Oracle-owned NetSuite has announced the general availability of four new features for its cloud-based SuiteSuccess business management solutions. 

First launched in 2017, SuiteSuccess is designed to help financial and wholesale distributers share best practices, insight, and deployment guidance across specific verticals.

The four enhancements, announced he NetSuite Now On Air virtual event, include the addition of SuiteAnalytics Workbooks to its financial and accounting best practices solution Financial First and a Manufacturing Mobile feature for Manufacturing Standard. 

SuiteAnalytics Workbooks aims to help businesses improve their operations using data insights, while Manufacturing Mobile enables manufacturers to remotely manage shop floor tasks.

NetSuite also announced that it now offers one Learning Cloud Support (LCS) pass with each SuiteSuccess edition bought by new as well as renewing customers. Moreover, all SuiteSuccess vertical editions will now include the new 2020 product features as well as adjustments to industry best practices, which were based on user and field experience.

All four are now available to customers.

Commenting on the enhancements, SuiteSuccess EMEA lead Richard Cutler said: «We’ve all had to manage a lot of change this year and that makes it more important than ever for us to share the wisdom we have gained from helping over 22,000+ customers take advantage of the cloud”.

UK companies using SuiteSuccess include wealth management and insurance broker SPF Private Clients (SPF), specialist food supplier Unisnacks, and commission-free investing app Freetrade Limited.

When asked about its strategies for the UK market, NetSuite EMEA VP Nicky Tozer told Cloud Pro that it «remains critical to NetSuite’s success both in EMEA and globally». 

“NetSuite has helped many UK businesses grow, adapt to change, and build for the future,” she said. 

Tozer described SuiteSuccess as «a great example» which saw the solutions provider develop «best-practice functionality for UK businesses across industries, from wholesale distribution and manufacturing to services and software». 

«We’re continually investing in our platform and partner ecosystem to bring the benefits of cloud ERP to UK organisations looking to improve operations and increase efficiencies,» she added.

Nvidia has launched a GPU-based video conferencing platform for developers that it claims can fix common issues with video calling.

The service is called Nvidia Maxine, a cloud-based platform that will use AI to realign callers’ faces, improve streaming quality, boost resolution, and more. 

Video conferencing is the number one source of internet traffic, according to Nvidia, with some 30 million web meetings estimated to take place every day. With that in mind, the company has developed a cloud-based suite of ‘GPU-accelerated’ AI enhancements.

With Maxine, service providers running the platform in the cloud can offer users new AI effects, such as ‘gaze correction’, super-resolution, noise cancellation and face relighting. What’s more, because the data is processed in the cloud rather than on local devices, Nvidia suggests that end users can enjoy the new features without any specialised hardware.

«Video conferencing is now a part of everyday life, helping millions of people work, learn and play, and even see the doctor,» said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of Accelerated Computing at Nvidia. 

«Nvidia Maxine integrates our most advanced video, audio and conversational AI capabilities to bring breakthrough efficiency and new capabilities to the platforms that are keeping us all connected.»

Maxine also includes reduced bandwidth whereby the AI software is used to analyse key facial points of each caller and re-animates the face in the video. This takes away the need to stream every single pixel which in turn requires less data to go back and forth across the internet.

The face alignment feature automatically adjusts users so they appear to be facing each other during a call and gaze correction helps simulate eye contact, even if the camera isn’t aligned with the user’s screen. Nvidia claims these features will help people stay engaged in the conversation rather than looking at their camera.
 
Developers can also add features that allow call participants to choose their own animated avatars with realistic animation automatically driven by their voice and emotional tone, while an auto frame option allows the video feed to follow the speaker even if they move away from the screen.

The new platform follows an announcement that Nvidia is planning to build the UK’s most powerful supercomputer for use in medical research. Dubbed Cambridge-1, the £40 million machine would hypothetically rank as the 29th most powerful supercomputer in the global TOP500 list if it were built today.

Google Cloud has launched a fully integrated workspace productivity platform from which customers can access widely-used G Suite apps including Gmail, Calendar and Drive, among others.

With a new user interface, the desktop-based application will allow users to seamlessly cycle between the entire G Suite portfolio depending on the task at hand, building on the integration of core tools earlier in the year. 

The merging of these core tools, including chat, email, voice and video calling as well as content management, aims to give employees access to all the tools they need in one place. Users have previously needed to endlessly cycle between web browser tabs, or third-party desktop clients, in order to replicate the same experience. 

