For the last few weeks, Boris Johnson and his government have floundered under the ruthless examination of the new leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer.

The coronavirus has robbed Johnson of his audience and made him look foolish up against the extensively prepared leader of the opposition. This week, Starmer rightly pointed out that the decision to end online voting and the hybrid Parliament was “shameful” as it prevented members from voting.

“If any other employer behaved like this it would be … indirect discrimination under the Equalities Act,” he scolded.

Johnson suggested that it wasn’t “unreasonable” for parliamentarians to come back to Westminster to physically vote, backing the decision made by the Leader of the House, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and completely missing the point that many can’t due to health conditions. 

My own local MP, Conservative, Robert Halfon, suffers from osteoarthritis and was advised by his GP not to go to Westminster and was therefore unable to vote. He told the BBC that Rees-Mogg was “lacking empathy and understanding”. 

As MPs – who are often targets for abuse and violence – queued up for hours on Wednesday, risking both their health and safety, Rees-Mogg addressed the decision to come back to Westminster.

“It is important for votes to be physical because we are coming here together as a single parliament and we are voting on things that have a major effect on people’s lives,” he said. 

The fact the subjects are important to the wider public is irrelevant in this regard. People in the street are not going to dismiss legislation passed over Zoom. It’s just the rule of a man who it seems hasn’t given a moment’s thought to MPs with disabilities, or who are carers, and will always choose tradition over equality. Given that he wrote a whole book on the Victorians, you’d think Rees-Mogg would be a fan of videotelephony (more commonly known as video conferencing), given it was first conceived in 1870. 

This is the thing with the ‘new normal’ and the technology we’re all using during lockdown – none of it is actually new. Some of it’s older than the MPs voting not to use it. And the predicament faced by many MPs is the same as the people they serve. Think of all the people who could have used cloud-based services to do their jobs flexibly from home long before the coronavirus. All those people that spend hours everyday commuting into London for their job. All those people that moved to the smoke, into tiny flats they can’t afford. All because their employer isn’t open to ‘new’ ways of working. 

My father-in-law is in that tragic little bracket. He was a project manager for a government-backed organisation, that shall remain nameless. He has rheumatoid arthritis, so standing for more than 10-minutes is a painful experience. All he ever needed to do his job was a phone, a laptop, an internet connection and some cloud-based services. And yet, he was consistently asked to go into the office, in central London for no reason other than ‘that’s just the way it is’. 

I recall a horrible journey home where I had to meet him at Loughton Tube station where he was too weak to make it all the way to Epping. I’m only five-foot-seven and he’s six-foot-six if you want the humorous mental image of me trying to help him into a car. He took medical retirement at the start of the year, just avoiding the outbreak of COVID-19, yet his former employers are one of the many businesses that have been able to continue operating due to remote technologies. 

Life after the coronavirus can be completely different if we fully embrace cloud computing. It’s an example of how British business can carry on in the face of adversity, how the experience can act as a springboard to transform the way we work for the better. It may even lead to more equality. But with the ‘traditionalists’ calling the shots in government, it seems the country’s leadership is determined to be left in the past.

​Microsoft’s decision to replace journalist with AI on the MSN home page appears to have backfired within just a week. 

As reported by The Guardian, the AI software the company is using to curate stories illustrated an article about racism with an image of the wrong band member of Little Mix.

A story about Jade Thirlwall’s personal reflections on racism was illustrated with a picture of her fellow band member, Leigh-Anne Pinnock. What’s more, despite its human editors correcting the image, the software is also said to be surfacing reports of the mistake on the home page. 

The error, which was first spotted on Friday, couldn’t have come at a worse time as people across the UK and US are taking to the streets to protest racial injustice. It also follows Microsoft’s work to restructure its AI policies, aimed at preventing mishaps of this kind. 

Thirlwall, who has been attending recent Black Lives Matter protests in London, criticised MSN for the post, calling it ignorant, unaware that the error was made by artificial intelligence.  

“@MSN If you’re going to copy and paste articles from other accurate media outlets, you might want to make sure you’re using an image of the correct mixed-race member of the group,” she said. 

