Cloud computing is “for everyone”, Google Cloud CEO Diane Green said at the company’s Next event at London’s ExCel on Wednesday, but not everyone knows it.

Highlighting this point, the CEO told an anecdote from the night before. Green met a man, whose company is using Google Cloud to migrate their IT systems, but also didn’t seem to realise who she was.

“My favourite interaction was last night, I was checking into my hotel and someone, I hope is in the audience, asked me if I was here to go to Google Cloud Next,” she said with a wry smile. “I said yeah, I am.”

It’s a strange paradox to be the boss of a company delivering a game-changing technology for a business and yet that business has no idea who you are. Unlike its parent company, Google Search which celebrated its 20th anniversary recently, Google Cloud is only ten years old and, as yet, hasn’t reached the same iconic status.

“It is interesting because we are early in the cloud,” said Green. “Just 10% of workloads have moved to the cloud, but it is really clear that it is this major vehicle for digital transformation and that is where so much of our companies are going to digitally transform themselves.”

This, Green said, was Google’s new mission; to deliver its technology to millions of companies, any size, and take their data, organise it, manage it and make it useful and assessable to them in driving their business.

The company has laid a lot of groundwork, infrastructure and new services in Europe, particularly in London, where Green noted Google has been investing heavily in.

“Some of the investments we’ve made in the last 18-months include five new cloud regions in London, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and we’ve also just announced one in Zurich,” said Green. 

“We have some of our best people here in Europe. We have DeepMind in London and they just announced another lab opening in Paris. Google Brain has a lab in Paris, Google Cloud AI has a large group in Munich, where we are doing applied AI and also some interesting robotics work and in Dublin, we have our Advanced Solutions Lab (ASL), where customers can come in and get deep immersive training in machine learning.”

The range of digital transformations Google Cloud is offering can be seen in the diverse partnerships it has forged with companies such as AirAsia or transport services such as Airbus and German software company SAP, who Green said was a big partner.

Perhaps most unusual, is the company’s partnership with the Zoological Society London (ZSL) which is using Google Cloud image API’s to provide surveillance over wildlife to help with conservation. This nod to the environment is also seen in the company’s regional data centres that Green said made Google Cloud Unique.

“Another differentiator that Google Cloud has, that is good for everybody in the world, Google Cloud runs all of its 17 plus region’s data centres, carbon neutral,” she said.

Google has decided to drop out of the bidding for the Pentagon’s $10 billion, 10-year cloud computing project because it may conflict with its “corporate values”.

The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud involves the migration of defence department data to a commercially operated cloud system. Bids for the work are due on 12 October.

“We are not bidding on the JEDI contract because first, we couldn’t be assured that it would align with our AI Principles,” a Google spokesman said in a statement. “And second, we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications.”

The JEDI contract opportunity attracted interest from many of the big cloud firms. However, there was discontent that there could only be one contract winner, with industry players stating their preference would have been for multiple providers to bid for and win the work.

It would seem that Google felt the same about how the contract should have been apportioned, with the spokesperson adding: “Had the JEDI contract been open to multiple vendors, we would have submitted a compelling solution for portions of it. Google Cloud believes that a multi-cloud approach is in the best interest of government agencies because it allows them to choose the right cloud for the right workload.”

The tech giant’s decision not to bid for the work follows fairly swiftly on the heels of news that it would not be renewing its contract with the Pentagon’s AI weapons programme, Project Maven – a project its employees protested heavily about. Tweets by the Tech Workers Coalition regarding this latest move hint at similar discontent among employees.

The company then released a set of principles which would asses its AI applications against a host of objectives, saying it believes any use of its technology should be socially beneficial, accountable, and incorporate privacy-by-design, and adhere to ethical standards.

Wi-Fi Alliance has simplified the names for Wi-Fi standards by dropping its complex code scheme, such as ‘802.11’.

Instead, the alliance has introduced single digit classifications, starting with ‘Wi-Fi 6’ which is the new designation for products and networks that support Wi-Fi based on 802.11ax technology.

The alliance hopes that Wi-Fi 6 will provide users with an easy-to-understand designation for both the Wi-Fi technology supported by their device and used in a connection the device makes with Wi-Fi networks.

“For nearly two decades, Wi-Fi users have had to sort through technical naming conventions to determine if their devices support the latest Wi-Fi,” said Edgar Figueroa, president and CEO of Wi-Fi Alliance.

