Cisco is planning to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) technology from BabbleLabs into its collaboration division to improve the audio quality of participants in Cisco Webex meetings and remove background noise.

BabbleLabs specialises in developing AI that can detect speech, distinguish this from background noise, and use speech enhancement tech to improve the quality and clarity of speech.

​Telehouse has announced plans to further expand its campus in London’s Docklands area by adding a new, 31,000 square metre data centre.

The new facility, which will be the Telehouse’s fifth data centre in London Docklands, will stretch across six floors and have a total power capacity of 30MVA. Located approximately 300m away from the existing Telehouse London Docklands data centres, it will be connected to them with the help of a network of existing fibre-optic cables.

The company announced that the new facility will offer the same credentials as the currently-existing Dockland campus buildings, providing a “flexible, scalable infrastructure” for enterprises seeking “a highly secure operating environment” as well as the ability to interconnect with a variety of cloud, network and IT service providers.

The first floor of the new data centre will host around 500 racks and is scheduled to become available to customers in early 2022. The further five floors are to follow later, with no date specified at the time of going to press.

Commenting on the announcement, Telehouse Europe managing director Ken Sakai said that the “latest investment demonstrates our continued support for the UK market”. 

“London is one of the most critical interconnection points in the world and plays a major role in facilitating the flow of data that supports the growing digital economy. The new data centre will ensure we are well-positioned to continue this growth, service our customers’ needs and meet future demand,” he said.

The news of the development coincides with the 30th anniversary of the launch of Telehouse’s first London data centre.

In 2010, the company also completed a data centre which uses excess heat to power a housing development and businesses in the Docklands area. The facility, which cost £80 million to build, exports heat through the cooling system and converts it into energy. Although three storeys taller than the newly-announced data centre, it holds significantly less floor space: 19,000 square metres.

Telehouse Europe’s technical services director at the time, Bob Harris, said that “any attempt to address the lack of space within the data centre industry has to be undertaken with a level of environmental awareness”.

Cloud-based accounting software firm Xero has acquired Waddle, a lending platform which specialises helping small businesses gain access to capital. 

The transaction, valued at AU$ 80 million (around £44 million) is expected to be completed before the end of the year and is subject to satisfaction of closing conditions. According to Xero, the transaction, integration, and operating costs are expected to have minimal impact on the company’s FY21 EBITDA.

Xero CEO Steve Vamos described the Waddle acquisition as “an important step” in the company’s “strategy to help small businesses better manage cash flow and gain access to working capital”. 

He added: “Waddle’s lending platform has the potential to enable a wide range of banks, fintechs and other lenders to better support small business financial needs. We’re excited about the benefits Waddle can bring to many of our customers and banking partners.” 

Founded in Australia in 2014, Waddle’s lending platform service automates the manual processes involved in invoice financing, making it easier for banks and fintechs to lend to small businesses.

Although headquartered in Sydney, Waddle – which has been a Xero ecosystem partner since 2016 – currently also serves customers in the UK. Following the acquisition, it is expected to continue to offer services to customers and partners, including other accounting software providers.

The announcement comes two years after Xero acquired document management and collection software Hubdoc for £53 million. Following the acquisition, it was also announced that Hubdoc’s co-founder and CEO Jamie McDonald joined Xero’s leadership team as executive general manager of product, accounting, and global services. It is unclear whether Waddle co-founders and directors Simon Creighton and Nathan Andrews will hold any new positions within the company.

Xero offers three tiers of SaaS accounting suites targeting businesses of various sizes: Xero Starter for £10 per month, Xero Standard for £22 per month, and Xero Premium for £27.50 per month. Unlike some of its rivals, all three tiers support online VAT submission to HMRC and also offer new subscriber discounts.

Microsoft is pursuing major cloud deals with foreign governments in the mould of the highly lucrative Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud infrastructure project that it secured last year.

Although elements of the contract in the JEDI cloud infrastructure project, worth $10 billion over ten years, are still not fully settled, the industry giant is increasingly keen to pursue similar deals outside of the US.

The company is indeed in the process of signing deals similar in shape to the cloud infrastructure project assembled for the US Department of Defense, according to people familiar with the matter speaking with CNBC.

