While data is the new currency of business, it’s worthless without ensuring individuals and organisations can rely on and trust in the integrity of that data. 

So suggested Salesforce co-founder and co-CEO, Marc Benioff, who used his opening keynote at the company’s annual Dreamforce conference to talk about how we have now entered the so-called trust revolution. 

“It’s a trust revolution. Everything is changing in our industry. Everything is changing in our work. It’s an intelligence revolution. AI is becoming such a pervasive part of our world,” he said, setting the scene to announce the launch of Customer 360 Truth, a set of services designs to aid firms in authenticating, connecting and governing customer data and identity. 

“[But] revolutions are not easy and there are gaps. Those gaps are also between us and our customers. We’re able to heal these gaps and bring these things together. That is also why we are building our Customer 360 platform. We have done this together. We are building this together.”

By better understanding customers, organisations will be able to more easily and comprehensively deliver more personalised and exceptional customer experiences. 

“We love data. Data is an important part of everything we are doing and everything that you are doing,” Benioff added. 

“We have moved from systems of record to systems of engagement. We then moved from systems of engagement to systems of intelligence. Now we have moved from systems of intelligence to a single source of truth. 

“As we pursue the truth, it requires us at Salesforce to transform. That is why we have also enhanced Customer 360.” 

Customer 360 Truth provides a single source of the truth by uniting previously disparate data from commerce, marketing, sales, service, and more, to create one, universal Salesforce ID for every customer. This ID brings together behavioural historical data that can come into play during a customer engagement – whether that’s marketing, problem solving, sales or something else. 

During his keynote address, Benioff used State Farm as case in point of what can be achieved through better and easier access to customer data. 

“We want to be about the customer and the customer experience is absolutely dominant in that, “ said Fawad Ahmad. State Farm’s chief digital officer (CDO). 

“I’m proud to say I work for an organisation that has always focused on the customer. We will always be guided by their needs, their dreams, and aspirations. C360 Truth becomes a single, reliable place we can go -regardless of where in the company – to be able to look at, and then leverage,  the intelligence that comes from the platform.’

Salesforce shone the spotlight on enhancing customer service during the first day of its Dreamforce event in Las Vegas by emphasising how important partnerships are in the equation.

“We have partnered with all of the other major companies,” Founder and co-CEO Marc Benioff told attendees during his opening keynote.

“We realise you do have more than Salesforce. We will not create boundaries between us. We will operate as one community.” 

At the same time, as further evidence and recognition of the importance of working with the right partners, the cloud giant confirmed it is expanding its existing partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

“We have an inclusive partnership strategy at Salesforce. We talk a lot about listening to our customers, but we have to think through what they’re saying. Having an inclusive partnership strategy is very important [to that],” said Ryan Aytay, Co-CEO Quip and Salesforce’s executive vice president of strategic partnerships. 

“Companies are making this big bet and spending a lot of money bringing workloads to pub cloud. Salesforce is the world’s number one CRM and we need to be unified with a public cloud provider. That is a part of our strategy. 

“This is a partnership we’ve been talking about for a while. It’s the world’s number one CRM with world’s number one cloud provider.”

The newest element of the pre-existing alliance will see Amazon Connect integrated with Service Cloud, resulting in something dubbed Service Cloud Voice, which will ensure call centre operatives have the best tools at their disposal to deliver a polished customer experience. 

What’s more, by ensuring agents have access to all the information they need at their fingertips, rather than having to visit multiple sources, organisations will be able to increase satisfaction while also reducing costs. 

AI-powered speech analytics – in preferred languages –  will also be provided through Amazon Connect directly to call centre workers to further assist them in answering customer enquiries expertly and efficiently. 

“We have an inclusive partnership strategy. This is very important when you put the customer at the centre,” added Sarah Franklin, executive vice president and general manger, platform, Trailhead and developers at Salesforce.

Other strands of the extended partnership include the availability of AWS educational content on Trailhead and the exploration of ways to make Einstein Voice Skills compatible with Alexa and other smart speakers and assistants. 

“At John Hancock we are focused on making decisions easier and lives better for our customers, and part of how we achieve this mission is through our interactions with them in the contact center,” said Tracy Kelly, AVP Shared Services Contact Centre, John Hancock. 

“With the integrated Salesforce Service Cloud and Amazon Connect solution we can handle millions of calls annually, delivering the personalised and frictionless service our customers expect.”

Both Amazon and Salesforce, along with other industry players, are part of the Voice Interoperability Initiative, which aims to make use of voice-enabled products to deliver greater choice and flexibility through the use of interoperable voice services. 

