Londoners were more likely to work from home during the pandemic than those living elsewhere in the country, according to an official snapshot.

An annual population survey conducted by the National Office of Statistics (ONS) found that working from home doubled in 2020, but it still remained an overall minority across the whole of the UK.

Around a quarter of people (25.9%) worked from home at some point over the year, compared with just 12.4% in 2019. But there was a concentration of remote workers in London (46.4%) that actually offset the figures for the whole country, with rural and northern towns having considerably fewer remote workers – below 14% in Burnely and Middlesbrough, for instance.

“The ONS figures confirm what we already know, that highly productive, digitally savvy jobs are concentrated in London and the South East,” said teckUK’s head of policy, Neil Ross. 

“We know as well that digital adoption, such as the uptake of home working technologies can lead to increased productivity and business performance. To prevent the pandemic from compounding the existing regional inequalities we know about we need to double down on our ambition to improve digital skills across the UK as well as incentivising business adoption of digital tech.”

Additionally, occupation also played a crucial role in the likelihood of remote working. The highest rates of people that said they had worked from home were in the communication and information (59%) and financial services (56%) sectors. The lowest numbers were in the retail and transport sectors (roughly 11% each).

It also appears that the more senior the role, the more likely people were to work from home. For example, 39% of managers, directors and senior officials and 40% of those in professional occupations said they had worked from home, compared to just 11% for those in sales and customer services and 7% for care and leisure workers. 

Oxford University and Oracle have collaborated on a Global Pathogen Analysis System to help governments identify and act on the spread of new COVID variants. 

The system combines Oxford University’s Scalable Pathogen Pipeline Platform, which was first used for tuberculosis, to with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to analyse and compare sequence data for COVID. The university has already processed half of the world’s COVID sequences, which is more than 500,000 in total.

The Pathogen Pipeline is available worldwide, 24-hours a day in the Oracle Cloud and its processing capability has been enhanced with extensive new development work from Oracle that enables high performance and security. 

The system will use Oracle’s machine learning services to deliver comprehensive results within minutes of submission before sharing its findings with countries around the world in a secure environment. This includes identifying variants of interest and their potential impact on vaccine and treatment effectiveness. There will be an analytics dashboard to show which specific strains spread more quickly and whether certain genetic features contribute to its increased transmissibility and vaccine tolerance.  

“This powerful new tool will enable public health scientists in research establishments, public health agencies, healthcare services, and diagnostic companies around the world to help further understanding of infectious diseases, starting with the coronavirus,” said Derrick Crook, professor of microbiology in the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford.

“The Global Pathogen Analysis System will help to establish a global common standard for assembling and analysing this new virus, as well as other microbial threats to public health. This adds a new dimension in our ability to process pathogen data. We are excited to partner with Oracle to further our research using this cutting-edge technology platform.”

The platform will be free for researchers and non-profits to use worldwide and the next steps will be extending the service to more pathogens beyond the COVID pandemic to enable governments to act on future outbreaks quickly. 

Business communication is a hotly contested market with a slew of different services that your organisation can use for internal messaging. However, two companies that always seem to be pitted against each other in this space, Slack and Microsoft Teams, want to take this one step further. They want businesses to talk to other businesses from within their platforms, rather than use emails. 

Slack is a communications platform that, at its most basic, offers internal instant messaging and document sharing services to businesses. Managers and employees create and use various ‘channels’ to talk to each other and these channels help to either differentiate departments or workflows, depending on the preference of the organisation. 

Microsoft Teams is also a comms platform, but it has more emphasis on video conferencing and comes with Office 365 integration. It looks and feels very similar to Slack as it also uses ‘channels’ for collaboration. The two are fierce rivals, but currently seem to have the same goal: Make email obsolete.

Slack Connect

Slack has never hidden its contempt for email and some would say its platform is entirely built for the purpose of squashing the legacy technology. But while businesses can use Slack to talk internally, until recently they still had to depend on email to reach anyone outside their organisation. However, in June 2020, Slack launched a new feature to fix this and (in its mind) kill off email altogether – Slack Connect. 

Users can connect with external parties by navigating to the sidebar in Slack and clicking on ‘Add Channels’. This will offer up two options: ‘Create a new channel’ or ‘Browse all channels’ and users will need to click on the former. The channel will need a name before it can be created and then to make it different from your internal channels, you’ll need to send an invite to the outside party you wish to speak to. From there the onus is on the receiver who needs to accept the link and set the same channel up on their end (in their own Slack account). This is then verified and approved by account administrators on both sides. 

