Two of tech’s biggest players have announced sweeping job cuts as the economic effects of COVID-19 continue to take their toll, with IBM and HPE reducing its staff count by potentially thousands.

IBM has already swung the axe, with the number of affected staff thought to be in the thousands, according to people familiar with the company’s plans, speaking to Bloomberg. The publication spoke with a Californian-based worker who lost his job along with his entire team of 12. Job cuts are also being made across sites in other US states including Pennsylvania, Missouri, New York.

The layoffs are thought to affect several divisions across IBM including its Global Technology Services division, which offers IT outsourcing, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) also suggests.

It’s unclear how much of an effect the pandemic has had on IBM’s plans, though the actions represent the first major staffing shakeup since CEO Arvind Krishna took charge in January 2020. Krishna transitioned into the role with an ambition to revive growth at IBM, after recent quarters of declining revenue.

“IBM’s work in a highly competitive marketplace requires flexibility to constantly add high-value skills to our workforce,” an IBM spokesperson told Bloomberg. “While we always consider the current environment, IBM’s workforce decisions are in the interest of the long-term health of our business.”

“Recognizing the unique and difficult situation this business decision may create for some of our employees, IBM is offering subsidized medical coverage to all affected U.S. employees through June 2021.”

HPE, meanwhile, has outlined plans to make severe cost reductions following a collapse in revenue in the latest quarter, falling 16% year-on-year $6 billion. As a result of job cuts, executive pay reductions, and other measures, the company expects to save between $1 billion and $1.3 billion over the next three years.

In an earnings call, the firm announced it would be reducing employees’ base salaries from 1 July through to the end of the year. The CEO and each executive officer at the executive VP level sustaining a 25% pay cut, while the base salaries of each executive officer at the senior VP level will suffer a 20% cut.

HPE will also embark on an immediate “cost optimisation” plan which will involve realigning the workforce to “areas of growth” and implementing measures to simplify the product portfolio, supply chain structures, and digital customer support model.

Each of the company’s divisions suffered losses in the last quarter, with High-Performance Compute & Mission Critical Systems revenue down the sharpest year-on-year, a fall of 18% to $589 million. This was followed by the Storage division which fell 16%, to $1.1 billion. Profit margins in both divisions also declined.

The smallest drop in revenue was in the Intelligence Edge division, which declined 2% to $665 million. This equated with an 11% operating profit margin, however, compared with 5.3% from the prior-year period.

HPE’s recent financial performance, and the resultant cost-saving measures, have been pinned heavily on the coronavirus pandemic, and its effect on demand as well as the supply chain.

As with IBM in recent years, HPE has suffered from consistent falling revenues since splitting from HP in 2015. The firm has, however, made a series of moves in recent years in order to change its fortunes, including the acquisition of supercomputing behemoth Cray last year.

Its CEO Antonio Neri declared in 2019 that his vision for the company is one that champions a “cloudless” future, adding that the cloud wasn’t a destination, rather, an “experience”, where businesses encounter true cloud interoperability.

​The seemingly endless state of isolation we have found ourselves in for the past three months has taken its toll, warping our minds in weird and wonderful ways. For me, this has manifested as a newfound obsession with the bizarre workings of the virtual House of Commons.

Our parliamentarians’ attempt to follow the government’s own advice to work from home has, by all accounts, been a success, barring the occasional sweary glitch. It’s an example of the fascinating dynamics at play, with MPs using Zoom to remote-into parliamentary debates while using a web platform to hold parliamentary votes securely. Surely, in moments like this, therefore, there must be a catch… but none came.

Despite the Palace of Westminster being seen as more old fashioned (and, indeed, just old) than the more modern regional assemblies, the project in London has been by far the most comprehensive. The Scottish Parliament in Holyrood, for example, has implemented video conferencing but hasn’t yet added provision for remote voting.

By all measures, the UK’s virtual parliament has been a success, and our MPs have been able to continue to work and scrutinise the government effectively. Then, scrolling through my Twitter feed for nuggets of news, came the catch. The ‘hybrid’ House of Commons has been such a success that it has been ditched in its entirety.

