Digital transformation should be a constant process, not just a project to get your business through the pandemic, according to Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The tech giant has released a report into cloud adoption ahead of its 2021 AWS Summit event, which suggests that pandemic has accelerated organisations’ digital transformation plans by an average of two years and five months. 

The firm surveyed 10,000 senior business and IT decision-makers across France, Germany, Israel, Spain, and the UK, with the aim of understanding digital transformation at speed and how it could continue beyond the pandemic. 

IT Pro spoke to the company’s head of operations in the UK and Ireland, Darren Hardman, who joined the tech giant not long after the outbreak of COVID, about the post-pandemic businesses that we can expect to see. 

“I think the key thing that I’ve learned is that a new breed of enterprises is emerging post-pandemic that is confident about responding to change, more agile in managing that change, and more secure and resilient,” Hardman told IT Pro. 

Enterprises that have experimented during the COVID pandemic are experiencing a “reinvention dividend”, according to Hardman, with these organisations now more resilient and better placed to succeed in the so-called ‘new normal’. 69% of the business leaders surveyed said they have a clear strategy to seize opportunities, and 60% agreed they will need to adjust their business model again once lockdown measures lift.

“It has been interesting actually trying to understand which of the companies were reacting to a short term issue with no intention to carry on, versus those that were actually just accelerating their strategy, because in the data 64% of them have told us that they intend to adopt more cloud technologies post-pandemic,” Hardman explained. 

“And 54% of them are now dependent on their cloud to service their customers. Which is interesting, isn’t it? Because it shows that their journey to the cloud, even if it started during the pandemic, is something they expect to continue.” 

However, the report also suggested that there were plenty of warning signs when it comes to sustaining agility and transformation, including internal challenges. Half of the decision-makers said their organisations still lack an understanding of how to link business problems to technical solutions, 47% said employees were resistant to change, and 42% said a lack of skills could hold them back.

“It’s about having the leadership and the leadership muscle to drive this culture of change in your organisation,” Hardman added. “So constantly, as a leader, am I relentlessly trying to seek out the truth to see what competitors are doing in my space to see what customers think about my product or my service, and am I creating the right culture to challenge my own organisation to continually reinvent?”

Oracle has extended its work with the UK government by updating its existing Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Crown Commercial Service (CCS).

The update aims to foster stronger working relationships between Oracle and the UK’s public sector by enabling better use of secure cloud technologies and includes support from Oracle’s Centre of Excellence.

Oracle’s original MoU was penned in 2012 and the update will push more of its services into public sector bodies, such as NHS Trusts and local and devolved governments. Critical public services will also have access to the full suite of Oracle Cloud applications, secure infrastructure services and also autonomous technology.

“This enhanced Memorandum of Understanding will continue to deliver savings and benefits for new and existing public sector customers using Oracle’s cloud based technologies. It will continue delivering value for money whilst supporting public sector customers’ journey to the cloud”, said Philip Orumwense, commercial director and chief technology procurement officer, Crown Commercial Service.

With the enhanced Oracle Centre of Excellence, the UK government will enable better use of secure cloud technologies to support long term innovation and transformation of public services.

Oracle provides a dual-region sovereign cloud that is used by public sector customers, such as the Home Office, Office for National Statistics, the NHS NEP, the Ministry of Defence and West Midlands Police. Its updated MoU will expand on these relationships and allow more public sector organisations to use cloud technologies.

While Oracle is an existing customer, the UK’s list of cloud providers has grown during the pandemic, with the likes of Microsoft and Google Cloud all signing MOU. However, earlier in the year, MPs questioned the number of cloud contracts that had gone to AWS, claiming the government had given too much to one provider.

Half of UK businesses expect to reduce the size of their office space, with a third looking to cut it down by 30%, according to a new report. 

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) surveyed 258 C-Suite executives and over senior employees of the UK’s largest companies and their proposed cuts roughly equated to nine million square feet of space.

