Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has acquired open source artificial intelligence (AI) startup Determined AI.

The four-year-old company, which only brought its product to market in 2020, specialises in machine learning (ML), with the aim of training artificial intelligence (AI) models quickly and at any scale. While it hasn’t been around long, the startup has managed to secure customers in a number of sectors, including defence contracting, manufacturing, autonomous vehicles and biopharmaceuticals.

Determined AI will be brought into HPE’s high-performance computing (HPC) and mission-critical solutions (MCS) business unit, and the deal will see the startup’s technology combined HPE’s AI and HPC offerings. 

Justin Hotard, SVP and GM of HPC  and MCS said: “Determined AI’s unique open source platform allows ML engineers to build models faster and deliver business value sooner without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. I am pleased to welcome the world-class Determined AI team, who share our vision to make AI more accessible for our customers and users, into the HPE family.”

Determined AI’s founders Neir Conway, Evan Sparks and Ameet Talwalker, described the acquisition as “a massive accelerant for our mission to empower users to efficiently build cutting-edge AI applications”.

The three added that the platform will remain open source, saying “HPE shares our vision that driving an open standard for AI software infrastructure is the fastest way for the industry to realise the potential of AI.

“Consequently, HPE is committed to investing in and rapidly growing the Determined Training Platform as an open source project. Our customers and open source community members will continue to receive the same high level of service and support that they always have, from a team of experts who are intimately familiar with the challenges they’re facing.”

The five largest cities in the UK could lose as much as £322 million a month if offices move to hybrid working long-term, according to new research. 

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) has estimated that London, Manchester, Glasgow, Newcastle and Cardiff could all see revenue from shops, pubs and office-adjacent eateries fall significantly. 

A total of £11.9 billion has already been displaced from city centres during the pandemic, the organisation said, which would have otherwise been spent on inner-city retail and eating out. 

London appears to be the hardest hit, with a total of £8.2 billion lost between March 2020 and May 2021, according to the CEBR. What’s more, the capital is predicted to lose £234 million per month, should businesses maintain a hybrid working strategy for the foreseeable future.

Manchester will see the next biggest loss at £1.8 billion, with an estimated loss of just £48 million per month expected by the CEBR.

The research pulls in Google mobility data which shows that in April 2020, the number of people going to places of work on a weekday was 69% lower than before the pandemic. That figure had only recovered by half at just 34% in May 2021.

Of the five cities, Cardiff had the lowest share of returning workers, at 50% lower than pre-pandemic levels, while Newcastle had the highest share at just 34% lower. 

The popularity of hybrid working environments is rapidly growing as businesses look for realistic ways to manage COVID restrictions and the demands of their employees. Over the weekend, financial giant Deloitte announced that it would allow its 200,000-strong workforce to choose where they work, with its offices set to be transitioned into collaboration spaces. 

What’s more, the UK government is reportedly set to begin encouraging hybrid approaches, according to leaked documents seen by the CEBR.

The Conservative Party had previously sent out muddled messages on remote working, suggesting people should come back into the office after the first lockdown, citing concerns around the loss of footfall traffic to shops and eateries. Despite the expected losses in revenue, the document reportedly suggests the government is actively looking at ways to help people to continue working from home if there is no ‘need’ for them to be in an office. 

HPE GreenLake now supports Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and SQL Server.

The announcement of the new integration came just ahead of the company’s annual HPE Discover conference, held virtually for the second time in a row, where GreenLake is expected to take centre stage.

According to the company, the expansion of GreenLake to include support for Azure Stack HCI and SQL Server will enable customers to take advantage of a cloud-like experience for their applications and workloads even as they remain in a private environment, such as their own data centre.

This is no small amount of customers, either; according to research from IDC, some 70% of critical production applications remain outside the public cloud, in a secure single-tenant environment and at the edge.

In addition to providing a cloud-like experience, HPE said customers will benefit from a cloud-like operating model as well, as GreenLake is a consumption-based service.

This is not the company’s first foray into working with Microsoft Azure via GreenLake, which has been able to support public cloud deployments on Azure, as well as private cloud infrastructure via Azure Stack, since 2018. However, it’s the first time the relationship has focused on hyperconverged infrastructure in particular.

