Microsoft’s once widely-used Internet Explorer browser will reach end-of-life status from June 2022, with the firm no longer supporting the desktop application.

The legacy browser will also be absorbed into Microsoft Edge through an in-browser Internet Explorer mode, so organisations still reliant on the out-of-date service can continue to run critical applications in an emulated environment.

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The number of users still relying on Internet Explorer is minimal compared with historic standards, with the soon-to-be legacy browser holding a 0.71% market share as of April 2021. Chrome, by contrast, holds a 64.47% market share, according to Stat Counter.

Microsoft launched the next generation of its web browser, Microsoft Edge, in 2015 as a replacement for Internet Explorer 11.

The company then launched the second iteration of its flagship browser in 2020, powered by the open source Chromium engine, while announcing plans to retire the ‘legacy’ Edge version. Chromium-based Edge is now the default browser for Windows 10, with the 2015 version removed as of last month.

“With Microsoft Edge, we provide a path to the web’s future while still respecting the web’s past,” said Microsoft developer Sean Lyndersay. “Change was necessary, but we didn’t want to leave reliable, still-functioning websites and applications behind.

“We’re here to help you transition to the more comprehensive browsing experience of Microsoft Edge and tell you a bit more about why we think it will address your needs, both at home and at work.”

Microsoft is encouraging its users to transition to Edge by promoting the wide range of benefits it over the Internet Explorer user experience. The use of a dual-engine, for example, supports both legacy and modern sites, while the Internet Explorer mode will allow users to continue using sites and apps that are only compatible with Internet Explorer.

The Edge browser is also more secure than Internet Explorer, offering a host of features including Microsoft Defender SmartScreen to block phishing attacks and malware infection attempts. While Internet Explorer 11 packaged security updates monthly, Edge can issue security patches for flaws within days.

Organisations using Internet Explorer are being encouraged to move to Microsoft Edge immediately, and continue to use their legacy applications through the dedicated Internet Explorer mode, which Microsoft will continue to support until 2029.

Internet Explorer was first released in 1995 as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95. The project was started by developer Thomas Reardon in 1994 who used source code from Spyglass’ Mosaic web browser.

The web browser underwent several transformations and redesigns through the years, before its final version, Internet Explorer 11, was released in 2013 alongside Windows 8. Development on the project was suspended in 2016 when all work was shifted over to Microsoft Edge, which launched in the previous year.

Microsoft announced in February that Internet Explorer would no longer be compatible with Microsoft 365 apps from August 2021. This follows Microsoft Teams dropping support for the browser in November last year.

Users have until June 2022 before the Internet Explorer desktop app will no longer be supported, or available to download.

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Businesses are able to update their Windows 10 systems with version 21H1, dubbed the May 2021 Update, which is designed to deliver features that improve security, remote access and the quality of experience.

The update, which will take a staggered and measured approach to rollout, introduces several new security-oriented features, namely multi-camera support for Windows Hello, Windows Defender Application Guard, and a group policy service. 

These are inspired by work Microsoft has done on its Windows 10X operating system, which was initially designed for dual-screen foldable devices but has since evolved to be a more general-purpose system.

“In the current environment, we know that you continue to rely on your PCs more than ever. As a result, we are initially taking a measured seeker-based approach to the rollout of the May 2021 Update,” said Microsoft’s vice president for program management, Windows servicing and delivery, John Cable. 

“We are throttling availability up over the coming weeks to ensure a reliable download experience for all, so the update may not be offered to you right away. Additionally, some devices might have a compatibility issue for which a safeguard hold is in place. In these cases, we will not offer the update until we are confident that you will have a good update experience.”

Among the features included in 21H1 is Windows Hello multi-camera support, which will set the default as the external camera when both external and internal Windows Hello cameras are connected to a device. 

