Tax Digital?

It can do. Making Tax Digital (MTD) is the government’s initiative to modernise the way businesses submit their tax records. It wants to move all tax filing – including VAT, Corporation Tax and Self-Assessment – to electronic systems by early 2020. This means that whatever the size of your business, from micro through to enterprise, MTD is something you will need to get to grips with sooner rather than later.

Some services pitch themselves as being “MTD-ready”, especially at the top tier, but it’s worth familiarising yourself with the requirements of Making Tax Digital, if you aren’t already. Take into account what each product offers, how comfortable you are with the needs of MTD and how helpful (or convenient) something that’s MTD-ready will be for you.

More information on Making Tax Digital can be found in our guide to MTD preparation, but it’s worth speaking to your accountant to work out what’s best for your individual business needs.

Which is the best cloud accounting software for me?

As alluded to above, this will largely depend on your situation. Consider your needs – not only things like the number of users you have or the number of contacts you can add, but also what you can really afford. Remember, as your business grows you can always move up a tier to unlock those extra bells and whistles that were a nice-to-have but are now more necessary to your operations.

To help you make your decision, check out these reviews of some of the major cloud accounting software offerings, including details on pricing, features and configuration, over on our sister site IT Pro.

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Securing distributed clouds with an integrated approach: A guide

As digital innovation and resulting transformation increase, organisations also face the rise of traffic volumes from end user and IoT devices, SaaS applications and data from employees, consumers, and partners. As a result, many big data and large-scale applications simply outpace the centralised data centre infrastructure and the IT teams who have to manage and maintain distributed clouds.

New hybrid designs allow applications and compute to adjust to growth and sudden surges in traffic levels by extending storage and compute resources to the public cloud in order to scale on demand. Leveraging a hybrid approach can help DevOps teams through their rapid experimentation processes and enterprises can accelerate the prototyping of applications and services since critical resources can be provisioned on the fly.

A hybrid approach also provides greater agility for business-critical workflows that cross thousands of services, provides better support for advanced applications, and optimises communication patterns to shorten round trips between essential data and compute resources – all with a fraction of the manpower required for legacy data centre environments.

The challenge is that because today’s applications and data exist across on-premises, co-located, private, and multiple public clouds, organisations that own these applications and data are increasingly vulnerable to attacks that target their expanding attack surface. To address these risks, many IT leaders often try to bolt on individual point security solutions to patch the resulting defensive gaps while also trying to cover evolving regulatory compliance requirements.

Unfortunately, such a piecemeal approach simply cannot address the diversity of the compute infrastructure and full spectrum of vulnerabilities being introduced. Instead, IT leaders require an integrated security strategy that includes deeply integrated solutions with advanced capabilities designed to span and protect today’s hybrid IT environments. All without compromising the speed, scalability, or functionality that today’s applications require.

Three key elements of network and security integration

To address the expanding attack surface, network and security teams must integrate security across all parts of their hybrid IT environments. These tools not only need to function as native solutions on whatever platform they are deployed, but they also need to work seamlessly between different environments to ensure three critical functions:

Visibility: Hybrid IT environments render a mix of disparate tools each offering different level of visibility and different management systems causing major challenges to assess risks, trace security and performance issues, achieve compliance and more. This is why organisations need a consistent underlying security management platform interconnecting the distributed environments, enabling consistent visibility and management across the entire distributed cloud environment. This also better supports troubleshooting, consistent policy enforcement and other cloud operations.

Scalability: As workloads increasingly spread out across the hybrid IT infrastructure, security requirements should follow suit. In order to do so, security solutions must exhibit the same level of elasticity, scalability and resilience as the cloud so they can keep up with application demand. As hybrid IT environments expand and diversify, security solutions should be integrated into the underlying infrastructure operations in order to ensure continuous reliability and business continuity.

Automation and orchestration: An integrated security architecture must also leverage the power of automation across the hybrid cloud infrastructure. This requires individual network and security components to not only communicate with each other, but also support consistent operational attributes and APIs in order to support the provisioning of consistent policy enforcement as data and workflows move from one environment to the next. An integrated security architecture must also consist of real-time management and provisioning of application and workflow classifications and enforcement policies across multiple virtual, WAN, or cloud environments.