Microsoft Connect

As Slack would have it, Microsoft Teams is a poorer version of its platform that is only dominating in the space because it comes bundled in with Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of services – the argument being that it is forced upon users rather than something they would necessarily choose to use. Microsoft disputes this, naturally, but it is now offering a service similar to Slack Connect, which it has also named ‘Connect’. 

It’s currently available as a ‘preview’, with a full release scheduled for later in 2021. It works in a similar way to Slack in that you create the channel in your sidebar, under the ‘Your Teams’ section. The shared channel is called ‘Agent Portal Launch’ and once you click on this you’ll have a popup window where you can share a link with your intended party. Once again, it will need approval from administrators on both sides. 

Pros and cons

Users can only have a maxim of 20 organisations at one time with Slack Connect and bringing in anyone new to shared channels means taking someone out. You have to bear in mind that each connection has to be verified by the administrators of your account and the same process on the other end, so initially, it’s a lot more work than a simple email. But if you have a group of businesses you regularly converse with, having a shared channel is easier, faster and more collaborative – you’ll feel less like customers and partners, and more like colleagues. So far, there is no mention of any limits for the number of organisations you can link to with Microsoft Teams Connect. 

The debate around whether or not Teams is as good as Slack is frankly pointless because, as the smaller firm keeps pointing out, Teams comes bundled in with Office 365. Slack on its own doesn’t offer the breadth of services that Microsoft does so the biggest benefit with Teams is working within a suite of services many companies already use. As such, linking Teams accounts together also enables different businesses to work on projects simultaneously. This can be done with Slack as it has an integration with Google Workplace (formerly G Suite) but it’s not one holistic platform, it’s multiple providers joined together. 

However, as the first one to launch, Slack Connect has a head start on new features and security controls. Plus it’s soon to be operating under Salesforce which could potentially increase Slack’s business customers. Analysts suggest that the acquisition will see Salesforce using Slack Connect as an enterprise networking service. 

Why not just use email?

There are a number of issues that plague email, such as spam and phishing, which can slow productivity and also compromises a company’s security. Add to that the growing list of additional services people are now using to work remotely and connect to partners or customers, which all have to be installed and managed by IT, and things can get very messy, very quickly. Slack’s answer is to have everything you need – coworkers, partners, vendors, customers – in one place. 

It requires a paid Slack account for both sender and receiver, which in itself is an argument to continue with email. While Slack is popular, particularly with startups, it’s but one service in a very competitive market. There’s a very high likelihood that the people you want to speak with are using Microsoft Teams, which reportedly surpassed 75 million daily active users mid-way through 2020.  

Slack is determined to kill off email, however, and it recently added a function to Connect that lets users directly message individuals from outside their organisation. ‘Slack DMs’ works in the same way as Connect in that users send out an invite to a person at another organisation that is monitored by administrators on both sides. The function was initially launched with the option to add a bespoke message to the invite, but Slack had to shut that down after concerns were raised that it could be used to send abusive messages. Despite this, Slack DMs is now available with paid accounts and, so far, there isn’t a similar feature available on Microsoft Teams Connect.

There are lots of (often similar) benefits with both services and also plenty of room for new functions to be added. But it has to be said, there isn’t really enough in either to finally render email obsolete.

In the 80s and 90s, tobacco sponsorships were as synonymous with Formula 1 as Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’ – and, it’s a testament to the power of advertising that many of the sports most famous cars and drivers can still conjure the memory of a certain brand of cigarette.  

The Williams Renault driven by Damon Hill in 1996 won the Championship, and a mental image of the winning car will show a giant ‘Rothman’s’ logo. Four years earlier, Nigel Mansell did the same but his Williams car is as famous for its great big yellow advert for ‘Camel’. 

In 2006, when motorsport’s governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), brought in a sport-wide ban on tobacco advertising, nine of the ten Formula 1 (F1) teams had some form of cigarette logo on their cars. However, over the last 15-years, this advertising space has been largely taken over by technology firms.

For the 2021 season, there are logos for at least two technology companies on each car; Oracle is the proud sponsor of the RedBull team, the UK’s Darktrace has a prominent spot on the McLaren’s spoiler, Kaspersky is right at the front of the Ferrari and chipmaker AMD can be seen on closeups of Lewis Hamalton in the Mercedes. 

