BT has rolled out Facebook Workplace to enable enterprise-wide internal communications for 80,000 employees, as businesses put emphasis on new ways of interaction due to lockdown restrictions.

The telecoms giant told IT Pro that it previously used various social networking platforms, including Microsoft’s Yammer, before deciding to unify and simplify its communications channels. It started the deployment of Workplace in July 2019.

Facebook Workplace, which was launched in 2016, now connects 80% of BT employees through chats, Groups, and video across all parts of the organisation in 54 countries.

The B2B communications platform is being used to connect BT employees, including external employees at Openreach and engineers, enabling them to stay informed while working in the field. 

BT’s director of Internal Communications Helen Willett said that “Workplace was a simple choice for BT”, describing it as “mobile-friendly, easy to use and intuitive”.

“But more than that, it’s culture-enhancing. Leaders can talk to their teams in a matter of seconds and the peer-to-peer benefits include enabling a sense of belonging, instant access to news and a way to solve problems collaboratively.

«Perhaps most importantly, having Workplace has made it so much easier for us to stick to our principle of ‘inside out’ – letting our colleagues know what’s happening, increasing trust and, in turn, advocacy. Sometimes we have a matter of minutes to reach our people – Workplace allows us to do that, and to do it well,” she added.

So far, BT has seen an avalanche of involvement from its employees, with three million reactions and a further 970,000 comments on Workplace.

BT CEO Philip Jansen said that the platform is allowing the company to aim for a “fast-paced, inclusive and empowering” future. 

“We’ve seen many benefits including being able to share news instantly, gather feedback on subjects that our people care about, and enabling more authentic leadership communications,” he said, adding that the platform has also “strengthened” the company’s communities across BT and Openreach.

“Through Workplace, colleagues connect with each other on the things that matter, sharing ideas and problem-solving together in real time. That is hugely beneficial to our colleagues and customers, and therefore to BT as a whole.»

Microsoft has pledged to ‘re-invent’ customer relationship management (CRM) software after partnering with Adobe and enterprise AI company c3.ai to launch a new platform to take on the market dominance of Salesforce. 

C3 AI CRM is powered by the core functionality of Dynamics 365 and is combined with Adobe’s real-time customer profiles and journey management, as well as c3.ai’s industry-specific AI capabilities. 

The AI-driven CRM platform is purpose-built for specific industries and uses data from any source to produce meaningful business insights. The collective claims that conventional CRM is not sufficient for the modern age, given that AI can’t be used to analyse much of the data because they weren’t built with the appropriate architectures.

The three-way partnership represents a major challenge to Salesforce, which enjoys dominance in the CRM segment, and follows reports last week that Microsoft was making CRM a “priority”. SAP and Oracle are also big players in the CRM space, with Adobe and Microsoft following the pack with conventionally only a fraction of the market share.

“C3.ai, Microsoft, and Adobe bring together the perfect combination of technology, industry, and domain expertise to address the requirements for a new generation of CRM,” said c3.ai CEO Ed Abbo.

“Importantly, in addition to this combination of leading technologies and expertise, we share a common vision with our partners of an AI-first, industry-specific approach to delivering a new generation of AI CRM solutions.”

The announcement builds on a pre-existing partnership between the enterprise AI firm and Microsoft, with c3.ai also contributing its technology to Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams earlier this year.

The three companies claim that C3 AI CRM will allow clients to better anticipate their customers’ needs and deliver more satisfying and personalised user journeys. The level of intelligence brought on by AI functionality, for example, could allow for more accurate forecasts, for example. Massive amounts of data can also be analysed to augment human agents or trigger automated processes in the CRM platform.

Microsoft claims that its technology has an expansive and unmatched footprint, combining Dynamics 365 business applications with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Microsoft Power Platform, powered by Azure. Microsoft hopes that when combined with Adobe’s speciality in the digital customer experience, and the AI capabilities of c3.ai, the combined system will offer customers a powerful alternative to the biggest players. 

Zoom has started rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to both free and paying users. 

E2EE is now available in technical preview on the Zoom desktop client version for macOS and Windows, the Zoom Android app and Zoom Rooms, with the Zoom iOS app currently pending App Store approval. 

Zoom’s E2EE uses the same 256-bit AES-GCM encryption that secures Zoom meetings by default. Account administrators can enable the feature in the web dashboard at an account, group, and user level, and participants must also enable the feature to join a meeting with end-to-end encryption.

When E2EE is enabled, nobody except each participant – not even Zoom’s meeting servers – has access to the encryption keys that are used to secure the meeting.

However, the company has warned that at least in the first stage of the four-phase rollout, E2EE will block certain Zoom functions, including cloud recording, streaming, live transcription, Breakout Rooms, polling, 1:1 private chat, and meeting reactions.

