Nvidia has laid out plans to topple Intel in the data centre market with some early signs of success coming from its second-quarter revenues.

Chief executive Jensen Huang told the Financial Times that the US firm wants to become the main supplier of the core technologies that power large-scale data centres. He said the company was planning to supply “the full technology stack needed to run data centres”.

Huang believes the company’s future lies in “data centre scale computing”, an area it has made significant investments in. Earlier in the year, it shelled out $7 billion to acquire Mellanox Technologies, a firm that makes critical components for modern data centres, such as high-speed interconnect links between servers and storage.

The company has enjoyed initial signs of success, as data centre revenue has increased by 167% over the year, outperforming its gaming business for the first time. The data centre unit brought in $1.75 billion compared to $1.65 billion for gaming. Mellanox also contributed 14% of Nvidia’s overall revenue for the fiscal second quarter.

The company’s graphics processing units (GPU), originally developed to handle video streams, are widely used as computing engines to training modern AI system, making them a key component in data centres. As a result, the only area Nvidia now falls short in terms of data centre tools is in traditional computing cores (CPUs).

That could be solved with the acquisition of UK chipmaker Arm, which Nvidia has been heavily linked to in recent months. The Cambridge firm’s designs are thought to be a key weapon to compete with Intel in the data centre space.

Huang did not reveal any information regarding a potential acquisition of Arm, but he did go into detail about Nvidia’s “long-term” partnership with the UK chip manufacturer and the many services they collaborate on.

“They’re really great guys, and one of the special [things] about the Arm architecture that you know very well is that it’s incredibly energy-efficient, and because it’s energy-efficient, it has the headroom to scale into very high-performance levels over time,” he said.

Arm is currently owned by SoftBank, which acquired the chipmaker in 2016 for £32 billion, and any sale of the company will be down to its parent companies “bungled business strategy”, according to Arm’s former president. Speaking to the Financial Times, Tudor Brown, who left the firm in 2012, said SoftBank had “spent money on things that clearly weren’t going to make money in the short term”.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is reportedly in preliminary talks to invest in US-based cloud migration specialist Rackspace Technology. 

The deal would see AWS acquire a minority stake in Rackspace, according to Reuters, which cites “sources familiar with the matter”. 

Rackspace helps firms migrate their data to the likes of AWS, Google, Microsoft, VMware and more. The firm is headquartered in Texas but has offices stationed around the world. According to recent estimations, the company is thought to be valued between $5 billion and $9 billion. 

According to Reuters, the deal will have to be negotiated with Apollo Global Management, the parent company of Rackspace, but sources warned that there was no guarantee of an agreement, suggesting it could take months to hash out. 

Shares in Rackspace have soared 15% based on the Reuters report, according to CNBC. It’s claimed that trading was even briefly halted due to its volatility. 

Rackspace leases server space and helps organisations store and access cloud services and data. Apollo acquired the firm in 2016, for a $4.3 billion leveraged buyout. 

AWS, the market leader, has seen a boost from higher demand for cloud services as companies switch to virtual offices amid the coronavirus outbreak. Its revenues climbed almost 30% in the second quarter of 2020, hitting £10.81 billion. 

If a deal is made, it would be the second Apollo-owned company to secure a deal with a major tech company in 2020. Earlier in August, Google purchased a 6.6% stake in ADT for $450 million; Apollo acquired ADT for nearly $7 billion in the same year it snapped up Rackspace. It’s thought that Google is interested in the company’s strong customer base and its security technicians as looks to drive sales of Nest devices. 

Car manufacturer Nissan is migrating its on-premise computing workloads to Oracle’s Cloud network in a bid to cut costs and reverse a recent financial slump.

The Japanese automotive giant uses software-based Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and structural simulation techniques to design and test cars for external aerodynamics and structural failures.

However, the automotive sector has been hit hard by the pandemic and many car manufacturers are turning to cloud computing providers to process increasing volumes of data at a lower cost. French firm Renault recently signed a multi-year deal with Google Cloud to store its data and use its analytical services, for example.