At the same time, intelligent networking protocols need to be combined with automated security responses and accelerated management features to shrink the windows of risk exposure and reduce staff workflow burdens, human errors, and operating expenses (OpEx). Where possible, the management and orchestration of these automated networking and security functions don’t just need to be centralised, but fully integrated into a single-pane-of-glass management to ensure that configurations and policies are consistent and reliable across the distributed environments.

Dynamic cloud security requires new standards for integration

As data and the delineation between private public and hybrid cloud blurs, organisations need to evolve towards a distributed cloud security strategy. An organisation’s attack surface will naturally expand, adding new risks and complexities that can often overwhelm limited resources and budgets.

Far too often, to meet the demand for increasing levels of compute performance, cloud security operators end up compromising security to meet user demands for performance. This is almost always the result of a security strategy that does not realise the dynamic nature of distributed cloud infrastructures. What is needed is a strategy and security solutions that are designed to operate at scale across a heterogenous environment.

In the face of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats and the growing cybersecurity skills gap, it’s time for organisations to revisit their plans for securing their distributed cloud infrastructure. To deliver both security and agility, especially across diverse computing environments, IT leaders must embrace an integrated security architecture strategy based around the principles of dynamic cloud security, combined with an integrated security platform designed to deliver agility, resiliency, scalability and automation.

https://www.cybersecuritycloudexpo.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/cyber-security-world-series-1.pngInterested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

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Banco Sabadell signs up to 10-year IBM deal


Bobby Hellard

15 Jan, 2020

Spain’s Banco Sabadell has agreed on a €1 billion (£852.5 million) digital transformation deal with IBM to overhaul its IT systems over the next ten years.

The bank will migrate to a hybrid cloud infrastructure, developed by IBM’s Red Hat unit, which it acquired in 2019.

The deal is an extension of an existing partnership between the two companies that will see IBM transform Sabadell’s technological infrastructure into an advanced platform, able to integrate all its data and applications and facilitate a centralised single customer view.

Sabadell is aiming to upgrade its computer systems to be more efficient as it handles more data and transactions from customers. The bank has also prioritised security and a readiness to adapt to regulatory changes as digitisation sweeps through the industry.

“As the financial sector develops its digitalisation process in a highly regulated environment, banks need to combine a huge capacity for customer-focused innovation with a technological environment that offers maximum levels of solidity, resilience and security,” said Marta Martinez, president of IBM Spain, Portugal, Greece and Israel.

“An open hybrid cloud platform, created and managed with in-depth knowledge of the financial sector, is the best possible foundation for confronting these challenges.”

According to Sabadell’s CEO, Jamie Guardiola Romojaro, the deal will not only increase its resilience, security and scalability but also help the bank adopt key elements of the new technologies and processes such as cloud, intensive use of data and artificial intelligence.

In November, IBM announced a deal with Bank of America to develop “the world’s first financial services-ready public cloud”. Like the Sabadell deal, the public cloud platform was said to be built using services acquired through its Red Hat deal.

The deal also extends to UK bank TSB, which is a subsidiary of Banco Sabadell and has previously worked with IBM during its 2018 meltdown nightmare. A report from IBM suggested that the bank didn’t carry out rigorous enough testing of its new systems.

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The future of business banking now


Nicole Kobie

15 Jan, 2020

Forget walking down the high street to queue at your bank branch to set up an account, make a deposit or do any other basics of business banking. Thanks to the rise of mobile and online banking, such tasks can be done with a few taps on a smartphone between meetings. But the future of business banking isn’t just digital – it’s about integrated services and linking up with third-party software to make your finances as streamlined as possible. 

That’s the idea behind open banking, which is a set of regulations that lets your financial data be shared, opening up the way for new services and apps. Indeed, it’s helped spark the rise of so-called “challenger” banks, which are normally digital only, each with intuitive apps, near-instant account setup and handy features such as instant notifications and automated roundups for saving pots. But as compelling as they are, the likes of Monzo, Revolut and N26 started their push into the world of finance via consumer accounts for individuals, leaving small businesses behind.

That’s no longer the case. Starling has signed 60,000 businesses (and is approaching a million consumer users), Tide passed the 100,000 mark last summer and Monzo’s business accounts are set to arrive any day now. However, traditional banks have also caught on and don’t want to lose their lucrative business clients to newcomers, unveiling their own take on the challenger bank idea with the like of Bó from RBS – think big brewers releasing their take on a craft beer. Whichever you choose, it means same-day account setup, easy-to-use apps, and integrated accounting and other software tools. 