“Wi-Fi Alliance is excited to introduce Wi-Fi 6 and present a new naming scheme to help industry and Wi-Fi users easily understand the Wi-Fi generation supported by their device or connection.”

The new naming system will identify Wi-Fi generations in a numerical sequence that corresponds to major advancements in Wi-Fi. The generation names can be used by product vendors to identify the latest Wi-Fi technology a device supports, by operating system vendors to identify the Wi-Fi connection between a device and a network and by service providers to identify capabilities of a Wi-Fi network to their customers.

Wi-Fi Alliance said this new terminology may also be used to differentiate previous generations, such as 802.11n or 802.11ac. The numerical sequence includes Wi-Fi 6 and also Wi-Fi 5 to identify devices that support 802.11ac technology and Wi-Fi 4 to identify devices that support 802.11n technology.

The change has already been welcomed by the tech industry, including Lissa Hollinger, VP of marketing for Hewlett Packard’s Aruba: “We applaud this effort by Wi-Fi Alliance to simplify the terminology used to differentiate between the different generations of technologies as it will help users more quickly and easily discern the technology their particular device or network supports.”

UKFast’s CEO has compared its new business ClearCloud, selling AWS and Microsoft Azure support, to a sports car customers never need to refuel.

Lawrence Jones said the business’s new arm will also support UKFast’s eCloud Hybrid and eCloud Private services, and that it was launched with the purpose of broadening the firm’s multi-cloud offering to its 5,000 clients.

What sets it apart from the competition, according to Jones, is quality of service matched with fixed prices.

“Smaller businesses and the medium-sized customers don’t want to give people a blank cheque and [buying] Amazon is like giving someone a blank cheque because you don’t really know how much it is going to cost,” he told Cloud Pro.

“My customers are used to having a fixed fee and as much bandwidth as they want, as much CPU usage as they want, as much storage as they want and all within the agreement that was set out at the beginning of the contract.”

Indeed, outlining the cost from the start is a big selling point for ClearCloud, Jones said.

“It’s like having a sports car and not having to pay for the petrol. I know how much I’m going to pay and I won’t be spending any extra,” he said.

The new venture was born out of conversations with customers. Originally, UKFast targeted small businesses paying between £700 and £800 per month, but over the last few years, it has started attracting larger clients that could pay hundreds of thousands of pounds a month.

Its roster now boasts the likes of Laterooms as well as huge public sector organisations like the Ministry of Defence and the Cabinet Office. These large customers are adopting a multi-cloud strategy where they host with ClearCloud, but they also have workloads in AWS and workloads in Azure.

A key element to ClearCloud’s future success is the appointment of former AWS global architect Matt Bibby as MD. Jones believes that his insight into AWS and understanding of the cloud market gives UKFast a competitive advantage.

“With Matt joining us, it has supported UKFast in another way that is quite unusual because we’ve had a few customers contemplating AWS and they were able to talk to Matt and spin up some clouds and then they realised this was definitely not for them and wanted to go back to UKFast,” he said.

“So we decided, yeah, we will take a couple of these bigger workloads on for some of our larger customers, and it turned out very positive,” Lawrence added.

Picture of Matt Bibby, MD of ClearCloud (left), with UKFast CEO Lawrence Jones/Credit: UKFast 

AI could soon be used to help decide if you’re worthy of a pay rise, a bonus or a promotion.

And, as scary and dystopian as it sounds, IBM’s Watson is already predicting the future performance of employees.

Big Blue has been using AI and Watson Analytics to look at the experience and past projects of employees to judge the qualities and skills that individuals might have to serve the company in the future, according to a report from Bloomberg.

The software also checks up on what internal training an employee might have undertaken to further assess their skills. The assessment is made into a rating for managers to make an educated decision on bonuses, pay rises and even promotions.

“Traditional models said if you were a strong performer in your current job that was the singular way that you got a promotion,” said Nickle LaMoreaux, vice president for compensation and benefits at IBM. “Well, we certainly still care about performance,” she told Bloomberg.

The performance LaMoreaux is referring to is a hypothetical one, although IBM claims that Watson has a 96% accuracy rate. The company has also shown current employees what positions it needs to fill and the relevant training required to get a high score from Watson.

IBM claims its staff take an average of almost 60 hours of extra training each year, to boost their career chances.

