Salesforce is redesigning its office culture and giving employees more choice around when and where they work.

The cloud giant declared the 9-to-5 workday “dead” in a blog post on Tuesday, claiming its demise would lead to a greater work-life balance and, ultimately, a better business.  

Going forward, Salesforce employees will have the choice of three working models; flex, fully remote and office-based. For those that work under the ‘Flex’ bracket, which Salesforce suggests will be the majority of its employees, their time in the office will be between one and three days a week, mostly for collaborative projects, customer meetings and presentations. Otherwise, they will work remotely.

There will also be an option to work remotely on a permanent basis to accommodate those that do not live in close proximity to a Salesforce office and those who have jobs that are not dependent on office attendance.

For a small group of workers, there is the option to work in the office four to five days a week if they are in roles that require it, potentially in segregated shifts. 

“As we enter a new year, we must continue to go forward with agility, creativity and a beginner’s mind – and that includes how we cultivate our culture,” said Brent Hyder, president and chief people officer. “An immersive workspace is no longer limited to a desk in our towers; the 9-to-5 workday is dead, and the employee experience is about more than ping-pong tables and snacks.

“We have an opportunity to create an even better workplace – one that allows us to be more connected to each other, find more balance between work and home, and advance equality – ultimately leading to increased innovation and better business outcomes.”

Not everyone agrees that remote working is the way forward, however. Both Google and Microsoft have expressed concerns about prolonged working from home and Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins on Tuesday suggested that some people were tired of working from home. It’s worth noting that the only examples Robbins gave were from Cisco employees, which he claimed were longing to get back into the office.

“I think we sort of moved into that phase where people actually struggle mentally, people are – they’re not enjoying it,” Robbins said according to CNBC. “One of our employees said to me the other day, ‘I don’t mind the option of working from home. I don’t like being forced to work from home,'” he said.

Unlike most tech firms, Cisco has struggled during the pandemic. The company this week reported a decline in revenue for the fifth quarter in a row, blaming a slowdown in infrastructure spending. 

Google has warned that its productivity and finances may take a hit due to the new ‘hybrid working’ model necessitated by the global COVID pandemic. 

The firm is concerned that social distancing measures and hybrid work models – a structure whereby employees are given more flexibility to work remotely while others work from a central office – will increase costs and potentially impact its “corporate culture”, according to Google’s annual 10-K report.

The tech giant is well-known for offering employee perks as an incentive. It has over 135,000 full-time workers, but it also offers lots of temporary and freelance work for contracted professionals from third-party firms. 

“As we prepare to return our workforce in more locations back to the office in 2021, we may experience increased costs as we prepare our facilities for a safe return to work environments and experiment with hybrid work models, in addition to potential effects on our ability to compete effectively and maintain our corporate culture,” the company stated.

Google was one of the first firms to order its employees to work from home, but as the year and the pandemic progressed, it issued muddled instructions for its planned return to the office. The company has made a number of announcements about ‘testing’ a hybrid approach, but it’s also still investing in large office spaces around the world. 

In December, it was reported that CEO Sundar Pichai told employees that remote working would be extended to 1 September 2021. However, it also came with the stipulation that they would have to work at least three days in the physical office and remain within a suitable commuting distance. 

These reports suggest that one of the biggest providers of remote working software isn’t so keen on its own staff enjoying the benefits of it. Similarly, rival firm Microsoft has also made concerning remarks about mass remote working – despite also heavily investing in services that facilitate this shift. 

For some, it highlights a concerning lack of progression from the very companies powering the so-called ‘new normal’. 

“Many companies in Silicon Valley have been actively encouraging presenteeism for years now with beds, restaurants and even gyms, but it’s an outdated metric for technical staff productivity,” said Martin Biggs, VP and GM of Spinnaker Support. “Our definition of productivity has to change from clock-watching and time-in-office to actual outputs. The biggest mistake I see is organisations trying to apply old strategies to an entirely new situation.”   

There are also some businesses that find the struggles of a tech giant like Google “refreshing”. The company’s “open and honest assessment” of the time it will take to readjust is a great insight for smaller businesses, according to Dan Harding, the CEO of Sign In App. 
 
