​Google has decided to abandon the development of a controversial cloud computing project named “Isolated Region”, which catered to various governments’ desires to control data within their borders.

The tech giant scrapped the initiative in May, partly due to the coronavirus pandemic but also due to the rising geopolitical tensions between the US and China, where Isolated Regions was being developed, according to two anonymous Google employees speaking to Bloomberg.

The project, which was launched in early 2018, sought to comply with Chinese regulations which require Western companies to form a joint venture with a Chinese partner company when they provide data or networking services. However, the development was paused in January 2019, reportedly due to Google choosing to focus on potential customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

However, according to one source, the geopolitical issues placed demands on Isolated Region that Google was not capable of delivering.

A Google spokeswoman refuted the claims made by the employees, telling Bloomberg that Isolated Region wasn’t shut down for either of the given reasons and that the company “does not offer and has not offered cloud platform services inside China”.

Google has said that the cloud initiative was cancelled because “other approaches we were actively pursuing offered better outcomes”, although it has yet to elaborate on the specifics of these approaches.

“We have a comprehensive approach to addressing these requirements that covers the governance of data, operational practices and survivability of software,” the spokeswoman said. “Isolated Region was just one of the paths we explored to address these requirements.”

“What we learned from customer conversations and input from government stakeholders in Europe and elsewhere is that other approaches we were actively pursuing offered better outcomes.»

The news comes just days after Google, alongside Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter, made the decision to suspend the processing of user data requests from the Hong Kong government, following the implementation of a new security law that criminalises protests. The Hong Kong government reportedly requested data from Google users 105 times in 2019 alone.

IBM has announced its acquisition of WDG Automation, a Brazillian software provider specialising in robotic process automation (RPA). 

Financial details of the acquisition weren’t disclosed to the public, but the companies said they expect the deal to close in the third quarter. 

IBM’s decision to acquire WDG Automation sees the tech giant continuing its expansion into the AI-infused automation market, as it looks to provide its customers with the ability to “quickly identify more granular opportunities for automation (…) as well as help ensure consistent and accurate data is being used across all tools and business functions, including customer service, IT, finance, HR, and supply chain”. 

RPA technologies have the ability to computerise repetitive tasks, removing them from the human employees’ workload and therefore boosting productivity, as well as general welfare and wellbeing.

WDG Automation, based in São José do Rio Preto, Brazil, is a provider of RPA, Intelligent Automation (IA), Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and chatbots. It markets its products at business users looking to create automations using a desktop recorder without the need for IT.

WDG’s software robots are able to run on-demand or by using an automated scheduler, depending on the customer’s needs.

The company’s founder and CEO Robson Felix called automation “crucial in the digital era, as businesses need to perform several repetitive or routine tasks so that employees are able to focus on innovation”.

“I’m incredibly proud of the role WDG Automation has played in the RPA market with a unified and integrated platform to help companies in Brazil increase their productivity,» he added.

WDG co-founder Kleber Rodrigues Junior said that |joining forces with IBM will scale our capabilities to a wider audience, helping companies around the world accelerate their growth on their business transformation journeys».

Denis Kennelly, general manager of Cloud Integration at IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software, added: «IBM already automates how companies apply AI to business processes and IT operations so they can detect opportunities and problems and recommend next steps and solutions». 

«With today’s announcement, IBM is taking that a step further and helping clients accelerate automation to more parts of the organization, not just to routine, but more complex tasks so employees can focus on higher-value work.»

The acquisition might signal a shift of priorities for IBM, which recently decided to «sunset» its general-purpose facial recognition and analysis software suite over ethical concerns following a fortnight of Black Lives Matter protests.

Last week, the company unveiled an AI-powered inventory control system to help businesses optimize their decision-making and build resilient supply chains more effectively.

German-based Linux distribution company SUSE has announced plans to acquire Kubernetes management outfit Rancher Labs. 

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, but two people familiar with the deal told CNBC that SUSE is paying between $600 million to $700 million to buy the Cupertino-based startup. 