Using AI to predict someone’s future sounds very close to the film Minority Report, but rather than taking inspiration from Tom Cruise to fight the system, recent research from Oracle suggests that we actually want to be governed by the technology.

The company’s AI at Work study found that most employees were ready to embrace AI at work, with 93% saying they would trust orders from a robot. It stated that 60% of all employees believed that failing to use AI will have negative consequences on their own careers, as well as impacting their colleagues and their organisation overall.

Google has responded to The Wall Street Journal highlighting how common it is for third-party developers to view user Gmail messages.

The publication had previously reported that Google has a “dirty secret” by allowing developers to sift through Gmail due to users granting permission for third parties to do so. 

Google said it makes it possible for applications from other developers to integrate with Gmail, such as email clients, trip planners and customer relationship management systems so that users have options around how they access and use email.

As a result of this, private messages in Gmail can be read not only by third-party systems but also by humans not intended to be the recipients of such emails.

The search giant stressed that it continuously works to vet developers and their apps that integrate with Gmail before it opens up them for general access. It said it also provides both enterprise admins and individual consumers transparency and control over how their data is used.

“A vibrant ecosystem of non-Google apps gives you choice and helps you get the most out of your email,” said Suzanne Frey, Google Cloud’s director of security, trust and privacy.

“However, before a published, non-Google app can access your Gmail messages, it goes through a multi-step review process that includes automated and manual review of the developer, assessment of the app’s privacy policy and homepage to ensure it is a legitimate app, and in-app testing to ensure the app works as it says it does.”

In order to pass Google’s review process, non-Google apps must meet two key requirements. Firstly, apps should not misrepresent their identity and must be clear about how they are using your data and secondly, they must only request relevant data they need for their specific function, nothing more, and be clear about how they are using it.

The WSJ story did not unearth any wrongdoing from third-party apps or services using Gmail, but it has shone a light on a previously discreet industry practice that is under heavier scrutiny since Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal.

Google is now taking steps to actively defend its own data management and user privacy practices to convince users and businesses that is a responsible steward of sensitive user data.

Picture: Google

The UK government is using a type of artificial intelligence that can detect emotion on social media to measure and understand how people feel on certain topics.

Web science firm FlyingBinary has released the “artificial emotional intelligence” service to the government’s G-Cloud marketplace, in partnership with emotional AI recognition company Emrays B.V.

“The web has become a noisy space as online content grows exponentially,” said Professor Jacqui Taylor, CEO of FlyingBinary. “Where once tools were in the hands of a social team it is increasingly difficult for humans using social media monitoring to understand the signals about a brand, initiatives, good news or issues.”

“This service uses AI technology to understand digital content from an emotional perspective and how resonant this is with an online audience before content is shared online.”

The two companies have deployed the artificial emotional intelligence engine as part of a newly awarded G-Cloud 10 service built for the UK government.

FlyingBinary has vast experience in web science, GDPR and security and has thus far supported almost 40,000 government organisations, helping them to understand the dynamics of emotions on the social web, and in the mass media space.

Emrays emotion AI, on the other hand, is said to be able to detect more than 20 distinct emotions in any digital content, which it says can help companies and governmental organisations measure and understand how people feel about any topic, ranging from companies, brands and concepts.

The engine learns collective patterns of emotional reactions to digital content publicly available on the web. The emotion AI analyses and “feels” content on par with humans, based on more than one billion data points it has already been trained on. It uses a diverse set of human emotions, such as love, anger, surprise and shock.

Taylor added that no personal data is used by the AI engine and that it focuses instead on the content itself and the human emotion expressed.

FlyingBinary was one of thousands of small businesses that won the chance to bid to supply cloud computing services to government bodies through the major government procurement framework.

G-Cloud 10, which is predicted by the government to have a potential worth of £600 million, gives the central government, local councils, NHS Trusts and other public sector bodies a way to purchase cloud-based services, such as web hosting from a single, central website.

Oliver Dowden, the Minister for Implementation, said: “Small businesses are the backbone of our economy, delivering innovative solutions in partnership with the public sector, fuelling economic growth and supporting the delivery of efficient, effective public services that meet the needs of citizens.

“The success of G-Cloud demonstrates how we are breaking down the barriers for SMEs who want to supply to the government.”

Picture: Shutterstock

Microsoft’s LinkedIn unit has rolled out a new translation feature for the employment networking site that uses Microsoft’s cognitive services.

