Facebook’s enterprise communications platform, Workplace, now has seven million paid subscribers, representing a 40% increase year-on-year.

Launched in 2016, Workplace has traditionally been one of Facebook’s lowest-earning business units, often counted alongside the likes of Oculus and Portal under the «other» section of its financial results.

However, its steady growth and brand association has helped it secure some high profile customers, including the likes of Spotify and Starbucks – although it still lags behind market rivals Slack and Microsoft Teams.

«We built Workplace as an internal version of Facebook to run our own company, and it was so useful we started letting other organisations use it too, including everyone from Spotify to Starbucks to the World Health Organisation,» CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Tuesday. «More companies are starting to use our virtual reality tools for work as well, and I’m excited to build more new ways for people to work together that weren’t possible before.»

Microsoft Teams revealed last month that it has surpassed 145 million daily active users – a yearly increase of 93%. Slack no longer reveals user numbers but, as of September 2019, the company recorded 12 million daily active users, almost double that of Facebook’s Workplace.

As it looks to continue increasing users, Workplace has also announced a few new features, such as a live Q&A function and an integration with Microsoft 365 and Google G Suite’s calendar. There are also ‘diversity-focused’ updates, such as emojis with different skin tones and a service that allows users to show their colleagues the correct way to pronounce their name.

The feature offers both audio pronunciation and phonetic spellings.

This article originally appeared in the March edition of IT Pro 20/20, available here. To sign up to receive each new issue in your inbox, click here.

The COVID pandemic has forced a radical shift in the way we work. Since March 2020, when the government first advised that everyone should “start working from home where they possibly can”, businesses have been forced to ditch traditional workplaces and transition to a remote-first way of working.

While the shift was undoubtedly frantic and stressful for many organisations, particularly those that previously required employees to endure long commutes and overpriced lunches five days a week, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the pandemic has broken through cultural and technological barriers that prevented remote work in the past. As a result, many companies are now figuring out that working remotely is the future of work, public health crisis or not.

While it’s likely that hybrid work – a mix of remote and office-based working – will become the norm for the majority of once-office based employees, some companies are ditching the office for good. Twitter, for example, has told employees that they can continue to work from home indefinitely and Microsoft, though initially wary of home-based working, has also given its staff the option to ditch the commute for good.

Dropbox 

Another big name embracing remote working is Dropbox, which recently announced it’s becoming a “virtual-first” company. Not only will working from home become the norm for employees, but the remote experience will go one step further with “non-linear workdays”, meaning core collaboration hours will be set up with overlap between time zones, with employees encouraged to design their own schedules beyond that.

Andy Wilson, director of new products initiatives at Dropbox, tells IT Pro that the company is already reaping the benefits of a virtual-first approach – and not just because its San Francisco headquarters recently sold for a record-breaking $1.08 billion (£777 million).

“Over the year, we’ve seen the obvious benefits of a virtual first approach. We’ve been able to live out our product truths; being a distributed team, building for distributed teams,” says Wilson. “Our employees have had more control over how they work, and as we move out of lockdown, they’re going to have more flexibility in terms of where they can work.

“While shifting to a virtual-first model, we must provide the right tools to enable our employees to collaborate as effectively as possible. Video calls are key, but other tools are important to get work done. By using our own tools such as Paper and Spaces, the teams were already working together asynchronously across the globe – it quickly became normal for us to collaborate on projects across time zones.

“We’ve also been adopting popular applications, such as Slack, to create a more effective and productive virtual way of working. For example, we recently moved our IT support to work across Slack – this has improved response times and allowed team members to gain instant support wherever they are.

“As we build teams from around the world, our ability to brainstorm in co-authoring tools like Paper means that teams can hand off work, or ideas, to others in different time zones to pick up. It’s something that we’ve seen our customers pioneer as they move projects and content across time zones to speed up delivery.”

Panaseer

It’s not just big name technology companies that are leading the charge. Panaseer, a continuous controls monitoring platform for enterprise cyber security, has also recognised that, after a year of successful remote working, it has become a viable long-term solution.