NetApp has also partnered with the UK’s Aston Martin team, which is back in F1 after an almost 60-year absence. The firm is providing cloud services to help collect, store and process data from the car, but it’s also a chance to promote NetApp in Britain. The company’s UK director, Chris Greenwood, tells IT Pro that the deal was a great opportunity for the firm to be linked with a British company, pointing out that the NetApp logo appears next to a Union Jack at the front of the car. A space that would not so long ago have been dominated by tobacco brands.

Up in smoke

The influence of tobacco in Formula 1 can be traced back to 1974 with Marlboro’s first partnership with McLaren. The famous brand of cigarette, which is owned by Philip Morris International, is perhaps more well known for its lucrative collaboration with Ferrari, which has arguably produced the sport’s most iconic cars. However, the tobacco industry as a whole was heavily invested in F1 from the mid-80s and lingered well beyond the millennium. But its involvement in sport, in general, goes back hundreds of years, according to sports advertising expert Tim Crow.

“When sport got organised and got big back in the 20s and 30s of the 20th century, you’ll find a lot of tobacco advertising and sponsorship happening then,” Crow points out. “But obviously TV cameras moved in in the 50s and 60s, and at the same time, the legislators were starting to outlaw cigarette advertising on television. So they needed to find another way to do advertising and get onto TV and sport represented a very good way. 

“Professional sport was still growing, still learning the ropes. And big tobacco came along and offered big checks, and sport took them. So it was that combination of sport getting big and getting the TV cameras in, and tobacco companies having to find a new way of getting onto TV without being able to use TV advertising.” 

In the case of Formula 1, cigarette branding almost covered every available space, from cars to drivers’ suits to massive billboards above the race tracks. Its impact was so great that it was still being felt decades later with the 2013 movie Rush, which tells the story of James Hunt’s rivalry with Niki Lauda. Hunt’s 1976 McLaren carries the Marlboro logo and its repeated use in the film forced the British Board of Film Classification to rate it ‘12A’. 

Value in Kind

Modern Formula 1 cars are virtually IoT ecosystems with nearly all components connected and fitted with sensors. Swaths of IT professionals are at the roadside and even further afield, monitoring and analysing continuous streams of data about every facet of performance. Everything from the tread of the tyres to the health of the driver is translated back to the team with various forms of cloud software used to inform race strategy and even predict car failure. 

They’re by no means the most lucrative sports sponsorship deals, but unlike the tobacco companies, tech firms are providing more than just hefty fees. They offer ‘value in kind’ deals ,where F1’s sprawling mass of engineers and analysts can access some of the most advanced hardware and software in the world. 

For example, Darktrace isn’t improving the McLaren car, as such, but it is protecting its data and the IT teams that analyse and share it. Likewise, Oracle has supplied cloud infrastructure to the RedBull team and Mercedes uses HPE’s edge computing services. Simply put, the modern version of F1 couldn’t function without the cloud and analytics, and it has been that way for a number of years. It’s this context that makes F1 a great place for technology sponsorships, Crow suggests.

“So they give the team’s stuff that the teams need to go racing,” Crow explains. “And instead of having to pay cash to do that, they give the teams their people and their knowledge and their expertise and their time and their services to do what is called ‘value in kind’ deals.”

“These are a big feature of sport, particularly, for example, in the Olympics where 60% of the value of total Olympic sponsorship is value in kind deals by B2B companies, who provide the Olympics with a whole range of products and services that the Olympics could not do without in order to put the show on.”

Similarly, the organisers of F1 also have deals with large tech companies. AWS has been a collaborator for the last few years, providing cloud and data analytics services as well as statistical platforms for use in TV broadcasting. A lot of the information that the drivers and teams have is also fed through to the live stream of the race. So you at home know more about the state of the car than which cigarette brand formerly paid for it.

VMware has promoted executive VP and COO Rangarajan “Raghu” Raghuram as its new CEO, with the change taking effect at the beginning of June.

Raghuram replaces current CEO Zane Rowe, who took over as  “interim” CEO while the firm searched for a long term successor for Pat Gelsinger.

A number of analysts predicted a new CEO would come from within the company, with chief operating officer Sanjay Poonen thought to be the most likely candidate. However, Raghuram’s promotion came with the news that Poonen had decided to leave the company after seven years.