At the start of June, contracted journalists were told they would no longer be employed by Microsoft to curate news on the MSN home page. Microsoft doesn’t carry out any original reporting or content creation, but it employs human editors to select, edit and repurpose articles from certain publications which it shares advertising revenue with.

With the coronavirus pandemic hitting media jobs hard, the company began terminating the contracts for dozens of its temporary journalists, according to The Guardian, with the aim of replacing them with AI. A number of those whose contracts were terminated suggested the tech giant had already begun using software to curate stories on the website. 

The human editors are thought to be unable to prevent the robot editor from selecting stories from other sites, according to The Guardian, as such editors have been told to stay alert and delete any version of the Little Mix article that software selects.

IT Pro has approached Microsoft for comment, but a staff member told The Guardian that the company was deeply concerned about reputational damage to its AI product. 

“With all the anti-racism protests at the moment, now is not the time to be making mistakes,” they said. 

Rackspace is ushering in a four-point plan to transform its business into a multi-cloud specialist under the name Rackspace Technology. 

The move follows a series of acquisitions and partnerships that have helped bolster the companies’ services. 

The four areas focus on cloud optimisation, security, cloud-native enablement and data modernisation, and the name change is the culmination of the company’s transformation over the past year, led by CEO Kevin Jones. 

“Our technical acumen with the world’s leading cloud technologies – across apps, data and security – empowers our customers to build new revenue streams, increase efficiency, and create incredible experiences,” Jones said. 
 
“Our new name, mission and multi-cloud solutions better represent the full value we bring to market. Our mission is simple. Embrace technology. Empower customers. Deliver the future.”
 
Under its new branding, the company will offer multi-cloud services. These include cloud optimisation that improves cost and performance, cloud security with compliance services for enterprise cloud customers, cloud-native enablement which accelerates multi-cloud transformation with cloud-native application and data, and finally, a data modernisation service that aims to help customers make predictive, data-driven decisions and increase the return of investment with data analytics.
 
In terms of value for money, Rackspace has already shown it can usher in multi-cloud transformations at low costs, according to Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.

“Our first year of savings with Rackspace was in the 40-45% range versus our historical run costs. As we’ve continued to optimise, our second and third year of savings will be more than 60%,” said Scott Strickland, EVP & CIO, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. 

“Rackspace has been a tremendous partner, and their strategic shift to double down on new multi-cloud solutions addresses our long-term business needs.”

This is also the latest in a string of name changes for the tech firm. It was previously known as Rackspace.com, Rackspace Managed Hosting, Rackspace Hosting and, most recently, simply Rackspace.

A third of people using their home broadband to continuing working during the pandemic say they have seen disruption to their services, according to YouGov. 

2,031 people took part in a survey, with three-quarters (73%) stating that they have been using their household connection more heavily than usual since entering lockdown. 

However, 35% of UK households have revealed that they have experienced worse internet performance since the outbreak of COVID-19. 

According to YouGov data, 52% of those who have experienced poor internet connectivity have also had difficulty doing work activity, with 15% suggesting they’ve experienced “a lot” of disruption. Six in ten (59%) also say they’ve had trouble with video and audio calls, which has become the main method of business communication under lockdown. 

Poor internet performance was cited as a reason for low productivity in remote working in a report from Aternity in April. The COVID-19 Remote Work Productivity Tracker, which was compiled with data from millions of employee devices from over 500 Global 2000 companies, suggested that productivity had declined by 20%. 

Speaking about the findings, Forrester VP of research, Martin Gill suggested the drop in productivity could be simply “user error”.

“The primary issue seems to be broadband issues, what I’d categorise as user error, so people not knowing how to switch microphones on, people talking over each other in meetings, people just not used to the whole etiquette of remote working,” he said.

YouGov’s evidence suggests that internet performance is worse for those with more people in their households, which is particularly problematic if more than one person is work from home. 

Four in ten (41%) of those living in homes with three or more people say their connection has deteriorated during the pandemic, increasing to 43% for those in households of four or more. 

Slack has agreed on a multi-year partnership with AWS that will see its voice and video calling features integrated with Amazon Chime.