I’m ashamed to admit, for a moment, that I’d bought into the fantasy that our parliamentarians saw the proverbial light and – in a rare departure from form – embraced the progressive force of digital transformation. In typical fashion, however, as soon as they were given a taste of progress, they agreed to spit it straight back out by 350 votes to 258 – a government majority of 92. 

When the House of Commons returns on 2 June, after a two-week break coinciding with Whitsun, MPs can no longer participate in debates using video conferencing technology, let alone vote remotely using the platform that’s been in place for just a week. This, incidentally, is a system that House of Commons staff have worked tirelessly to build, install and sufficiently test over a short four-week period.

There are myriad reasons why the decision is a travesty; not just for the interests of progress, but the impracticality of asking MPs to travel into London, a COVID-19 hotspot, from across all the constituent parts of the UK. Many of our MPs also fall in the at-risk age groups, while others will have pressing childcare needs due to schools still being shut, not to mention those who should be ‘shielding’ due to medical conditions.

Beyond that, the decision to bin the remote working technology flies in the face of the government’s own advice to “work from home where possible”, based on the false logic that remote working isn’t actually working. This short-sightedness can be neatly summarised by the views of Conservative MP for Crawley, Henry Smith, who tweeted: “Not that I should be surprised by the lazy left but interesting how work-shy socialist and nationalist MPs tried to keep the remote Parliament going beyond 2 June.”

Beyond the sheer incomprehension on display, this also sends a terrible message to many businesses that have embraced the mass shift to remote working and sustained measured benefits as a result. Twitter and OpenText are among companies that will let their staff work from home indefinitely following the pandemic, for example, while workers themselves have also reported feeling more productive as a result of the added flexibility and a lack of commute.

Nevertheless, the fact that our MPs have voted to reject progress doesn’t come as a surprise, despite the fact I readily admit bought into the delusion that they finally turned a corner. British MPs have gained notoriety for neglecting the benefits of technology, best symbolised by the snail-paced rollout of Wi-Fi across the Palaces of Westminster. One former MP, Dr David Drew, for example, was sufficiently moved by the lack of Wi-Fi across the parliamentary estate as near ago as 2018 that he took it on himself to chase up the state of progress on essential works to improve availability and coverage.

Yesterday’s vote to ditch ‘hybrid’ proceedings is a minor hitch, with not even the House of Commons able to escape the inevitability of progress. For MPs to do so now, however, despite the fact it’s proven a success, is like having taken one step forward, only to immediately take two steps back and fall off a cliff.

​Google has announced that it has secured a contract with the United States Department of Defense in order to aid in the detection and countering of cyber threats.

The Google Cloud Console is to manage the applications run by the Defense Innovation Unit across platforms such as Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure.

Although no specific sum has been disclosed, the contract is valued at “seven figures”, according to Axios.

“Multi-cloud is the future,” Google Cloud VP of public sector Mike Daniels told the publication. “This is now coming to the federal government as well.”

The “seven figure” deal is significantly less than the $10bn JEDI contract which involves almost 80% of the Department of Defence’s IT systems being migrated to the cloud that could last 10 years. The deal had garnered headlines for the past two years, with multiple cloud vendors, including AWS, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft, battling to be chosen by the US government. 

In December 2018, Google announced that it would “not be bidding on the JEDI contract because first, we couldn’t be assured that it would align with our AI Principles, and second, we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications”.

However, the announcement of the new deal with the US Department of Defense might signify that Google has since earned those certifications.

The news comes a month after an internal investigation by the Department of Defence (DoD) found that the October 2019 decision to award the JEDI contract to Microsoft was administered fairly, despite widespread reports of political interference.

The JEDI project was halted in February in order to determine whether Department of Defence improperly evaluated a Microsoft storage price scenario. Prior to that, AWS filed an appeal claiming that “political influence” led the Pentagon to award the $10bn contract to Microsoft. Although it was believed at the time that AWS was “likely to succeed” in the court challenge, that was not the case.