“Culture takes years to build and it’s clear that Google is not ‘anti-remote work’, just realistic about how much needs to change and adapt to new ways of working and employee expectations,” said Harding. “Some of Google’s main competitive elements and focuses are its staff, culture and wellbeing so they will certainly be one of the ones to watch how they adapt during 2021 and beyond.”

IBM and Palantir have announced a jointly developed product for AI applications called Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data. 

Built on Red Hat OpenShift, the new platform offers a no-code/low-code environment for building and deploying AI-based applications. 

“Today, nearly 75% of businesses surveyed in an IBM sponsored report say they are exploring or implementing AI. However, 37% cited limited AI expertise and 31% cite increasing data complexities and silos as barriers to successful adoption,” said IBM.

Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data leverages Palantir Foundry data operations platform and IBM Cloud Pak for Data services, such as Watson, to help users access, analyze, and act on extensive data spread across hybrid cloud environments. The platform also enables businesses to reduce data silos and monitor data throughout the AI lifecycle, starting from data scooping and model building to analytics and full-fledged enterprise AI deployment. 

What’s more, businesses can choose to work with IBM Data Science and AI Elite team to address AI adoption challenges and handle any data science use cases.

The offering targets enterprises looking to include AI-based applications to automate tasks and processes for large quantities of data, resulting in informed, data-driven decision-making.

For instance, Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data provides retailers with increased visibility and transparency by integrating data across their operational silos, enabling vendors and distributors to proactively monitor supply-chain health in real-time. 

In the finance sector, Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data helps with high-volume data integration, deduplication, and mapping to a common data model, ensuring an aggregated and consistent single customer view (SCV).

Also primed for telecommunications, Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data connects data from suppliers, CRM applications, sales orders, and production data with AI models for campaign optimization and attrition prediction/prevention to enhance customer care and add value across multiple business objectives.

“Our clients deliver products and services while operating in some of the most complex, fast-changing industries of the world,” said Rob Thomas, senior vice president, cloud and data platform, IBM. “Together, IBM and Palantir aim to make it easier than ever for businesses to put AI to work and become data-driven throughout their operations.”

Users of the original version of Microsoft’s Edge browser have until April to upgrade before the tech giant kills if off completely.  

Support for the desktop application, now dubbed ‘Legacy Edge’, will end on 9 March before it is replaced by the new Microsoft Edge browser a month later. 

This move will not come as a surprise to many, as the to kill off the old browser was originally announced in August 2020.

The original version of Microsoft Edge, which first launched in 2015, failed to persuade users to ditch Chrome and Firefox and struggled to live up to the early success of Internet Explorer, which also lost popularity to rival browsers. 

Edge 2.0, however, is built upon the Chromium open source project – the same web rendering engine that powers Google Chrome, as opposed to EdgeHMTL that underpinned Internet Explorer. The decision to use Chromium was to create a browser with better web compatibility for users and less complexity for developers. 

As such, the Legacy Edge browser will now be put to rest completely, first with an update in March that removes support, before it’s ultimately replaced with the new Chromium-based Edge browser in April.
 
“To replace this out of support application [Legacy Edge], we are announcing that the new Microsoft Edge will be available as part of the Windows 10 cumulative monthly security update – otherwise referred to as the Update Tuesday (or ‘B’) release – on April 13, 2021,” the tech giant said. 
 
“The new Microsoft Edge offers built-in security and our best interoperability with the Microsoft security ecosystem, all while being more secure than Chrome for businesses on Windows 10,” the company added. 
 
Microsoft has stressed that Edge won’t suddenly become the default browser if you’ve set Chrome as the preference, but there is no mention, as yet, about automatically migrating browser-related data, such as history or bookmarks.

​If file sharing security and privacy are major concerns, you’ve come to the right place: Tresorit delivers total end-to-end encryption. Its zero-knowledge policy means all data is encrypted client-side, in transit, and on Tresorit’s cloud servers, with no encryption keys or passwords stored anywhere in unencrypted form, meaning that only you have access.