“End-to-end encryption is another stride toward making Zoom the most secure communications platform in the world,” said Zoom CEO Eric S. Yuan.

“This phase of our E2EE offering provides the same security as existing end-to-end-encrypted messaging platforms, but with the video quality and scale that has made Zoom the communications solution of choice for hundreds of millions of people and the world’s largest enterprises.”

Phase 2 of the E2EE rollout is «tentatively roadmapped» for 2021, according to Zoom. 

The rollout of end-to-end encryption comes five months after Zoom initially announced plans to add support for the security standard. However, at the time it said it would only be available for businesses and institutions that pay for a premium Zoom subscription. Following backlash from users and privacy activists, Zoom backtracked two week’s later and announced that it would make E2EE available to both free and paying users. 

Software giant SAP saw its market valuation drop by €25 billion (£27.8bn) after it announced plans to go «all-in» on cloud computing during its third-quarter earnings call. 

The German firm is on track for its worst trading day in 12 years, according to CNBC, after slashing its revenue forecast for 2020.

Fearing that lockdown restrictions would affect demand for its business relations and customer management software into 2021, the tech giant has announced plans to go «all-in» on cloud computing. The announcement means that SAP is abandoning medium-term profitability targets which could take longer than expected to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

«As the CEO of SAP, I have to be focused on the long-term value creation of this company,» SAP CEO Christian Klein told CNBC‘s «Squawk Box Europe» on Monday. «So I cannot trade the success of our customers and the significant revenue potential of SAP against short-term margin optimisation.»

Investors reacted badly to the announcement, dumping shares and wiping €25 million off SAP’s market value. However, some will point to a year of turmoil following the exit of long-term CEO Bill McDermott and the less than successful ‘tandem’ leadership that ended in April when Klein became the company’s sole CEO. 

At that point, with the coronavirus pandemic starting to hit global operations, SAP had focused on medium-term «ambition» which was favoured by McDermott on the estimates that it would lead to profit margins growing by at least a percentage point up to 2023. 

The change, however, effectively means that profit margins will stagnate over the next three years. But cloud revenue, from subscription-based services, is now expected to triple to €22 billion by 2025. As such, total adjusted revenue is being forecast at €36 billion with an operating profit of €11.5 billion.

Oracle has launched its next-gen dual-region government cloud for use by UK public sector organisations and their partners, including a host of cloud-based services such as Oracle Cloud VMWare and Kubernetes.

The dual-region infrastructure, comprising two separate sites in London and Wales connected by Oracle Cloud’s high-speed network backbone, will allow public sector bodies to deploy cloud services in multiple regions with ease. 

Bodies can use Oracle’s infrastructure to deploy not just disaster recovery services, but cloud hosting and storage of data from within the region.

The company’s partnership with the public sector has expanded in recent times to service organisations such as the Home Office and NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA), and local government organisations. 

The private dual-region cloud will also allow public sector customers to take up additional services, including Oracle Autonomous Database, Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and Oracle OCI services, as well as Oracle Fusion Cloud applications. 

«We’ve had a Government Cloud Region in the UK for several years, but today’s announcement really unlocks a completely new potential for all of our customers across the UK to take advantage of Oracle’s second-generation Cloud,» said Richard Petley, senior vice president with Oracle UK and Israel.

«This is a completely unique offering to the UK government – no other cloud provider offers the sovereignty and performance we are announcing today. We’ll be working with all aspects of government – both local and central – to help them understand how they make use of the cloud to deliver better services and value to the UK taxpayer.»

The platform has been designed in collaboration with several UK government and national defence organisations, and adheres to the security requirements set out by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Oracle claims. This allows various organisations to handle and transmit sensitive information through the private cloud network.

The company’s second-gen cloud is built specifically to help large organisations and enterprises run the most demanding workloads in a secure way and is built to run autonomous services. These include Oracle Autonomous Linux and oracle Autonomous Database.

The increasing complexity of enterprise cloud environments and the rise of hybrid cloud is rapidly increasing IT workloads and fuelling a rising demand for automation, Puppet’s CTO has claimed.

During a time when many organisations are being asked to do more with less, the shift from mostly on-prem to a mixture of cloud environments in a relatively short space of time has radically complicated the workloads of CIOs. 

Speaking exclusively with CloudPro on the launch of Puppet’s automated Comply platform, Puppet CTO Abby Kearns suggested the increasing complexity of IT infrastructures over as little as the last five years is serving as the main element driving demand for automation.

«The hybrid cloud, and managing across hybrid environments, is the number one driver, honestly, because it’s so complex,» Kearns said. «So many companies started about five years ago to move workloads to the cloud, so we started to see that slow migration, but the cloud wasn’t really set up to mimic the way we were managing on-prem environments.” 

Enterprises now have an on-prem environment, a public cloud deployment or perhaps even multiple clouds, with different tools, different workloads and different approaches all in play. Businesses are also using more cloud-native applications and more microservices, so the landscape for IT standards compliance is becoming far more complex.