Speaking about the new offerings, Keith White, GM of HPE Greenlake cloud services, said: “The world is becoming hybrid and that’s why we are so excited about this collaboration with Microsoft, especially as we see significant growth in the Hyperconverged Infrastructure area. 

“By combining Microsoft Azure Stack HCI with offerings like the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, customers benefit from a unified, automated experience. The solution means customers can determine their own right mix of hybrid cloud and workload placement, with flexibility but also control. We continue to deepen our collaboration with Microsoft to develop comprehensive solutions that help customers transform to modern cloud-driven organisations.” “

Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, has been appointed chairman of the board following a unanimous vote by the company’s independent directors.

It’s the first time in more than 20 years that the tech giant has had the same executive in both CEO and chairman roles, with co-founder Bill Gates the last to hold the titles simultaneously.

Although we won’t know how this will specifically change Nadella’s day-to-day workload, the chairman is usually tasked with ensuring the board is effective in setting and implementing the company’s direction and long-term strategy. In this regard, it appears Nadella has been given more responsibility and more scope to shape the company’s future, having gained the support of the directors during his time as CEO.

John Thompson, who Nadella is replacing as chairman, will take on the role of ‘lead independent director’ with a mandate to head up the performance evaluations of the CEO. Thompson has played a significant role in Nadella’s rise at Microsoft, leading the team that appointed him CEO in 2014, not long after Thompson, himself, originally took over as chairman. Prior to this, Bill Gates held the chairman role, alongside Steve Ballmer as CEO.

Although he had stepped down as CEO in 2000, Gates still retained control of Microsoft, and its technological vision, as chairman. He also kept a position on the board long after relinquishing that role to Thompson, finally fully departing the company in 2020 to focus on his charity work.

The partnership of Nadella as CEO and Thompson as chair has seen Microsoft pivot towards cloud computing, with its hugely successful Azure platform, which Nadella originally headed up.

The firm is now one the biggest companies in the world, matching the likes of Apple and Amazon, which were all valued at around $1 trillion in 2019.

Slack has announced a new ‘Schedule Send’ feature that allows users to queue up messages to send at specific dates and times.

Set to start rolling out on Thursday, the function will appear as a drop-down menu that pops up when users click on the ‘send’ arrow in the chat box.

Slack will offer both pre-filled options, like “tomorrow 9am”, as well as the ability to set a custom date and time to send the message. Users can schedule messages up to 120 days in advance and they can reschedule, edit, or delete them before they’ve been sent.

The feature will work in both channels and direct messages, and also for temporary groups and threads. It’s available for both the desktop service and the Android and iOS mobile apps, with users of the latter needing to press and hold the ‘send’ arrow to see the drop-down menu.

“Today we launched Scheduled Send to empower users to communicate and collaborate in a way that works best for them,” the company said in a statement, adding that “teams shouldn’t be obligated to sync their schedules in order to communicate effectively.”

The function will be important for large businesses with offices and employees in different time zones, but also for companies planning to mix in-office and remote working with various shift patterns. It will allow Slack users more opportunities to fully switch off by preventing out-of-hours notifications, but it also means that some messages won’t get buried by others before the recipient starts their shift.

Given accusations that apps like Slack contribute to an ‘always-on’ culture, some may question why it has taken so long to add a feature of this kind to the platform, particularly as a similar feature has been available on Gmail for some time. 

A message scheduling feature is also available on Microsoft Teams, although the Slack version appears to offer a slightly easier user experience.

Microsoft’s Windows 11 operating system has leaked online in full just days before developers were set to showcase its new look and key features in a reveal event. 

Screenshots of the in-development successor to Windows 10 show that the biggest aesthetic features include a centralised Start menu and taskbar, rounded corners for all windows and menus, as well as a light skin activated by default. 

Images were first leaked to the Chinese site Baidu, although a fully operational version of Windows 11 has since emerged online, according to The Verge.  

The user interface (UI) is altogether more reminiscent of macOS than classic Windows deployments, although activating a dark skin and shifting the Start menu to the left of the taskbar does make it resemble Windows 10. 

It’s also very similar in the layout of the UI for Microsoft’s Windows 10X, first developed for dual-screen devices but since abandoned and integrated instead into the broader Windows development cycle. The latest major Windows 10 update, for example, borrowed heavily on elements first devised to be included in Windows 10X.  