Application Guard, meanwhile, is designed to help prevent old and emerging attacks by isolating untrusted entities in a Hyper-V-powered container. The Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) Group Policy Service (GPSVC), finally, will receive a performance update to better support remote work scenarios.

All editions of the May 2021 Update will receive 18 months of servicing and support, with commercial organisations recommended to begin targeted deployments to ensure services and infrastructure works as expected. 

The update also integrates elements of the once completely separated Windows 10X platform that had been in development. Instead of launching Windows 10X as a standalone product, Cable said, Microsoft is using teachings from the development process to integrate its core elements into other parts of Windows and alternative services. 

The new app container technology at the heart of Microsoft Defender Application Guard, for example, is derived from Windows 10X, as is an enhanced voice typing experience, and a modernised touch keyboard. 

Londoners were more likely to work from home during the pandemic than those living elsewhere in the country, according to an official snapshot.

An annual population survey conducted by the National Office of Statistics (ONS) found that working from home doubled in 2020, but it still remained an overall minority across the whole of the UK.

Around a quarter of people (25.9%) worked from home at some point over the year, compared with just 12.4% in 2019. But there was a concentration of remote workers in London (46.4%) that actually offset the figures for the whole country, with rural and northern towns having considerably fewer remote workers – below 14% in Burnely and Middlesbrough, for instance.

«The ONS figures confirm what we already know, that highly productive, digitally savvy jobs are concentrated in London and the South East,» said teckUK’s head of policy, Neil Ross. 

«We know as well that digital adoption, such as the uptake of home working technologies can lead to increased productivity and business performance. To prevent the pandemic from compounding the existing regional inequalities we know about we need to double down on our ambition to improve digital skills across the UK as well as incentivising business adoption of digital tech.»

Additionally, occupation also played a crucial role in the likelihood of remote working. The highest rates of people that said they had worked from home were in the communication and information (59%) and financial services (56%) sectors. The lowest numbers were in the retail and transport sectors (roughly 11% each).

It also appears that the more senior the role, the more likely people were to work from home. For example, 39% of managers, directors and senior officials and 40% of those in professional occupations said they had worked from home, compared to just 11% for those in sales and customer services and 7% for care and leisure workers. 

HPE has announced a set of capabilities to equip organisations with the tools required to monetise data by tapping into the EU’s in-development Gaia-X federated data infrastructure.

Companies, service providers and public organisations can use HPE’s Solution Framework for Gaia-X to gear up to be compatible with the data platform when it launches in the near future. The system supports all functionality required to provide and consume data and services in a decentralised, federated environment. 

By buying into HPE’s framework, organisations can tap into huge distributed data pools, strengthen data sovereignty and create value from data in ways they could never have prior to involvement in Gaia-X. 

This framework is based on a reference architecture comprising key components of HPE’s software portfolio, third-party software, and the Cloud28+ network, a marketplace for monetising data and services. Everything will also be bundled in an ‘as a service’ HPE Greenlake model, meaning it’s more accessible to customers and partners. 

“Gaia-X is not about US versus Europe, but about the key question of the next wave of digital transformation and how to create network effects without centralisation in order to unlock the value of distributed data, while at the same time reserving sovereignty of every participant,” said Johannes Koch, HPE’s senior vice president for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and MD for Germany. 

“Gaia-X is the focal point of this endeavour, and as such is also a catalyst to create the future architecture of the digital world. In essence, it’s about restoring the original freedom of the internet and about creating an open, decentralised cloud.” 

The EU proposed Gaia-X as a next-gen continental-wide system in order to reduce the reliance on, and domination of, large US tech companies with regards to data, the cloud, and digital transformation. 

The platform connects a host of cloud service suppliers through an interoperable data exchange platform that serves as a warehouse for several industries and data sources. It also acts as a data repository for businesses to pick specific services, such as IoT, big data and machine learning. 

HPE joined the non-profit organisation managing and contributing to Gaia-X on day one, and has contributed to its architecture, standards and certification since. 