The partnership announcement comes a day after Slack reported its revenues increased 50% to $201.7 million in its first-quarter earnings. This also included a 28% rise in paid customers.

Its latest paid customer is tech giant Amazon, which has agreed to adopt Slack within its workforce as part of the deal. In the other direction, Slack will use a range of AWS services, including storage, compute, database, security, analytics, and machine learning, to develop new collaboration features.

The agreement will see ‘Slack Calls’, it’s service for all voice and video calling, integrated into Amazon’s video conferencing platform Chime, a service that has similar call functions to Microsoft Teams.

“The future of enterprise software will be driven by the combination of cloud services and workstream collaboration tools,” said Stewart Butterfield, CEO and co-founder of Slack.

“By integrating AWS services with Slack’s channel-based messaging platform, we’re helping teams easily and seamlessly manage their cloud infrastructure projects and launch cloud-based services without ever leaving Slack.”

Slack will also use AWS’s global infrastructure to support enterprise customers adopting its platform, making use of the recently announced data residency. Revealed in May, the updated zones allow Slack customers to select from a greater number of regions in Europe to help them store their data locally and fulfil compliance requirements. The deal will allow Slack to build on this offering by taking advantage of AWS infrastructure.

While Slack’s first-quarter results beat expectations, the 50% jump was in fact lower than many investors had anticipated, according to TechCrunch. Immediately after its earnings report, an investor sell-off resulted in a 4.4% drop in shares.

The firm reported rapid growth following the outbreak of the coronavirus in March. The mass adoption of cloud-based services led some investors to expect a little more than 50%.

Google Cloud has entered into an agreement with the UK’s Crown Commercial Service (CCS) to provide cloud computing to the country’s public sector agencies. 

The two companies have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) which is an agreement that isn’t legally binding. 

The purpose of the MoU is to make it easier and more affordable for public sector agencies to use the full range of Google Cloud services for digital transformation. CCS, the UK Cabinet Office executive agency and trading fund, approached Google in 2019 to discuss cloud services. 

The result is an agreement that aims to open up the cloud services market to more suppliers to provide the best value for public sector agencies investing in the technology. Google Cloud has even confirmed a discount for qualifying public sector bodies based on aggregated cloud service demand and their expected spend. 
 
The MoU will also include access to Google Cloud’s managed and serverless offerings, such as its comprehensive hybrid and multi-cloud services and Anthos.

“This is a significant milestone for us, as we see the results of our focused investment in cloud services and solutions primed and tailored for the public sector,” said Mark Palmer, head of public sector EMEA, Google Cloud. 

“The UK public sector is a major focus for Google Cloud, and this is an opportunity to further support Her Majesty’s government in their digital transformation.”

According to Google, the fund will allow organisations, such as the NHS and government bodies, to take full advantage of a range of technologies across Google Cloud, including infrastructure, analytics, AI, application modernisation and development, and collaboration services. 

The MoU marks the beginning of an expanded relationship between CCS and Google Cloud, according to both organisations, and they will maintain regular dialogue and strategy sessions to ensure the UK public sector has access to Google Cloud’s latest innovations.

​Microsoft is reportedly planning to replace contracted journalists that work on the homepages of MSN and its Edge browser with artificial intelligence. 

The tech giant won’t renew contracts for roughly 50 US employees at the end of the month, according to The Seattle Times, while The Guardian reports that around 27 journalists are being let go in the UK. 

The contracted employees, hired through staffing agencies, were reportedly notified last week that their services would not be needed beyond 30 June. The 27 UK employees affected, who were employed by PA Media, were told on Thursday that their jobs would be terminated as Microsoft is shifting away from humans in favour of automated news updates. 

A spokesperson for PA Media told The Guardian: “We are in the process of winding down the Microsoft team working at PA, and we are doing everything we can to support the individuals concerned. We are proud of the work we have done with Microsoft and know we delivered a high-quality service.”

Many publications have had to let journalists go due to the impact of COVID-19 and the outbreak has also accelerated a number of cloud-based technologies. According to some of those whose contracts are not being renewed, the curation of news on MSN is already partly automated. 