Nissan’s economic troubles actually started before the outbreak, posting its worst year-on-year performance for a decade in 2019. Now, rather than keep it in-house, the firm is moving performance and latency-sensitive engineering simulations to Oracle Cloud where Nissan hopes it will achieve higher performance and lowers costs.

Nissan products rely on digital processes to make quick and critical design decisions that improve on areas such as fuel efficiency, reliability and safety. The firm will be using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s compute, networking and storage services, including an optimised HPC application that will allow Nissan to benefit from the industry’s first and only bare-metal HPC solution, according to Oracle.

“Nissan is a leader in adopting cloud-based high-performance computing for large scale workloads such as safety and CFD simulations,” said Bing Xu, the GM of engineering systems at Nissan. “We selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s HPC solutions to meet the challenges of increased simulation demand under constant cost savings pressure. I believe Oracle will bring significant ROI to Nissan.”

The move to Oracle is part of Nissan’s wider financial restructuring. It plans to downsize global production, discontinue unprofitable models and focus on improving its electric vehicle range. The company hopes to return to profitability by 2023.

Slack has announced a slew of new security features, certificates and integrations, including a verification system that adds an additional layer to protect against phishing scams.

The announcement follows on from Slack Connect, launched in June, which allows organisations to create shared channels with other companies. This is the company’s big play in its attempt to move people away from email, where phishing and ransomware scams have increased.

For Slack Connect, the company is adding a verification system that shows the legitimacy of a contact – similar to Twitter’s blue ticks, or the padlock symbol on Google Chrome.  

“It’s always a challenge for us to give customers everything they need to feel comfortable sharing their data with Slack,” the firm’s CISO Larkin Ryder told CloudPro.

“But right now people are especially concerned. Moving from the office environment to remote work means that there is a whole new set of risks that every CISO is thinking about.”

During the pandemic, there were a number of reports suggesting that coronavirus-related phishing scams were on the rise – the UN reported a 350% increase in the first quarter of 2020. Slack has taken preventative steps to combat this on its Connect service, where would-be scammers could potentially pose as clients and infiltrate Slack channels.

The company is also adding a feature called ‘Information Barriers’, which can block communications between specific users within the same organisation to avoid conflicts of interest.

There is also a new enterprise key management (EKM) for the Workflow builder, which provides full encryption to all data added to the service, including form data and search queries. The EKM will also be available for Slack Connect.

Finally, Slack has also achieved FedRAMP moderate authorisation, which is a US government standard for cloud service providers.

IBM has agreed a multi-year partnership with Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP) to accelerate the company’s hybrid cloud transformation. 

The firm behind the famous soft drink will be using an open hybrid cloud environment with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

The aim is to reduce its operational expenses, increase IT resiliency and use analytics and AI in its daily operations to bring enhanced business insights and deliver greater service to its customers.
 
A key priority for CCEP is to streamline its existing IT infrastructure to create a platform for standardised business processes, data and technology. From that groundwork, it hopes to build data analytics, IoT and AI technologies to provide new insights across its business to help drive further efficiencies.
 
The agreement includes the use of IBM public cloud and several large SAP workloads. IBM will also provide CCEP with a consolidated view and single point of control over its entire IT infrastructure.

“Our successful collaboration with IBM over the last few years has given us the confidence to take the next step in our strategic cloud-first digital transformation,” said Peter Brickley, CIO of Coca-Cola European Partners.

“The selection of IBM’s hybrid cloud architecture with Red Hat OpenShift gives us the flexibility to optimise across different public cloud platforms according to our future needs.”
 
IBM and CCEP have been working together since 2018 when IBM successfully moved one-third of its enterprise workloads from a dedicated US data centre to the IBM Cloud in Europe.
 
A cornerstone of this transition will be Red Hat OpenShift and its comprehensive Kubernetes platform, which will allow CCEP to build mission-critical applications and run them on IBM public cloud. This will include IBM’s Multicloud Management service, which will be used to integrated legacy systems, private and public clouds into a single dashboard.
 