The Department of Transport has been working with Google Cloud to modernise its core technology to be a “cloud-first” organisation by 2020. 

The DfT announced that for the past two years, the two organisations have been working to reinventing internal service delivery and introduces new digital capabilities for DfT staff.

Prior to moving to the cloud, it was resource-intensive for DfT to maintain servers, manage backups and ensure the overall health of the IT systems, the organisation said. As a result, simple utilisation and querying tasks often required days to complete.

A part of the problem was that its data centres lacked the scalability to match DfT’s longer-term needs as it looked to undertake bigger and more complex data initiatives.

In an effort to build the capabilities it required, DfT and Google Cloud migrated a large proportion of the former’s applications to the public cloud. Over the course of 12 months, DfT said it has successfully completed the migration of hundreds of virtual machines to the Google Cloud Platform. According to the DfT, this has allowed it to decommission a large chunk of its on-premises infrastructure while improving the reliability, resilience and security of its systems.

Over 100TBs of application data has been migrated from an internal cluster into BigQuery, reducing data search time from up to five days down to mere seconds

The partnership with Google Cloud is helping the DfT to become a more digital and data-driven organisation, according to said Mark Lyons, the interim CIO for DfT. He said the capabilities the platform offers are helping it to use data better to support decision-making, policy-making, reporting and governance, as well as provide new digital services to engage with citizens on transport-related initiatives.

“We’ve been excited to go on this journey with Google Cloud,” said Lyons. “When you have finite resources, having a partner that understands the process of change and can direct your focus to the things that really matter is invaluable. We’ve invested in this as a long-term partnership and are excited for Google Cloud to remain our number one cloud platform provider.”

You’ve doubtless read repeated warnings about how to avoid ransomware, but even the companies we think of as the good guys attempt to take hostages – your cherished email address being one of them.

People cling to their email address like their mobile phone number, because they’ve had it from way back when their computer made screeching noises every time they went online; it’s the one that all their friends have saved in their address books; and they use it for all their online accounts. Moving email address is only marginally less hassle than moving house.

The broadband providers know this all too well, which is why you’ll get stung if you try to retain a provider’s email account after you leave them. BT charges you £7.50 per month for the Premium Email service you need to keep old BT email addresses running, while TalkTalk will fleece you for a fiver each month to keep TalkTalk or Tiscali addresses active. When better-equipped webmail accounts are free, that doesn’t half hurt.

How do you avoid getting caught in this trap? My advice is to steer clear of broadband provider accounts in the first place. Gmail, Outlook and the like will probably remain free forever, and you can access them with whichever broadband provider or device you use.

The other alternative is to buy your own domain (bertjackson.co.uk, for example) and run your own email, which isn’t as expensive as you might think. The brilliant Zen Internet’s basic Bronze hosting package is £5.39 per month and that includes up to 10 email inboxes on your own domain.

A ‘.co.uk’ address costs £8.39 per year from Zen, which all added up is still cheaper than paying for BT Premium Email over the course of a year.

Whether you go down the free webmail route or buy your own domain, moving an email account is not as tricky as you’d expect. The key is preparation: don’t shut off the old account before moving to the new one, and give yourself a couple of months with both running to give you the best chance of a smooth transition.

The first step is to import the messages from your old account to the new one. Most webmail providers offer an import tool somewhere in their settings – Gmail’s can be found by clicking the Settings cog, choosing Settings and then selecting the ‘Accounts and Import’ tab. You may want to spring-clean the old account first, getting rid of any messages with huge attachments that you don’t need.

Next, you need to set up two things on your old account: a forwarder that sends all incoming messages to the new account; and an auto-reply that explains to your correspondents that you’re moving to a new address and to please update their contacts. Obviously, emails from stores such as Amazon and eBay, utility companies and even your bank won’t pay any attention to this, so you’ll have to do the manual drudge work of changing your registered email address with key accounts.

On the plus side, you’ll find you get rid of an awful lot of junk mail and accounts that you didn’t want in the first place when you finally turn the forwarder off and close the old account. And you’ll feel like Liam Neeson, having freed your email account from the hostage takers.

It’s not usually part of our remit, but despite it being a gaming-geared announcement, there’s something about the new Google Stadia gizmo that interests us, specifically its infrastructure which raises questions we can’t quite answer yet.

Codenamed Project Stream before its launch, Google’s game streaming service is far from the first to grace the market, but it might be the most well-timed attempt of them all. It aims to bring console-quality games directly to virtually any screen with no need for a physical console.

Games will be controlled by a new Stadia controller which connects directly to the platform via Wi-Fi. Not the screen, not the Chromecast – directly to the game client residing in the cloud.