Sophie Harrison, chief of staff at Panaseer, tells IT Pro: “We closed both our London and New York offices during the lockdown, to test a new remote working model. Our leadership team managed the communications, as we recognised this was a fundamental shift in working practices. We implemented a number of tactics to ensure our team were engaged in both the decision and new working model, including running weekly surveys and developing a cross-functional ‘winning from home’ group to garner feedback.

“We have developed collaborative initiatives to ensure our employees feel supported and still part of a team. This includes a monthly productivity allowance for all employees to assist with running home office costs, an Amazon voucher to ‘pimp’ the home office and passes to use co-working  spaces. Our social team has run games nights, group activities and weekly HIIT classes.”

These initiatives have received an overwhelmingly positive response from Panaseer’s employees, Harrison says, which is why the company now plans to implement remote working on a permanent basis.

“We are committed to maintaining our culture and values virtually, and we are constantly measuring our team’s satisfaction. Our leadership team has set an example by communicating more appropriate flexible working guidelines and offering better remote meeting and internal comms practices.”

HomeHero

HomeHero, an AI-powered digital home manager that helps users to run all of their services from one platform, also has no plans to return to the office.

Internal employee research at the start of the pandemic found that a significant majority of HomeHero’s team supported a permanent shift to remote working. While flexible and remote working has always been a part of the culture at HomeHero, the business is now a remote first organisation, with no plans to return to the office.

Kenny Alegbe, founder and CEO, HomeHero, said: “We’ve had nothing but positivity from our team about the move to being a remote first business. I hold weekly company wide updates to keep the team informed and connected and we have a ‘bunker’ in Central London, that the team can use for workshops and brainstorms whenever they want (and restrictions allow).

“We have found that not only has remote working boosted morale and productivity, it has also facilitated a fantastic work life balance for our colleagues.”

The business uses Slack, Notion and Google Hangouts as part of its day to day business tools and also supports team members in funding remote office spaces near to their home, as well as kitting out personal offices too. The team is also keen to keep that Friday feeling with a variety of social events being hosted on Google Hangout, including sunset drinks in Mykonos, wine tasting in Provence, film club and a cocktail masterclass.

“The people at HomeHero are driving this business to be a success and I want to give them whatever they need to continue on this trajectory,” Alegbe added. “I have listened to the team and we are now a remote first organisation and we will continue to evolve our ways of working to ensure they work best for the team.”

34SP 

Similarly, Manchester-based WordPress web hosting company 34SP has been so impressed by the results it saw from staff working remotely, it has decided to shift to this way of working on a full-time basis.

Stuart Melling, business development director at 34SP, tells IT Pro: “Before COVID-19 hit, we routinely offered WFH as a staff perk. This meant that one day every week, an employee could choose to work from their home, or indeed any remote location.  This meant we were particularly prepared from a tech stand point (Slack, Zoom, VoIP, VPNs etc), and with the start of the pandemic we naturally sent everyone to work from home, and indeed, they remain there today.

“Everyone was a little apprehensive about what the change would mean in terms of productivity but what we found really surprised us. In all areas of the company, things have materially changed for the better. In our customer service department we’ve set a series of records in terms of quality – as rated by our own clients.

“As 2020 started to come to an end, we were so impressed by the results, we announced the change would become permanent in 2021. Some of our staff have decided to relocate around the country, and indeed, internationally given the flexibility afforded. Everyone’s fairly thrilled about the change, and as business owners, we are too.

“I can’t imagine why we’d force people to return just for the sake of it.  I keep reading that some have struggled with knowledge sharing, mentorship, creativity etc, but for us, we’ve just re-imagined new ways to undertake all those tasks and improve on them.”

Microsoft has launched an open source tool to help developers assess the security of their machine learning systems.

The Counterfit project, now available on GitHub, comprises a command-line tool and generic automation layer to allow developers to simulate cyber attacks against AI systems.

Microsoft’s red team have used Counterfit to test its own AI models, while the wider company is also exploring using the tool in AI development.