“As businesses shift to cloud, we understand that each industry and client has unique business needs in their cloud adoption journey,” said Howard Boville, SVP IBM Cloud.

“By selecting IBM for its hybrid cloud environment with decades of industry expertise and experience, CCEP is embarking on a journey towards an open and secure cloud architecture driving greater digital advancement.”

There is something inherently ignorable about an email. Ray Tomlinson sent the first one (to himself) in 1971 but he can’t remember what the subject was.  

Email is not particularly cool either; it’s a Gen-X invention that Millennials and Gen-Zs are consistently trying to move away from it with platforms like Slack, which is hellbent on killing it off. 

Slack doesn’t make any attempt to hide this contempt for email, either. Recently it added a feature to send messages beyond the walls of a company and connect organisations into shared channels. Unfortunately for email, most businesses want these instant cloud-based communications. Not some legacy tech where you can accidentally ‘cc’ in all your contacts.

Yet for some time there has been a growing community of individuals, entrepreneurs and startups that still see value in email in the golden age of cloud computing. They see an opportunity to feed that cloud-based innovation into your inbox and breathe new life into this founding pillar of the Digital Age. Simply put, the innovations that Slack has built to kill email off have, ironically, inspired others to improve it. 

The inbox revolution

In the middle of 2019, a New York Times article drew attention to a startup that promised to revolutionise emails with machine learning-based shortcuts. It was a Gmail plugin called Superhuman that reportedly had an ever expanding waiting list of potential clients, all keen to pay a $30 (£22.8) a month premium for email.  

The company borrows Gmail creator Paul Buchheit’s rule of “every interaction should be faster than 100ms”. It has developed features that it says will “make you feel superhuman”, such as an AI-based email triage (which is actually just a suped up filter), an undo send capability, message scheduling and a few more that sound like very mundane superpowers.

Productivity expert, author and founder of career advice site The Muse, Alexandra Cavoulacos points out that Superhuman is the newest in a long line of startups that claim to improve email. She gave its plugin a go, along with a rival service called Hey (you may have seen it battling Apple in the news). 

“Few have been successful in the long-term, but many have had early user growth and interest,” Cavoulacos explains. “What that indicates to me is that there is a real demand for an improved product. We spend so much time in email that something that has a better user experience or saves you time can be very valuable. 

“We are very used to our existing tools, so the new options have to be that much better to be worth switching – even more so for paid products. Superhuman has focused on speed and shortcuts, quite successfully – when I tested them out I definitely saw better speeds and enjoyed a number of their features. Hey seems to be focusing more on being a better filter – keeping just anyone from taking up your time, mental energy and inbox real estate.”

While apps like Slack have a lot of upsides, Cavoulacos still believes that email has an important role in the modern age and she suggests that instant message platforms have facilitated a move to an immediate response model. And, while there is certainly work that is best done via platforms that focus on real-time collaboration and instant messaging, the more private affair of email still has its place in 2020 and beyond. 

“Email is still the best tool for thoughtful asynchronous communication, which is critical for allowing individuals to control when and how they do their work,” Cavoulacos says. “It is already challenging enough to keep your inbox from becoming your to-do list, with every email becoming a new task for you to do. Add in Slack or other app notifications, and professionals find themselves busy all day, but not productive.” 

Collaboration loops

Like Superhuman and Hey, Boštjan Bregar, the CEO and co-founder of Loop, believes that innovations in cloud-based communications and instant collaboration tools can be imported to your inbox. HBregar has been in the collaboration space for many years but didn’t start with email. In 2016, angel investor and long-term collaborator Ben White suggested he should stop thinking about new, alternative email platforms and instead look at adding collaboration into something already in use. Whereas Slack and Microsoft Teams talk about killing off email, White and Bregar decided to go against the grain to try and modernise it.

“There are about three or four players that are really trying to sort of reinvented email – Dropbox just entered the market a few weeks ago with their solution,” Bregar explains. “So there are quite a few people now figuring out that maybe the solution is not bringing people out of email, but actually bringing all the new stuff into it.”