The Start menu included in this beta version of Windows 11 represents perhaps the most significant UI change against Windows 10. There’s a tiled layout to the apps in the menu, with a section for pinned and recommended services, alongside a prompt to view all apps.

Much of the leaked version remains completely unchanged, however, barring updated icons and the fact that windows are in keeping with the rounded edges aesthetic. The task menu as well as contextual menus and the file explorer all look much like they do in Windows 10, though it’s unclear whether these will change with the finished version.

Another significant addition is that of a Widgets button in the taskbar, which suggests the return of a widgets system that was included with Windows Vista and Windows 7. A screenshot shows a menu that slides out with tiles that show different pieces of information such as the weather, football scores, and news headlines.

Users can also snap windows far more effectively and micromanage the layout by clicking the maximise button in the top right corner. They can, at present, choose which half, or quadrant, of the screen in which to place their window.

Microsoft has strongly hinted at the existence of a successor to Windows 10 for some months, teasing various details about a Sun Valley build that promises to improve users’ workflow, according to Windows Central. 

The firm is due to discuss the build and detail its features for the first time on 24 June. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described this as “one of the most significant updates to Windows of the past decade”, and argued that it will unlock greater economic opportunity for developers and creators. 

“I’ve been self-hosting it over the past several months, and I’m incredibly excited about the next generation of Windows,” he said during his keynote at the Microsoft Build 2021 event. 

“Our promise to you is this: we will create more opportunity for every Windows developer today and welcome every creator who is looking for the most innovative, new, open platform to build and distribute and monetise applications.”

Microsoft has also announced in recent days that it plans to retire Windows 10 by 2025, again signalling that Windows 11 is on its way very soon.

IT Pro approached Microsoft for confirmation the leaks are genuine, and whether it’s considering taking any action.

Canonical has launched the premium version of the open source Ubuntu Linux kernel on Google Cloud, offering enterprise users a suite and new features and security capabilities for their deployments. 

Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud is available to all Google Cloud users, with the deployment allowing for instant access to all security patches covering thousands of open source apps, as well as critical compliance features. 

This premium version of the free-to-use Linux operating system focuses on enterprise and production use, providing developers and admins with secured DevOps environments, as well as additional security tools. 

Live kernel patching, for example, offers virtual machine (VM) instances increased security, while users can benefit from ten years of mission-critical support for 18.04 LTS onwards. The maintenance period of Ubuntu Pro 16.04 LTS is eight years.

“Enterprise customers are increasingly adopting Google Cloud to run their core business-critical and customer-facing applications,” said VP and GM for Compute at Google Cloud, June Yang.

“The availability of Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud will offer our enterprise customers the additional security and compliance services needed for their mission-critical workloads.” 

With Ubuntu Pro, alongside all standard optimisations and security updates in Ubuntu, users can also utilise certified components to allow operating environments under various compliance regimes, including GDPR and PCI. 

Later in the year, additional features will be added such as certified FIPS 140-2 components, a security dashboard, managed apps, and more that haven’t yet been defined.

Google Cloud has partnered with Canonical in some capacity for many years, and the standard iteration of Ubuntu has been available to Google Cloud customers since 2014. 

The two platforms have worked together on Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud, which serves as a more secure, hardened and cost-effective DevOps environment that aims to boost customers’ cloud transformation efforts.

“Since 2014, Canonical has been providing Ubuntu for Google Cloud customers. We continuously expand security coverage, great operational efficiency, and native compatibility with Google Cloud features,” said VP of Cloud GTM at Canonical, Alex Gallagher. 

“I’m excited to witness the collaboration between Canonical and Google Cloud to make Ubuntu Pro available. Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud sets a new standard for security of operating systems and facilitates your migration to Google Cloud.”

Customers can purchase these premium images directly from Google Cloud by selecting Ubuntu Pro as the operating system directly from the Google Cloud Console. 

Laura Dawson, CIO at the London School of Economics, has spent the past 12 months establishing a range of collaborative systems and services to help people login and carry on learning from home. It’s been a challenging 12 months, but it’s also been an intense learning period for Dawson and her team.

In just a matter of days last spring, Dawson and her IT colleagues secured remote links, sent out Windows 10 laptops, and established cloud-based services such as Zoom for the provision of online education. Twelve months on and these technologies are helping Dawson, her colleagues in the IT department and the educators and students they serve to work productively and effectively.