This has come after overseas governments have begun to show an interest in replicating the type of relationship that Microsoft has formed with the Pentagon. Microsoft, specifically, has staffed the project with people who hold security clearances and has committed to delivering existing products and services, as opposed to specifically-built technologies at a customised price.

However, the company’s move to focus on more government contracts comes at a time when its JEDI contract work has been put on hold due to a legal challenge from Amazon. The rival cloud company is especially aggrieved as it feels the contract was awarded unfairly.

This conscious evolution in Microsoft’s cloud strategy will likely be formally announced later this year, a source told CNBC, with overseas intelligence agencies and militaries set to be key customers. Another source said the firm had already established JEDI-like cloud contracts with foreign governments, although it’s not clear which countries are the main focus.

“We’ve worked with governments around the world on a longstanding and reliable basis for four decades,” a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC.

“We have government customers using our products to enhance their services with the latest in commercial innovations, deeply engage and connect with citizens in powerful ways, and empower government employees with the modern tools they need to be more efficient and effective, and to give them time back to focus on their agency mission.”

The JEDI work is currently on hold while the Pentagon re-examines elements of the contract, which Amazon said were ridden with errors and which a judge suggested may not comply with current standards. The Pentagon was due to finish the examination last week, on 17 August, although it requested a 30-day extension earlier in the month, according to Nextgov.

IBM has announced that it’s reached a new quantum computing milestone, hitting its highest quantum volume to date. 

Using an upgraded 27-qubit client system deployed within the IBM Q Network, the company achieved a quantum volume of 64. The company’s previous milestone, announced in January, was 32, which means IBM has successfully doubled its quantum volume every year for three years running. 

Quantum volume measures the length and complexity of circuits; the higher the volume, the higher the potential for exploring solutions to real-world problems across industry, government, and research.

IBM achieved the latest performance increase by making enhancements to one of the three 27-qubit Falcon chips it announced earlier this year.

The company said it used “hardware-aware” optimisations that unlock more performance from the Falcon chip’s circuits. This includes software improvements to Qiskit, IBM’s compiler for running code on its quantum systems. 

These techniques will be available in upcoming releases and improvements to the IBM Cloud software services and the cross-platform open source software development kit (SDK) Qiskit. 

«We are always finding new ways to push the limits of our systems so that we can run larger, more complex quantum circuits and more quickly achieve a Quantum Advantage,» said Jay Gambetta, IBM fellow and vice president at IBM Quantum.

«IBM’s full-stack approach gives an innovative avenue to develop hardware-aware applications, algorithms and circuits, all running on the most extensive and powerful quantum hardware fleet in the industry.» 

in the last four years, IBM has made 28 quantum computers with eight of them being developed in 2020 alone. 

​Zoom has announced that it is expanding its Zoom for Home programme by making it compatible with assistant-enabled smart displays from Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

Users will be able to access Zoom for Home using their Amazon Echo Show, Portal from Facebook, as well as Google Nest Hub Max devices.

The move comes as a recent Gartner survey found that nearly half (47%) of company leaders said they intend to allow employees to work remotely full time going forward. The extended compatibility for smart displays aims to further facilitate working from home.

The integration will enable users to join meetings with a simple voice command such as “Alexa, join my Zoom meeting” in the case of Amazon Echo Show, or “Hey Google, join my next meeting” with Nest Hub Max.

Oded Gal, chief product officer at Zoom, said that the company is “excited to bring Zoom to these popular devices”.

“It’s more apparent than ever that people are looking for easy-to-use displays for their video communications needs, both professionally and personally,” he added.

In May, Facebook announced the launch of Workplace Rooms, which aimed to compete with Zoom in the thriving video-conferencing market. At the time, Workplace VP Julien Codorniou emphasised that the feature, also accessible through Portal, would not be prone to hijacking scenarios such as ‘Zoom-bombing’.

Brian Oliver, Director of Alexa Communication, said that it’s “more important than ever to offer features like these to help people stay connected with their friends, family, and co-workers,” while Lilian Rincon, senior director of Product Management at Google Assistant said that the company wants “people to be able to use the video calling service of their choice to keep in touch with friends and family”.