Loop connects to your existing email structure, whoever the provider may be, and floods it with various shortcuts and efficiency add-ons. It works as an individual performance boost or as a company-wide collaboration tool similar to Slack and Microsoft Teams. For example, when an email comes through that is perhaps more relevant to someone else in your team, rather than cc them in another message, you can @ them, or @ your whole team, and find the right person. From there, documents, resources and anything else required can be pulled in for more instant collaboration between you, your team and also the sender. 

However, as seamless as that sounds, it adds to the concerns raised by Cavoulacos about “always-on” culture where the lines between work and life can blur – something that may have been exacerbated for home workers by the pandemic. So, letting the rest of your team, or the world, know you’re currently reading emails may take away that intimacy. 

Bregar doesn’t see it that way, however. In fact, quite the opposite. “It is such an individual tool,” he says. “You’re on your own when you’re in your inbox, you don’t feel there’s anybody else in there. If you use Slack, you feel there are other people there. Any tool you take today that has been put onto the market in the last 10 years, you have this feeling that you’re sort of together. Whereas within the inbox, it’s yours.

“The challenge is how to preserve this ability to be on your own and be effective in doing your stuff while feeling that you have your team there to help you because otherwise, you have to switch between platforms.”

For now, at least, email seems here to stay as it still remains one of the most effective ways to communicate outside your organisation. With add-ons for easier collaboration that imitate what instant messaging-focused platforms offer, maybe it really will be email that triumphs after all.

Facebook is allowing its employees to work from home until July 2021 due to the continuing spread of the coronavirus across the US.

The social media firm will also give its staff £1,000 to put towards any home office equipment they’ll need.

The decision follows a number of tech companies that have announced similar plans, such as Google, and those that have made remote working permanent for some of their workforces, such as Twitter and Fujitsu. 

“Based on guidance from health and government experts, as well as decisions drawn from our internal discussions about these matters, we are allowing employees to continue voluntarily working from home until July 2021,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement. “In addition, we are giving employees an additional $1,000 for home office needs.”

The company also said it will continue to reopen offices in a restricted capacity, but only where virus mitigation has been in place for at least two months. It is unlikely that many locations in the US will reopen before the end of the year, however, due to the high number of coronavirus cases in the country. 

There was more optimism from Facebook and Google in May, mid-way through the first wave of the pandemic, as both announced plans to reopen offices in July. That has come and gone, but the pandemic still has a strong foothold in America.

Twitter showed a bit more flexibility and forward-thinking with its COVID-19 strategy, offering employees the decision to work from home indefinitely. The social media company also announced it wouldn’t open offices before September, though that may also change due to the continued rise in cases.

Japanese manufacturing giant Fujitsu announced plans at the start of July to make 80,000 workers permanently remote. This also included reducing its office footprint by 50% as part of its post-pandemic future. The plans are only for its employees in Japan at the moment, but Fujitsu hopes to reduce office space by 2022. 

The virtual hearing for the trial against a teenager accused of July’s mass Twitter hack was cut short on Wednesday after the meeting was hijacked by members of the public.

Prosecutors were in the midst of deliberations over the alleged involvement of a 17-year-old teenager from Florida when their conference call was hijacked by a series of interruptions, including 15 seconds of a porographic clip, according to Krebsonsecurity.

The teenager is thought to have orchestrated the 15 July hack on Twitter, which led to the compromise of a number of high profile accounts. His bond hearing with the Hillsborough County criminal court was held via videoconferencing service Zoom, which has been plagued by security issues throughout 2020.

A notice of the hearing was available via public records, which included joining details and the session’s identification number. In a practice known as ‘Zoom bombing‘, unauthorised users are able to make use of this information in order to repeatedly join a call and interrupt the meeting taking place.

“Less than a minute had passed before one attendee not party to the case interrupted a discussion between the attorney and the judge by streaming a live video of himself adjusting his face mask,” Brian Krebs wrote. “Just a few minutes later, someone began interjecting loud music.”