The new dynamic feature is called “See Translation” and will create immediate translations for posts on the site. LinkedIn has over 500 million users worldwide, which is almost double the number of people using Twitter.

“The need for economic opportunity is global, and that is represented by the fact that more than half of LinkedIn’s active members live outside of the U.S,” engineer Angelika Clayton and tech led Bing Zhao wrote in a blog post.

“Engagement across language barriers and borders comes with a certain set of challenges, one of which is providing a way for members to communicate in their native language. In fact, translation of member posts has been one of our most requested features, and now it’s finally here.”

See Translation incorporates three central components; language detection, machine translation and feed experience. It uses Azure Text Analytics programming interface, which can detect up to 120 languages and also the Microsoft Translator Text programming interface, which is another one of Microsoft’s cognitive services.

The Translator Text API provides the ability to customise the translation models for a certain domain, like a news feed.

LinkedIn also announced the global availability of a QR code feature, which allows users to quickly look up someone they’ve met without the need to swap business cards or contact details. Scanning other codes or uploading an image of one from your phone will take you straight to that user’s profile. The features are available in the LinkedIn iOS and Android apps.

Microsoft purchased LinkedIn in 2016 for a reported $26.2 billion but has allowed the site to largely run independently and allowed it to tap into Azure cloud services.

Pictures: Shutterstock and LinkedIn

Agile methodologies have become a popular approach to building and running digital services for most organisations looking to undergo a digital transformation.

Even for the UK government this is now a mandatory process for improving digital services. In 2007 it was compelled to change from DirectGov to Government Digital Services (GDS) after a damning report from UK Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox.

Her report called for a “revolution” in the way Directgov dealt with the public online, adding that the government “should take advantage of the more open, agile and cheaper digital technologies to deliver simpler and more effective digital services to users.”

Since the report was published, the government has embraced agile methodologies by creating a digital service team who have since set about modernising online services throughout central and local government.

Essex County Council was one of those authorities keen to revamp its online services, having found their old website ill-suited to the demands of a increasingly connected public. Through the use of agile methodologies, the council set about creating a new blogging platform in just two weeks, a tool the council could use to communicate information more effectively.

The council turned to public sector digital specialists Dwx for help on the project – a company that has previously worked alongside the Cabinet Office on its new assurance tool for approving government spending, and the Small Business Commissioner service, a online advice platform provided by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Agile working

The first post on the new blogging platform, written by ECC’s service delivery team manager Nicholas Ward, paid tribute to the new method of service delivery.

“It was exhilarating making something so tangible in just two weeks. That said, trying to keep pace with a truly digital organisation like Dxw really highlighted how slow some of our internal processes and systems are and how we tend to accept this as the norm,” he wrote.

An agile project is where research, planning, design, development and testing all happen in parallel. Feedback from users comes regularly, so a thick skin and an adaptable mindset are required. It allows for continuous improvements to be made throughout the process with the new system only going live when it has demonstrated the service works and meets the user’s needs.

“This kind of sprint-based approach uses less documentation and provides more value, which are the principles of what we are doing,” Ward tells Cloud Pro. “We understand the problem that we are trying to solve and we do our user research to make sure what we are doing is right.”

“It involves early prototyping and testing and continuing testing as we go through the process of building. It’s very focused on you as the user of the website achieving your goal.”

Borrow, don’t build

The guiding principle for Ward was “not to reinvent the wheel” and use a system that already exists and has proven to be successful. The team decided to use the incredibly popular platform WordPress due to its ease of use, although the design and coding was based on a publicly available template already deployed on GOV.UK blogs, sites that use the same style and functionality needed by ECC.

It was this process of recycling tools that have already been tried and tested elsewhere in government that helped cut down on any extra programming that would have otherwise been needed.

“As well as the obvious speed advantages, using a codebase borrowed from central
government illustrates a broader principle: borrow, don’t build,” says Ward. “Our problems are not unique, there are people all across central and local government facing very similar challenges.”

User stories

Dxw and Ward worked with the Essex team to develop a series of user stories, used to explain the functionality of a feature from an end-user perspective.

These stories describe the type of user, including what they need from a specific application feature, to help create a simplified, easy to implement solution to the problem. For example: “As a user, I need to be able to navigate between different blog posts so that I can read other posts that I’m interested in”.

