An advocate for tech startups is urging the UK government to find ways of incentivising tech adoption for SMBs to boost the country’s productivity. 

The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec) have called for a digital adoption fund that provides tax reliefs to SMBs and greater collaboration from the UK’s startup ecosystem. 

In its report, ‘Hidden Figures‘, Coadec refers to the UK as “the sick man of Europe” due to its stagnated productivity. The organisation suggest that unless more is done to make digital adoption easier and more attractive to the country’s small and medium-sized businesses, the UK will fall further behind others in Europe. 

“Although most nations have experienced slow productivity growth since 2008, the situation in the UK is by far the worst amongst our peers and one of the worst performances in UK history,” the report states.

“However, the British economy hasn’t always been characterised by slow productivity growth, but performance has fluctuated compared to that of our peers across the last 60 years. In 1960, the UK had the highest level of productivity in Europe before suffering a slowdown in the 1960s and 1970s which led to the UK becoming known as the “sick man of Europe”. 

To get the country back to health, Coadec recommends the government put in place four incentives for SMBs. The first is a fund that works like tax credits for companies that want to adopt new technology – helping to reduce the cost. 

For those that are perhaps not confident on what tech their business needs, or unsure what value they will offer, the report recommends creating a sector-by-sector ‘tech matrix’, a list of approved products and services. This also ties into its recommendation that tech startups offer support to SMBs on what tech to adopt and how.

Finally, the report urges the government to create a post-COVID-19 tech adoption strategy, so businesses can be more agile in the face of future challenges. 

The growth of Alibaba‘s cloud business is outpacing both AWS and Microsoft in the third quarter of 2020, with the Chinese firm capitalising on the country’s early recovery from the pandemic.

Alibaba’s cloud division brought in revenues of 14.89 billion yuan (£1.71bn) in the three months ending 30 September. That’s a 60% increase year-on-year, representing faster growth than the 29% recorded by AWS and the 48% cited by Microsoft’s Azure. 

That was also higher than the 44.7% growth recorded by the third biggest provider, Google Cloud.

It’s worth noting that Alibaba is a smaller operation that doesn’t provide the same breadth of cloud services as the three larger companies and its business is mostly in China, despite recent expansion into Europe.

The company said that most of the gains were from its internet, finance, and retail businesses, although part of it can also be attributed to China’s earlier recovery from the COVID-19-related downturn.

“We delivered another solid quarter,” said Maggie Wu, Alibaba’s CFO, in the earnings report. “Our domestic core commerce business continued to grow steadily during the post-COVID-19 environment in China through higher purchase frequency and consumer spending, while cloud computing revenue grew 60% year-over-year, driven by the acceleration in digitalisation across all industries and businesses of all sizes in China.

“We are happy to see that our strategic investments are starting to see improving operational efficiencies and the effect of scale.”

Amazon and Microsoft are currently the outright leaders in cloud, between them accounting for over half of the worldwide market, according to Synergy Research Group. Alibaba is now the fourth-largest provider of cloud services, behind Google but ahead of the likes of IBM and Oracle.

“We remain focused on our three long-term growth engines – domestic consumption, cloud computing and data intelligence, and globalisation – to effectively capture opportunities from the ongoing changes in consumer demand and acceleration of digitalisation of businesses across our digital economy,” said Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang.

Software giant SAP saw its market valuation drop by €25 billion (£27.8bn) after it announced plans to go “all-in” on cloud computing during its third-quarter earnings call. 

The German firm is on track for its worst trading day in 12 years, according to CNBC, after slashing its revenue forecast for 2020.

Fearing that lockdown restrictions would affect demand for its business relations and customer management software into 2021, the tech giant has announced plans to go “all-in” on cloud computing. The announcement means that SAP is abandoning medium-term profitability targets which could take longer than expected to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

“As the CEO of SAP, I have to be focused on the long-term value creation of this company,” SAP CEO Christian Klein told CNBC‘s “Squawk Box Europe” on Monday. “So I cannot trade the success of our customers and the significant revenue potential of SAP against short-term margin optimisation.”

Investors reacted badly to the announcement, dumping shares and wiping €25 million off SAP’s market value. However, some will point to a year of turmoil following the exit of long-term CEO Bill McDermott and the less than successful ‘tandem’ leadership that ended in April when Klein became the company’s sole CEO. 