Puppet’s Comply automation platform is a system designed to cut out many of the traditionally manual processes IT teams and CIOs would manage when ensuring their hardware meets a range of compliance standards. 

The product, which will be offered in addition to a compliance automation consultancy service the company already markets, would allow customers to manage their own automation programmes across their IT estate.

Alex Hin, Puppet’s principal product manager, told CloudPro the platform will raise IT visibility, identify compliance shortcomings and remediate these issues.

He explained the need for such software comes from small teams of three to five people suddenly being tasked with making configuration changes on hundreds of thousands of nodes, either on-prem or on the public cloud. This becomes a high investment for the company, requiring a lot of spend and a lot of expertise for all environments to move into compliance.

«That’s really where it comes into play,» Kearns continued, «the idea that automation is really the only route to be able to do that. Because this isn’t just something where you can assign more people to the work. You can’t just throw more people at the problem, you’re going to have to figure out how to automate this as you start to get into the hundreds of thousands of workloads. It’s just a different kind of scale.»

Puppet\s Comply platform will launch in the coming weeks with pre-integrated compatibility with the CIS benchmarks, and further plans to integrate a number of other compliance standards in future. These will extend to include many common standards from DISA, FedRAMP, SOX, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.

The drive to automate, Puppet hopes, will begin to free up time for many organisations that are trying to do more with less, particularly as a result of economic pressures due to COVID-19. One example of a process that Comply will automate is the ‘desired state configuration’ feature. This essentially automatically reverts any configuration changes to a ‘desired state’ if the system detects that the change has led the system to deviate from the particular standard to which it’s adhering to. 

«For us, we’ve spent the last six months really investing in a platform-centric approach and the opportunity to really extend into compliance and really build on those capabilities are really powerful for us and our customers,» Kearns added. 

«And that’s something we’re going to spend the next several years really continuing to expand on, and really continuing to drive innovation from an automation standpoint, but also from a compliance standpoint as we see those things go hand-in-hand for our customers. “

A surge in attention Slack enjoyed at the start of the pandemic, that led to thousands of new paid customers, appears to have now dissipated, according to analysts, as customers appear to now be turning to rival products instead.

The communications platform has been unable to maintain the same levels of growth as that enjoyed by the likes of Microsoft Teams and Zoom, prompting Morgan Stanley analysts to downgrade Slack’s stock to the equivalent of a selling rate, according to CNBC.

Slack shares closed down 6.3% after the downgrade. The comms platform hasn’t seen the same rapid growth as Zoom, which reportedly saw revenues increase 355% in Q2.

«Massive work from home demand for collaboration tools may end up doing more harm than good for Slack,» the analysts wrote, according to CNBC. «We see higher risk at current levels.

«In many cases, Slack did not have the opportunity to properly pitch its differentiation, and in our view, the customers that have standardised on Microsoft Teams are not looking back.»

In March, CEO Stewart Butterfield posted a lengthy tweet about the company’s reaction to the pandemic and its sudden uptick in paying customers. According to that note, by the mid-point of the first quarter of 2020, Slack had added 7,000 new paying customers, rising to 9,000 a week later. In previous quarters the average was around 5,000 new customers, suggesting that the company would be a beneficiary of the so-called ‘new normal’.

Most companies that provide technology or software to aid remote working saw some level of increased adoption in the first quarter of the year and that continued into the second quarter and beyond. Slack, however, saw its growth peak on 3 June, with its stock falling 28% in the following months.

What will hurt more, however, is how far Slack has fallen behind Microsoft Teams. The two companies are fierce rivals but Microsoft’s more holistic service helped it secure some 44 million daily active users in March. Those users have largely stayed with the service, according to Morgan Stanley’s analysts.

Slack has filed an anti-competition complaint against Microsoft, arguing that Teams is a ‘weak’ product that is forced upon Office 365 users as part of the bundle.

This complaint has only been raised with the EU and it has yet to be acknowledged.

Salesforce’s dominance of the customer relationship management (CRM) software market might be under threat from a fresh strategic challenge from Microsoft. 

Despite not having much luck in the market for the past 20 years, the tech giant has told sales teams to get existing customers to adopt its Dynamics 365 products, according to analysts cited by CNBC. 

A ‘major’ Microsoft partner reportedly indicated the plans to RBC Capital Markets. They suggested that partners typically resell Microsoft software, often in conjunction with consulting services, hardware, or other software.

It is thought that the push could lift Microsoft’s Commercial Cloud, a group of products that now represents over one-third of the company’s total revenue, and encroach further into an area dominated by Salesforce in the process.

«Microsoft engages executives throughout the agreement renewal process and we routinely check in with salespeople to make sure they’re exploring Dynamics 365 and Power Platform prior to each deal’s completion,» Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw said to CNBC.