It’s important to note this isn’t the first time a cloud streaming of this kind has been attempted. OnLive and PlayStation Now, to name but two, promised so much but then crashed and burned after delivering very little.

OnLive ran into money issues where the cost of running its infrastructure far exceeded the income it made. It’s reported that the service cost millions of dollars to run every month but on launch, and for a few weeks after, the company only received single-digit daily income because of its “try before you buy” policy on games.

PlayStation Now is actually still alive and kicking. The premium service hasn’t been adopted nearly as widely as first thought, probably due to a combination of its reported heavy input lag and poor variety of supported games.

So with that, Stadia must overcome some significant challenges to breathe new life into the platform. With edge computing, it theoretically has an advantage over OnLive and being Google, it has already managed to secure a decent selection of launch titles to ensure day-one success.

What caught our eye is the cloud and edge computing aspects of the service’s infrastructure and streaming strategy. OnLive attempted cloud gaming in the past but the existing support infrastructure, which was unfit for purpose, has been the main blockade in developing a system that actually works. The streaming speed and quality were passable as a proof of concept and just about playable with some games, but to launch Stadia eight years after the failure of OnLive, it must do much better.

So many questions

Google has said it will be using a combination of its highly advanced data centres and edge infrastructure to deliver gaming at low latencies, something that, especially in the online multiplayer space, is of vital importance.

Phil Harrison, VP and GM at Google, leading the Stadia project, said that the measurable latency issues seen in Project Stream are “solved and mitigated”.

“There are some investments in the datacentre that will create a much higher experience for more people, and there are some fundamental advances in compression algorithms,” he told Eurogamer.

“One important thing to keep in mind is that we are building our infrastructure at the edge. It’s not just in our central, massive datacentres. We’re building infrastructure as close to the end user, the gamer, as possible – so that helps mitigate some of the historical challenges”.

The interaction between the datacentre and the edge is unclear, specifically to what extent both will impact the overall processing and transmission of game data. What’s been said so far seems somewhat confusing and at times contradictory. For example, Harrison spoke about microsecond ping speeds for gamers but 20ms edge to datacentre speeds.

Google’s massive number of datacentres, according to Harrison, will be pivotal in delivering the Stadia experience the tech giant has imagined. Harrison said Google’s datacentres offer the theoretically unlimited compute capacity needed for a cloud-based streaming service to thrive. Gaming developments have, in years gone by, been limited because of hardware and people’s reluctance to upgrade for a few years, or until the next console life cycle starts. In the datacentre, CPU and GPU capacity is as powerful as the developer needs it to be to run its game.

Chris Gardner, senior analyst at Forrester is optimistic about the capability of Google’s infrastructure. “The network configuration is somewhat of a mystery, but clearly Google nailed this because benchmarks have shown perceived input latency to be extremely fast,” he tells Cloud Pro. “Google has experience with network optimisation (all the way down to designing its own protocols) so the performance is not a stretch.”

Take the specified hardware announced by Google and put it into one of Google’s many datacentres and you arguably have a recipe for success, he adds.

Trouble in the network

However, the promises around network speeds proved to be a point of contention for us. Firstly, Harrison told the BBC that 4K gaming can be achieved on download speeds of 25mbps; for reference, the average UK household gets just 18.5mbps speeds from its internet connection, far less in rural areas. The VP said Google expects network demands to improve, but it definitely wasn’t a promise.

Although Google seems to be confident in the fact that its back-end equipment is up to the task, it’s likely to face the problem of internet service provider (ISP) throttling – world-class servers or not. Harrison already confirmed that Google already has relationships within the wider industry, but it’s possible the company could run into the same problems that Netflix faced during its expansion where it started paying ISPs to allow faster speeds on the service but instead users were throttled.

It’s a very real possibility that ISPs would throttle bandwidth as popularity grows and network demands are greater. “[Netflix] had to negotiate with the major players to ensure the customer experience wasn’t dreadful,” says Gardner. “I expect the same experience for game streaming providers, although much more so because now it’s not just a bandwidth negotiation, it’s latency as well”.

On the topic of latency, Gardner cited this as his biggest concern of the whole project. “What I expect to see is streaming to be initially successful with casual games, platformers and roleplaying games,” he said. “However, multiplayer games demand low latency and low input lag to stay competitive and enjoyable. This is my biggest concern,” he added. “Shooters, MOBAs and other types of super competitive games – I honestly don’t expect gamers to tolerate the latency.”

