Facebook and Google will continue to allow employees to work from home for the rest of the year, the two companies have confirmed.

The tech giants have announced plans to reopen offices for July, but both will allow home working to continue for most of their workforces.

As lockdown restrictions are lited, there are concerns about how employees will manage issues like childcare, commuting and keeping to safe distances to prevent further spread of COVID-19. In the US, there has been plenty of criticism around the handling of the pandemic and the government’s plan for a lockdown exit. 

Facebook previously said it would ignore government guidance and only bring back “critical workers” when it’s safe to do so. The company has expanded on that statement, announcing that it will reopen offices on 6 July, but that most employees will be encouraged to continue working from home. 

“Facebook has taken the next step in its return to work philosophy,” a spokesperson said, according to the BBC. “Today, we announced anyone who can do their work remotely can choose to do so through the end of the year. As you can imagine this is an evolving situation as employees and their families make important decisions re: return to work.”

Google has also extended its working from home policy, which it originally had in place till 1 June. CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed that its offices will reopen in July, with enhanced safety measures, but that all employees that can do their jobs from home will be able to continue doing so till the end of the year.

What’s more, the tech giant has also announced a company-wide holiday for Googlers to help deal with coronavirus fatigue. All employees will take a day off on the 22 May to address “work from home related burnout”, the firm has said. ​

Zoom will implement new security measures for its free users in response to a growing number of ‘Zoom-bombing’ incidents.

The company said on Wednesday it will be updating default password settings for all account types and it will also require that users set passwords for meetings and webinars, including events which were scheduled before 9 May, when the new measures are set to be implemented.

Zoom will also make its Waiting Room feature enabled by default for the Personal Meeting ID for all account types.

In a move which is likely a response to the numerous ‘Zoom-bombing’ incidents, where hackers crash a meeting to share offensive content, the company also announced that their Screen sharing feature will be limited to the host exclusively. With this, even if hackers manage to join a video conference, they will not be able to show other users offensive content from their screens.

While all free/basic accounts will see the changes implemented this week, Pro, API, Business, Education, and Enterprise accounts will receive the update on 30 May.

The announcement comes after an online tasting event, hosted by a Prestwich-based wine merchant, was hacked by a ‘Zoom-bomber’, who shared child porn material to the 60-70 unsuspecting participants.

Last month, Zoom’s stock price dropped nearly 14.5%, as numerous school systems, including the New York City Department of Education, moved to ban Zoom entirely. The video conferencing platform has also been outlawed by Google, SpaceX, and the FBI.

Zoom also announced on Wednesday the appointment of a new independent director on Zoom’s Board of Directors, the role being given to former US National Security Advisor Lieutenant General Herbert Raymond “H.R.” McMaster. The company also chose Jonathan “Josh” Kallmer to take over as the head of Global Public Policy and Government Relations, starting 26 May.

Last week, Zoom quietly edited a blog post claiming the number of daily users the platform had. The company stated earlier this month that it had “more than 300 million daily users” and “more than 300 million people around the world are using Zoom during this challenging time”. These claims have since been deleted, and the company now says it has “300 million daily Zoom meeting participants.”

Box has announced a host of changes to the platform to maximise productivity with new integrations for Zoom and a simplified filing system.

The changes speak to the broader trend of how tech companies are adapting to remote working, according to the company.

The “all-new Box experience” includes ‘Collections’, a new way to personalise and organise content in Box, available now in beta, and an enhanced Zoom integration that makes it easier to collaborate on content while on a video call.

With Collections, users can create and name a dedicated space for projects within Box. This includes adding files, folders, or book-marked documents into one or more of their personal sections without impacting access for collaborators.

As an example, Box suggests a user might want to group documents and folders around projects, such as ‘event contracts’, ‘marketing launches’ or ‘user research studies’. In Collections, this can be organised personally with the information users need to find them in the left-hand navigation in Box.

The makeover has also included a new action bar design, refreshed icons, and advanced preview capabilities for ZIP and RAW file types.

“We’ve seen work styles change more dramatically in the last two months than at any time in the previous few decades,” said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO at Box. “With the All-New Box, we’re taking usability even further, introducing powerful new tools for organising your files and working together in real-time, while making it easy to bring your content into the applications you use every day.”

Deeper integration with Zoom is also due later in May. The two companies have been working together since last year and the integration between the two has grown “dramatically” over the past few months, according to Box. As such, a new enhancement will let users create or join Zoom meetings directly from a piece of content in Box with just a click from Box Preview.

Data platform Splunk is now available on Google Cloud in beta before it’s rolled out fully later in the year. 