Dxw deployed a copy of blog.gov.uk and the two teams began to work on the user stories, all
of which went onto a Trello board. Each story worked on by the Dxw team had specifically defined acceptance criteria, so the whole team knew at what stage each task was to be completed by.

As the stories moved from the product backlog through each of the columns on the board, it was the responsibility of both the deadicated Dxw delivery manager and the ECC product owner to provide oversight and approve stories as they were developed.

Working in the open

The delivery service team looked at central government’s recent technology led work and tried to implement similar collaborative practices into Essex’s digital services.

“We learned lessons from central government and its ways of working that we have found tremendously useful and we wanted to do the same,” says Ward. “It’s a tool to help us to reach out and build relationships with other local authorities who are doing similar work. And, potentially, we could form partnerships that help us and help them.”

Local and central governments now share tools, templates and patterns as part of this new agile method and ECC has lots to gain from making this part of its own culture. The service design team is now piloting the blog and will roll it out to other teams while also documenting the process as part of its commitment to working in the open.

The idea is that sharing the work as you go and taking on the feedback you can quickly get a sense of whether the project is going in the right direction. It’s the opposite of building something in isolation, where there is no feedback until its final reveal as a fully formed product.

“Everyone is at a different stage, but I think it is a growing community,” says Ward. “We share and talk with a number of different partners in other local authorities, some of them come out of comms teams, some from IT teams and some from digital teams.

“It’s a methodology that crosses over quite a few different departments in traditional local authorities. Everyone has a part to play.”

Setting the standard

ECC’s blog platform project demonstrated what can be achieved in a short space of time with a well organised effort and a culture of openness and collaboration.

“We are at the start of the journey,” Ward says. “Things like the blog are a good example of something we can do that is achievable and shows the principles of how we want to work and this is something that we can just get out and deliver very quickly.”

Image: Shutterstock

Oracle has changed the way it reports cloud revenue figures every quarter by only offering up a combined figure for SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.

The database vendor used to report SaaS numbers on their own, and a combined figure for PaaS and IaaS, but it is now reporting just one figure for all of these, lumped in with license support. It’s also combined new cloud licenses and new on-premise licenses under ‘new software licenses’, not breaking either out.

Oracle co-CEO Safra Katz explained the change in a conference call with analysts last week, transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

“We have now labelled new software licenses as cloud license and on-premise license, and we’ve combined cloud SaaS plus cloud PaaS and IaaS, plus software license updates and product support, into cloud services and license support,” she said.

Katz said the changes were justified because of the company’s recent introduction of the option for on-premise customers to use a bring your own licence (BYOL) model when shifting to Oracle’s cloud.

“BYOL allows customers to move their existing on-premise licenses to the Oracle cloud so long as they continue to pay support for those licenses,” she said.

“BYOL also makes it cost effective for customers to buy new licenses, even if those licenses are only going to be used in the cloud. So some of our customers are buying new licenses and immediately deploying them in the cloud.”

Her argument is that customers are adopting a hybrid approach to buying Oracle kit, where revenues can’t be broken out neatly as cloud or on-premise, so instead, Oracle’s decided to bundle them together.

“To say it another way,” Katz added, “customers are entering into large database contracts where some of those database licences are to be deployed on-premise, while other database licenses are used in the cloud.

“Previously, all of those licenses and its related support revenue would have been counted entirely as on-premise, which clearly it isn’t.”

However, Oracle has doubled down on its cloud strategy over the last few years, aiming to outgrow rivals like Workday and Salesforce, making this a significant change.

Results a year ago saw cloud revenues grow a huge 60% year-on-year to $1.36 billion across SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. SaaS alone grew 75%.

This year Oracle’s financials painted a very different picture. Its bundled cloud services and license support category grew just 8% year-on-year to $6.8 billion, and its license revenues were down 5% to $2.5 billion.

CTO Larry Ellison cited AT&T’s decision to move thousands of databases into Oracle Cloud, saying: “We think that these large scale migrations of Oracle database to the cloud will drive our PaaS and IaaS businesses throughout FY19.”

But in Oracle’s third quarter for the three months up to the end of February 2018, when it was still listing SaaS separately, and IaaS and PaaS together, growth had slowed. SaaS grew 33% year-on-year (compared to 75% in June 2017) and IaaS and PaaS together grew 28%. Overall cloud grew 32%, almost half that 60% figure it recorded in June 2017.

Picture: Shutterstock