Tresorit offers a wide choice of plans for individuals and businesses, and we tried out the Business Plus plan which costs £13 per user per month if paid yearly. This is a great choice if you’re sharing very large files as the maximum single file size is 15GB, and although you don’t get the unlimited cloud storage offered by some competitors, 2TB per user should be enough for most SMBs.

The Business Plus plan brings a lot more into play as along with file sharing, syncing, user and group management plus Outlook integration, it enables custom portal branding, access audit logs, and an unlimited file version history. Businesses that need to keep their data in one country for compliance reasons can also choose from 11 global data centre locations.

Deployment is undemanding as invitations are mailed out from the Admin Center cloud portal and when a user clicks on the link, they can create an account and choose a password. Obviously, users shouldn’t forget this but, with the Advanced Control option enabled in the portal, administrators can perform password resets.

Users are also invited to download the desktop app which, on completion, will create a personal ‘Tresor’ – Tresorit’s name for a secure, encrypted folder. They can add an unlimited number of Tresors up to their storage limit and for swift access, the desktop app creates a Windows Explorer drive mapping or a Finder favorites folder for macOS.

Tresors can be shared by selecting team members from the desktop app contact list and deciding whether they can manage, edit or view them. These functions are also available from the user’s personal web portal which now allows multiple folders to be selected and offers previews of Office documents and PDFs.

There are plenty of ways to securely share files with outside partners and contractors that don’t have a Tresorit account. From the desktop app, you can create a web link or send them directly from any installed email app with the Outlook plug-in adding extra controls such as link expiry dates, download limits, password protection, access logging, and a requirement for recipients to verify their email addresses.

You can also use Tresorit on the move, as the iOS and Android mobile apps provide many of the features in the desktop app. We loved their built-in scanning functions; we used an iPad to take photos of documents, scan them as JPEGs or PDFs, encrypt them, and send them straight to a selected cloud folder.

Tresorit clearly takes security very seriously, and policies created in the Admin Center portal control everything users are allowed to do. These determine what devices they can access their account from, you can stop browsers from storing their login details and apply IP filtering to block access from specific locations.

You can choose which users are allowed to create file links, set login session limits in days, deny them personal Tresors and disable downloads so users can only view files in shared links. Policies can enforce 2-step verification and Tresorit has now added support for SSO (single sign-on) authentication using Azure Active Directory and Okta.

Tresorit may be a little light on collaboration tools but it’s very heavy on security. Affordable and easy to deploy, it’s an ideal choice for SMBs sharing sensitive and confidential information.

Google Cloud Platform has signed a multi-year agreement with Twitter that will see the social media company shift its offline analytics, data processing and machine learning workloads to Google’s Data Cloud.

The deal means Twitter will be able to more quickly process trillions of data points generated by every tweet, retweet and like send on its platform to generate insights that, in turn, can be fed into improvements to the core product.

Twitter’s data platform currently consumes hundreds of petabytes of data and runs tens of thousands of tasks over a dozen data clusters each day. It previously struck an agreement with Google Cloud Platform as part of its ‘Partly Cloudy’ strategy in 2018, when the firm moved its Hadoop clusters to Google’s infrastructure.

With this expanded partnership, Twitter will adopt a number of Google services including BigQuery, Dataflow, Cloud Bigtable and machine learning tools. Ultimately, it’ll allow the firm to expand its data ecosystem and generate insights much faster, as well as allowing for deeper machine learning-driven innovation.

“Our initial partnership with Google Cloud has been successful and enabled us to enhance the productivity of our engineering teams,” said Twitter’s CTO Parag Agrawal. “Building on this relationship and Google’s technologies will allow us to learn more from our data, move faster and serve more relevant content to the people who use our service every day. 

“As Twitter continues to scale, we’re excited to partner with Google on more industry-leading technology innovation in the data and machine learning space.

Twitter is also hoping to ‘democratise’ data access by offering a range of data processing and machine learning tools to better understand and improve how Twitter features are used. Previously, engineers and data scientists developed large custom processing jobs, although these can now be queried faster using SQL in BigQuery. 

The partnership, generally, will make it easier for both technical and non-technical teams to study data generated from the usage of Twitter, and gain insights from these.