The message HPE was keen to stress is that businesses cannot reap the benefits of Gaia-X unless their infrastructures and data operations are configured in such a way that they’re compatible with the platform. This is where the firm’s HPE Solution Framework for Gaia-X steps in as a means of getting businesses ready to be a part of the Gaia-X project.

The firm says its own strategy is perfectly aligned with the approach Gaia-X is taking, and the problems that it’s trying to solve, with HPE’s software portfolio and business model pivoted to it. 

A key component of the HPE Solution Framework for Gaia-X is a reference architecture that defines the foundation of the components needed to decentralise workloads, and this also includes a central governance structure 

The HPE Ezmeral Software Platform, which provides tools such as access to distributed data and unified control of distributed Kubernetes clusters, serves as the technological foundation of its framework. 

Its Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) and the SPIFFE Runtime Environment (SPIRE) offer open source standards for securely authenticating software services.

Finally, Cloud28+ allows customers to monetise their data and services through the marketplace that this platform offers, and the partners associated with the community. 

Over 17 million people in the UK lack essential digital skills (EDS) for work, while less than a quarter (23%) of employees reported having received any digital skills training from their employer.

That’s according to a new report released by FutureDotNow, a coalition of companies and civil society groups working in collaboration with the UK government to boost the nation’s digital skills. 

The coalition, which counts BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, Dropbox, CompTIA, and BT among its members, defines EDS as accessing payslips, booking shifts and leave, avoiding social media disasters, basic password practice, using cloud storage, analysing data, synchronising information across multiple devices, as well as basic cyber security skills such as being able to identify suspicious emails. 

All of these are not being addressed by the majority of UK organisations, the report has found. It also warns businesses of the risks presented by the lack of EDS among employees, such as slowing the adoption of digital processes, which negatively impacts business productivity and financial performance. This, in turn, leads to businesses being held back and the UK’s global competitiveness reduced.

FutureDotNow chief executive Liz Williams said that the report “reveals a hidden middle between digital exclusion and advanced digital skills which needs addressing urgently”.

“There’s a significant part of our workforce without the essential digital skills required for the new global digital world we’re competing in. Great businesses are underpowered like smartphones with a flat battery because their workforces lack these essential digital skills.

«FutureDotNow and its members, who are already seeing the power of working together to upskill their employees, will be able to help them take action. And our Playbook, launched today is a practical guide to identifying missing essential digital skills and how to go about upskilling employees,” she said.

According to techUK president Jacqueline de Rojas CBE, the pandemic has revealed “an increase in people wanting and needing to acquire essential digital skills”. 

“This has created positive momentum in driving the UK’s digital adoption which we must maintain in order to address the growing mismatch in the demand and supply of digital skills in the UK. FutureDotNow’s initiative to encourage business leaders to share knowledge and skills is critical to ensure the country and our citizens are ready for what comes next,” she added.

Oxford University and Oracle have collaborated on a Global Pathogen Analysis System to help governments identify and act on the spread of new COVID variants. 

The system combines Oxford University’s Scalable Pathogen Pipeline Platform, which was first used for tuberculosis, to with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to analyse and compare sequence data for COVID. The university has already processed half of the world’s COVID sequences, which is more than 500,000 in total.

The Pathogen Pipeline is available worldwide, 24-hours a day in the Oracle Cloud and its processing capability has been enhanced with extensive new development work from Oracle that enables high performance and security. 

The system will use Oracle’s machine learning services to deliver comprehensive results within minutes of submission before sharing its findings with countries around the world in a secure environment. This includes identifying variants of interest and their potential impact on vaccine and treatment effectiveness. There will be an analytics dashboard to show which specific strains spread more quickly and whether certain genetic features contribute to its increased transmissibility and vaccine tolerance.  

«This powerful new tool will enable public health scientists in research establishments, public health agencies, healthcare services, and diagnostic companies around the world to help further understanding of infectious diseases, starting with the coronavirus,» said Derrick Crook, professor of microbiology in the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford.

