Cisco has confirmed its commitment to the IoT, with the announcement of new developer tools, networking products and partnerships to establish its position in the IoT world.

The first major facilitator is the launch of its Catalyst industrial switches and integrated services routers that have been specifically built for IoT environments. Both tools are managed by Cisco DNA Center that allows businesses to manage their infrastructure in a single area, even if they’re being used across environments.

“In IoT, the conversation is about business outcomes. It starts with secure connectivity as the foundation of every IoT deployment. By providing scale, flexibility and security, we’re turning the network into a secret weapon for our IoT customers,” said Liz Centoni, senior vice president and general manager, IoT at Cisco.

An extension of Cisco’s IoT developer tools within its DevBet IoT developer centre will make it easier for creators to integrate Cisco’s IoT networking solutions into their apps and services.

“With a new DevNet IoT developer center, we’re empowering thousands of partners and developers around the world to build upon our IoT platform,” Centoni said.

Cisco also said it wants to work closer with resellers, ISVs, manufacturers and service providers to spread the reach of its IoT programme. By providing the hardware and software tools businesses need to embrace the IoT world, Cisco believes it can make a difference to a whole host of industries, particularly manufacturing, utilities and remote and mobile assets. It has recently unveiled validated designs for those industries to get them up and running faster.

“We closely collaborated with Cisco on Cisco’s new compact, low-power industrial router to meet the stringent environmental and safety standards used in the utilities industry,” said Didier Hinguant, telecom director at Cisco partner Enedis.“We operate and deploy our connected grid with thousands of Cisco routers via Field Network Director zero touch provisioning, with an agile, highly secure and future proof network using IPv6 to address our scalability constraints.”

SAP has unveiled its fourth quarter financials, presenting year-on-year revenue growth of 9%. The company said it met or exceeded all expectations, although has made the decision to restructure its business to take advantage of new opportunities on the horizon.

Operating profit increased by 22% over the entire year, with new cloud bookings up a quarter during the final period of 2018 and cloud subscriptions and revenues rising by 41%.

“In 2018, SAP hit or exceeded all guidance metrics even after multiple raises. With Qualtrics joining SAP, we are now poised to revolutionize the business software industry with Experience Management,” said Bill McDermott, CEO at SAP.

“With a consistent track record of unprecedented growth behind us, we are leading our stakeholders forward to bridge the experience gap. Our strategy is innovative, complete and alone at the forefront of the experience economy.”

Although cloud revenues were a big winner for the company, with S/4HANA contributing nicely to its overall performance, the company’s software revenues fell by 5% year-on-year and it’s increasingly relying on its cloud services to keep its growth in an upwards direction.

“It will be interesting to see whether SAP will announce a continuation of the Q3 trend of cloud eclipsing software,” said George Lawrie, Forrester VP and principal analyst.

“The company’s operating profit demonstrated a marked improvement in Q3 and I expect that as cloud deployments accelerate this will improve even further.”

Although these results were pretty impressive, the company explained it wants to innovate to keep up with its competitors and to lessen the impact of retiring employees.

It may let go up to 3,000 of its current employees to boost profitability and reach its goals of reaching €35 billion in revenues.

Dropbox has announced that it’s acquiring eSignature and document workflow management platform HelloSign for $230 million, making it easier for the company’s customers to sign documents and complete forms on the go.

It’s good news for HelloSign’s customers too, with the company explaining that the tie up will allow its users to take advantage of Dropbox’s services to with cloud storage and team collaboration options.

It will help businesses move away from using pen and paper to sign forms and enable them to take a digital-first strategy, keeping digital documents in the cloud rather than physical files in filing cabinets.

“We waste so much time using clunky tools that were designed for yesterday’s work environment,” said HelloSign Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Joseph Walla. “Over the past ten years, Dropbox has built a trusted global brand focused on transforming people’s working lives. We share a design philosophy based on building the best experience for end-users, fueling our efficient business models and sales strategies.

“Together with Dropbox, we can bring more seamless document workflows to even more customers and dramatically accelerate our impact.”

The entire product portfolio will be joining Dropbox, including HelloSign and HelloFax, plus its workflow management platform HelloWorks and HelloSign API.

“With over an exabyte of data on our platform, millions of people already use Dropbox as a place to collaborate on their most important content,” said Dropbox Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Drew Houston. “Together, we can deliver an even better experience to Dropbox users, simplify their workflows, and expand the market we serve.”

Microsoft has acquired database business Citus Data in the hope it’ll be able to offer customers access to scalable databases on PostgreSQL.

The company said it wants to offer developers access to more scalable and flexible systems to deal with larger data volumes in a faster fashion. It says the integration of Citus Data’s software into its platform will allow for more advanced data-led insights.