SMBs long ignored

It’s high time banks paid better attention to SMBs. According to analyst firm EY, SMBs account for £1.9 trillion in turnover annually and make up 99% of private companies in the UK. But a survey from Adaptive Lab suggested SMBs feel undervalued by larger banks, with too high costs for not enough specialised services. No wonder then that British startup Starling decided early on to target SMBs. “We recognised it was an underserved segment of the market, where the incumbent banks dominate and where there hadn’t been much innovation,” says Alex Frean, head of corporate affairs at Starling. “We thought there was a real customer need out there.”

Oliver Prill, CEO of business challenger bank Tide, adds that his fintech startup started because the co-founders had previously gone through the difficulty of setting up a business bank account themselves. “It didn’t work smoothly,” he says. “The biggest motivation for switchers at the moment is the huge annoyance they have had with the big five banks… they’ve really had it with their bank.”

Why have incumbent banks failed to offer such services? “We come from a history of monolithic universal banks, where small business is one segment among many others without much mindset to look at it any differently,” Prill says. “We fundamentally believe that these are very different industries,” he continues, suggesting that one bank may not be able to serve consumers, corporations, sole traders and SMBs very well, let alone those operating across different industries. 

All this means that business banking is ripe for disruption – and the disruptors are at the gate. They’re helped by the rise of digital in SMBs and API-led fintechs, open banking regulations prising data out of incumbents, and also the Alternative Remedies Package, which means there’s money sloshing around to help boost fintech startups. And, so far at least, it appears to be working. 

Making the move

That said, despite the increasing options, a June 2019 survey from Accenture suggests a mere 15% of SMB customers intend to switch their bank in the next year, with only 25% saying they would be willing to move to a digital-only service. 

There are two types of customer that challenger banks need to convince: those starting new businesses and those switching from an existing company to a different financial provider. For Tide, about 70% of its customers are new-to-market, and 30% are switching. To win over the first tranche, challenger banks need better awareness, admits Prill. He says Tide opens 12% of all new business current accounts, but its own in-house research suggests there’s only brand awareness among 17% of new companies – that’s why Tide ads are plastered all over London at the moment. “For the new-to market, a bank has to be fast… and have a good reputation,” he says. “But you need to be aware of the bank in the first place.” Frean agrees, noting that the lack of high street banks means creating awareness is a challenge. “We have to go and find customers and make them aware of us,” she says.

And then there are switchers, those annoyed at their current banks. It’s not easy to switch, but open banking is making it easier. For consumers, trying out Monzo or Starling is easy: sign up for an account, order a card, install the app, and you can see if it’s a system you like without having your salary paid in or transferring over all your direct debits. It’s more difficult for businesses to try out a new bank fully, as switching everything over takes time and, therefore, money; you would have to be sure of a new service before taking the plunge.

To help, Tide wants to set up a system for trial switching, in which all your figures, transactions and so on are pulled into the Tide account as a data feed, with your existing account staying the same. That lets companies try a bank effortlessly without much risk. “The trial switching overcomes friction, but you need to have a real reason to switch,” Prill says. 

Worth the switch?

Alongside attractive apps with whizzy features, challenger banks are trying to convince SMBs to make the switch by helping with or even taking over admin such as payroll and accounting, either offering such services or software themselves or via a third-party provider. “It’s really around saving small businesses time,” explains Prill. “We look at the space not as business banking, but as everything a business owner would consider admin and finance.” Indeed, Tide sees itself not as a bank, but instead as a platform, letting others build products that SMBs can embed into their banking processes. “We want to be the operating system for an SMB, but not the application layer,” Prill says. 

And that’s where open banking and third-party partnerships come in. Rather than export transactions and then import them into your software of choice, tools such as Xero and FreeAgent are integrated into the app. When the right tool isn’t available, Tide builds one; so far, it’s created built-in systems for invoices as well as credit. Take invoicing, for example: an SMB needs to create, send and chase that invoice, noting when it’s paid and pushing the relevant information into an accounting system. “Across these different product sets – invoicing, credit, payments, accounting – is a connectivity chain that we orchestrate, we make it highly usable,” says Prill. 