At that point, with the coronavirus pandemic starting to hit global operations, SAP had focused on medium-term “ambition” which was favoured by McDermott on the estimates that it would lead to profit margins growing by at least a percentage point up to 2023. 

The change, however, effectively means that profit margins will stagnate over the next three years. But cloud revenue, from subscription-based services, is now expected to triple to €22 billion by 2025. As such, total adjusted revenue is being forecast at €36 billion with an operating profit of €11.5 billion.

A surge in attention Slack enjoyed at the start of the pandemic, that led to thousands of new paid customers, appears to have now dissipated, according to analysts, as customers appear to now be turning to rival products instead.

The communications platform has been unable to maintain the same levels of growth as that enjoyed by the likes of Microsoft Teams and Zoom, prompting Morgan Stanley analysts to downgrade Slack’s stock to the equivalent of a selling rate, according to CNBC.

Slack shares closed down 6.3% after the downgrade. The comms platform hasn’t seen the same rapid growth as Zoom, which reportedly saw revenues increase 355% in Q2.

“Massive work from home demand for collaboration tools may end up doing more harm than good for Slack,” the analysts wrote, according to CNBC. “We see higher risk at current levels.

“In many cases, Slack did not have the opportunity to properly pitch its differentiation, and in our view, the customers that have standardised on Microsoft Teams are not looking back.”

In March, CEO Stewart Butterfield posted a lengthy tweet about the company’s reaction to the pandemic and its sudden uptick in paying customers. According to that note, by the mid-point of the first quarter of 2020, Slack had added 7,000 new paying customers, rising to 9,000 a week later. In previous quarters the average was around 5,000 new customers, suggesting that the company would be a beneficiary of the so-called ‘new normal’.

Most companies that provide technology or software to aid remote working saw some level of increased adoption in the first quarter of the year and that continued into the second quarter and beyond. Slack, however, saw its growth peak on 3 June, with its stock falling 28% in the following months.

What will hurt more, however, is how far Slack has fallen behind Microsoft Teams. The two companies are fierce rivals but Microsoft’s more holistic service helped it secure some 44 million daily active users in March. Those users have largely stayed with the service, according to Morgan Stanley’s analysts.

Slack has filed an anti-competition complaint against Microsoft, arguing that Teams is a ‘weak’ product that is forced upon Office 365 users as part of the bundle.

This complaint has only been raised with the EU and it has yet to be acknowledged.

Salesforce’s dominance of the customer relationship management (CRM) software market might be under threat from a fresh strategic challenge from Microsoft. 

Despite not having much luck in the market for the past 20 years, the tech giant has told sales teams to get existing customers to adopt its Dynamics 365 products, according to analysts cited by CNBC. 

A ‘major’ Microsoft partner reportedly indicated the plans to RBC Capital Markets. They suggested that partners typically resell Microsoft software, often in conjunction with consulting services, hardware, or other software.

It is thought that the push could lift Microsoft’s Commercial Cloud, a group of products that now represents over one-third of the company’s total revenue, and encroach further into an area dominated by Salesforce in the process.

“Microsoft engages executives throughout the agreement renewal process and we routinely check in with salespeople to make sure they’re exploring Dynamics 365 and Power Platform prior to each deal’s completion,” Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw said to CNBC.

“This is about being efficient with customer engagement and ensuring awareness of the growing interest we see in these offerings, without introducing any change to the structure of customer agreements.”

RBC analyst Alex Zukin told CNBC that the move was a “new priority” for Microsoft. Zukin also said the unnamed Microsoft partner indicated that the tech giant’s senior leadership must approve any enterprise license renewal that leaves out Dynamics, which includes CRM and other business management software and PowerApps.

Microsoft’s sales executives want their teams to talk with clients about the Dynamics 365 cloud services, particularly about renewal times, according to RBC’s source, which said the efforts became more pronounced when the company’s current fiscal year began in July.

In the second quarter of 2020, Dynamics grew 38% compared to the same period the year before, faster than most other Microsoft products. In the 2020 fiscal year, which ended on June 30, total Dynamics revenue exceeded $3 billion, with more than 60% coming from Dynamics 365.