Raghuram is an 18-year veteran of VMware and is currently in charge of its products and cloud services. He was part of the team that helped to develop its core virtualisation business and since 2003 and is said to have played a “pivotal” role in the company’s mergers and acquisitions strategy and a key driver of its partnerships with Dell Technologies.

“Congratulations to my good friend @RaghuRaghuram on your well-deserved promotion to CEO. With his tenure of 18 years at VMware, Raghu is practically a founder. I know he will take the company to new heights in the years to come, I am cheering on,” Poonen posted on Twitter.

As CEO, Raghuram will be tasked with leading VMware as it is spun off from Dell Technologies. The latter has an 81% stake in the cloud company but plans to separate in order to generate more revenue and ultimately reduce its debts.

“I am thrilled to have Raghu step into the role of CEO at VMware,” Micheal Dell, chairman of the VMware Board of Directors, said. “Throughout his career, he has led with integrity and conviction, playing an instrumental role in the success of VMware. Raghu is now in position to architect VMware’s future, helping customers and partners accelerate their digital businesses in this multi-cloud world.”

IBM unveiled a suite of new artificial intelligence (AI) services on Monday ahead of its virtual IBM Think 2021 conference. 

The new features include software that teaches AI how to translate code, a cloud migration service, and more functions for the firm’s Watson Assistant. 

The most interesting of the announcements was a Rosetta Stone-like service for programming code called ‘CodeNet‘, which is an expansive dataset designed to teach AI and machine learning systems how to translate code. It comprises some 14 million snippets and 500 million lines of code spread across more than 55 legacy and active languages, such as Cobol, Java, C++, and Python. The dataset is constructed in a way that allows for bidirectional translation, enabling Cobol legacy code to be translated into Java, for example. 

“Given its wealth of programmes written in a multitude of languages, we believe Project CodeNet can serve as a benchmark dataset for source-to-source translation and do for AI and code what the ImageNet dataset did years ago for computer vision,” the firm said. 

AI featured heavily in the updates, with new features for Cloud Pak for Data, an SaaS integration platform called ‘Watson Orchestrate’, and a Watson Assistant collaboration with healthcare providers handling increased workloads due to the pandemic. The tech giant also revealed ‘Maximo Mobile’, a mobile platform based on IBM’s Maximo asset management service. 

The updates also included a new cloud migration service called ‘Mono2Micro’ that also uses AI to analyse large enterprise applications and provide recommendations on how to best adapt them for the move to the cloud. IBM said it can simplify and speed up an error-prone process, which can reduce costs and maximise returns on investment.

Beyond artificial intelligence, the announcements included a hybrid cloud-based financial services platform, built with Red Hat OpenShift. There was also a $1 billion investment to support IBM’s partner ecosystem which includes skills training, and a streamlined service for quantum computing called Qiskit Runtime.

NHS Digital has been accused of a potential conflict of interest over contracts given to IT service Accenture, where two of its board members previously worked. 

David Rowland, the director of the Centre for Health and Public Interest (CHPI) told The Financial Times that the close links between the two firms were “concerning”.

The digital body, which provides data and IT systems for the NHS, handed over 15% of its yearly budget to Accenture, with contracts worth around £33 million out of its total £218 million operating expenditure, according to its own 2018-2019 accounts. 

What’s more, the family of another non-executive, Deborah Oakley, is also listed as owning shares in Accenture, according to a ‘Declarations and Conflicts of Interest Register’ that was published on 30 June last year. Oakley has said the shares were held by her husband and she herself has never worked at the consultancy. However, the large sums of public money that have been exchanged has caught the attention of the CHPI think tank. 

Rowland told the FT that it is “concerning that there are a number of close links between the two organisations which give rise to potential conflicts of interest and opportunities for undue influence”. 

In a statement given to IT Pro, Accenture said its contracts with NHS Digital “were awarded following a competitive public tender process.

“We are proud of our work supporting major NHS projects including the delivery of Microsoft Teams during Covid and significant improvements to NHS Mail, Office 365 and cyber security services for all NHS users,” it added.

Accenture is already facing criticism for charging high fees for its services during the pandemic, including its work on the government’s £37 billion test and trace programme. The consultancy firms received 18 contracts related to the UK’s pandemic response, according to the research firm Trussell.

Since the start of 2016, it has also won a total of 94 contracts from public authorities worth around £480m. 

Facebook’s enterprise communications platform, Workplace, now has seven million paid subscribers, representing a 40% increase year-on-year.