The finding indicates an appetite for ‘hybrid work‘ models in the UK, where employees mix remote and in-office shifts, with around 71% of the respondents planning to increase investment in technology to enable more agile work models over the next two years. 

As such, only 10% of those surveyed agreed that the level of employees working in the office will match that of pre-pandemic levels, despite taking into account the speed of the vaccine roll out. The consensus from the survey among the senior executives is that staff will continue working remotely for two or three days a week. 

“The figures couldn’t be more clear, the shift to hybrid working, with part of your time at home and part in the office, is pretty much embedded into the working culture of many organisations,” said Angus Johnson, the UK real estate leader for PwC UK. “So much so that a significant proportion of the businesses we spoke to are planning to reduce their office portfolio, which could lead to up to nine million square feet of vacant space. 

“However, it’s clear that the role of the office is not going to disappear. We may see an increased demand for flexible space as many businesses’ operating models may well need that option if holding dead space is to be avoided. It’s also clear that the nature and purpose of office space are going to change.”

Many of the respondents are said to be implementing ‘subleasing‘ models and exploring partnerships for shared office space. What’s more, 51% of the organisations with 100 employees or more already have a workplace strategy that considers the long-term impact of COVID. 

Video conferencing platform Zoom beat analysts’ expectations with sales more than doubling by 191% in its first-quarter earnings. 

Revenue for the quarter that ended 30 April jumped up to $956.2 million from $328.2 million in the same period of 2020. 

The company’s massive success in 2020, where it became a household name during the pandemic, has bled into 2021. The firm recorded revenue rising 369% in the previous quarter, with many analysts predicting a larger fall as more businesses bring employees back into the office. 

“Work is no longer a place,” said the company’s CEO, Eric S. Yuan. “It’s a space where Zoom serves to empower your teams to connect and bring their best ideas to life. We are energised to help lead the evolution to hybrid work that allows greater flexibility, productivity, and happiness to both in-person and virtual connections.”

The company’s profits also reached more than $227 million (£160m) in the first quarter, roughly ten times more than the $27 million it brought in over the first quarter of 2020. Paid users also increased with businesses with more than 10 employees jumping up 87% to 497,000 in the first quarter. 

Although it recorded enormous success in 2020, it wasn’t until the second quarter, which ended 31 July, that the firm really began to see huge usage spikes (355%). As the pandemic spread across Europe and the US, and lockdown restrictions started to be implemented, Zoom became bogged down by security issues. Users began reporting incidents of ‘Zoom bombing‘ and businesses questioned its lack of end-to-end encryption. 

As such, most analysts are estimating that Zoom’s growth will be lower in the second quarter compared to the year before. With the roll-out of the vaccine and more offices set to welcome workers back in again, there is a suggestion that Zoom will lose some relevance. 

Nividia has reported revenues of $5.66 billion for the first fiscal quarter of 2021, with record growth in its gaming, professional visualisation, and data centre segments.

The overall revenue for the quarter ending 2 May is an increase of 84% year-on-year and a 13% rise from the previous quarter. It highlights the company’s stable growth at a time where global semiconductor shortages are hampering the wider industry.

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Its data centre revenue was up 79% year-on-year, bringing in a record $2.05 billion, with the rise attributed to Mellanox, a data centre firm acquired in 2019, specialising in end-to-end services for servers, storage, and hyper-converged infrastructure.

“Mellanox, one year in, has exceeded our expectations and transformed Nvidia into a data-centre-scale computing company,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. “We had a fantastic quarter, with strong demand for our products driving record revenue. Our data centre business continues to expand, as the world’s industries take up Nvidia AI to process computer vision, conversational AI, natural language understanding and recommender systems.”

The firm’s graphics segment, comprised mostly of graphics cards, was up 81% to $3.45 billion in revenue, and its gaming products were up 106%, year-on-year, to $2.76 billion in sales. This was mainly fuelled by the increase in gaming during the pandemic, but the GPUs Nvidia makes are also essential for AI and cryptocurrency mining.