Zoom on Facebook’s Portal is the only compatibility to have a set release date at the moment. It is to become widely available in September and will be compatible with Portal Mini, Portal and Portal+, as well as Portal TV in the future.

Zoom for Amazon Echo Show and Google Nest Hub Max are to be rolled out by the end of the year.

Nvidia has laid out plans to topple Intel in the data centre market with some early signs of success coming from its second-quarter revenues.

Chief executive Jensen Huang told the Financial Times that the US firm wants to become the main supplier of the core technologies that power large-scale data centres. He said the company was planning to supply «the full technology stack needed to run data centres».

Huang believes the company’s future lies in «data centre scale computing», an area it has made significant investments in. Earlier in the year, it shelled out $7 billion to acquire Mellanox Technologies, a firm that makes critical components for modern data centres, such as high-speed interconnect links between servers and storage.

The company has enjoyed initial signs of success, as data centre revenue has increased by 167% over the year, outperforming its gaming business for the first time. The data centre unit brought in $1.75 billion compared to $1.65 billion for gaming. Mellanox also contributed 14% of Nvidia’s overall revenue for the fiscal second quarter.

The company’s graphics processing units (GPU), originally developed to handle video streams, are widely used as computing engines to training modern AI system, making them a key component in data centres. As a result, the only area Nvidia now falls short in terms of data centre tools is in traditional computing cores (CPUs).

That could be solved with the acquisition of UK chipmaker Arm, which Nvidia has been heavily linked to in recent months. The Cambridge firm’s designs are thought to be a key weapon to compete with Intel in the data centre space.

Huang did not reveal any information regarding a potential acquisition of Arm, but he did go into detail about Nvidia’s «long-term» partnership with the UK chip manufacturer and the many services they collaborate on.

«They’re really great guys, and one of the special [things] about the Arm architecture that you know very well is that it’s incredibly energy-efficient, and because it’s energy-efficient, it has the headroom to scale into very high-performance levels over time,» he said.

Arm is currently owned by SoftBank, which acquired the chipmaker in 2016 for £32 billion, and any sale of the company will be down to its parent companies «bungled business strategy», according to Arm’s former president. Speaking to the Financial Times, Tudor Brown, who left the firm in 2012, said SoftBank had «spent money on things that clearly weren’t going to make money in the short term».

The UK government has established a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with HPE that will allow public sector organisations to adopt a pay-per-use model when acquiring hybrid cloud services for digital transformation.

The MoU, agreed between HPE and the government’s Crown Commercial Service (CCS), will allow to public sector bodies to take advantage of preferential rates when seeking a third-party provider for cloud services. 

«Despite the growth of cloud strategies in the public sector, many organizations have struggled to move business-critical applications to the public cloud, due to application entanglement, data gravity, security and compliance, and unpredictable costs,» said vice president and GM UK&A at HPE Pointnext Services, Sue Preston. 

«By leveraging HPE technologies, like HPE GreenLake, public sector organizations can reduce complexity, boost innovation and bring cost efficiency to their digital transformation efforts.»

Qualifying organisations can benefit from minimum agreed discounts on a range of HPE systems and platforms, including HPE GreenLake cloud services, Aruba enterprise networking and security products, as well as HPE’s storage and compute technology. 

The agreement also gives public sector bodies access to HPE’s pay-as-you-use cloud model in their own data centres, at the edge, as well as at facilities such as Crown Hosting Data Centres. Organisations can also use the full extent of GreenLake services, including its pre-integrated configurations of varying sizes.

«CCS provides commercial agreements which help organisations across the entire public sector save time and money on buying everyday goods and services,» said the chief executive of CCS, Simon Tse.

«This Memorandum of Understanding with HPE not only provides great value for public sector organisations, it also allows them to innovate more readily and improve services for the citizens they serve.»

This is the fourth such arrangement that the CCS has struck with cloud service providers over the last few months, as part of the One Government Cloud Strategy. This venture offers public sector bodies comprehensive guidance on pursuing cloud-powered digital transformation projects. 

MoUs have previously been established with Google Cloud, UKCloud, and most recently with IBM to give public sector bodies a number of options when looking for digital transformation services from a third-party provider.