So how did Dawson support her organisation during its shift to online learning and what are the key issues that academic organisations will need to consider as they use digital technology to help shape the future of education? In many ways, she says LSE was in a fortunate position – while COVID-19 undoubtedly accelerated digitalisation, the process was already underway.

Internal expertise

Dawson also says LSE is lucky to be able to draw on the experience of Dilly Fung, a forward-thinking pro-director of education who is keen to explore new and engaging approaches to teaching. Fung’s research around the connected curriculum aims to find ways to foster strong relationships between students and educators. 

“So that whole-of-life learning approach was very much the kind of thing we were looking at when we were exploring the future of education,” says Dawson. “We were already thinking about, ‘What does digital education look like? What does research-based education look like, how will we service that and how will that look in the longer term?’” 

When lockdown came, Dawson and her senior colleagues had the opportunity to answer some of those questions. “That was all about getting the teaching going as quickly and effectively as possible,” she says, reflecting on the rapid adoption of online learning methods. 

Once again, she says LSE had a number of advantages: the institution had already established VPN connections to support secure remote access. LSE had also implemented the collaboration platform Microsoft Teams. Two weeks prior to lockdown, the IT team was able to ask every department to work at home as a beta test for socially distanced working. 

“We asked everybody to go and test it and come back to us and tell us what they thought: How did it work, what worked, what didn’t? That gave us quite a lot of insight into the sort of things that we’d need,” she says.

“There was a weird moment days before lockdown where just about everyone in the IT department was updating Windows 10 machines and getting them sent out to staff. But we managed to work very well with our third-party partner; we managed to get the machines that we needed, and we dished them out.”

Choosing the right software

The second key element of technology provision involved the establishment of the online-learning environment. Cloud technology played a crucial role here: While the institution was already using Teams for collaboration, it decided to use Zoom as its video-conferencing platform for online lessons.  

“We did that because we brought the right people into the room within the first week of the pandemic,” says Dawson. “We went with Zoom because that is the best way for us to get our students online and give them a great experience. So we’d done the due diligence, but we did it really quickly – and that just freed up the discussion.”

LSE also used the online-learning platform Moodle to help deliver assessments. Once again, the team took a similar approach – they made a decision to move the assessment process into the cloud and brought key people together to make decisions and implement systems.

“We created a small sub-team and they went off and did it,” she says. “They got the technology implemented by almost working like a start-up. There’s still more work to be done around honing our approach, but they did it and we were able to deliver assessments.”

Taking the next steps

This rapid but successful digital transformation process has helped LSE and Dawson to develop a much stronger sense of what the future of higher education might look like. What she envisages is a hybrid form of teaching that’s different to before the pandemic. Yes, face-to-face learning will remain but the use of online lessons will also rise.

“What we’ve proven is that education can take place online – what we maybe need to think about now are our skills for maintaining that,” she says. “I think hybrid just needs to be really good. And a successful hybrid is where you are bringing people into the classroom with people who are not in a classroom together in a really equitable way.”

It’s also important to recognise that online learning remains a constant work in progress. During the first lockdown, Dawson’s team had to pivot to provide socially distanced IT support to people who weren’t in the same location and who were trying to deliver online learning. 

As social-distancing restrictions eased, conversations turned to the hybrid teaching environment and the blend of offline and online teaching methods. There was a significant piece of work around turning physical teaching spaces into COVID-safe spaces with fewer seats. For those who were still unable to attend in-person, the IT team has continued to provide online teaching.

Dawson says it’s important to recognise just how far the move to online learning during the coronavirus pandemic has helped to boost the electronic educational experience, particularly in the case of asynchronous teaching, where teaching materials are posted online and learners work through them in their own time.

The future of education, says Dawson, might involve a whole range of emerging technologies, from virtual reality through to even more advanced forms of educational engagement. She refers to an example from the Imperial College Business School, which became the first institution to deliver live lectures via hologram.

Dawson says this technology is “really cool” and provides a way to get more people together when international travel is impossible. Yet it’s also important to recognise that these technologies are at the cutting edge and are far from replacing traditional forms of learning or even video-conferencing systems. 