Although restrictions on movement are gradually easing in the UK, lockdown is still a claustrophobic experience for many. Confined largely to our houses and local areas, with holidays still currently off the table even within the UK, it’s easy to feel like you’ve lost touch with the outside world.

Thanks to the marvels of the internet, however, it’s possible to reconnect with what’s going on in the wider world. Here are some tracking tools that can help break the monotony of lockdown.

Track the coronavirus pandemic

Scientists have been racing to keep track of the COVID-19 pandemic using self-reporting apps such as Covid Symptom Tracker and Track Together, as well as daily reports from Johns Hopkins University (JHU), the world’s leading medical research institution, which uploads its daily COVID-19 reports here.

The JHU team’s COVID-19 Map turns this raw data into interactive maps, graphs and curves. You can tweak the main map to show different backgrounds and layers (such as an OpenStreetMap layer showing confirmed cases in each country), and click to enlarge the graphs for viewing in a handful of formats.

For more visual detail, visit the 91-Divoc site, which plots the latest JHU data on graphs that you can tweak to show different types of curve (for example logarithmic, also known as exponential). You can see the impact on different countries, including the UK, by selecting from the ‘Highlight:’ drop-down menu.

You can also see a map of the latest self-reported data from the UK’s COVID Symptom Tracker app. The data is anonymous but divided by region, so you can click the map to check your area.

Track the world’s population

Few real-time data trackers are quite as unsettling as World Population Clock’s live ticker. The number is so big (7.8 billion and counting fast) that rival sites can’t agree on it, with World Population Review a few tens of millions behind. But the latter site breaks down the data into more detail, and maps it so you can click to explore individual cities and countries, such as the UK.

Data-mapping site Plumplot has created a population density map for England and Wales that lets you zoom right into your street, then use the drop-down menus to visualise various datasets such as house prices, crime stats, and more. Plumplot’s maps aren’t quite in real-time because they’re aggregated from sources including the Census and the Office for National Statistics (ONS), but they still provide a fascinating insight into the nation’s current population status.

Track the changing weather and climate

See weather systems on the move in real time by zooming and spinning the virtual globe at Earth. You can customise the display by opening the menu, then clicking an element. For example, click Ocean to see today’s tidal currents at work.

If you’d like to zoom in for a closer look, use the Map option on OpenWeather. It’s less impressive to look at than the Earth tool, but it does let you see all kinds of weather systems (wind speed, clouds, temperature and so on) in action anywhere in the world, or just where you live. It also provides live data both as charts and plain old numbers.

The Met Office’s UK rainfall radar map is strangely engaging. Watch the big blue blob move across Ireland and the UK, or zoom in to see how heavily (or not) the rain is falling on your town. You can also see a rainfall playback from the past six hours, and monitor types of weather other than rain by clicking More.

To put the weather into long-term perspective, see the climate tickers at The World Counts. Among other things, these alarming real-time monitors track the average world temperature and how long until the world’s oil runs dry (47 years and counting).

Chase the sun and moon

The full moon is due above our house on 7 May, but what about where you live? The Moon Phases calendar – just one of umpteen real-time monitors at the brilliant TimeandDate.com – detects your location automatically and reveals the moon’s phase, altitude and position over the coming hours and days. Among the site’s other live trackers are the Day and Night World Map and World Time Lookup, which reveals the current time, weather, and sun and moon phases for any location.

The free apps Sun Locator Lite (Android) and Lumos (iOS) let you track the sun and moon by the hour. 

Track stars and satellites

Numerous augmented-reality (AR) apps bring the heavens into your locked-down living room, and the best is Night Sky (iOS). Focus on any flat surface – ceiling, wall, dining table – to see moons, planets, constellations and even the International Space Station (ISS) overlaid in their real-time positions.

A slightly less powerful Android app called SkyView Lite visualises the galaxy and ISS when you hold your device up to the sky.