“Helping customers manage the entire continuum of data – from storage to analytics to AI – is one of our key differentiators at Google Cloud,” said Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian. 

“It’s been phenomenal to watch this company grow over the years, and we’re excited to partner with Twitter to innovate for the future and deliver the best experience possible for the people that use Twitter every day.”

Zoom has revealed a number of new updates for its Zoom Rooms video conferencing hardware suite that showcase the company’s idea of the hybrid office. 

The new features are aimed at businesses that will keep a portion of their workforce remote for some time after offices reopen or on a permanent basis. 

Zoom Rooms is a suite of tablets, monitors and webcams that organisations use throughout their place of work to enable staff to schedule, conduct and remotely connect to meetings. The company is now doubling-down on the remote element as businesses look at ways to safely return to workspaces. 

“Many organisations will likely take a gradual, phased approach to bring employees back to the office full time,” Zoom’s senior product manager, Cynthia Lee, wrote in a blog post. “When this happens, IT leaders and line-of-business managers will then face the challenge of supporting in-office and remote workers simultaneously.

“Businesses can use technology to empower workers wherever they are, streamline collaboration between in-office and remote workers, and make the transition back into the office as seamless as possible.” 

To start with, when you come back to the office you could be greeted by a virtual receptionist. This uses Zoom’s ‘Kiosk Mode’ and a touchscreen device that in-office workers and visitors can operate under the guidance of a remote receptionist. 

For meetings themselves, users can now pair iOS and Android mobile devices with Zoom Room meetings. This will include access to room controls and the ability to start and join meetings via the Zoom Rooms Controller app.

Meeting admins will also be able to view more data. They can see how many people are in a room via the dashboard, and both set and police specific social distances measures. There will also be information about the temperature within each room. 

There are also collaboration-focused updates, such a shareable whiteboard that can also be put into the chat function and a new meeting toolbar.

The head of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Andy Jassy, has been announced as the successor to Jeff Bezos, who is stepping down as CEO later in the year. 

Bezos is not leaving the company entirely as he will take on the role of executive chair. 

The decision to hire Jassy, however, is seen as logical, given how long he has been at the company and how well AWS has expanded under his leadership. Jassy joined in 1997, founding AWS in 2002, and he has been at the forefront of cloud computing for nearly two decades. 

For the fourth quarter of 2020, AWS brought in $12.7 billion, adding to the company’s record-breaking revenues. The cloud unit has been a reliable contributor for over a decade with consistent increases in revenue. The success of AWS has led many to suggest that Jassy’s appointment will usher in a new era for Amazon, with even more of a focus on cloud computing.
 
“Andy Jassy taking over signals the importance of not only AWS as the profit driver for its parent but also the role of cloud tech that will drive the growth of Amazon as a digital platform business going forward,” according to Forrester VP Allen Bonde.
 
“While consumer e-commerce is a big market, B2B is an even bigger prize. Picking a leader who is driving their main enterprise offering may indicate the future of Amazon is in fact selling more to businesses, than consumers. In general, a much bigger prize in the long run.”

Forrester’s principal analyst James McQuivey agreed, adding that it was key to avoid a Bill Gates-style handoff. The company struggled to successfully transition Microsoft into a new era following the appointment of Steve Ballmer.  

“By choosing Andy Jassy, Bezos is potentially skipping the Ballmer transition phase and moving right into a Satya Nadella mode, turning to an expert in running a cloud business, someone who understands the long-term role that infrastructure and business services will play for Amazon, even as it tries to maintain its role as a consumer innovator,” said McQuivey.

The most comparable executive change is IBM’s decision to replace CEO Ginni Rometty with Arvind Krishna. The company is splitting into two units, one cloud-focused and another that will take care of its infrastructure business. The cloud arm, which will arguably be more prominent, is built on much of Krishna work, such as the acquisition of Red Hat and its hybrid cloud strategy.

Similarly, Jassy has been the driving force behind AWS since 2002 and is arguably one of the most important figures in the mass adoption of cloud computing and e-commerce across the world. 