The launch of Google Workspace essentially overwrites the G Suite, with new branding also launched to coincide with the platform rollout. 

“Now, work itself is transforming in unprecedented ways. For many of us, work is no longer a physical place we go to, and interactions that used to take place in person are being rapidly digitized,” said VP and GM for Google Workspace, Javier Soltero.

“Office workers no longer have impromptu discussions at the coffee machine or while walking to meetings together, and instead have turned their homes into workspaces.

“These are unique challenges, but they also represent a significant opportunity to help people succeed in this highly distributed and increasingly digitized world. With the right solution in place, people are able to collaborate more easily, spend time on what matters most, and foster human connections, no matter where they are.”

Beyond merely serving as a centralised hub, among the uses of Google Workspace, customers can dynamically create and collaborate on a document with guests through a chat room, for example. This means it’s easier to share content and work together with users beyond the confines of your organisation’s network. 

Users can also preview a linked file in Docs, Sheets and Slides without having to open a new tab, meaning, again, less time is spent cycling between web tabs. Google Meet video conferencing sessions, meanwhile, can be seen as picture-in-picture in not only Gmail and Chat, as the firm previously announced, but in Docs, Sheets and Slides as well.  

There are different pricing tiers available with Google Workspace, depending on the needs of any particular organisation, in addition to varying amounts of cloud storage. Subscriptions also include administrative and security tools to manage workforce access to Google’s productivity tools, as well as threat protection.

Cisco has been ordered to pay $1.9 billion (£1.46 billion) to a cyber security firm after a US district judge ruled it had infringed its patents. 

Judge Henry Morgan concluded after a month-long trial that Cisco infringed upon four out of five patents that belonged to Centripetal Networks, according to Reuters.

Virginia-based Centripetal was founded in 2009 and develops threat intelligence software and firewall hardware for cyber networks. The company took legal action against Cisco earlier this year and has successfully challenged the US tech giant. 

In a 167-page decision, Morgan said the case was «not a close call,» pointing out inconsistencies in Cisco‘s evidence and within its own technical documents. Most of these were used by Centripetal during the trial. 

The massive payout reflects $755.8 million in damages suffered by Centripetal, which has been multiplied by 2.5 on account of «willful and egregious» conduct from Cisco. Add to that prejudgment interest and it leaves the final sum at $1.9 billion. 

With regards to the four patents it lost, Morgan said that Cisco did not «advance any objectively reasonable defences at trial».

«The infringing functionality was added to their accused products post June 20, 2017, and resulted in a dramatic increase in sales which Cisco touted in both technical and marketing documents,» Morgan wrote.

Cisco said it was disappointed with the decision and confirmed it plans to appeal: «Given the substantial evidence of non-infringement, invalidity and that Cisco’s innovations predate the patents by many years.»

In its latest fiscal year, Cisco posted $11.2 billion of net income from $49.3 billion of revenue. 

«With this judgment, the court rejected the primitive doctrine that might makes right,» Paul Andre, a lawyer for Centripetal, said in a statement. «This is a significant win for all small, innovative companies.»

Cisco has revealed plans to acquire Israeli cyber security startup Portshift, in a move the tech firm says will enable its security platform to better deploy and manage Kubernetes container clusters. 

Announcing the acquisition, Cisco said that Portshift aligns to its own approach to providing secure connectivity between users, devices and apps, regardless of where they are based. 

A Kubernetes-native security platform, Portshift enables DevOps, security and operations teams to maintain security of the entire containerised applications life-cycle, from their creation to implementation. 

Portshift’s products are also designed to provide vulnerability and configuration management, network segmentation, data encryption, as well as compliance auditing.

«Today, the application security space is highly fragmented with many vendors addressing only part of the problem,» commented Cisco SVP Liz Centoni said in a blog post. «The Portshift team is building capabilities that span a large portion of the lifecycle of the cloud-native application.

«They bring cloud native application security capabilities and expertise for containers and service meshes for Kubernetes environments to Cisco, which will allow us to move toward the delivery of security for all phases of the application development​ lifecycle.»

Portshift was founded in 2018 by CEO Ran Ilany, the former head of security infrastructure at Check Point Technologies, and vice president of research and development Zohar Kaufman, who also previously co-founded CTERA networks. 

The Tel-Aviv firm has raised around $5.3 million in seed funding from the Team8 cybersecurity foundry and currently has a workforce of 14 employees. 