“It’s been semi-automated for a few months but now it’s full speed ahead,” one of the terminated contractors told The Seattle Times. “It’s demoralising to think machines can replace us but there you go.”

Microsoft is retaining full-time news producers, according to the reports, but the functions of the contracted employees will be taken up by automation. This includes using algorithms to sources trending news stories and optimising the content by rewriting the headline or adding different images or slide shows.

The contracted journalists also created news pieces, maintained editorial calendars of partner news sites and even assigned content to them but it isn’t clear if this will also be taken on by the software.  

“Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis,” a company spokesman said in a statement. “This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, re-deployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic.”

“We’ve been in this for a few years now, but it’s taken a pandemic to actually kick it off.”

Giles Chamberlain, CTO of startup Pexip, is musing on one of the less expected outcomes of the coronavirus pandemic: the explosion in the use of video conferencing services. 

He’s right, of course. The technology, which some had even started to consider old-fashioned, has really come of age during the outbreak of COVID-19 and subsequent lockdowns, keeping tech-savvy businesses ticking over and revolutionising the humble pub quiz. 

Technology firms becoming successful businesses in a time of economic and political crisis isn’t anything new. Amazon grew out of the dot-com bubble, Uber and Spotify emerged from the wreckage of the Great Recession, and there is a feeling that something based on video conferencing will rise out of the coronavirus. The early front runner seemed to be Zoom, but security concerns have seen its reputation – and clientele – plummet.  

Pexip’s chief commercial officer Tom-Erik Lia has sympathy for Zoom.

“A lot of the things that Zoom has experienced have been a little bit unfair,” he says. “If you post your meeting link on social media, you’re going to have people all over the place, right?” 

Indeed, this was a common cause of the “Zoombombing” issue that dealt one of the first blows to its reputation and a slip up made by the UK’s prime minister, Boris Johnson.  

Despite the empathy, however, Pexip is firmly one of Zoom’s rivals. The Norwegian firm also saw a huge surge in users when the coronavirus hit Europe, but so far, there have been no public security gaffs. 

The Oslo-based startup has been a big favourite for a number of organisations around the world, thanks to its comprehensive security, but also its flexibility. The Irish Court system has been using it during the lockdown, hosting hearings virtually where attendees can link up via other video conferencing services, according to RTE Ireland.    RTÉ Hist

“It is technically possible,” Chamberlain ponders. “You can call out from this meeting room we’re in at the moment into a Zoom meeting, or into a Microsoft Teams one. We just had one interesting experience of joining a Google meeting to a Microsoft meeting – pure Ghostbusters fashion, crossing the streams.

“We’re the only company that provides Google Meet interop, we’re one of three certified companies providing Microsoft Teams interop and then we specialise in the standards-based interop from people like Cisco and Huawei.”

Pexip is made up of a team of video conferencing veterans. It’s their work and their obsession, so much so that the firm recently debuted on the stock market via its own service. What better way to market your product to investors than to use it for an IPO? To say it worked is an understatement as Pexip is now valued at $942 million – not far off unicorn status. 

Pexip’s team has over 20-years of experience in video conferencing. Chamberlain and Lia had actually been working together long before their company was even an idea. The two met when a video conferencing firm from Oslo, called Tandberg, acquired a UK rival called Ridgeway. “I thought the company had been taken over by a bunch of crazy Norwegians,” Chamberlain quips. 

Tandberg was acquired by Cisco in 2010 and a couple of years later Lia and Chamberlain parted ways, each leaving to found their own video conferencing startups. Lia formed Videxio, which focused on the software as a service (SaaS) side of things, whereas Chamberlain’s company was called Pexip and specialised in video infrastructure. Both firms became relatively successful in the following years and in 2019 they merged, bringing Lia and Chamberlain back together again.

Having the two specialities in one service gives Pexip a unique advantage. Customers can either use it as a traditional video conferencing service or similar to the Irish Courts, they can self-host Pexip’s infrastructure and take on responsibility for security themselves. Both use cases have attracted the likes of Vodafone, Intel, Amnesty International, and many more.

“We’ve been going after the large enterprises from day one, that was always the target,” Chamberlain explains. “We sell to the US military and the US Federal [Government]. That means we’ve been through something called Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) certification, which is a very elaborate certification process saying this stuff is fit for purpose.