Nvidia recently unveiled its first Arm-based data centre CPU, Nvidia Grace, which is designed for AI and high-performance computing, which currently powers the Swiss National Supercomputer Centre. Its impending takeover of Arm is currently under investigation by the UK’s Competition and Market’s Authority, though Huang said Nvidia was continuing to “make headway” with the deal.

“From gaming, cloud computing, AI, robotics, self-driving cars, to genomics and computational biology, Nvidia continues to do impactful work to invent a better future,” Huang said.

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Google Cloud is launching three database services across its analytical portfolio that aim to unify its data services. 

Dataplex, Analytics Hub and Datastream are all ‘previews’ that aim to reduce silos and securely predict business outcomes in ‘dynamic’ digital environments. 

Datastream is a serverless offering and replication service that enables customers to replicated data streams from Oracle and MySQL into Google Cloud products like BigQuery or Cloud Spanner.

The Analytics Hubs is a service where companies can create, curate and manage analytics tools. This includes sharing data insights, dynamic dashboards and machine learning models both internally and externally. Google said it builds on BigQuery’s existing sharing capabilities, which have already proven popular with organisations.

The third new service is called ‘Dataplex’ and is described as an ‘”intelligent data fabric”. It meshes the best of Google Cloud with open source technology to enables secure and rapid curation, integration, and analysation of data at scale. 

“Data must be thought of as an ability that integrates all aspects of working with it,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, VP and GM of Databases, Data Analytics and Looker, at Google Cloud. “Every industry is accelerating their shift of being digital-first as they recognise data is the essential ingredient for value creation and the key to advancing their digital transformation.”

“At Google Cloud, we’re committed to helping customers build the most powerful data cloud solution to unlock value and actionable, real-time insights, needed to future-proof their business.”

Equifax is an early user of the new previews, working with Google to incorporate Dataplex into the company’s core analytics platform. The firm is hoping to simplify its workloads and build a single interface for policy management and governance across all its analytics data offerings. 

“Google Cloud has been a critical part of the Equifax journey, helping us protect our customers’ sensitive and proprietary data,” said Bryson Koehler, Equifax CTO. “Google Cloud allows us to create a rich, unified and trusted data ecosystem between business units and partnerships – one in which everyone gains immediate value.”

The Home Office has published plans for its long-awaited digitisation of border controls and immigration. 

The new strategy promises a “fully end-to-end digital customer experience” for online applications, proof of identity and also crossing the border. 

It includes a new digital visa system to help count the number of people coming into the UK, which is said to be similar to the US Esta electronic travel authorisation. This would apply to any entrant that does not have an existing visa or immigration status.

“Our new fully digital border will provide the ability to count people in and count people out of the country,” home secretary Priti Patel told an online conference on Monday, according to the Guardian. 

The project was originally scheduled for completion in 2019 and has reportedly cost upwards of £173 million. The plans still appear to have missing details, such as the cost of the digital visa and specific details on when it will be finished. The move to a fully digital border system has been heavily criticised by MPs for being too slow. 

“As part of this, we are looking at further ways to remove physical documents from the process and streamline the system, such as potentially removing the need for separate vignettes and Biometric Residence Permits, taking out the cost and time for the user and the Home Office and improving security,” the department said in a statement.

“This would be supported by increased use of the online services to prove right to work and rent, simplifying the process for employers, landlords and individuals and reducing the number of documents relied on to prove status.”

In March, the Public Accounts Committee slammed the Home Office for failing to make progress on its digital border transformation, labelling it “miserable” and “exorbitantly expensive”. 

A McKinsey survey of over 20,000 European citizens revealed that 86% of Brits have used e-commerce or online services in the past six months.

The report suggests that this makes the UK the most digitally advanced country in Europe, ahead of France (82%) and Germany (65%), and only behind India (88%) and Brazil (97%) on a global scale. 

Around seven million people in the UK have accessed new digital services since Christmas, mostly grocery and education services as a result of the pandemic, with McKinsey estimating a total of 43 million digital users in 2021.