Cisco said it expects to complete the transaction during the first half of its FY21 but did not reveal any financial details surrounding the move. According to a report from Globes, however, the figure is expected to total around $100 million.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger last year said “multi-cloud is the new model for enterprise IT” while explaining the company’s acquisition of Pivotal just before the kickoff of its annual VMworld conference in California.

Since then, a lot has changed. Like many companies’ big annual conferences, VMworld has gone virtual in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and attendees are watching from the comfort of their own homes rather than the expansive Moscone Center.

But there are many things that haven’t and for VMware that includes its focus on multi-cloud – using services from multiple public cloud vendors – as a key strategic direction for enterprise IT.

“There’s a big shift in mindset among CIOs I talk to when it comes to multi-cloud,” Gelsinger told his audience. “Old view: Multi-cloud is a confusing mix of different services. It’s a mess I need to clean up. Today, they have a different view: Multi-cloud is the strategic platform to move my business forward, multi-cloud allows you to innovate by leveraging the strengths of different cloud services. But how do I make sure my multi-cloud strategy does not turn into a multi-silo story.”

The answer, at least according to VMware, is the company’s very own VMware Cloud product: “We are the unifying layer for today’s multi-cloud world,” Gelsinger said. “The cornerstone of VMware cloud is VMware Cloud Foundation, bringing together market leading compute, storage networking and the management, all in a single integrated stack.”

It’s not just about using multiple clouds and bridging them with VMware cloud, though. Gelsinger also took time to highlight Kubernetes, describing it as “the de facto API for today’s multi-cloud world”.

“Much like Java, two decades ago, Kubernetes is a rare technology that brings everyone together,” said Gelsinger. Indeed, like multicloud, Kubernetes was a highlight of last year’s VMworld with the launch of VMware’s management portfolio, Tanzu.

Touching on the updates announced for Tanzu this week, Gelsinger said “the best way for [VMware] to demonstrate [its] belief in the power of Kubernetes … [is to] re-architect vSphere to put Kubernetes at the core. And that’s exactly what we’ve done”.

“What we called Project Pacific is now fully available; vSphere today is the best platform to run your virtualized apps and the best platform to run your containerized apps,” he continued. “We’re putting enterprise grade Kubernetes directly into the hands of millions of mighty operators, no training required.”

Gelsinger concluded by alluding to the idea of the “new normal” that’s emerging in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and what that means for the IT community.

“If you are a technologist, this is your time. We have the will to drive change, plus the environment for change. And we have the platform we need – the digital foundation – for an unpredictable world.

“I think about all the students around the world, whose lives have been disrupted. We owe it to them to act with empathy and urgency right now. We owe it to them to chart a path forward by unlocking the power of software. Each of us must play our part, by building a better and more resilient future for all.”

​Microsoft has suffered a second global outage within a week, with users being unable to access their Outlook accounts, the tech giant has confirmed.

The reports come just days after the company said it had fixed a global outage that affected its Microsoft 365 platform. Microsoft services including Azure, Outlook, Office, Power Platform, Dynamics365, and Microsoft Teams were down for around five hours on Monday.

This latest outage began at around 2am ET, with Microsoft initially suggesting the issue was only affecting users based in India, according to a status update on Twitter. However, customers from around the world soon replied that they were also experiencing problems.

«We’ve collected additional data from the affected infrastructures to determine impact to our Exchange online protocols,» the tech giant tweeted. «Additionally, we’ve identified this issue to be affecting users worldwide. Further details can be found in your admin center under EX223208.»

Microsoft has said that a recent configuration update to components that route user requests was the cause of the outage. It has now «reverted» this update and will continue to monitor the service for signs of recovery.

The company’s outage on Monday was also blamed on unexpected errors relating to a recent update, although reverting this update did not immediately solve the problem.

«Rolling back the previously described change did not resolve the incident as expected,» Microsoft said on its Office status page. «We’re evaluating additional options to remediate the problem.»

For Wednesday’s outage, the rollback has «mitigated impact» for affected features in SharePoint and Teams, Microsoft tweeted. It also said that the majority of users were «seeing recovery».

​Welcome to the ninth issue of IT Pro 20/20, our sister title’s digital magazine that brings all of the previous month’s most important tech issues into clear view.

Given all that’s going on in the world right now, it’s easy to forget that technology is still evolving. Whether it’s changes to how we work, how we interact with the world, or how we communicate with one another, the next decade will likely be drastically different to the current one. It’s this idea that is at the core of this month’s issue.