Anyone can download the tool and deploy it through Azure Shell, to run in-browser, or locally in an Anaconda Python environment.

It can assess AI models hosted in various cloud environments, on-premises, or in the edge. Microsoft also promoted its flexibility by highlighting the fact that it’s agnostic to AI models and also supports a variety of data types, including text, images, or generic input.

“Our tool makes published attack algorithms accessible to the security community and helps to provide an extensible interface from which to build, manage, and launch attacks on AI models,” Microsoft said.

“This tool is part of broader efforts at Microsoft to empower engineers to securely develop and deploy AI systems.”

The three key ways that security professionals can deploy Counterfit is by pen testing and red teaming AI systems, scanning AI systems for vulnerabilities, and logging attacks against AI models.

The tool comes preloaded with attack algorithms, while security professionals can also use the built-in cmd2 scripting engine to hook into Counterfit from existing offensive tools for testing purposes.

Optionally, businesses can scan AI systems with relevant attacks any number of times to create baselines, with continuous runs as vulnerabilities are addressed, helping to measure ongoing progress.

Microsoft developed the tool out of a need to assess its own systems for vulnerabilities. Counterfit began life as a handful of attack scripts written to target individual AI models, and gradually evolved into an automation tool to attack multiple systems at scale.

The company claims it’s engaged with a variety of its partners, customers, and government entities in testing the tool against machine learning models in their own environments.

Discord has signed a partnership and investment deal with Sony, in a move that likely puts to bed any rumours surrounding a potential takeover of the chat platform by Microsoft.

The amount given by Sony has not been disclosed but it is thought to be a small fee that came within Discord’s latest round of funding, which is thought to have raised $100 million, according to TechCrunch.

Sony’s partnership will involve integration with PlayStation as the two companies plan to «bring the Discord and PlayStation experiences closer together on console and mobile starting early next year», according to Sony.

In March, Discord was reportedly exploring a potential sale, with Microsoft being the most likely suitor for a deal worth around $10 billion. However, talks between the two firms reportedly ended soon after, with Discord deciding to go down the route of becoming a listed company instead.

Microsoft’s plans for the chat app were unclear, but it was speculated that the tech giant would integrate the service with Xbox and maybe even use data from its growing pool of users to inform other Microsoft services.

The communications platform found success among gamers as a voice chat app, but it has since found more varied use cases during the pandemic. While Epic Games were also said to be in talks with Discord, non-gaming entities, such as Twitter and Amazon, were also rumoured to be interested.

Sony’s partnership will involve integration with PlayStation as the two companies plan to «bring the Discord and PlayStation experiences closer together on console and mobile starting early next year», according to Sony.

Microsoft has been on a spending spree of late, including the recent acquisition of AI firm Nuance Communications for $19.7 billion and game maker Zenimax for $7.5 billion.

It was also rumoured to be interested in Pinterest and opened talks to buy Chinese social media firm TikTok last year, but ultimately lost out to Oracle. That deal, however, has been put on hold by the US government.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) revenues grew 32% in the first quarter of the year, as greater demand for cloud computing continued into 2021.

The cloud computing arm of Amazon brought in $13.5 billion between January and March, jumping from $12.75 billion in the final quarter of 2020.

AWS has long maintained its position as the world’s largest cloud provider and is often Amazon’s most reliable source of income, contributing billions to its overall profits every quarter. Its success is part of the reason that its CEO, Andy Jassy, is set to replace Jeff Bezos at the end of Q2.

In a statement, Bezos referred to AWS as Amazon’s 15-year old child that had «grown-up fast» and come into its own.

«In just 15 years, AWS has become a $54 billion annual sales run rate business competing against the world’s largest technology companies, and its growth is accelerating – up 32% year over year,» Bezos said.

«Companies from Airbnb to McDonald’s to Volkswagen come to AWS because we offer what is by far the broadest set of tools and services available, and we continue to invent relentlessly on their behalf. We love AWS, and we’re proud to have them in the family.»