The new partnership is aimed at organisations that want faster analytical decisions from large datasets, and follows on from Google’s acquisition of multi-cloud data analytics firm Looker in February. 

The two companies plan to integrate Splunk Cloud across Google Cloud, with services like Anthos, Google Cloud Security Command Centre and Google Cloud’s operations suite. 

With these integrations, Google hopes existing customers can share critical data between applications and pull insights from hybrid and multi-cloud datasets. 

“Data is at the centre of every digital transformation and we are proud to partner with Splunk to help organisations build data-driven, cloud-native strategies,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud.

“Businesses can now leverage Splunk’s capabilities in data analytics for IT, security, user behaviour and more, on Google Cloud’s trusted and secure infrastructure.”

The partnership highlights Google’s cloud strategy, which has seen big moves with data and migration companies in 2020. Along with Looker, the company also acquired Cornerstone Technologies in February, a Dutch mainframe migration firm.

Google Cloud is seen as the third big provider, behind AWS and Microsoft, but its heavy investment in the market is leading to signs of growth. 

According to Doug Merritt, president and CEO of Splunk, the new partnership will help companies bring data to every question, decision and action for both on-premises and cloud digitisation journeys at incredible speed and great scale.  

“We chose to partner with Google Cloud to deliver the technology, capabilities and trusted infrastructure required to help businesses connect all forms of data,” said Doug Merritt, president and CEO of Splunk. 

“Splunk’s partnership with Google Cloud will help empower even more customers to harness nearly limitless data opportunities across IT, Security and Application Development while remaining agile and cost-effective.”

IBM is “pivoting hard” to help its customers accelerate digital transformation and the adoption of artificial intelligence, its executives have said. 

The tech giant kicked off its Think Digital virtual conference this week and the key themes so far have been AI, edge computing and hybrid multi-cloud. 

While the coronavirus has been disrupting business and putting greater emphasis on cloud computing services, IBM has not only been adapting to the challenge but also making changes at the top. Ginni Rometty announced she was stepping down just a before the pandemic hit and her replacement, Arvind Krishna, has been at the helm for a month – taking over mid-crisis. 

Think Digital is the first major event under Krishna’s stewardship and during his virtual keynote on Tuesday, he set out his vision for both IBM and the future of business.

“More than 20-years ago, experts predicted that every company would become an ‘internet company’,” Krishna said. “I’m predicting today that every company will become an AI company, not because they can, but because they must.”

At the very beginning of the event, IBM launched AIOps, its automated cloud protection system, along with an edge computing service built with Red Hat. Krishna touched on both of these new offerings and also spoke about life after the pandemic. 

His belief is that there will be no going back, companies will need to change for the ‘new normal’ that awaits them. His comments were backed by Michelle Peluso, IBM’s SVP of digital sales, who said that the company was “pivoting hard” to provide customers with the capabilities they need now. These were technologies to help supply chain and business continuity and, also, essential transformations. 

Gartner analyst, Chirag Dekate, agreed that the coronavirus is forcing companies to accelerate digital transformation journeys.
 
“CIOs today are faced with two choices, they can either reboot to their previous state and do business as usual, or they can use this opportunity to rethink their ecosystems and devise a new strategy to go forward,” he told IT Pro. “What we are seeing at Gartner, is that most organisations are choosing to use this time to rethink their infrastructures and accelerating their cloud adoption and AI journey.” 

Dekate has been impressed with the new IBM CEO, particularly in this challenging period but also with his involvement in the company’s biggest acquisition to date, Red Hat.
 
“Krishna was the brains behind it,” Dekate said. “He was a key IBM leader, who was shepherding the process and integrating these companies together. So he’s had a leadership role at IBM, quite extensively, prior to him taking over. 
 
“A lot of the portfolio announcements since he took over, you can clearly see themes around hybrid multi-cloud, customer AI transformations and edge computing.”

​Tech giant Nvidia is set to gobble up networking software firm Cumulus Networks in a bid to further enhance its data centre credentials.

Cumulus, which was founded in 2010, is an open source-focused firm that specialises in helping organisations optimise their data centre networking stack through its Linux distribution for network switches, as well as various network management tools.

While its bread and butter is software, it does also have its own hardware offering in the shape of the Cumulus Express data centre switch.

The acquisition is part of Nvidia’s continued drive into the enterprise and cloud market. While the company is probably best known for its graphics processing units (GPUs), initiatives like its EGX edge computing platform and its collaboration with King’s College London to develop AI technology that can detect cancer in scan images have seen it become a serious data centre player as well.

Further smoothing the way to this purchase is the fact Cumulus already had a partnership with high-performance networking firm Mellanox, which Nvidia formally acquired last month after announcing the merger in March last year. 