Competition is just around the corner

There are only three companies in the world right now that are positioned well enough to feasibly deliver on a cloud-based product like this. Google is one of them, AWS and Microsoft are the others. We just wouldn’t expect any of these to pump so much time and money into something the world isn’t ready for yet.

Google’s main competitor in this area is Microsoft, which is working on Project xCloud, its own game streaming service currently in beta. The company behind the Xbox is certainly lagging compared to Google as its product is currently still in the development stage, but it arguably presents the best case to make this idea of game streaming work. Reports from those selected to test the beta version of xCloud also seem to be unanimously positive.

Couple Microsoft’s prowess in the cloud market with its strong presence in the console sector spanning nearly two decades and that provides an impressive backing for what could potentially be a better product compared to Google’s. It’s possible Microsoft could let Google launch Stadia, learn from its inevitable mistakes, and then blow it out of the water with a far superior service.

Regardless of how all of this plays out, it’s difficult to get excited about something that has failed in so many previous attempts and with so little information about the project disclosed – the kind of information that we need to make educated guesses about its viability as a service – we can’t help but look on with scepticism.

Main image credit: Marco Verch

Microsoft has said it will be updating its privacy provisions for commercial cloud contracts after a report from EU regulators last month questioned the company’s ability to comply with data laws.

The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), an independent authority that oversees the application of GDPR, launched an investigation in April to assess whether the company’s contracts with EU institutions violated the rules.

The results of that investigation, released in October, raised “serious concerns” about Microsoft’s ability to provide appropriate safeguards for the processing of data done on behalf of the EU bodies it services.

In a statement on its website on Monday, Microsoft said: “We are announcing today we will increase our data protection responsibilities for a subset of processing that Microsoft engages in when we provide enterprise services”.

Last year the company worked alongside the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security to amend contractual terms of a services agreement after authorities raised similar concerns about the lack of technical safeguards for the processing of data.

Monday’s privacy policy update is designed to extend those amendments across all commercial cloud contracts globally for both the private and public sector, the company explained.

“We will clarify that Microsoft assumes the role of data controller when we process data for specified administrative and operational purposes incident to providing the cloud services covered by this contractual framework, such as Azure, Office 365, Dynamics and Intune,” the company said.

“This subset of data processing serves administrative or operational purposes such as account management; financial reporting; combatting cyberattacks on any Microsoft product or service; and complying with our legal obligations.

“The change to assert Microsoft as the controller for this specific set of data uses will serve our customers by providing further clarity about how we use data, and about our commitment to be accountable under GDPR to ensure that the data is handled in a compliant way.”

Microsoft will remain the data processor when providing its services, fixing bugs, operating security services, and providing software updates, the statement added.

The policy overhaul comes just days after the company committed to applying the California Consumer Privacy Act to all US states once it comes into force in January 2020, although it has no legal obligation to do so.

The company expects the new policy terms to be applied to all commercial cloud contracts by the beginning of 2020.

The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a copyright lawsuit that has spanned nearly a decade between tech giants Google and Oracle.

The case was originally brought to Google following Oracle’s 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the company responsible for developing the Java language. Oracle alleged that Google stole code from the Java language to build its Android platform, a claim Google has repeatedly denied.

What followed was a series of court hearings and resulting appeals, and although a number of lower courts sided with Google in the case, Oracle has successfully challenged these rulings in superior courts.

The case’s most recent ruling came in March 2018 when the Federal Court sided with Oracle’s copyright claim, resulting in Google being hit with a $9 billion (£7 billion) damages bill.

The bill hasn’t yet been paid as Google petitioned the US Supreme Court in January 2019, asking it to overturn “a devastating one-two punch at the software industry”.

No date has been set by the Supreme Court but a one-hour window has been allotted to hear the companies’ arguments. Being the US’ highest court, the ruling is likely to be the last word on the lengthy case which could have lasting effects on the software development industry – that is, whether application programming interface (API) packages can be copyrighted.

Permitting these vital components of software interoperation to be copyrighted could potentially stifle the software industry, making it difficult for new apps to work with other apps and software platforms.

The Supreme Court previously refused to hear the case following a 2014 Federal Circuit ruling but agreed this time around following support from the likes of Microsoft and Mozilla. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has also sided with Google, calling the case a “mess”.

“We welcome the Supreme Court’s decision to review the case and we hope that the Court reaffirms the importance of software interoperability in American competitiveness,” said Kent Walker, Google’s SVP of Global Affairs, speaking to Cloud Pro. “Developers should be able to create applications across platforms and not be locked into one company’s software.”

Cloud Pro has contacted Oracle for a statement but did not receive a reply by the time of publication.