HPE has secured a deal to build a supercomputer in the Czech Republic in 2021, what is considered to be the fastest of its kind in the country.

The development is part of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, an initiative between the EU and the tech industry to coordinate and combine resources to develop world-class exascale supercomputers within the continent.

The new installation has the working title “Euro_IT4”, referencing the IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, an R&D facility in the Czech Republic, where it will be housed.

HPE will power the project with its Apollo 2000 and Apollo 6500 systems, which are purpose-built to support high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, such as modeling and simulation, with AI and other data-intensive applications. 

IT4Innovations has said it plans to use the system to boost weather forecasting, advancing drug discovery – including a cure for COVID-19 – and to develop greener and sustainable infrastructure.

“HPE is uniquely positioned to provide the complete infrastructure and services that the next era of supercomputing demands, and together we are delivering one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe that will benefit science, industry and society as a whole,” said Vit Vondrak, Director at IT4Innovations.

The Euro_IT4 will feature over 500 Nvidia A100 Tensor core GPUs and network for targeted AI performance. Once built, it’s anticipated it will sit somewhere between the 20th and 50th fastest supercomputers in the world, with an anticipated peak performance of 15.2 petaflops per second.

Nvidia itself has recently announced plans to build the UK’s most powerful supercomputer as part of its acquisition of Arm. The ‘Cambridge-1‘ supercomputer will also be aimed at medical research and would hypothetically rank as the 29th most powerful supercomputer in the global TOP500 list.

AMD’s ‘Hawk‘ supercomputer in Stuttgart, Germany, is thought to be the fastest general-purpose system for scientific and industrial computing in Europe. That installation consists of 44 racks and 5,600 computer nodes, providing around 25 petaflops per second of compute power.

That, however, pales in comparison to the world’s most powerful supercomputer, the ‘Fugaku‘, which is the number one listed by the TOP500 benchmarking index. Powered by Arm processors, the Fugaku reached 415.5 petaflops per second.

​Google will begin transitioning customers from Google Hangouts to Google Chat starting next year, with the former set to be officially killed off.

Chat, a messaging service that was previously only available to paying G Suite users, will be made free as a service within Gmail but also as a standalone app.

The announcement signals the beginning of the end for Hangouts, which will slowly lose features and services as they are shifted over to Chat and other areas of Workspace, the company’s new G Suite desktop app.

The transition will start sometime in the first half of 2021, Google said in a blog post, as tools will be made available to help automatically move Hangouts conversations, contacts and conversation history to Chat. The details are still a little vague at this stage, but Google said it will share more guidance soon.

What we do know is that Hangouts will lose support for features such as Google Fi and Google Voice, early next year. It will also lose its call phones feature, to comply with new telecommunications regulations being introduced in the EU and US. The tech giant said it will send notifications to Google Workspace admins to detail the final migration stages in the “coming months”.

Google users won’t be surprised by the move away from Hangouts, as it was originally hinted back in 2018. According to The Verge, Google has said the switch will be gradual and will include a period of time where both Hangouts and Chat will both be available. However, eventually all free users and Workspace customers will be moved over to Chat where it will then fully replace Hangouts.

Google Cloud has announced the integration of Google Meet and Google Glass that allows remote teams to see through the eyes of workers in the field.

The integration is available now in beta on the Enterprise Edition 2 of Google Glass, but only for customers with a paid Workspace account.

Workspace is Google’s new desktop UI that allows users to access G Suite apps, such as Gmail, Drive and Meet, via one platform, rather than endlessly cycling between each one.

This now includes an integration with Google Glass and Meet to provide more support for those still working on-site. The cloud giant has tested its Meet for Glass app in data centres, given the reliance on on-site maintenance, allowing for repair work to be carried out by a single on-site engineer with the support of others watching virtually.

With the Meet for Glass integration, users can connect with a remote team and diagnose issues, review physical equipment, and potentially train employees without being in the same place. Google suggests this is far easier than simply connecting via a laptop or “bulky” webcam as it lets technicians work hands-free and gives the remote participants an optimal view of any situation.

“Our mission has never been more critical than in today’s remote work environment,” the company said in a blog post. “Many businesses are adapting to new policies and procedures that keep workers safe. As a result, on-site essential workers – those whose roles cannot be carried out remotely – have had to pivot the ways they work and collaborate.”