Underlining the importance of this partnership in Nvidia’s decision to make the acquisition, Amit Katz, VP of Ethernet Switch at Mellanox, said: “In March 2016, Mellanox announced a partnership with Cumulus and started shipping combined offerings.

“Today, the ONIE environment Cumulus created is a software foundation for Mellanox’s bare-metal switches. Together, we built DENT, a distributed Linux software framework for retail and other enterprises at the edge of the network. And our Onyx operating system continues to expand, especially in Ethernet Storage Fabrics (ESF).”

No financial details of the deal have been announced, although it’s likely to be significant, given Cumulus has raised $134 million in funding over the past 10 years.

​Dell EMC has taken the wraps off PowerStore, a new line of mid-range servers that bring Dell and EMC technologies together in a single appliance, on what would have been the first day of parent company Dell Technologies’ annual conference.

Speaking to journalists ahead of the launch, Travis Vigil, SVP of product management at Dell EMC, said it was the first new product introduced since the 2016 merger between Dell and EMC that used expertise from across both sides of the storage and server business, as well as from other arms – notably VMware.

Caitlin Gordon, VP of marketing at Dell EMC Storage, added that the company has been working on this project for “a number of years”.

Explaining the development of PowerStore, Gordon pointed to the fact that data has never been more valuable for businesses than it is today, but noted that it’s also incredibly diverse and difficult to manage. At the same time, organisations are also under pressure to carry out digital transformation, which IT is expected to support.

“What we found in our conversations with customers over the last number of years is they felt like their infrastructure investments require them to prioritise either the needs of their data, or the needs of their operating model in their operations,”” she said.

Upon realising there was nothing in the Dell Technologies portfolio – nor, the company claims, anything in the market more generally – that met that dual need in a single server, the decision was taken to build a new product “from the ground up”.

Scalable, programmable, autonomous

PowerStore is an Active-Active HA dual node appliance, with end-to-end NVMe and the ability to support either NVMe-based flash or dual-ported Optane storage class memory (SCM) drives from Intel. This, Dell claims, makes it 7x faster with 3x lower latency than its previous lead mid-range all-flash product.

The company also says that PowerStore can support any workload, traditional or modern, including containers, files, and virtualised or physical apps and databases. It also offers the ability to scale up and scale out up to 2.8 petabytes effective and 11.3 petabytes effective per cluster respectively, as well as having always-on inline deduplication.

It also has built-in machine learning to help optimise system performance, cloudIQ storage monitoring software and is programmable, allowing administrators to treat the infrastructure “as code”.

PowerStore is available immediately. 

The current global COVID-19 pandemic has had a “mildly positive impact” on cloud sales, the latest analysis from Synergy Research has revealed.

As other industries have suffered at the hands of the virus and subsequent containment measures, cloud service providers have recorded significant growth as many businesses switch to remote working.

During Q1 2020, spending on cloud infrastructure services hit $29 billion, marking a 37% increase from the first quarter of last year. Although this was in line with expected market growth rate, the research firm said there were no signs of a meaningful negative impact and “anecdotal evidence” suggested positive market tailwinds.

Synergy also estimated that market revenue for the last 12 months totalled $104 billion, with public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) increasing by 39% during Q1 2020.

“While COVID-19 is having a devastating impact on communities and economies around the world, indications are that it is having a mildly positive impact on the cloud infrastructure services market,” commented John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group.

In terms of the big market providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) continued to mirror the overall market trend with a global market share of 32%, while Microsoft increased to 18% following a strong year of growth.

Key players Google, Alibaba and Tencent were also found to be significantly outpacing the market and gaining market share, Synergy added, with all three firms seeing revenue increases of 45% or more year-on-year.

“For sure the pandemic is causing some issues for cloud providers, but in uncertain times the public cloud is providing flexibility and a safe haven for enterprises that are struggling to maintain normal operations,” Dinsdale added.

“Cloud provider revenues continue to grow at truly impressive rates, with AWS and Azure in aggregate now having an annual revenue run rate of well over $60 billion.”

​IBM has launched a slew of new AI services that aim to help chief information officers (CIOs) to predict and tackle IT problems before they occur. 

Watson AIOps, unveiled at the company’s Think Digital Conference, are designed to provide automated protection for IT infrastructures that make them more resilient to future disruptions. 

Unforeseen IT incidents and outages can cost businesses in both revenue and reputation, according to IBM, while tech hub Aberdeen.com suggests that the average cost of an outage across businesses is $260,000 an hour. 

Artificial intelligence is being widely tipped as the solution to this; analysts at IDC have predicted that, by 2024, enterprises that are powered by AI will respond to customers, competitors, regulators, and partners 50% faster than those that are not using AI.