Jude Christopher Nash, who presided over the hearing, was also “clearly” in charge of administering the video stream, according to Krebs. When the prosecution was interrupted by 15 seconds of the random conversation of an unauthorised guest, Nash reportedly told the participants he was removing the troublemakers as quickly as possible.

What happened next was quite common at the beginning of the year, when the first reports of Zoom bombing first surfaced. One of the unauthorised guests streamed a graphic video clip from Pornhub for roughly 15 seconds. Judge Nash then abruptly terminated the meeting.

Zoom has taken steps to prevent participants from hijacking meetings with settings that hide its information and capabilities to eject unwanted participants, but those settings were not fully used in this case.

The teenager on trial is accused of illegally gaining access to some 130 Twitter accounts, targeting the likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. It’s believed 36 inboxes were also accessed during the hack, which led to the theft of data from seven accounts, according to Twitter.

Despite the disruption, the Judge ruled not to change the defendant’s bail conditions.

​

Financial tech firm Global Payments has agreed a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to expand its global reach with the development of a cloud-based payment platform for card issuers.

As part of the deal, Global Payments will also tap into AWS services as its preferred cloud provider.

The cloud-based platform is described as a “processing service” for card issuers. It aims to give companies more access to technology-oriented services that could help them to deliver more modern consumer experiences and help accelerate feature improvements.

Global Payments CEO Jeff Sloan told MarketWatch that it could “level the playing field for large financial institutions” suggesting that innovations such as contactless payment options and digital banking services “can all be done better, faster and cheaper in the cloud“.

He added that the arrangement with AWS was about “letting large financial institutions globally access the same technology that startups did.”

“The new platform’s cloud-based architecture will give clients the ability to use the services they need with greater speed-to-market, flexibility and best-in-class experiences for our customers and their cardholders,” said Sloan.

“By strategically partnering with AWS, we can capitalise on the fintech and open banking movement, further expand our role in technology innovation, leapfrog existing distribution models and solidify our position as a leading provider of technology solutions for financial institutions, new market entrants, and retailers across the globe.”

Global Payments will use a range of AWS services, such as storage, compute, database, security, analytics and machine learning to fulfil compliance requirements, enable new cloud-based services, and enhance customer experiences.

The two organisations will also work together to explore additional opportunities for collaboration on innovative payments products and services across all of Global Payments.

The partnership is another big win for AWS in the financial world. The company already works with CapitalOne, CoinBase and the National Bank of Canada, to name a few.

Google is building a subsea fibre-optic network cable that connects the UK, US and Spain as part of an effort to improve its services. 

The ‘Grace Hopper’ cable, Google’s fourth privately-owned undersea cable, will run from New York and split off to Bilbao in Spain and Cornwall in the UK.

Underwater cables carry 98% of the world’s data, according to Google, and are a vital part of global communications. They are typically built by groups of communications firms which then charge other companies to use them.

The Grace Hopper cable will be one of the first new cables to connect the US and UK since 2003 and will power Google services like Meet, Gmail and Google Cloud. It also marks the tech giant’s first investment in a private subsea cable route to the UK and its first-ever route to Spain. The Bilbao landing point will also integrate an upcoming Google Cloud region in Madrid. 

The cable will be equipped with 16 fibre pairs (32 fibres), which is a significant upgrade to the internet infrastructure connecting the US with Europe, according to Google. A contract to build the cable was signed earlier this year with Eatontown, a New Jersey-based subsea cable provider and the project is expected to be completed by 2022.

The name of the cable is a nod to American computer science pioneer Grace Brewster Murray Hopper who is best known for her work on one of the first linkers (compilers). She’s also famous for finding an actual bug in a programme when a trapped moth short-circuited an early Harvard Mark II computer. 

Jayne Stowell, who oversees construction of the company’s undersea cable projects, said Google needed an internet connection that could be relied upon.

“It’s not enough to have a single cable because any element in the network can break from time to time, and if it’s 8,000 metres under the sea, it takes a while to repair,” she told the BBC.