Citus Data is an open source extension to PostgreSQL that transforms the technology into a distributed database. It’s available as a fully-managed database as a service, as enterprise software, and as a free open source download, making it flexible enough to integrate into a business’s existing infrastructure.

“Together, Microsoft and Citus Data will further unlock the power of data, enabling customers to scale complex multi-tenant SaaS applications and accelerate the time to insight with real-time analytics over billions of rows, all with the familiar PostgreSQL tools developers know and love,” said Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president for Azure Data.

Although PostgreSQL is always available as a managed service on Azure Cloud (as well as AWS), Microsoft will integrate Citus Data so it’s available for all workloads, whether in the cloud or on-premise environments.

“We created Citus to transform PostgreSQL into a distributed database—giving developers game-changing performance improvements and delivering queries that are magnitudes faster than proprietary implementations of Postgres,” said Umur Cubukcu, co-founder and CEO of Citus.

Microsoft is ramping up partnerships with open source businesses at the moment, with last year’s acquisition of GitHub, possibly the biggest open source community in the world.

AWS has released its Neo-AI code as an open source project, encouraging developers and other AI experts to contribute to the platform.

The company explained that usually, ensuring a machine learning model works across a variety of hardware platforms (especially those running on edge networks) is difficult because there are so many factors and limitations to consider.

Even in less complicated devices, there are so many software variations that it can be tricky to make sure machine learning works across all of them. As a result, manufacturers and vendors are being limited by which companies they can work with to provide machine learning tools they require.

With AWS’s Neo-AI, machine learning models are automatically optimised for use TensorFlow, MXNet, PyTorch, ONNX, and XGBoost models, converting them into common formats to work on a wider variety of devices. The models can be run at a  faster pace as well because Neo-AI uses a compact runtime, limiting the resources a framework would typically consume.

Even if edge devices are being constrained by resources, this is irrelevant, because Neo-AI will shrink down the resources needed to run. Neo-AI currently supports platforms from Intel, NVIDIA, and ARM, with support for Xilinx, Cadence, and Qualcomm arriving later in the year.

“To derive value from AI, we must ensure that deep learning models can be deployed just as easily in the data center and in the cloud as on devices at the edge,” said Naveen Rao, general manager of the artificial intelligence products group at Intel.

“Intel is pleased to expand the initiative that it started with nGraph by contributing those efforts to Neo-AI. Using Neo, device makers and system vendors can get better performance for models developed in almost any framework on platforms based on all Intel compute platforms.”

Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud-powered productivity suite went down yesterday morning across Europe, with users reporting issues connecting to the cloud-hosted email servers at around 9.30am.

The tech giant confirmed that it was experiencing problems with its servers and it was working on a fix to get email back up and running.

“We’re investigating an issue where users can’t access their mailboxes through multiple protocols,” the company posted on Twitter. “More details are published in the admin center under EX172491, available to your Microsoft 365 admin.”

However, customers weren’t particularly happy about the outage (who is ever joyous when they can’t access a key part of their working arsenal?!), especially when Microsoft failed to keep users updated about an estimated fix.

The company’s Office 365 status page didn’t provide much in the way of detail about the problem. In fact, it said that the tool was running smoothly, despite users bombarding the company with comments and complaints.

“I think its time to take someone to court for disruption of business if a critical system like email can be down for +6 hours without resolution for a whole geographical region #Office365,” Twitter user @the_adam_tm said.

Some joked that the whole concept of email was broken if they couldn’t access their Office 365 accounts. “Hey @Microsoft
your #office365 has been down for 9 hours now. Shall I go to a local post office to send my emails?” @konradzaczek wrote on the social network.

Meanwhile, businesses such as Arcsystems used the outage as an opportunity to promote its disaster recovery solutions.

Later in the day, Microsoft’s advice remained to acknowledge the issue, but still advised customers keep an eye on the Admin Centre for updates. It said it had determined the cause of the problem and was working on a fix.

“We’re working to resolve difficulties a limited subset of enterprise customers in Europe are experiencing when attempting to access Exchange Online. Consumers are not affected. Admins can find status updates on the Admin Center.”

Six months after buying marketing intelligence platform Datorama, Salesforce has announced it will be integrating the company’s tech into its Marketing Cloud platform as well as developer tools business can use to create extensions for powering their business decisions.

Datorama Marketing Cloud will tag on the ability for marketers to visualise the performance of their social media and email marketing campaigns against other marketing methods, with enhanced reporting, insights and analytics. It supports detailed insights from paid social media, paid media, web analytics, sales data and other marketing or advertising data so marketers can ascertain which marketing channels were the most successful over time.

The Datorama Developer Portal offers developers the tools to build custom integrations into their marketing performance platform to make it more tailored to their needs. It comprises a Platform API, Query API, Custom API Data Connectors, Python retrieval and Custom Visualisation to create widgets within Datorama for analysing and measuring success.