«The Global Pathogen Analysis System will help to establish a global common standard for assembling and analysing this new virus, as well as other microbial threats to public health. This adds a new dimension in our ability to process pathogen data. We are excited to partner with Oracle to further our research using this cutting-edge technology platform.»

The platform will be free for researchers and non-profits to use worldwide and the next steps will be extending the service to more pathogens beyond the COVID pandemic to enable governments to act on future outbreaks quickly. 

Business communication is a hotly contested market with a slew of different services that your organisation can use for internal messaging. However, two companies that always seem to be pitted against each other in this space, Slack and Microsoft Teams, want to take this one step further. They want businesses to talk to other businesses from within their platforms, rather than use emails. 

Slack is a communications platform that, at its most basic, offers internal instant messaging and document sharing services to businesses. Managers and employees create and use various ‘channels’ to talk to each other and these channels help to either differentiate departments or workflows, depending on the preference of the organisation. 

Microsoft Teams is also a comms platform, but it has more emphasis on video conferencing and comes with Office 365 integration. It looks and feels very similar to Slack as it also uses ‘channels’ for collaboration. The two are fierce rivals, but currently seem to have the same goal: Make email obsolete.

Slack Connect

Slack has never hidden its contempt for email and some would say its platform is entirely built for the purpose of squashing the legacy technology. But while businesses can use Slack to talk internally, until recently they still had to depend on email to reach anyone outside their organisation. However, in June 2020, Slack launched a new feature to fix this and (in its mind) kill off email altogether – Slack Connect. 

Users can connect with external parties by navigating to the sidebar in Slack and clicking on ‘Add Channels’. This will offer up two options: ‘Create a new channel’ or ‘Browse all channels’ and users will need to click on the former. The channel will need a name before it can be created and then to make it different from your internal channels, you’ll need to send an invite to the outside party you wish to speak to. From there the onus is on the receiver who needs to accept the link and set the same channel up on their end (in their own Slack account). This is then verified and approved by account administrators on both sides. 

Microsoft Connect

As Slack would have it, Microsoft Teams is a poorer version of its platform that is only dominating in the space because it comes bundled in with Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of services – the argument being that it is forced upon users rather than something they would necessarily choose to use. Microsoft disputes this, naturally, but it is now offering a service similar to Slack Connect, which it has also named ‘Connect’. 

It’s currently available as a ‘preview’, with a full release scheduled for later in 2021. It works in a similar way to Slack in that you create the channel in your sidebar, under the ‘Your Teams’ section. The shared channel is called ‘Agent Portal Launch’ and once you click on this you’ll have a popup window where you can share a link with your intended party. Once again, it will need approval from administrators on both sides. 

Pros and cons

Users can only have a maxim of 20 organisations at one time with Slack Connect and bringing in anyone new to shared channels means taking someone out. You have to bear in mind that each connection has to be verified by the administrators of your account and the same process on the other end, so initially, it’s a lot more work than a simple email. But if you have a group of businesses you regularly converse with, having a shared channel is easier, faster and more collaborative – you’ll feel less like customers and partners, and more like colleagues. So far, there is no mention of any limits for the number of organisations you can link to with Microsoft Teams Connect. 

The debate around whether or not Teams is as good as Slack is frankly pointless because, as the smaller firm keeps pointing out, Teams comes bundled in with Office 365. Slack on its own doesn’t offer the breadth of services that Microsoft does so the biggest benefit with Teams is working within a suite of services many companies already use. As such, linking Teams accounts together also enables different businesses to work on projects simultaneously. This can be done with Slack as it has an integration with Google Workplace (formerly G Suite) but it’s not one holistic platform, it’s multiple providers joined together. 