«This is about being efficient with customer engagement and ensuring awareness of the growing interest we see in these offerings, without introducing any change to the structure of customer agreements.»

RBC analyst Alex Zukin told CNBC that the move was a «new priority» for Microsoft. Zukin also said the unnamed Microsoft partner indicated that the tech giant’s senior leadership must approve any enterprise license renewal that leaves out Dynamics, which includes CRM and other business management software and PowerApps.

Microsoft’s sales executives want their teams to talk with clients about the Dynamics 365 cloud services, particularly about renewal times, according to RBC’s source, which said the efforts became more pronounced when the company’s current fiscal year began in July.

In the second quarter of 2020, Dynamics grew 38% compared to the same period the year before, faster than most other Microsoft products. In the 2020 fiscal year, which ended on June 30, total Dynamics revenue exceeded $3 billion, with more than 60% coming from Dynamics 365.

Chromebook users are being offered the capacity to run Microsoft’s flagship Windows 10 operating system on their devices using software company Parallels’ newly released platform.

Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise is the culmination of a partnership between the firm and Google, and allows users to access full-featured Windows apps, including Microsoft Office, on their Chromebooks without necessarily needing a stable internet connection. 

The system is integrated with Chrome OS and the Google Admin console – and doesn’t require virtual desktop infrastructure to run or deploy, meaning IT administrators can set up parallel desktops on devices at relative ease. This builds on a recent partnership struck in June which allowed Windows applications to run natively on budget-friendly Chromebooks.

“Chrome OS is increasingly being chosen by modern enterprises, either for remote work, hybrid, or in the office,” said Google’s vice president of Chrome OS, John Solomon.

“We are thrilled to partner with Parallels to bring legacy and full-featured Windows applications support, through Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise, to help businesses easily transition to cloud-first devices and workflows.”

The platform will allow enterprise users to run multiple operating systems on their Chromebook devices simultaneously, with the company hoping it allows workers to raise their productivity. 

A number of features allow cross-talk between Windows 10 and Chrome OS, for example, copy-and-pasting text and graphics between the two operating systems, or printing from Windows apps via shared Chrome OS printers. Sharing features also extend to user profiles and custom folders, with documents and data seamlessly accessible by both platforms.

Windows 10 can also be used in full-screen mode on the Chromebook, or the operating system can be put on a separate Chrome OS virtual desktop, with users able to switch between the two with just a swipe.

There are already a number of devices supporting Windows 10 on Chrome OS, including the Google Pixelbook Go, the HP Elite c1030 Chromebook Enterprise, Acer Chromebook Spin 713, and Dell Latitude 5400 Chromebook Enterprise. There are 10 devices in total that support Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise, including units from Lenovo and ASUS in addition to the aforementioned devices.

The machines themselves require at least an Intel Core i5 or i7 processor, 16GB RAM, and storage capacity of at least 128GB SSD. 

The revenues of computing giant IBM declined by 2.6% year-on-year during the third quarter of 2020, with the company reporting $17.6 billion of income fuelled chiefly by a surge in cloud revenue.

This dip represented the third quarter of consecutive year-on-year revenue decline for the company, with IBM’s systems division, global business services and global technology services and global financing sector suffering over the last three months.

The positive trend in terms of the firm’s cloud business also continued, following a 30% spike in cloud revenue during the previous quarter, and 19% growth in the three months before that.

The company’s cloud computing divisions, particularly its cloud and data platforms division, led by Red Hat, grew by 7% year-on-year, bucking the wider business trend. Within this segment, cloud and data platforms grew 20%, while cognitive applications grew 1%. 

These financial results have emerged only days after the company announced it plans to divide its business in half, spinning its infrastructure services unit into a separate entity while going all-in on the cloud.

“The strong performance of our cloud business, led by Red Hat, underscores the growing client adoption of our open hybrid cloud platform,» said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna. 

«Separating the managed infrastructure services business creates a market-leading standalone company and further sharpens our focus on IBM’s open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities. This will accelerate our growth strategy and better position IBM to seize the $1 trillion hybrid cloud opportunity.”

The company’s plans to pour all its efforts into its cloud business will, on paper, be justified based on these most recent financial results, with the general health of cloud computing improving following the COVID-19 pandemic.

The firm’s global technology services division, which includes infrastructure and cloud services as well as technology support services, contracted by 4% year-on-year, with cloud revenue within this segment up 9%. 

The systems division, meanwhile, saw revenues of $1.3 billion, down 15%, driven by declines in IBM Z and Storage Systems. This is reflective of the impact of product cycle demands, the company said.

As part of the spin-off, IBM wants to create two separate companies by the end of 2021, with the to-be-cleaved infrastructure business, dubbed NewCo, making way for IBM to focus on AI capabilities and hybrid cloud.