Microsoft also recorded increased revenues for 2021 Q1, with a third consecutive quarter of 50% growth. However, the Redmond firm still only accounts for 19% of the overall cloud market, compared to 32% taken up by AWS.

Cloud emerged as a winner across all sectors over the last year, according to Canalys research analyst Blake Murray. As such, organisations have become dependent on digital services to maintain operations and adapt.

«Though 2020 saw large-scale cloud infrastructure spending, most enterprise workloads have not yet transitioned to the cloud,» said Murray. «Migration and cloud spend will continue as customer confidence rises during 2021. Large projects that were postponed last year will resurface, while new use cases will expand the addressable market.»

IBM has announced plans to acquire Turbonomic, a network and application performance management software provider, for an undisclosed amount.

With the acquisition, which is expected to finalised in the second quarter of 2021, IBM aims to help its customers lower the costs of managing multiple applications within the same hybrid cloud environment.

The announcement follows IBM’s recent acquisition of Instana, as well as the launch of IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, which automates IT operations with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).

Turbonomic, which was founded in 2008 as VMTurbo, is to provide IBM with unique AI-powered automation tools capable of running on Red Hat OpenShift and across any hybrid cloud environment.

Commenting on the acquisition of Turbonomic, IBM general manager Dinesh Nirmal said that the company believes “that AI-powered automation has become inevitable, helping to make all information-centric jobs more productive”.

“That’s why IBM continues to invest in providing our customers with a one-stop-shop of AI-powered automation capabilities that spans business processes and IT. The addition of Turbonomic now takes our portfolio another major step forward by ensuring customers will have full visibility into what is going on throughout their hybrid cloud infrastructure, and across their entire enterprise,” he added.

The announcement comes just days after IBM unveiled a set of improvements to its storage portfolio designed to give its customers greater access to and management of their data across their complex hybrid cloud environments. The company previously added AI-powered automation and data management to its Cloud Pak for Data and Cloud Pak for Automation platforms, following its October 2020 decision to focus entirely on its AI capabilities and the hybrid cloud.

IBM Cloud and Data Platform senior VP Rob Thomas said that the tech giant “continues to reshape its future as a hybrid cloud and AI company”, adding that the acquisition of Turbonomic is “yet another example” of IBM’s “commitment to making the most impactful investments to advance this strategy and ensure customers find the most innovative ways to fuel their digital transformations”.

Commenting on the news, Turbonomic CEO Ben Nye said that “the combination of IBM and Turbonomic will continuously assure target application response times even during peak demand”.

IBM stated that the transaction with Turbonomic is “subject to customary closing conditions”.

A US Federal Claims judge has refused a request from Microsoft and the US Department of Justice to dismiss Amazon’s claims that the Trump administration interfered with the bidding process for the Pentagon’s JEDI contract.

Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith decision on Wednesday paves the way for further review of a lawsuit filed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2019, which has maintained that the deal to provide cloud services was unfairly awarded to Microsoft.

The cloud giant claimed that the bidding for the $10 billion Joint Enterprise and Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud migration contract was flawed and that the then president, Donald Trump, had used his position to influence the final decision.

«The record of improper influence by former President Trump is disturbing, and we are pleased the Court will review the remarkable impact it had on the JEDI contract award,» an AWS spokesperson said. «We continue to look forward to the Court’s review of the many material flaws in the DoD’s evaluation.»

The claims against Trump have been widely reported but, until now, haven’t been considered in a legal setting. According to a book written by Guy Snodgrass, ‘Holding The Line‘, former Pentagon secretary James Mattis claimed that the president directed him to «screw Amazon» out of a chance to bid on the JEDI contract.

In response to the decision to reject its motion, Microsoft said that it «changes little» and that professional procurement staff at the DoD chose the tech giant after a thorough review.

«We’ve continued for more than a year to do the internal work necessary to move forward on JEDI quickly, and we continue to work with DoD, as we have for more than 40 years, on mission-critical initiatives like supporting its rapid shift to remote work and the Army’s IVAS,» said Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s CVP of communications.