Over the last six months, digital growth has remained the same, according to McKinsey, but it may drop once the pandemic is fully over. The report suggests that over nine million Brits are expected to return to physical stores as soon as they are safe to do so. 

“With consumers having reached high levels of digital penetration in most regions and industries, the acceleration into digital channels now seems to have levelled off in both Europe and the United States,” McKinsey said. 

“As a result, even as total digital adoption remains above pre-pandemic levels, many industries and regions may see a modest negative net change in post-pandemic digital use relative to 2020.” 

Consumer expectations of the post-pandemic future suggest a strong return of physical channels, according to the report, with some expecting to fully return to pre-pandemic behaviour. The main sectors here include travel, banking, telco carriers and entertainment. 

In the UK, 35-44 year-olds plan to use fewer digital services after the pandemic, citing “distrust” as a result of data handling. This was also apparent in questions around security, with 44% of the respondents suggested they didn’t fully trust digital services. 

Amazon has announced it is retiring its standalone Prime Now service, with its app and website shutting down globally by the end of 2021.

Prime Now has been available since 2014 as a way for members of Amazon’s Prime subscription service to get items delivered straight to their doors within a few hours for an extra fee.

However, the e-commerce giant is now directing users that want these fast deliveries to the Amazon app and website where a two-hour delivery option will be made available. This also includes Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods, which are both available in the app and website.

The move will also incorporate any third-party retailers or local stores that were offered within Prime Now, such as the supermarket chain Morrisons. Available retailers differed slightly from region to region, but the service was used in more than 5,000 cities and towns and even operated out of dedicated Prime Now warehouses.

“To make this experience even more seamless for customers, we are moving the experience from a separate Prime Now app onto the Amazon app and website so customers can shop all Amazon has to offer from one convenient location,” the company’s vice president of grocery, Stephenie Landry, said in a blog post.

“In 2014, I wrote a six-page document outlining a service that would allow customers to get last-minute items in about an hour. We even gave the project the internal code name ‘Houdini.’ In just 111 days, our team took the concept outlined in that six-page document and turned it into Prime Now, which became the foundation for Amazon’s ultrafast grocery and same-day delivery businesses.”

The change has been planned for some time with pop-up notifications in Prime Now directing users to the new website and app. The service has also been discontinued in India, Japan, and Singapore.

Zoom has announced a platform for hosting virtual events that will be available to its paid tier of customers in the summer.

The service, called ‘Zoom Events’, is described as a “comprehensive solution for event organisers” that offers features to ticket and monetise audiences of any size.

It will include a hub to manage and share events, registration portals, integrated networking, and an analytics dashboard to monitor and review attendance and revenues. The events can be hosted as both one-offs or as part of a series of conferences that can also be made private or posted on a public directory for others to discover.

Most of those features have come from a rebranded version of the ‘OnZoom’ platform, which has been in beta since October 2020. This was a service for people to adapt their in-person events, such as fitness classes or music lessons, so that they could work as virtual or hybrid ones. It included tools for monetising sessions and a marketplace to search for them.

However, OnZoom will no longer be available as a standalone service as it will be folded into Zoom Events.

“It’s an exciting time to be at Zoom where the pace of innovation continues to accelerate,” said Oded Gal, the firm’s chief product officer. “We know that people are looking for flexibility in how they attend events in the future. The hybrid model is here to stay, and Zoom Events is a perfect solution for our customers who are looking to produce and host customer, company, and public events with an easy, yet powerful solution.”

The timing of the announcement may come as a surprise to some, given that the popularity of virtual events is almost certainly going to decline as lockdown restrictions begin to lift and companies jump on the novelty of hosting a physical event.

Google, for instance, hosted its I/O developer conference earlier in the week with people allowed to attend at its Mountain View campus. MWC 2021 is also still aiming to host 50,000 people at Barcelona’s Fira Grand Via in June, despite a number of high profile companies pulling out of the event.