However, as the first one to launch, Slack Connect has a head start on new features and security controls. Plus it’s soon to be operating under Salesforce which could potentially increase Slack’s business customers. Analysts suggest that the acquisition will see Salesforce using Slack Connect as an enterprise networking service. 

Why not just use email?

There are a number of issues that plague email, such as spam and phishing, which can slow productivity and also compromises a company’s security. Add to that the growing list of additional services people are now using to work remotely and connect to partners or customers, which all have to be installed and managed by IT, and things can get very messy, very quickly. Slack’s answer is to have everything you need – coworkers, partners, vendors, customers – in one place. 

It requires a paid Slack account for both sender and receiver, which in itself is an argument to continue with email. While Slack is popular, particularly with startups, it’s but one service in a very competitive market. There’s a very high likelihood that the people you want to speak with are using Microsoft Teams, which reportedly surpassed 75 million daily active users mid-way through 2020.  

Slack is determined to kill off email, however, and it recently added a function to Connect that lets users directly message individuals from outside their organisation. ‘Slack DMs’ works in the same way as Connect in that users send out an invite to a person at another organisation that is monitored by administrators on both sides. The function was initially launched with the option to add a bespoke message to the invite, but Slack had to shut that down after concerns were raised that it could be used to send abusive messages. Despite this, Slack DMs is now available with paid accounts and, so far, there isn’t a similar feature available on Microsoft Teams Connect.

There are lots of (often similar) benefits with both services and also plenty of room for new functions to be added. But it has to be said, there isn’t really enough in either to finally render email obsolete.

SpaceX and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) have struck a partnership that’ll see the two companies deliver data management, cloud services, and applications to enterprise customers across the world.

The agreement will combine SpaceX’s flagship Starlink low-orbit satellite system with Google Cloud’s data centres to provide high-speed broadband to customers on the network edge.

Starlink, a low latency broadband system comprising roughly 1,500 satellites, will base its ground stations within Google’s data centres, with GCP’s high capacity private network supporting the delivery of the global satellite internet service.

The aim is to connect businesses and consumers to the internet and to cloud computing services regardless of where they’re based, and with the highest possible levels of connectivity.

“Applications and services running in the cloud can be transformative for organisations, whether they’re operating in a highly networked or remote environment,” said senior vice president for infrastructure at Google Cloud, Urs Hölzle.

“We are delighted to partner with SpaceX to ensure that organizations with distributed footprints have seamless, secure, and fast access to the critical applications and services they need to keep their teams up and running.”

Combining Starlink’s broadband system with Google’s infrastructure will offer organisations across the world networking availability and speeds that they should expect in the modern age, SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell added.

SpaceX began developing Starlink in 2015, and the system has undergone deployment tests over the last few years. The objective has been to deploy roughly 1,500 satellites by 2021 in order to launch the networking service for enterprise customers, which SpaceX has almost achieved.

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) also submitted filings in 2019 for approval of up to 30,000 additional satellites to complement the 12,000 Starlink satellites that the FCC had already approved, according to Space News.

SpaceX previously struck a partnership with Microsoft in October 2020 to allow the computing giant to launch a fleet of satellites to host its Azure Space platform. This services the space industry’s mission needs while also claiming to offer high networking speeds with low latency for public and private organisations.

The networking service, powered by GCP, will be available from the second half of this year.

IBM has been a fixture of the computing industry almost since its inception, defining various eras with products such as the Model 5150 or Watson, the AI-powered suite of business services. One of the secrets to its longevity has been a powerful ability to reinvent itself when market shifts threaten the viability of its business model. As a result, the company is just as relevant today as it was when founded in 1911. 

While we may not readily associate IBM with cloud computing, this is where the company sees its future, alongside the twin pillars of AI and quantum computing. As such, the firm has launched itself into a radical shift in pursuit of a revenue model reliant on expanding its hybrid cloud business. This is a strategy that’s seen IBM plot to cleave off its managed services business as well as make ten acquisitions within the space of a year, comprising one of the computing giant’s most comprehensive reinventions yet. It’s a process, however, that its executives feel is essential to IBM’s long-term survival.