In the first of our three exclusive features, we take a look at the role of augmented technology in business, and how transformative the technology has already been. Unlike the much-hyped virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) has proven to be an exceptionally powerful tool for many roles across a business, from front line workers to executives in a boardroom.

Elsewhere, we examine the surge of interest that many ‘touchless technology’ companies have enjoyed ever since it became apparent how dangerous the coronavirus truly was.

We also examine a technology described as the most serious AI threat we face today – deepfakes. What danger does this tech pose to society and is it really a threat to our democracy?

We appreciate you taking the time to download IT Pro 20/20, and we hope you enjoy this month’s future tech-themed stories.

The next IT Pro 20/20 will be available on Friday 30 October – previous issues can be found here. If you would like to receive each issue in your inbox as they release, you can subscribe to our mailing list here.

Microsoft has announced a new cloud platform called Azure for Operators that has been designed to help telecommunications operators unlock the full potential of 5G.

The new offering will help communication service providers create new opportunities and provide core infrastructure, the Redmond giant says, using cloud, cellular and edge to create the lowest latency and largest reach for a low cost.

Ultimately, Azure for Operators aims to help providers create advanced industry solutions based on connections to AI, signature consumer experiences with new forms of mixed reality content, as well as an ecosystem of developers that can quickly leverage 5G network opportunities. 

«We’re building a carrier-grade cloud and bringing more Microsoft technology to the operator’s edge,” commented Jason Zander, Executive Vice President of Microsoft Azure, in a blog post. 

«This, in combination with our developer ecosystem, will help operators to future-proof their networks, drive down costs, and create new services and business models.”

Building on its acquisitions of Affirmed Networks and Metaswitch, Microsoft says the move will enable operators to offer a wide range of services such as ultra-reliable, low-latency connectivity, mixed reality communications services, network slicing, as well as highly scalable Internet of Things (IoT) apps.

With Azure, businesses can also implement a more flexible and scalable model, bring down infrastructure cost, as well as automate operations using AI and machine learning to differentiate their services.

Microsoft also highlighted that it will support operators as they evolve their infrastructure and operations using tech such as software-defined networking, network function virtualisation and service-based architectures.  

«We are bringing to market a carrier-grade platform for edge and cloud to support the operator’s goals to future proof their infrastructure with disaggregated, and containerised network architectures,» Zander added. 

«Recognising that not everything will move to the public cloud, we will meet operators where they are—whether at the enterprise edge, the network edge, or in the cloud.»

Red Hat has announced it’s teaming with Samsung to help deliver 5G network solutions across various use cases, including 5G core, edge computing, IoT and machine learning.

This collaboration will be built atop Red Hat OpenShift, which Red Hat calls the “most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform.” It will also include other components of Red Hat’s proven hybrid cloud portfolio, including  Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage. 

Samsung will chip in with its 5G vRAN, vCore, MEC and management and analytics to expand 5G use cases. 

This new solution will allow providers to capitalize on edge economics and vRAN. According to Red Hat’s ACG report, operators can extend TCO benefits gained in horizontal designs in the core by using common horizontal infrastructure in 5G core and edge computing.

Operators can also support new applications and services based on location awareness, reduced latency and scalability in the distributed cloud when deploying horizontal clouds to vRAN sites.  

On top of all this, Red Hat has given Samsung’s virtual network functions its VNF certification, and it plans to give Samsung’s containerized network functions its CNF certification soon. These certifications are the highest standard for critical functions on Red Hat OpenShift and ensure vendors can effectively prepare their applications for a cloud-native future running in production on Red Hat OpenShift. 

These certified solutions help customers quickly reach their full 5G capabilities. With 5G rollout already underway, this partnership should help accelerate its spread. 

Wonil Roh, senior vice president and head of product strategy, networks business at Samsung Electronics said of the collaboration: “We are pleased to collaborate with Red Hat to help service providers stay competitive in this increasingly demanding global 5G market, especially on the cloud-native front.

«Through this partnership, Samsung 5G solutions will provide a highly efficient and reliable network experience for our customers by integration with Red Hat’s cloud-native solution.”

Chris Wright, senior vice president and chief technology officer and Red Hat said: “As service providers build 5G networks, they are forming the foundation for the next wave of cross-industry innovation.

«From helping businesses in their edge computing solutions to ensuring enterprises can successfully deploy their artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, we expect these services to be built on a proven, cloud-native infrastructure.

«We’re very excited to work with Samsung to bring this Kubernetes-driven solution to help service providers and their customers focus on complex and competitive use cases across the enterprise to every industry.”