Starling’s equivalent is the Marketplace. This is the epitome of the open banking idea, a digital library of services and tools that Starling customers can easily integrate with their account, from receipt tracking to lines of credit, as well as leading accountancy software Xero and FreeAgent. “They can immediately pull your files from your Starling account and populate your accountancy files,” Frean says. “We’re adding to the Marketplace all the time.” Of course, some of the key features aren’t high-tech. Starling and Tide offer cash deposits via the Post Office, with Frean noting that it’s one of Starling’s most popular features.

What’s next? 

Prill predicts the banking market will fragment even further, particularly for businesses. Rather than choose the best of few options from five or so big banks, we’re already seeing more competition from the likes of Tide, Starling and the rest. “In the long term, there will be many different models to suit different customer needs,” he says. “We think this is a sign of a healthy market, that there is not a monolithic culture but offering true choice.”

Such banks will become less about your finances, and more about all aspects of your company – that’s Tide’s idea with the “OS for SMBs” concept. Right now, invoices and accounting are built into challenger business accounts, but within the next several months, Tide plans to also offer company formations. “The data we collect to set you up with a bank account… we might as well set up the company for you,” Prill says. “We could register your domain and website for you too.

“I think we’ll continue to see traditional banking providers lose share,” Prill adds, promising more richness of services, as well as more variety – and that’s where artificial intelligence (AI) could come in, he suggests, with machine learning used to find and suggest the best services for your business from a multitude. So many features and services that small-to-medium sized businesses need help choosing between them? That’s a nice change from which of the five boring banks will stash your money.

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iManage Cloud adoption fuels Ascertus growth


Daniel Todd

15 Jan, 2020

Consultancy firm Ascertus has achieved all-round business growth for 2019, the company has announced, driven by a significant upsurge in customers adopting the iManage Cloud solution.

Ascertus, which provides document and lifecycle management solutions to law firms and legal departments across EMEA, said its 2019 growth includes revenue, headcount, new partnerships and expansion into Europe.

With revenue increase split equally between law firms and corporate legal departments, the company said the “key driver” for its progress was a 34% increase in customers moving to the iManage Cloud.

“The cloud has truly come into its own as a technology deployment platform,” commented Jon Wainwright, sales director at Ascertus. “In 2019 we have seen major take up of iManage Cloud by corporate legal departments of all sizes and in the law firm space, by mid-tier organisations. 

“This clearly signals a maturity in mindset – cost isn’t the only consideration for cloud adoption, elements such as disaster recovery, in-built security and the advantages of always being on the latest version of the solution has been deemed more important. We see this trend and line of thought across Europe.”

Ascertus has strengthened its presence in mainland Europe – particularly in Ireland and the Nordic countries – as well as made inroads in the pharmaceutical, finance and insurance sectors. 

In the last year, the company has struck partnerships with Xakia, a provider of matter management systems for in-house legal departments, managed printer services supplier DMC Canotec, as well as timekeeping software provider Smart Time. 

Headcount has also increased by 15% in key roles such as professional services, support, pre-sales and training, which the firm says are key to ensuring superior client service and customised and efficient solution delivery. 

Ascertus added that In 2020 it aims to further improve the services and support it provides to its existing clients, highlighting an incoming new client portal which will be supported by collaboration and secure file-sharing platform Hubshare.

“Our aim is to offer customers the most comprehensive set of solutions across the document and information management lifecycle and so although iManage is our key business partner, we are always looking to strengthen our relationships with our other current partners, plus enter into meaningful partnerships with suppliers of complementary solutions,” Wainwright said. 

“This approach enables us to design and tailor solutions that are best suited to customers’ business requirements.” 

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Get ready for a seismic shift in business structure for 2020 – underpinned by cloud

The technology industry is advancing at a rapid pace, with new developments like IoT and AI moving on leaps and bounds within the span of mere months. The broader impact of this is that the very structure of business is being altered by this acceleration, and the management of such technologies is becoming a discipline – and a necessity – in itself.

In 2020, it will be more important than ever to have the proper protocols and systems in place to manage the ever-expanding technology estate, particularly as we continue to see yet more new cutting-edge technologies such as quantum computing come to the fore. If not properly assessed and assimilated into the organisation, these innovations can become a real headache for the IT and finance teams, as well as for the operation of the wider business.