The ‘$1 trillion hybrid cloud opportunity’

IBM’s leadership has often referenced the “$1 trillion hybrid cloud opportunity” as a key driver for the strategy, and for good reason. The market has shown a long-term move towards cloud services, Gartner VP analyst Craig Lowery tells IT Pro, with many businesses changing their strategies to help their clients achieve their cloud objectives. “Customers have been making their requirements known for many years,” Lowery says. IBM has, like many other companies, eventually had to respond to that, he adds, saying that its leadership “has taken the appropriate actions, as they see it, to align with customer needs”.

This explosive cloud growth coincides with the continued success of businesses such as AWS, Google Cloud and Alibaba, with a wave of digital transformation projects triggering an acceleration in cloud adoption. “Overall, these trends have maintained growth in cloud spending,” says Blake Murray, research analyst at Canalys. “However, increased spending is now happening across almost all industries, with the need for digitalisation, app modernisation, content streaming, collaboration software, online learning and gaming. This is likely to continue, as an increasingly digital world becomes a ‘new normal’.”

State of decline

Just as the fortunes of major cloud giants have surged, the financial power of IBM as a wider entity has dwindled over the previous decade.

Delving into specific business units, we can see that performance declined on all fronts between 2011 and 2016, but especially the Systems and Technology segment. Like for like comparisons beyond this point are difficult, as IBM underwent two internal restructures, once in 2015 then again in 2018, but these moves failed to stem the long-term trend, and revenues continued to decline. At the same time, IBM’s cloud operations – spread across all divisions – began to spark into life, mirroring wider industry trends. 

Today, cloud computing is one of IBM’s most important revenue streams and will continue to grow in significance. The rising value of the firm’s cloud business is clear, and a key reason why its leadership sees cloud computing as a future moneymaker.

Sparking an internal revolution

In October, IBM announced it would carve away its managed services business into a separate entity by the end of 2021. This is a key part of the overall strategy, the company’s vice-president for Hybrid Cloud EMEA, Agnieszka Bruyère, tells IT Pro, with its AI, quantum computing and cloud operations being recast as the three main pillars of IBM’s operations. 

The origins of this strategy stretch back two or three years, she adds, when the company first pinpointed the key role cloud computing would play in its clients’ digital transformation journeys. At that stage, however, 80% of its customers’ workloads were still residing in the data centre. This is partially why IBM is pursuing hybrid cloud. The firm, Bruyère explains, doesn’t consider the public cloud alone to be a viable long-term solution for helping its customers modernise. “It cannot be only a purely public cloud transformation,” she says. “It does not meet the companies’ reality in terms of security, compliance, business model, whatever, and really the best way to respond to companies’ challenges is a hybrid cloud strategy.”

The foundational step on this path was IBM’s record $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, with the open-source giant brought in to bolster the company’s technology portfolio. Playing a key role in driving this deal forward was Arvind Krishna, who at the time was VP for hybrid cloud but was named CEO in April 2020. His promotion coincided with the recruitment of Bank of America veteran Howard Boville as his replacement. Since then, Bruyère tells IT Pro, IBM has adopted much-needed “clarity” on its hybrid cloud strategy, with the business taking more aggressive steps since.

The pair have played a key role in making a set of strategic acquisitions while paving the way for the divestiture of its entire managed services business. This follows a long history of divestments, Krishna recently commented, with IBM divesting networking in the 90s, PCs back in the 2000s and semiconductors about five years ago.

“We want to make sure we are focusing our investment in this space, and we really want to do it only in this space – hybrid cloud and AI,” Bruyère says. “Another new aspect is about the industrial offerings with the new management, and this is really important because it’s not only about building technical capabilities, but also bringing the regulation layer; the specifics for every industry.” 