The final new addition is the Activation Centre that offers marketers the opportunity to action recommendations instantly, all from one place. Data can be compared across marketing platforms and those that aren’t performing as well can be automatically paused. Marketers can also set up notifications or alerts should a key API is met or is not performing.

“When Salesforce acquired Datorama, it recognized a real need for customers–bringing all the data from different marketing campaigns and channels together to optimize spending and maximize marketing ROI,” said Rebecca Wettemann, VP of research at Nucleus Research.

“Six months later, Salesforce and Datorama are bringing customers more ways to get value by delivering the strengths of Datorama and Salesforce Marketing Cloud to customers. These advancements will enable marketers to better understand campaign performance and act on that data through customized integrations and automated actions.”

Three quarters of UK businesses are adopting cloud-powered unified communications (UC) models so they can offer more innovative services, a report by Mitel has revealed.

These businesses don’t believe the same scope of services is available with traditional models and so are moving to the cloud to offer a more diverse product selection.

Almost 90% of businesses think access to UC services such as presence, secure instant messaging, voice and video calls are vital to their success and so are so turning to the cloud to provide this flexibility. Nearly a third of companies also insist that audio and video conferencing and seamless content sharing is a key part of their offering.

However, before migrating to a cloud-first model, businesses feel it’s crucial they explore the cost of the move, with 88% saying cost considerations are their primary concern. They are particularly interested in the cost of data reversibility, with almost half of businesses saying this played a big part in deciding whether to make the jump.

“Cloud communications accelerate digital transformation, enabling companies to improve their productivity and deliver a better level of customer experience,” said Jeremy Butt, senior vice president, International at Mitel.

“European countries are at different stages of maturity but the common point is that businesses already have a clear idea of which cloud model – UCaaS, hybrid or private cloud – will work for them based on their business needs.”

Businesses are increasingly turning to partners to help them move to the cloud, with 71% opting for advisor-level support, indicating firms aren’t worried about spending more to get the right advice regarding their implementation.

“The important thing is to give [firms] a cost-effective and low-risk migration map as well as the opportunity to choose between public or private cloud,” Butt added. “Mitel is uniquely positioned to offer customers that choice.”

Universities are the most forward-thinking public sector organisations when it comes to cloud usage, a report by Eduserv and Socitm has revealed, with more than a third storing data in the cloud.

Public bodies and authorities are also embracing the flexibility that the cloud provides, although the emergency services still lag behind, with only 13% using the cloud because it needs to put cost savings first and cannot afford to switch to a cloud-first approach.

In fact, 91% of public body organisations are still using on-premise servers to store their data – the highest proportion of any public sector sub-sector.

“As the report highlights, the journey will start on-premise and will almost certainly transition into a hybrid phase, possibly for quite some time, as many organisations are insufficiently mature in their IT management and information governance”, said Andy Powell, CTO at Eduserv.

The way IT is managed across different sub-sector of the publicly funded services in the UK is having an impact on cloud adoption. For example, 96% of universities manage their IT in-house, while public bodies and the emergency services tend to outsource IT management.

“During their journey to the cloud, public sector organisation IT departments will need to refine their IT delivery models, based on an improved understanding of cloud technology and its potential, new governance models and opportunities of information and data,” Powell added. “There is no better time to start thinking about those issues than right now.”

Socitm added that public sector organisations need to realise that the cloud is an enabler to better collaboration, enhanced productivity and more effective service delivery.

Silver Peak has made a strong stand in the SD-WAN world, announcing a partnership with Google Cloud to become one of the only companies of its kind to have ties with the four leading public cloud businesses in the world.

Before this announcement, Silver Peak had already partnered with Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle, but this latest news means Silver Peak’s Unity EdgeConnect platform is certified for use across the big four’s platforms.

One of the benefits of having such a strong network is that geographically-distributed businesses can now take advantage of Silver Peak’s platform to ensure all locations, across any of these cloud services can run their services securely and with stability. This is the case even if different workloads are offering on different public cloud platforms.

“Enterprise customers gain choice and control in how they execute multi-cloud strategies in alignment with their business requirements,” said Chris Helfer, senior vice president of strategic alliances at Silver Peak.

“By harnessing the full power of the Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform, they can deliver the highest quality of experience to their users whether applications or services are hosted in their own data centers or across any combination of leading public cloud provider’s data centers.”

As well as reliability, Silver Peak’s cross-platform SD-WAN solution also offers reliable broadband services utilising last mile broadband and simple migration between services, without affecting running applications.

Using a multi-cloud strategy will allow businesses to cut costs by giving them the flexibility to choose different cloud providers on a case-by-case basis, with the knowledge that their resources will be running on the most efficient cloud platform for that particular scenario.