For many institutions, such as LSE, the coronavirus pandemic has represented a burning platform for the adoption of e-learning. For Dawson, the priority now is to make the most of the technology that’s been implemented and to build on those gains.

“I don’t necessarily think there’s any special magic technology that we need in order to create fantastic online learning. I think confidence is the key thing; people now know that they can actually deliver education online,” she says.

Google is aiming to broaden the appeal of its online productivity suite, Google Workspace, by making it free to anyone that has a Google account. 

This means that all of the company’s three billion users, from enterprise to education, can access the full Google Workspace platform, and apps like Gmail, Chat, Docs and more, without the need to pay for a subscription. Some paid-for tiers will remain, however, along with a new tier designed exclusively for sole traders.

There are also new features for the free tier that address specific challenges workers will face with the switch to hybrid working, These include updates to Google Chat, new subscription offers and greater security across the platform. 
 
“Collaboration doesn’t stop at the workplace – our products have been optimised for broad participation, sharing and helpfulness since the beginning,” said Javier Soltero, VP and GM, Google Workspace. 

“Our focus is on delivering consumers, workers, teachers and students alike an equitable approach to collaboration, while still providing flexibility that allows these different subsets of users to take their own approach to communication and collaboration.”

The biggest change for free users is that Google Rooms has evolved into ‘Google Spaces’. This is effectively a private chat area, similar to those found Slack or Microsoft Teams, where groups of users can chat and collaborate via text or video call.

There are a range of new functions within this, such as ‘threads’ and presence indicators that let users know if participants are free or available to talk. Users can also pin messages to Spaces so that important announcements don’t get lost amongst the general chatter. 
 
Google is also adding a Companion Mode to Google Meet which it claims allows everyone to continuously contribute to meetings, no matter if they are in the office or at home.

For the paid-tier, Google has added client-side document encryption which will allow businesses to use their own encryption keys.

A number of major firms are participating in Vodafone’s project to deliver the first commercial deployment of Open Radio Access Network (RAN) in Europe. 

Dell, Samsung, NEC, Wind River, Capgemini and Keysight will contribute their technologies and expertise to Vodafone’s efforts to build on the Open RAN lab in Newbury, in England, as well as digital skills hubs in Malaga and Dresden in Spain and Germany. 

Open RAN is a networking concept that allows mobile network operators to use equipment from multiple vendors to form key components of a mobile network. Current RAN technology takes the form of a hardware and software integrated platform. 

The alternative, spearheaded by the O-RAN-ALLIANCE, allows for disaggregation between hardware and software with open interfaces and virtualisation, alongside software that controls and updates networks through the cloud. 

Benefits of the technology include diversifying the supply chain, raising flexibility, as well as adding new capabilities and services to networks. Operators, for example, could easily introduce AI functionality to optimise the network for specific use cases, such as large crowds at a football match.

“Open RAN provides huge advantages for customers,” said Vodafone CTO, Johan Wibergh. “Our network will become highly programmable and automated meaning we can release new features simultaneously across multiple sites, add or direct capacity more quickly, resolve outages instantly and provide businesses with on-demand connectivity.

“Open RAN is also reinvigorating our industry. It will boost the digital economy by stimulating greater tech innovation from a wider pool of vendors, bringing much-needed diversity to the supply chain.”

Allowing for a mix and match of hardware and equipment would also allow governments to move away from a reliance on technology provided by Huawei, over security concerns, as well as Ericsson and Nokia. Encouraging smaller companies to enter the market would, in theory, enhance competition. 

For this reason, the project is also backed by the European Commission, with the EU hoping that developments in Open RAN will bring more European companies into the emerging market. Vodafone and other major EU telecoms firms hope these networks architectures will help to build a broader ecosystem.

The initial focus will be on the 2,500 sites in the UK that Vodafone committed to Open RAN in October 2020. Described as one of the largest deployments in the world, it’ll be built jointly with Dell, NEC, Samsung and Wind River.

Vodafone also projects to use new radio equipment defined under the Evenstar programme, which the firm contributes to. Capegemini and Keysight will provide support to ensure there’s interoperability between all the components that make up the infrastructure.

From this year, the six vendors will work together to extend 4G and 5G coverage to more rural places across the South West of England and most of Wales, shifting to urban areas at a later stage of the programme.