The key difference since the leadership reshuffle is a strategic focus on the logistics around hybrid cloud, rather than the technology. The company has made efforts to apply its technology to the needs and requirements of particular industries, taking into account unique security, data protection and regulatory requirements, among other considerations. This was signalled with the launch of IBM Cloud for Financial Services, with specific sector-based services set to follow. 

IBM’s cloud computing ‘shopping spree’ 

The changed approach has also been expressed in the nature of IBM’s ten acquisitions since the Red Hat deal closed in 2019, one of the most recent being Taos Mountain, a cloud consultancy firm. IBM is hoping the services of each business, largely small enterprises, can give its wider cloud offering an added edge. 

Reflecting Bruyère’s assessment of IBM’s new strategic direction, Lowery highlights the importance of professional services in making cloud adoption work as the reason the company has focused on acquiring consultancies. Of course, of the ten, five are involved in consultancy. “The expertise about how to build in the cloud, how to build across clouds, how to build from cloud to your on-premises data centre – which is hybrid – most of that requires skills and expertise that are not readily available for hire, except through a professional services company,” he says. 

Red Hat, meanwhile, fits into the equation perfectly thanks to its technology for containers and container orchestration, as well as its OpenShift family of software products. “That technology is well-suited to building hybrid and multi-cloud solutions where you have one standard way for building applications,” Lowery adds. “It’s not the only way to solve hybrid and multi-cloud scenarios, but it is a valid way, and Red Hat brings IBM the technology to solve that particular set of problems in that way.” 

The rocky road to cloud success

Although the opportunity for IBM is undeniable, so too is the need for urgency. While the size of the cloud market has certainly grown in recent years, the grip of the biggest cloud companies has also tightened; as time passes it becomes increasingly difficult for a challenger to make serious inroads. 

Looking at how prospective customers plan to spend in the coming year, we can also see that IBM faces more of an uphill struggle for business than any other player in this space. 

Turning the tide commercially will be IBM’s most pressing challenge, although we can start to see these efforts pay off with a turnaround in IBM’s financial results for the first quarter of 2021. As far as Murray is concerned, the company is certainly on the right track with the actions it’s taking, especially the decision to spin off its managed services business into an entity named Kyndryl.

“It allows IBM to become much more nimble and responsive,” he explains, “increasing its relevance in a multi-cloud, hybrid world, and reducing competition with the largest systems integrators that will be critical partners for its hybrid cloud and AI offerings. The most important move it has made recently is establishing a new, simplified global sales structure and go-to-market model, giving partners ownership of all but its largest enterprise customers and removing compensation for IBM sales selling into any other accounts.”

Success will very much depend on IBM’s commitment to its new ecosystem and channel model, with a need to reduce complexity and refresh its rules of engagement, he adds. “In the past, IBM has made similar promises but failed to follow through. It now has an opportunity to establish itself as a vendor of partner choice.”

In the 80s and 90s, tobacco sponsorships were as synonymous with Formula 1 as Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’ – and, it’s a testament to the power of advertising that many of the sports most famous cars and drivers can still conjure the memory of a certain brand of cigarette.  

The Williams Renault driven by Damon Hill in 1996 won the Championship, and a mental image of the winning car will show a giant ‘Rothman’s’ logo. Four years earlier, Nigel Mansell did the same but his Williams car is as famous for its great big yellow advert for ‘Camel’. 

In 2006, when motorsport’s governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), brought in a sport-wide ban on tobacco advertising, nine of the ten Formula 1 (F1) teams had some form of cigarette logo on their cars. However, over the last 15-years, this advertising space has been largely taken over by technology firms.

For the 2021 season, there are logos for at least two technology companies on each car; Oracle is the proud sponsor of the RedBull team, the UK’s Darktrace has a prominent spot on the McLaren’s spoiler, Kaspersky is right at the front of the Ferrari and chipmaker AMD can be seen on closeups of Lewis Hamalton in the Mercedes. 