Launched in 2016, Workplace has traditionally been one of Facebook’s lowest-earning business units, often counted alongside the likes of Oculus and Portal under the “other” section of its financial results.

However, its steady growth and brand association has helped it secure some high profile customers, including the likes of Spotify and Starbucks – although it still lags behind market rivals Slack and Microsoft Teams.

“We built Workplace as an internal version of Facebook to run our own company, and it was so useful we started letting other organisations use it too, including everyone from Spotify to Starbucks to the World Health Organisation,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Tuesday. “More companies are starting to use our virtual reality tools for work as well, and I’m excited to build more new ways for people to work together that weren’t possible before.”

Microsoft Teams revealed last month that it has surpassed 145 million daily active users – a yearly increase of 93%. Slack no longer reveals user numbers but, as of September 2019, the company recorded 12 million daily active users, almost double that of Facebook’s Workplace.

As it looks to continue increasing users, Workplace has also announced a few new features, such as a live Q&A function and an integration with Microsoft 365 and Google G Suite’s calendar. There are also ‘diversity-focused’ updates, such as emojis with different skin tones and a service that allows users to show their colleagues the correct way to pronounce their name.

The feature offers both audio pronunciation and phonetic spellings.

Discord has signed a partnership and investment deal with Sony, in a move that likely puts to bed any rumours surrounding a potential takeover of the chat platform by Microsoft.

The amount given by Sony has not been disclosed but it is thought to be a small fee that came within Discord’s latest round of funding, which is thought to have raised $100 million, according to TechCrunch.

Sony’s partnership will involve integration with PlayStation as the two companies plan to “bring the Discord and PlayStation experiences closer together on console and mobile starting early next year”, according to Sony.

In March, Discord was reportedly exploring a potential sale, with Microsoft being the most likely suitor for a deal worth around $10 billion. However, talks between the two firms reportedly ended soon after, with Discord deciding to go down the route of becoming a listed company instead.

Microsoft’s plans for the chat app were unclear, but it was speculated that the tech giant would integrate the service with Xbox and maybe even use data from its growing pool of users to inform other Microsoft services.

The communications platform found success among gamers as a voice chat app, but it has since found more varied use cases during the pandemic. While Epic Games were also said to be in talks with Discord, non-gaming entities, such as Twitter and Amazon, were also rumoured to be interested.

Sony’s partnership will involve integration with PlayStation as the two companies plan to “bring the Discord and PlayStation experiences closer together on console and mobile starting early next year”, according to Sony.

Microsoft has been on a spending spree of late, including the recent acquisition of AI firm Nuance Communications for $19.7 billion and game maker Zenimax for $7.5 billion.

It was also rumoured to be interested in Pinterest and opened talks to buy Chinese social media firm TikTok last year, but ultimately lost out to Oracle. That deal, however, has been put on hold by the US government.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) revenues grew 32% in the first quarter of the year, as greater demand for cloud computing continued into 2021.

The cloud computing arm of Amazon brought in $13.5 billion between January and March, jumping from $12.75 billion in the final quarter of 2020.

AWS has long maintained its position as the world’s largest cloud provider and is often Amazon’s most reliable source of income, contributing billions to its overall profits every quarter. Its success is part of the reason that its CEO, Andy Jassy, is set to replace Jeff Bezos at the end of Q2.

In a statement, Bezos referred to AWS as Amazon’s 15-year old child that had “grown-up fast” and come into its own.

“In just 15 years, AWS has become a $54 billion annual sales run rate business competing against the world’s largest technology companies, and its growth is accelerating – up 32% year over year,” Bezos said.

“Companies from Airbnb to McDonald’s to Volkswagen come to AWS because we offer what is by far the broadest set of tools and services available, and we continue to invent relentlessly on their behalf. We love AWS, and we’re proud to have them in the family.”

Microsoft also recorded increased revenues for 2021 Q1, with a third consecutive quarter of 50% growth. However, the Redmond firm still only accounts for 19% of the overall cloud market, compared to 32% taken up by AWS.

Cloud emerged as a winner across all sectors over the last year, according to Canalys research analyst Blake Murray. As such, organisations have become dependent on digital services to maintain operations and adapt.

“Though 2020 saw large-scale cloud infrastructure spending, most enterprise workloads have not yet transitioned to the cloud,” said Murray. “Migration and cloud spend will continue as customer confidence rises during 2021. Large projects that were postponed last year will resurface, while new use cases will expand the addressable market.”