With that in mind, here are some thoughts on what 2020 will look like as this seismic technological shift in business gets underway.

Roles within IT are going to change and demand broader skillsets

The past 10 years have seen many new roles crop up in IT (CDO, Head of Cloud Excellence, TBM Manager) that weren’t conceived of the decade before. The pace of change in technology means this is only set to continue, and as a result there will need to be a concurrent improvement in both hard skills (such as AI development skills) and soft skills (to manage IT’s relationship with the rest of the business).

AWS, Azure and GCP will continue to enhance their specialities in 2020 – focusing on scale, or sector, or bringing AI capabilities – to provide differentiation

While individual business units will be the ones driving forward with new technologies in order to pursue innovation, the CIO and the expanding IT team will now be the ones to ensure those demands align with overall business needs. This shift in scope of work – and the greater level of responsibility it entails – means that IT professionals need to upskill in order to meet the new demands of the role.

AI and IoT adoption will need to be matched with better alignment of IT with the business 

The adoption of AI and IoT is on the rise, as many organisations increasingly realise the business benefits of the technologies. However, as these technologies move into the mainstream, companies will struggle to quantify their value over time as their IT finance systems aren’t set up for this. In 2020, the ability to calculate long-term ROI from technologies with costs that aren’t fixed will be increasingly important for CIOs and CTOs looking to justify their technology investments.

IoT, for instance, will widen the cost base for the IT team as smart devices proliferate. While this may reduce other costs, such as labour, over time smart devices are likely to become another layer of legacy technology. This makes it hard to assess the total cost of ownership without having dedicated tools for doing so. Similarly, AI will produce fast results in the short term, cutting down laborious manual processes, but its value is harder to quantify over time. For both of these technologies, as with other emerging innovations, CIOs and CTOs will need to have a defensible strategy for proving their value in order to align with the needs of the business while balancing their budgets.

IT finance management will need to change for agile to work

Agile is becoming an increasingly popular way for forward-thinking IT teams to work, but IT finance systems aren’t set up to properly assess costs and business value. As the way companies work moves from a waterfall methodology to an agile one, it’s not just the IT finance team that needs to change to keep up, it’s also management of the organisation in general.

Product development has shifted, with multiple iterative trials now taking place for each incremental improvement. It’s imperative that the rest of the business also change to align with this shift, particularly the CFO. The CFO needs to ensure that the organisation’s capital is spent wisely and in the right areas to support both the short- and long- term goals of the organisation.

CIOs will need to have a defensible strategy for proving their value – aligning the needs of the business with balancing their budgets

The office of the CFO needs to introduce governance and controls that don’t hinder and slow down the benefits of agile but provide a helicopter perspective across all of the organisation’s investments. This will ensure that the team’s efforts are supporting the business’ short- and long-term plans, as agile takes centre stage and becomes the accepted way of working.

Cloud providers will specialise their offerings instead of price-warring – and businesses need to get wise to the cost implications

As seen in other software industries, overly aggressive price wars have the potential to upset the cloud market. Given this, I expect that AWS, Azure and GCP will continue to enhance their specialities in 2020 (for instance focusing on scale, or a specific sector, or AI capabilities) to provide differentiation.

This will have a knock-on effect on costs. Apples to apples comparisons of pricings is already difficult but moving forward, businesses will have to do a much better job of tying value to cloud to make the right decisions for their business needs. Cloud services constantly scale to meet demand, which increases cost – but how do you compare providers or services with one another? How do you know the exact value you’re getting for your money?

To combat this uncertainty, in 2020 companies will need to establish a cloud centre of excellence and a “FinOps” mindset, whereby all areas of the business have greater understanding of, and accountability for, cloud spend. Currently, most IT functions don’t have the right set-up to manage cloud spend, with disparate instances of “Google here” and “AWS there.” This needs to change as organisations mature their cloud strategy and should start with the development of a central company IT strategy.

Conclusion

While it’s an exciting time to be in the technology space, it’s clear that there’s still a lot of work to be done in 2020. For starters, it will be important for businesses to be able to properly anticipate the advancements that are forthcoming. Get ready, or you risk being left behind.

https://www.cybersecuritycloudexpo.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/cyber-security-world-series-1.pngInterested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

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Firefox Voice trial begins in beta


Nicole Kobie

14 Jan, 2020

Mozilla’s trial of voice technology in the Firefox browser has kicked off, letting users speak to search, open or close tabs, and more.