To turn your browser into a heavenly radar, head for The Sky Live’s Online Planetarium, an interactive real-time map of space that displays the position of planets, moons, asteroids and more. ISS Tracker reveals where the International Space Station is right now, as it zooms around the planet at 17,000mph. The ISS is also monitored by the deceptively simple site N2YO.com, which tracks the details and positions of satellites orbiting the Earth. On the day of writing, N2YO had tracked 20,626 objects. No fewer than 2,261 (a number that’s continually updated) were “crossing our sky” at that moment, which is a lot more than we’d expected!

Track planes, trains and ships

The contrails have gone but there are still planes in the sky, according to web tool Flightradar24 – just not many. Hover over a plane icon to see its flight number, then click for more details, including destination, carrier and altitude. For $9.99 per year (approx. £8, after a seven-day trial), Flightradar24 adds goodies such as 3D views, real-time radar data and live alerts. If you do happen to see an actual plane in the sky, AR Plane Finder (Android and iOS) can reveal its flight details and destination.

Coming back down to earth, Raildar Radar plots tiny trains as they move around the UK network, using live data from UK train operators. In a similar vein but less comprehensive is the “vaguely live” Train Times, whose creator also makes a couple of London-based transport trackers: Live Underground map and Live London Buses, both of which are eerily quiet at the moment.

One of the most intriguing live maps is Vessel Finder, whose seas (and rivers) are sufficiently packed to suggest that ships are more active than planes and trains during lockdown. Pan and zoom around the map, then click a vessel to see more details and a photo. That said, you won’t get much detail if you happen upon a military ship – many of which we found snaking through the rivers of South America and Russia.

Monitor migrating birds and wandering wildlife

The swallows and cuckoos were still enjoying warmer climes at the time

of writing, but they’ll be back over Britain very soon. You can watch them get closer and closer on the live migration map at the Euro Bird Portal, although sadly it doesn’t stretch to include the birds’ African winter homes.

To monitor the creatures of the sea, turn to Ocearch. This opens on the Americas by default but lets you zoom out to track sharks, dolphins, alligators, turtles and more all around the globe. Given that all these animals are tagged and tracked, it’s no surprise to find that the researchers have given them names, too – as you’ll discover when you click each one.

The World Wildlife Fund’s Species Tracker uses data from radio collars on animals such as female polar bears (the males’ necks are too big, apparently) to keep track of them. Click a bear on the zoomable map, then ‘See More’, to explore the latest data – including photos of new cubs – from that area. The zoomable map also lets you monitor populations of jaguars, marine turtles and other endangered creatures.

The biggest wildlife-tracking site is Movebank, which links to hundreds of research projects from a global map. It’s an academic resource, so it’s slower and less easy to navigate than you’d hope, but you can search its database and click the dots to follow the links to relevant studies. You can even contribute to the research using the free Movebank app (Android and iOS). 

Track your pet’s wanderings

Where does your cat go when it exits the cat flap? And where has your dog wandered

off to this time? Pet companies have taken a tip from wildlife scientists and devised lightweight GPS tracking devices that fit onto Kitty or Fido’s collar, so you can monitor their whereabouts using linked apps.

Garmin’s top-of-the-range Atemos 100 can track up to 20 dogs up to 10km away, but at £750 the system is prohibitively pricey. A more sensible £59 buys a Kippy Evo, a dinky 38g waterproof device that fits onto cats’ and dogs’ collars and includes an integrated SIM to locate your four-legged friend via a linked app. You can also use the app to ‘geofence’ risky areas, then receive an alert if your four-legged friend wanders into them. Tractive’s £30 GPS collars for cats and dogs come with extra subscription costs (£3.33 per month), but add features such as location history, so you can log your pet’s favourite spots.

Dell Technologies and Google Cloud Platform have partnered up to launch OneFS for Google Cloud to allow customers to keep massive amounts of data flowing between private clouds and Google Cloud.

Dell OneFS for Google Cloud offers customers a hybrid cloud storage system that can see up to 50 petabytes of data move seamlessly between cloud environments without needing to make adjustments to their applications.

The system offers a native cloud experience that combines Dell’s scalability and performance with Google Cloud’s analytics services. The advancements will allow customers to move workloads across public and private clouds with greater flexibility while adopting a hybrid approach their suits their particular needs.