Judge Campbell-Smith had previously ruled that the DoD had «improperly evaluated» a price scenario, stating that part of Microsoft’s bid was not «technically feasible». As a result, the tech giant has not been able to start working on the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI project.

The Department of Defence (DoD) has previously suggested that it would scrap the project entirely if AWS was successful in its legal challenge.

The Walt Disney Company has extended its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as it continues the global rollout of its Disney+ streaming service.

Since it was revealed in 2017, AWS has been heavily involved in the development of Disney+, providing a range of services from data analytics to storage.

The extension will see Disney tapping into more than 50 different AWS services, such as machine learning, content delivery, and serverless computing, as it continues to launch in new regions.

The service has been built on a flexible, secured cloud video infrastructure powered by AWS with the two firms collaborating «closely» to balance loads and handle usage spikes with viewing peaking during premium content like The Mandalorian and the WandaVision. When it launched in November 2019, there were more than 10 million new sign-ups within the first 24-hours.

«Disney+ has completely reinvented what’s possible in content delivery by challenging convention and using cloud technology to build a streaming product from scratch that had never been launched and marketed before on such a global scale,» said Joe Inzerillo, the executive vice president and CTO, direct-to-consumer, of the Walt Disney Company. 

«AWS has been our preferred cloud provider for years, and its proven global infrastructure and expansive suite of services has contributed meaningfully to the incredible success of Disney+.»

Amazon Kinesis, which is a data analytics platform, and Amazon DynamoDB, a database that helps manage metadata and enables content to be watched on different devices, have both been extensively used by Disney to create and deploy Disney+. The company also uses Amazon Timestream to monitor the streaming platform and ensure that users continue to have access to the highest quality video content.

With the assistance of AWS, the Walt Disney Company has been able to rapidly expand Disney+ to 59 countries across North America, Europe, Asia and South America and there are plans to continue pushing its service around the world.

Red Hat has launched an advanced tier of its OpenShift container application platform, with added tools designed to offer a complete Kubernetes stack out-of-the-box. This is in addition to launching three new managed cloud services. 

Red Hat’s OpenShift Kubernetes Engine is the foundational layer of OpenShift, allowing customers to run containers across hybrid cloud deployments on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) OS. The OpenShift Container Platform adds developer and operations services, as well as advanced features for app development and modernisation. 

The tertiary tier, OpenShift Platform Plus, builds on the OpenShift Container Platform to provide advanced security features, ‘day two’ management capabilities and a global container registry. It brings together all the aspects needed to build, deploy and run any application where OpenShift software runs, Red Hat claims.

Its launch has come alongside a set of managed cloud services tightly integrated with the Red Hat OpenShift platform to help organisations build, deploy and manage cloud-native apps across hybrid configurations. 

Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka, Red Hat OpenShift Data Science and OpenShift API Management are being launched to ease the complexities of modern IT environments, while not compromising on productivity. 

OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka is designed to make it easier for customers to create, discover and connect to real-time data streams regardless of where they’re based.

OpenShift Data Science also offers organisations a way to develop, train and test machine learning models and export in a container-ready format.

OpenShift API management, meanwhile, reduces the operational cost of delivering API-first, microservices-based apps.

“To take full advantage of the open hybrid cloud, IT leaders need to be able to use the technologies that they need in whatever IT footprint makes sense for them,” said Red Hat’s executive vice president for products and technologies, Matt Hicks, at Red Hat Summit 2021. 

“Red Hat managed cloud services effectively drops many barriers that have kept organisations from harnessing the full potential of the hybrid cloud. We believe eliminating the traditional overhead of managing cloud-scale infrastructure will spark a genesis moment for customers and open up a future of possibility where those barriers once stood.”

Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus adds Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, a standalone product developed from the firm’s recent acquisition of StackRox. This offers built-in Kubernetes-native security tools to safeguard infrastructure and management workloads through an app’s development cycle. This is in addition to Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes and Red Hat Quay. The former brings end-to-end visibility and control of clusters, while the latter provides a secure registry for a consistent build pipeline.