Recent Q3 analysis from Canalys put AWS as the top cloud provider by a considerable distance. Between July and September, the firm received more business 32% than Microsoft (19%) and Google Cloud (7%) combined. 

Google Cloud has reported a loss of $5.61 billion (£4.1bn) for the fiscal year 2020, which ended on 31 December.

The cloud business brought in revenue of $3.83 billion (£2.8 billion) and recorded a loss $1.24 billion (£900 million) for Q4 2020, Google revealed on Tuesday. This marks the first time the company has announced the operating income metric for Google Cloud.

With 2020 dubbed as the year of the cloud due to the fact it’s helped keep people connected during the pandemic, an operating loss of $5.61 billion may seem like a grim result for Google. 

However, the company also managed to deliver $13 billion (£9.53 billion) of revenue during 2020, a steady increase from $5.8 billion (£4.25 billion) in 2018 and $8.9 billion (£6.53 billion) in 2019. Despite mounting losses over the year – $4.3 billion in 2018 and $4.6 billion in 2019 – this has been attributed to investment in new data centres as Google Cloud expands its operations. 

In 2020, the cloud giant launched four new cloud regions in Indonesia, South Korea, and the US, and announced another four to come in Qatar, Spain, Italy, and France.

On an earnings call with investors, CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google Cloud will continue to invest going forward.

“The market dynamics and our momentum in the context of the market is the framework in which we are thinking about the scale of investments – and the pace of investments,” he said, adding that the cloud giant is “definitely investing ahead” in order to ensure that the company is “able to serve the customers globally across all the offerings they are interested in”.

When it comes to Google as a whole, the tech giant reported Q4 revenues of $56.9 billion (£41.73 billion) which, according to CFO Ruth Porat, “was driven by Search and YouTube, as consumer and business activity recovered from earlier in the year”.

Porat also touched on Google Cloud’s results, adding that Workspace is experiencing strong growth among larger businesses, “which are signing meaningful, long-term commitment agreements”.

Google Cloud competitor AWS reported revenues of $12.74 billion (£9.34 billion) and an operating income of $3.56 billion (£2.6 billion) for Q4 alone. For 2020, AWS’s operating income was $13.5 billion (£9.89 billion).

The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, will step down as the company’s CEO later in the year after almost 30-years at the helm.

Bezos will become the firm’s executive chair and the move will give him the “time and energy” to focus on other ventures, such as space exploration company Blue Origin, fighting against climate change, and overseeing the Washington Post, the newspaper he owns.

He will be replaced by Andy Jassy, who has been at the company since 1997 and is currently serving as CEO of Amazon’s cloud computing arm AWS. The announcement was made to Amazon employees via an internal letter.

“I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to executive chair of the Amazon board and Andy Jassy will become CEO,” Bezos wrote. “In the exec chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives.

“Andy [Jassy] is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be an outstanding leader, and he has my full confidence.”

Some have questioned the timing of the move, with the majority of the world still living under COVID restrictions. 
 
“Every founder, no matter how successful, must eventually hand over the reins and Bezos has curiously chosen the middle of a pandemic to do it,” said Forrester analyst James McQuivey. “Perhaps he had this transition planned earlier and delayed it due to the pandemic or perhaps he realises that whoever leads the company past the pandemic will rightfully be seen as the leader for Amazon’s next phase.”

Whatever the reason for his departure, Bezos is leaving the company in good health. The firm’s fourth-quarter revenues broke the $100 billion mark for the first time, with the company raking in $125.5 billion between October and December 2020. 

Bezos and Amazon have both gained wealth during the pandemic, as more consumers and businesses used its services for retail, e-commerce and cloud computing. The company’s growth runs alongside one of the biggest financial crises of the last 30 years.

Amazon was founded by Bezos in 1994 and went public three years later, shortly before the burst of the dot.com bubble. As one of the few internet-based businesses to survive, it went from strength to strength, continuing to gain market share and revenue throughout the 2008 financial crisis and beyond.  

“This journey began some 27 years ago,” Bezos said in his letter. “Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. The question I was asked most frequently at that time was, ‘What’s the internet?’ Blessedly, I haven’t had to explain that in a long while.”