“Data and workloads exist everywhere – at the edge, in core data centres and public clouds. And, while data and apps are multiplying, IT resources and budgets are not,” said senior vice president and general manager for cloud platforms & solutions with Dell Technologies, Deepak Patil.

“For companies to turn their data into competitive differentiators, they need a way to manage it seamlessly and consistently, no matter where it resides. Dell Technologies Cloud brings the best of the public cloud to the data centre and the best of the data centre to the public cloud, removing complexity so companies can spend less time managing their infrastructure and more time delivering value to their customers.”

The system has been devised to encourage the movement of file data, which accounts for at least half of an organisation’s on-premise data, to public clouds. Very little of this data is stored in public clouds due to performance and scale limitations.

One clear example of businesses that could benefit from OneFS for Google Cloud is those in the media and entertainment industry, which commonly handle massive video files with 4K resolution. These files demand terabytes of storage and high throughput as well as low latency file storage, meaning it’s difficult for production companies to manage large file workloads in the public cloud.

With the joint hybrid system, Dell claims, these companies can work across private and public clouds with consistent operations, with the added flexibility to scale if needed.

“We’re proud to partner with Dell Technologies to deliver high-performance, scalable cloud storage services to our customers with OneFS for Google Cloud,” said vice president of engineering at Google Cloud Rich Sanzi.

“Through this partnership, customers can more quickly and effectively leverage Dell Technologies storage solutions through Google Cloud and have access to the best of breed file storage solutions, across hybrid cloud environments.”

Rancher Labs has announced the launch of Rancher Academy, a new certification program that the open source software firm says will address the growing Kubernetes skills gap.

The initiative arrives as a result of accelerating enterprise adoption of containers, as well as 250% year-on-year growth in Rancher’s training programs, with the initiative aiming to enable “the complete democratisation of Kubernetes”.

A no-cost and zero-obligation programme, users can now take on the five-week Certified Rancher Operator: Level 1 course via Rancher Academy, with new classes to be announced later this year, the company said.

“This Rancher certification is designed to help Kubernetes practitioners demonstrate their knowledge and competence with Kubernetes and Rancher,” commented Adrian Goins (pictured), director of Community and Evangelism at Rancher.

According to a recent Dice Tech Job Report for 2020, there has been an 82% increase in job demand for workers with Kubernetes skills over the last year, with Dice predicting a further 67% growth rate for the decade ahead.

A 250% increase in Rancher’s Rodeo and Master Class registrations over the last 12 months also highlights practitioners’ desire to build competencies in Kubernetes concepts and architectures, the software firm said.

The comprehensive and self-paced Rancher Academy training scheme aims to counter this demand by covering all the key details for deploying and managing Rancher, as well as how to use the platform to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters from any provider.

Rancher Labs says the course has been built using educational best practices, featuring a mix of passive and active learning, as well as an increasing difficulty as the weeks progress.

More specifically, Rancher Academy offers video introductions, theory work, demonstrations, hands-on labs, quizzes and a final exam.

“Not only do we want all members of our community to have the most relevant and up-to-date skills on the industry’s most widely adopted Kubernetes management platform. But we also want to empower them to be at the forefront of the cloud-native way of doing business, which is agile, open source-oriented and maniacally-focused on fast access to innovation,” Goins explained.

Remote working arrangements have led to benefits for the majority of UK office workers, despite a handful of employers failing to equip their staff with the technology required.

Most people working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic (55%) have registered a productivity boost due to additional free time in their day, according to research commissioned by Okta.

Remote working has also led to the majority of employees (62%) experiencing an increase in flexibility, which, in turn, allows them to focus more on work.

Despite a radical shift in the way many employees across the economy are working, only a third have felt their productivity levels take a hit as a result. Incidentally, this finding chimes with the proportion of people who feel let down by their employees with regards to being supplied with the technology needed to execute their roles remotely.

For instance, 28% of newly-remote workers reported their businesses had not equipped them with the necessary hardware, such as a laptop, in order to work productively from home. Meanwhile, 24% of remote workers said they couldn’t access the software they needed at the beginning of the pandemic.