The idea was announced at the end of last year as part of Mozilla’s Firefox Voice Campaign, but the beta extension has now been made available to install for those who have signed up, notes Ghacks.

“Firefox Voice is an experiment from Mozilla that lets you browse and get more done with your voice – faster than ever,” the developer said on the campaign’s website, where you can sign up for the trial.

“We are looking for fearless early adopters who are willing to test the new add-on and give us feedback before the major public release.”

Firefox Voice uses Google’s Cloud Speech Service, the report adds, but Google doesn’t record the results. The extension asks for a wide range of data, including all your websites, bookmarks and tabs, but that’s partially because it uses voice to access those areas of the browser.

Once installed, the extension lets users click the microphone icon or enter a shortcut key to trigger the system. Then you can speak to close a tab, find a page, and run a search, as well as copy and paste, read text, and pause videos.

The extension remains a beta, and you do need to register to get access.

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Memes and Viking funerals: The internet reacts to the death of Windows 7


Dale Walker

14 Jan, 2020

​It’s now official: Microsoft’s extended support for Windows 7 has now come to an end, marking the retirement of an operating system that enjoyed enormous success and popularity over its ten-year lifetime.

Organisations across the globe should now be working to ensure Windows 7 is removed from their environments, although, given the nature of software migration, it’s very likely that the operating system will maintain a large market share for many months to come.

The moment is bittersweet, as although Windows 10 has been the most popular desktop operating system globally since December 2017, the decline of Windows 7 has been remarkably slow given that it first hit the market in 2009. An intuitive design, stable performance and a much-loved taskbar were a breath of fresh air following the widely criticised Windows Vista, something that helped maintain its popularity through the disastrous launch of Windows 8.

The death of Windows 7 seems to have hit some harder than others, but fortunately, the measured, stable, and not at all unhinged IT industry has decided to give the software the send-off it deserves.

The outpouring of love on social media ranges from touching to the truly bizarre.

However, the best tribute so far comes courtesy of employees at Databarracks, who decided to express their reverence of the software by holding a traditional Viking funeral, complete with a little boat.

Touching stuff.

As of December 2019, Windows 7 held a market share of just under 27% globally, although this varies considerably depending on the demographic you look at. In the regions of Africa and India, for example, almost 40% of desktops are running Windows 7, while areas such as the US and the UK lead the way with 18% and 16% respectively.

The numbers stand in stark contrast to those of Windows Vista and the much younger Windows 8 – a sign that the ghost of Windows 7 is almost certainly going to linger for many years to come.

Those that have been heavy reliant on Windows 7 should have already started to migrate away from the OS. However, for those looking for tips about how to move operations over, we’ve put together this handy guide, although perhaps it’s time you start looking for Microsoft alternatives.

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Google Cloud unveils retail updates, expands Lowe’s and Wayfair partnerships

Google Cloud has announced it is expanding its retail acceleration program (RAP) among other initiatives designed to scale up retailers’ cloud projects.

The moves were announced at NRF 2020, the biggest event in the retail space, with Google doubling down on its message to accelerate retailers’ digital growth and customer experience – pinned together with its data expertise.

Alongside RAP, which is Google’s overarching term for services which help retailers optimise their websites as well as drive greater footfall, other tools were announced in various stages of availability. Google Cloud Search for Retail, in the pilot stage, aims to utilise the company’s AI and machine learning tools to provide higher quality product search results for websites and applications, while Google Cloud 1:1 Engagement for Retail, just launched, is a best practice guide to building out models and products in data analytics platform BigQuery.

Among Google Cloud’s retail customers are Kohl’s in the US, Carrefour in France, and Sainsbury’s in the UK; the latter having been announced in October. The company took the opportunity at NRF to unveil further customer updates. Hardware chain Lowe’s, which says it is in the ‘early stages’ of a large scale technology transformation to the tune of $500 million annual investment through 2021, is expanding its partnership with Google Cloud, while last week it was announced eCommerce firm Wayfair was using Google’s hybrid connectivity to tackle capacity issues during peak hours.