“We believe this version addresses the need for a hybrid cloud solution that we hear from our customers, and we’ll be working lead with customer-managed OpenShift across data centre, public and private cloud,” said senior vice president for cloud platforms at Red Hat, Ashesh Badani.

“This version also becomes a landing point for additional capabilities, and we have worked hard to reduce costs compared to purchasing any of these capabilities a la carte, and we will continue to offer all three versions so customers can best decide what’s appropriate for their use case, and subscribe to the best available version.”

One of the key appeals is it grants businesses system-level data collection and analysis, as well as more than 60 security policies out-of-the-box that can be enforced from the time apps are built to when they’re deployed. 

RedHat OpenShift Platform Plus also lets organisations take a DevSecOps approach to security by integrating declarative security into developer tooling and workflows.

The three managed services, being launched in the coming months, build on Red Hat’s existing suite of OpenShift apps, allowing customers and partners to build an open Kubernetes-based hybrid cloud strategy.

Based on the open source Apache Kafka project, OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka allows dev teams to more easily incorporate streaming data into their apps. Real-time data is critical to these apps, and provide more immediate digital experiences wherever a service is delivered.

OpenShift Data Science builds on Red Hat’s Open Data Hub project and provides faster development, training and testing of machine learning models without the expected infrastructure demands. 

Finally, the OpenShift API Management managed cloud service offers full API management to Red Hat Oepnshift Dedicated, as well as OpenShift on AWS. This combines managed operations with native OpenShift integration to let organisations focus on the innovation side of things as opposed to the infrastructure. 

Red Hat OpenShift API Management also enables customers to build their own API management program, with the capabilities to control access, monitor usage, share common APIs and evolve their overall application landscape through a single DevOps pipeline.

Google and Microsoft reported surging profits on Tuesday as the two tech giants continued to capitalise on the COVID pandemic.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, posted first-quarter revenues of $55.31 billion, an increase of 34% year-on-year, and profits more than doubled to $17.93 billion, marking the third consecutive quarter of record profit for the company.

Similarly, Microsoft reported that revenues increased by 19% to $41.7 billion for the fiscal third quarter, its biggest quarterly increase since 2018, while profits soared by 44% to $15.5 billion.

Google’s first-quarter growth was largely fuelled by its advertising business, which brought in $44.68 billion during the first three months of 2021 – a 32% increase compared to Q1 2020.

Google Cloud also reported impressive gains during the three-month period, although it continues to make a loss for Alphabet. The division reported $4.02 billion in revenue and had an operating loss of $974 million in Q1, compared to $3.83 billion in revenue and $1.24 billion in operating losses during Q4 2020, the first time Google broke out its cloud business’ performance separately.

Meanwhile, Alphabet’s «other bets», which include Verily and Waymo, reported revenue of $198 million and an operating loss of $1.15 billion.

“Over the last year, people have turned to Google Search and many online services to stay informed, connected and entertained. We’ve continued our focus on delivering trusted services to help people around the world. Our Cloud services are helping businesses, big and small, accelerate their digital transformations,» said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet.

Cloud remained Microsoft’s biggest driver during its fiscal third quarter, ending in March 2021. Sales of commercial cloud products generated $17.7 billion in revenue, up 33% from a year earlier, and Azure revenues soared 50% during the three-month period. Commercial Office 365 products were also up 22% for the quarter as corporate customers continued to embrace cloud-based tools as a result of the shift to mass remote working.

“Over a year into the pandemic, digital adoption curves aren’t slowing down. They’re accelerating, and it’s just the beginning,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “We are building the cloud for the next decade, expanding our addressable market and innovating across every layer of the tech stack to help our customers be resilient and transform.”

Microsoft’s Personal Computing business also saw growth of 19% year-on-year, thanks to a 10% increase in Windows OEM revenue, a 10% year-over-year increase in Windows commercial products and cloud services revenue, and a 35% jump in Xbox and gaming revenue.