The findings culminate in just 24% of respondents indicating they want to return to the office full-time, with a further 35% suggesting they’d prefer a flexible arrangement where they can work from home on a part-time basis.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us all to think and act differently”, said Okta’s EMEA VP and GM Jesper Frederiksen. “Businesses have had to learn the hard way about the need to digitally transform to survive, and it is these learnings that will help us emerge from this crisis stronger.”

Drilling down into the detail of changes to peoples’ day-to-day working arrangements, almost 40% said despite their new freedom that they were working the same hours as normal. A further 20% reported working longer hours than normal.

Despite the sudden shift away from in-person meetings to video conferencing platforms, the vast majority of workers have adapted smoothly, with only 5% saying they were not comfortable at all.

With lockdown measures forcing millions of people to work from home, the key question for many is whether it’s been for better or worse. A string of major companies has used feedback from the last few months to make fundamental changes to their working arrangements that could outlast the pandemic.

Twitter, for example, announced it would allow employees to work from home indefinitely beyond the pandemic. This came after OpenText revealed earlier this month that it would close half its offices and consign 15% of its workforce to permanent remote working.

The research, conducted by YouGov, put forward questions to 2,000 office workers across the UK. Beyond changes to productivity, there are aspects of traditional working that many miss sorely. 

Most workers (57%), for example, suggest they miss having in-person conversations with their coworkers, while half miss the relationships they have forged with those in the office.

This touches on an apparent trade-off between productivity gains and the opportunity to build relationships at work. This theme is something Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella referenced in recent comments, suggesting we shouldn’t be so quick to celebrate the productivity gains fuelled by remote working, as the social aspects of office working are too dear to sacrifice.

The research also raised concerns over whether organisations are fitted with sufficient cyber security protocols, with only a third of respondents “completely confident” that remote working security would keep them safe from cyber attacks.

This ranges across sectors, with workers the IT industry unsurprisingly feeling more protected than others. For comparison, just a quarter of respondents in the retail and education sectors shared a similar level of confidence.

“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.”​

Users of the Zoom video conferencing platform reported major issues for several hours on Sunday, with the outage even disrupting the daily Downing Street coronavirus press conference.

Thousands of people began reporting issues from approximately 9 am yesterday, according to the web monitoring service DownDetector, with the company confirming the platform had sustained issues later in the afternoon. 

Zoom confirmed at approximately 3 pm that a portion of its users affected by the issues were unable to host or join meetings and that it was investigating the matter. The outage also hit the Q&A portion of the government’s daily coronavirus press conference, hosted at Downing Street, with journalists unable to field their questions due to the technical difficulties. 

“I think people watching will, I’m quite sure, be aware that Zoom users are encountering some issues at the moment,” said business secretary Alok Sharma, who was standing in for the prime minister. 

“And so, unfortunately, we won’t be able to get any journalists live on-screen. Instead, I’ll be reading out their questions which have been sent in.”

The company issued an update at around 5 pm suggesting the issue had been resolved, with users now able to host, join and participate in Zoom Meetings and Zoom Video Webinars. DownDetector, however, suggests a small number of users were experiencing problems into the evening, and beyond.

IT Pro asked Zoom what the root cause of the issue was, and what steps were taken to rectify the situation.

The video conferencing service has, in a short space of time, become integral to the functioning of many organisations, including arms of the UK government. Even the House of Commons has resumed its function as best it can while observing social distancing rules courtesy of services provided by Zoom.

Therefore, such service disruption, if sustained during working hours and over a far longer time period, could, in turn, affect the day-to-day operations of countless businesses.

The company’s meteoric surge in usage – with more than 100 million users added in a matter of weeks – has been accompanied with a much stronger spotlight thrown onto its relatively lax security and privacy policies. Zoom has consciously been addressing these issues in recent weeks as part of a 90-day security plan, however. 

The latest update, for example, added 256-bit encryption among stronger host controls to prevent incidents such as ‘Zoom-bombing’.