AIOps is IBM’s answer, a service that can automate how enterprises self-detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies in real-time. 
 
“We want to arm every CIO in the world to use AI to predict problems before they happen, fix problems before they happen and if they still happen to occur, they can quickly address problems within their IT infrastructure,” Rob Thomas, IBM’s senior VP for Cloud and Data Platform, said during a press conference. 

“Complexity is increasing, certainly things like COVID-19 is driving us to a distributed work environment. A CIO needs a powerful AI – think of it as metaphorically sitting on their shoulder, helping them run the operation and do that in a really elegant way.”

Along with AIOps, IBM also announced edge computing services, launched in partnership with Red Hat. It starts with IBM Edge Application Manager, which is for remote management of AI, analytics and IoT workloads.

IBM Telco Network Cloud Manager, which runs on Red Hat OpenShift, automates virtual and container network functions for 5G applications, and there is also a new dedicated IBM service team for edge computing and telco networks.

By 2015, Manny Medina had reached a point where he felt the only way he could save his failing business was to sell all his office equipment. His company, Outreach, was struggling to find buyers for its recruitment software and after just one year of operation, it didn’t have enough cash left to cover legal fees. 

Out of desperation, Medina and his small team began tagging things on eBay, calculating how much they could get for their computers. They quickly realised the answer was “not much”.

“It was one of those moments where everybody is shaken and freaking out and not thinking rationally,” Medina, who co-founded Outreach and remains the CEO, tells Cloud Pro. “Nobody wants to do it, but we’re all thinking ‘what? We fold and then go get jobs at Microsoft?’ No one wants to do that. That’s when we sat down and talked through giving it another shot.”

What happened next is the startup version of the phoenix from the flames – or unicorn from the flames, if you will – as Outreach moved to a new business model and, five years later, is worth over a billion dollars.

The pivot

Originally Outreach was an online recruitment business using used technology to search the marketplace for IT and digital talent. While the tech side of it worked, according to Medina, both the sales and the marketing teams struggled to get the company going and within a year it was almost out of money.

“We were about two months away from being out of cash,” Medina explains. “The co-founders turned to each other and were like, ‘we shouldn’t be using tech to solve the marketing problem, we should be using tech to just drive more demand’. 

“I have a background in sales, so I voted for using direct sales as a way to generate traffic. We decided if we drove 10 times more meetings per representative we could dig ourselves out of the problem.”

The company didn’t have the resources to throw more people at the problem, however, and its three employees needed to sell as much as a team of twenty to bring in enough cash. To help, Medina and his team built an AI engine that could send out emails with personalised messages and then follow up on any response it got. Before long, they realised the automated call system was generating ten times more potential job interviews and pulling in a reply rate of almost 50% on cold emails. 

“That was pretty unheard of at the time,” Median explains. “The problem with that is we didn’t have the capacity to follow up on all those meetings and actually close business. So I started talking to agency recruiters, telling them, ‘look, I can sell you meetings instead of candidates’.”

The agencies Medina reached out to were sceptical at first, questioning why he would do that, but also curious as to how he was able to generate so many? When he explained the AI engine and how it worked, no one was interested in paying for the meetings – they wanted the software. 

Venture capitalists  

The initial business model struggled to attract investment. Although Medina managed to source enough to get going, there was a lot of rejection from potential backers. Rajeev Batra, a venture capitalist from Mayfield, was one of those who weren’t keen on the idea and suggested it wouldn’t work based on his experience of the market – but he was left impressed by Medina. 

Batra was even more impressed after Outreach pivoted, but by then, the company had grown profitable so quickly that Medina considered not raising capital at all. Batra was persistent, sensing that the team was onto something with lots of potential and eventually wore Medina down in August 2015. 

“I convinced Manny to accelerate the product roadmap and GTM of the company by capitalising it properly and partnering with us to go for it,” Batra tells IT Pro. “I felt they could build a platform company. We made a compelling offer to him and the company with the promise that we would do everything we can to help them succeed.”

For Batra, partnering with Outreach was one of the best, and luckiest, decisions he ever made. For Medina, getting rebuffed for the initial idea turned out to be a financial blessing in disguise. 

“It could very well have been that if we were successful as the original company, we could have been like [hiring marketplace] Vettery, which was sold to [HR consultancy and hiring firm] Adecco for $100 million,” Medina suggests. “We’re now worth $1.1 billion (£883.6 million). Even if we had a good outcome, it would have been ten times lower than what it is right now. Life is perverse that way and now Rajeev thinks we should thank him for not previously investing.”