NetApp has also partnered with the UK’s Aston Martin team, which is back in F1 after an almost 60-year absence. The firm is providing cloud services to help collect, store and process data from the car, but it’s also a chance to promote NetApp in Britain. The company’s UK director, Chris Greenwood, tells IT Pro that the deal was a great opportunity for the firm to be linked with a British company, pointing out that the NetApp logo appears next to a Union Jack at the front of the car. A space that would not so long ago have been dominated by tobacco brands.

Up in smoke

The influence of tobacco in Formula 1 can be traced back to 1974 with Marlboro’s first partnership with McLaren. The famous brand of cigarette, which is owned by Philip Morris International, is perhaps more well known for its lucrative collaboration with Ferrari, which has arguably produced the sport’s most iconic cars. However, the tobacco industry as a whole was heavily invested in F1 from the mid-80s and lingered well beyond the millennium. But its involvement in sport, in general, goes back hundreds of years, according to sports advertising expert Tim Crow.

“When sport got organised and got big back in the 20s and 30s of the 20th century, you’ll find a lot of tobacco advertising and sponsorship happening then,” Crow points out. “But obviously TV cameras moved in in the 50s and 60s, and at the same time, the legislators were starting to outlaw cigarette advertising on television. So they needed to find another way to do advertising and get onto TV and sport represented a very good way. 

“Professional sport was still growing, still learning the ropes. And big tobacco came along and offered big checks, and sport took them. So it was that combination of sport getting big and getting the TV cameras in, and tobacco companies having to find a new way of getting onto TV without being able to use TV advertising.” 

In the case of Formula 1, cigarette branding almost covered every available space, from cars to drivers’ suits to massive billboards above the race tracks. Its impact was so great that it was still being felt decades later with the 2013 movie Rush, which tells the story of James Hunt’s rivalry with Niki Lauda. Hunt’s 1976 McLaren carries the Marlboro logo and its repeated use in the film forced the British Board of Film Classification to rate it ‘12A’. 

Value in Kind

Modern Formula 1 cars are virtually IoT ecosystems with nearly all components connected and fitted with sensors. Swaths of IT professionals are at the roadside and even further afield, monitoring and analysing continuous streams of data about every facet of performance. Everything from the tread of the tyres to the health of the driver is translated back to the team with various forms of cloud software used to inform race strategy and even predict car failure. 

They’re by no means the most lucrative sports sponsorship deals, but unlike the tobacco companies, tech firms are providing more than just hefty fees. They offer ‘value in kind’ deals ,where F1’s sprawling mass of engineers and analysts can access some of the most advanced hardware and software in the world. 

For example, Darktrace isn’t improving the McLaren car, as such, but it is protecting its data and the IT teams that analyse and share it. Likewise, Oracle has supplied cloud infrastructure to the RedBull team and Mercedes uses HPE’s edge computing services. Simply put, the modern version of F1 couldn’t function without the cloud and analytics, and it has been that way for a number of years. It’s this context that makes F1 a great place for technology sponsorships, Crow suggests.

“So they give the team’s stuff that the teams need to go racing,” Crow explains. “And instead of having to pay cash to do that, they give the teams their people and their knowledge and their expertise and their time and their services to do what is called ‘value in kind’ deals.”

“These are a big feature of sport, particularly, for example, in the Olympics where 60% of the value of total Olympic sponsorship is value in kind deals by B2B companies, who provide the Olympics with a whole range of products and services that the Olympics could not do without in order to put the show on.”

Similarly, the organisers of F1 also have deals with large tech companies. AWS has been a collaborator for the last few years, providing cloud and data analytics services as well as statistical platforms for use in TV broadcasting. A lot of the information that the drivers and teams have is also fed through to the live stream of the race. So you at home know more about the state of the car than which cigarette brand formerly paid for it.