This is an idea that Microsoft worked on with the very first HoloLens demos in 2015, using the Skype app to video call a walkthrough for fixing a light switch. The Skype for HoloLens app has since been discontinued and the company uses its newer Dynamics 365 Remote Assist program instead.

Slack announced a number of security updates for its external chat service Slack Connect during its virtual Slack Frontiers conference this week. 

A new verification feature and a firewall-protected app builder are among the new security updates. Slack also revealed some insights into the company’s future plans with ‘sneak peaks’ at prototypes currently in development. 

The company has been building its email alternative, ‘Slack Connect’, for months, with the service first announced in June. It’s designed to let businesses of all sizes to connect and collaborate with partners, suppliers or other companies in the same way they would internally.

Bringing the outside in can obviously create security risk, but Slack says it builds everything with ‘enterprise-grade security in mind’. As such, organisations will need to be verified and Slack will denote this with a new checkmark feature.

What’s more, verified companies will also be able to Slack users from other organisations directly. ‘Slack Connect Direct Messages’ offers secure direct messaging with just a private invite link sent between a trusted partner, customer or vendor. 

“A channel happens when there is already a project in place, but when you’re just starting out your relationship with a customer or someone you’re about to sell to, or someone you’ve just met at a conference, a DM is much more appropriate,” Ilan Frank, Slack’s VP of product told IT Pro. 

“So this will allow you, in a really lightweight fashion, connect with anyone else that is using Slack.”

For all those that want to build apps on Slack, the firm has launched a secure process that works behind a company’s firewall. ‘Socet Mode’ lets developers securely receive events and interactions from users behind their organisation’s firewall through a WebSockets connection. This means that internal developers can use the full suite of functionality that comes with Slack’s APIs, including building rich interactive apps, without exposing public HTTP endpoints.

Slack said these security features will roll out in “early 2021”, along with the ability for admins to pre-approve channel requests with trusted organisations. 

There was also a surprising feature which Slack revealed. The firm is currently working on a ‘Stories-style’ function – similar to what you might find on Instagram. The company is calling it ‘Asynchronous video updates’ but the name may change as it’s the feature is no more a prototype at the moment. 

Similarly, the firm is also looking into further audio-based features, including instant audio-only meetings. 

Nvidia has launched a GPU-based video conferencing platform for developers that it claims can fix common issues with video calling.

The service is called Nvidia Maxine, a cloud-based platform that will use AI to realign callers’ faces, improve streaming quality, boost resolution, and more. 

Video conferencing is the number one source of internet traffic, according to Nvidia, with some 30 million web meetings estimated to take place every day. With that in mind, the company has developed a cloud-based suite of ‘GPU-accelerated’ AI enhancements.

With Maxine, service providers running the platform in the cloud can offer users new AI effects, such as ‘gaze correction’, super-resolution, noise cancellation and face relighting. What’s more, because the data is processed in the cloud rather than on local devices, Nvidia suggests that end users can enjoy the new features without any specialised hardware.

“Video conferencing is now a part of everyday life, helping millions of people work, learn and play, and even see the doctor,” said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of Accelerated Computing at Nvidia. 

“Nvidia Maxine integrates our most advanced video, audio and conversational AI capabilities to bring breakthrough efficiency and new capabilities to the platforms that are keeping us all connected.”

Maxine also includes reduced bandwidth whereby the AI software is used to analyse key facial points of each caller and re-animates the face in the video. This takes away the need to stream every single pixel which in turn requires less data to go back and forth across the internet.

The face alignment feature automatically adjusts users so they appear to be facing each other during a call and gaze correction helps simulate eye contact, even if the camera isn’t aligned with the user’s screen. Nvidia claims these features will help people stay engaged in the conversation rather than looking at their camera.
 
Developers can also add features that allow call participants to choose their own animated avatars with realistic animation automatically driven by their voice and emotional tone, while an auto frame option allows the video feed to follow the speaker even if they move away from the screen.

The new platform follows an announcement that Nvidia is planning to build the UK’s most powerful supercomputer for use in medical research. Dubbed Cambridge-1, the £40 million machine would hypothetically rank as the 29th most powerful supercomputer in the global TOP500 list if it were built today.