“The distributed software, it’s incredibly hard to bolt on retrospectively. So building that in from the start, it makes it slower to develop the product, but it does mean you have a more secure system. We do have customers who deploy our stuff on networks that aren’t connected to the internet. That’s secure. You’re gonna have a real job hacking that one.”

So far, security is the main battleground in the race to be the top video conferencing company. Where Zoom has struggled, Pexip has flourished, as have other services, such as BlueJeans. But, will there be as much interest once the world opens up again?

“I think there’s a social change that will happen,” Lia explains. “Of course, not everybody likes to work from home. We have to respect that as well, but at the same time, I think a lot of enterprises didn’t prepare their workers to work from home. They didn’t have a policy to allow that flexibility and now they’ve been forced to. So I think that will never be the same again.”

Salesforce has stopped registering some European sales in the UK due to how volatile the pound has become since Brexit.

The software giant said it lost $79 million (£65 million) in 2019 due to the country’s planned exit from the European Union.

The company announced it has “started to implement initiatives” to bypass its UK sales office, such as charging customers directly from local offices in France and Germany, as well as investing resources in Dublin that could “partially mitigate the impact” Brexit has on its operations. 

“Revenues in Europe were negatively impacted by approximately $79 million in fiscal 2020 compared to fiscal 2019 as a result of the strengthening British Pound Sterling,” the company wrote in its annual report. 

“We recognise that there are still significant uncertainties surrounding the ultimate resolution of Brexit negotiations, and we will continue to monitor any changes that may arise and assess their potential impact on our business.”

Brexit was a big business concern at the start of the year, and though it’s since been overshadowed by the global coronavirus pandemic, it’s still very much an issue. Salesforce‘s European business accounts for roughly a fifth of its annual revenue, which came in at $17 billion in 2019,

The company had previously revealed plans to increase its Irish workforce to around 3,000 staff over five years, but that could be accelerated based on its own findings. It currently has around 2,000 employees in the UK, according to reports. 

Recently the company has seen a number of leadership changes, such as co-CEO Kieth Block stepping down in August and Dame Jayne-Anne Gadhia leaving after just six months as the UK chief executive.

At the end of April, Salesforce was also forced to cancel its annual tech conference, Dreamforce, which was due to take place in November. 

“As the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve, our first priority is to help ensure the health and safety of our customers, partners, employees and communities,” the company said.

“With this in mind, we have decided to reimagine our events through the end of the year in new and virtual ways. This will be true for all events, including Dreamforce, Tableau Conference 2020, Tableau Conference Europe, TrailheaDX India and our World Tours.”​

The parent company of shopping chain Lidl is reportedly gearing up to launch a cloud computing service for third party retailers. 

German-based Schwarz Gruppe recently acquired software firm Camao IDC, according to Lebensmittel Zeitun, and is now looking to build a rival to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Cloud computing is a fiercely competitive industry with some of the biggest names in tech fighting for a share of the market. Companies like IBM, Google and Microsoft all deliver slightly different cloud-based services, but each one trails behind AWS.

Cloud Pro has approached Schwarz for comment as there is very little detail on the alleged service, but there is a suggestion that it will be more of a rival to China’s Alibaba as it appears to be more e-commerce-based.  

The acquisition is alleged to have brought 70 cloud computing specialists into the Schwarz Gruppe, which is seen as a key part of the strategy. The company’s head of strategy and business management, Stefan Herold is said to be heading up the new cloud division, which is thought to have been accelerated due to the current coronavirus pandemic. 

Many cloud-based services have enjoyed a surge in users, with remote and automated technologies coming to greater prominence since lockdowns have been enforced. Most retail outlets have either closed and furloughed staff or have shifted to online operations only. 

It is thought that Schwarz will use its cloud service to enable an online delivery service for Lidl, which was reported in January as launching sometime this year.

In October, Lidl advertised for ‘digital managers’ for an unnamed e-commerce project and the company’s UK digital director Alex Murray reportedly suggested online plans were in the works during an industry conference in 2018.