Writing in a company blog post, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian noted the opportunity available to retailers in building out their digital initiatives – as well as the wide variety of complimentary services on offer.

“One thing is clear: digital transformation is more than just a requirement. It’s a race,” wrote Kurian. “Retailers that transform the fastest are the most successful.

“Staying viable in the retail market today means using technology to solve big problems,” Kurian added. “Google continues to innovate and provide industry-specific tools that help retailers not just keep up with the competition, but also to win the ever-changing race.”

A common trend assessed by industry watchers over the past 12 months has been the rise of retailers building out their cloud initiatives – and particularly those who choose not to go to infrastructure leader Amazon Web Services (AWS). At the start of last year, Albertsons signed a three-year deal to make Microsoft Azure its preferred public cloud. Per a CNBC report, Albertsons CIO Anuj Dhanda said the decision was made because of Azure’s ‘experience with big companies, history with large retailers… and because it isn’t a competitor.’

The note was thinly veiled; in May Amazon surpassed Walmart as the leading retailer on the Forbes Global 2000 list, with the two companies previously having a well-documented spat. Amazon counts several leading retailers in its cloudy stable, from River Island, to Under Armour, to of course itself.

Under Kurian’s leadership, Google has put sharper focus on targeting specific industries. The Google Cloud CEO cited retail, healthcare, and financial services at Next in April as the three industries key to Google’s customer base, noting that the company worked with seven of the top 10 retailers.

You can read more of Google Cloud’s retail updates here.

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German football league picks AWS to score with real-time data


Bobby Hellard

14 Jan, 2020

Germany’s top football league has partnered with AWS to bring more in-depth insight into live broadcasts and enable more personalised fan experiences.

The Bundesliga will use a range of machine learning, analytical and storage services to build a statistical platform to provide viewers with real-time information on player statistics, game outcomes and predictions on future play. 

The league has the highest average number of goals per game and the highest stadium attendance globally, according to AWS, and the partnership is about improving the fan experience. It also makes Bundesliga the first soccer organisation in Europe to work with Amazon’s cloud computing arm.

“Innovation means challenging the status quo,” said Christian Seifert, CEO of the Bundesliga. “Working closely with AWS significantly enhances the investment we’ve made in innovation over the past two decades, all of which contributes to us being able to deliver a world-class football experience for our fans.”

A number of sporting organisations have taken on such digital transformation projects, using some of the biggest technology companies around. AWS has had plenty of success in this regard, with deep partnerships in Basketball, Formula 1 and the National Football League (NFL).

Real-time statistics

For fans of Germany’s top division, the work AWS has done with the NFL is arguably the closest example of what they can expect. 

With the NFL, during live games, broadcasters can pull up statistics as the game develops. The available pass options a quarterback has will appear on the screen as a graphic; each receivable player will have a percentage for the likelihood they will catch the pass in their given situation.

The Bundesliga system will be based on a similar concept, with the goal of providing insightful information on how likely a goal is to be scored or highlight how teams are positioning and controlling the field.

Such smart real-time functions will be powered by Amazon SageMaker – a managed service that can build, train and deploy machine learning models – which will come up with its predictions and insights through analysing historical data from more than 10,000 Bundesliga games, as well as live match data. 

Match day-ready machine learning 

Other AWS machine learning systems will also be used by Bundesliga. Amazon Personalise, which is used to create individually personalised recommendations in real-time, will be used to offer fans personalised footage, and search results based on their favourite teams, players or matches, as well as serving up tailored marketing promotions. 
However, processing all the information could be an arduous task for Bundesliga’s IT team, so to optimise such operations, Amazon’s Rekognition facial recognition technology will be put to the task. 

Bundesliga will create a cloud-based media archive with Rekognition being used to automatically tag specific frames with metadata on the players, team, game, and venue. This will avoid the need for the manual tagging of some 150,000 hours worth of video, and will make it easier to search for historical match footage and “pivotal plays” to be added into in-game broadcasts. 

As such, Amazon’s cloud-based machine learning services will not only help Bundesliga provide its football fans with a new way to receive match and league information, but also streamline the way the football league accesses and handles its match and team data. 

With cloud platforms and services being ever-more capable and accessible, Bundesliga is yet another example of how the cloud can be used to drive digital transformation in an organisation, whether that involves overhauling archaic IT systems or finding new ways to deliver services to customers.