Rancher Labs, which was was founded in 2014 and currently boasts more than 200 employees, provides open-source software that enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale.

The startup, which has raised more than $95 million in funding, claims Rancher is the «most widely used enterprise Kubernetes platform» with more than 30,000 active users. Its big-name customers include the likes of American Express, Comcast, Deutsche Bahn and Viasat.

The deal, SUSE and Rancher Labs claim, will deliver computing everywhere with the latest AI and seamless deployment of containerized workloads from the edge to the core to the cloud.

“This is an incredible moment for our industry, as two open source leaders are joining forces. The merger of a leader in Enterprise Linux, Edge Computing and AI with a leader in Enterprise Kubernetes Management will disrupt the market to help customers accelerate their digital transformation journeys,” said Melissa Di Donato, Suse CEO. 

“Only the combination of SUSE and Rancher will have the depth of a globally supported and 100% true open source portfolio, including cloud-native technologies, to help our customers seamlessly innovate across their business from the edge to the core to the cloud.”

Shen Liang, Rancher CEO, added that the merging of the two companies will «help organisations control their cloud native futures.»

«Our leading Kubernetes platform with SUSE’s broad open source software solutions creates a powerful combination, enabling IT and Operations leaders worldwide to best meet the needs of their customers wherever they are on their digital transformation journey from the data center to cloud to edge,» he added.

The acquisition is expected to close before the end of October 2020, following regulatory approvals. 

News of the takeover comes just weeks after Rancher Labs announced the launch of Rancher Academy, a new certification program that the open source software firm says will address the growing Kubernetes skills gap.

The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust has partnered with IBM to launch an AI-powered virtual agent that will provide staff with up-to-date HR and workplace information as the UK emerges from lockdown.

Ask Maisie, powered by IBM Watson, will give the Royal Marsden’s hospitals in London and Surrey the capacity to manage its workforce by serving as an information hub accessed through the intranet. 

Common questions can be answered through automation and AI with the HR department freed to engage in more complex areas, and handle more sensitive matters. Ask Maisie combines IBM Watson Assistant and natural langue processing (NLP) capabilities through the IBM public cloud. 

“As the pandemic evolves so have the long term implications on healthcare which include a growing expectation for immediate and remote access to trusted information,” said director for healthcare and life sciences with IBM UK and Ireland, Andreas Haimböck-Tichy. 

“This has led to many healthcare providers accelerating digital transformation plans to give clinicians time to focus on patients alongside helping to manage the physical and mental health of their key workers. Digital transformation in healthcare is not just limited to the clinical environment.

«Modern technology has an incredible potential to change the way a hospital operates for the better and help revolutionise the care patients receive.”

Topics the staff can access range from advice for high-risk workers, how to self-isolate, and what happens when staff receive official shielding letters. The sources of all information will be ‘trusted sources’ including the hospitals’ own policy handbooks as well as official bodies such as NHS England. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a highly disruptive force, but for many public sector organisations, it’s given development and engineering teams an opportunity to implement digital systems to help deliver services. 

For Royal Marsden, the crisis has triggered the need for technology to help manage its staff, with the organisation claiming the right investments in technology can help organisations build resilience and prepare for any future turmoil. 

Now that Ask Maisie has been launched, it can continue to enhance it knowledge-base as well as learning from interactions it has. 

Manufacturing giant Fujitsu is going to make 80,000 of its workers permanently remote and reduce its office footprint by 50% as it plans for the post-pandemic future. 

The company hopes to half its office footprint by 2022, with employees enjoying «unprecedented» flexibility to improve their work-life balance.

The ‘Work Life Shift’ campaign is an acceleration of the firm’s digital transformation, but it only concerns its Japanse workforce at the moment. The initiative will work on three core principles: «Smart Working», «Borderless Office» and «Culture Change».  

«Fujitsu today announced that it will further accelerate its shift to becoming a digital transformation company with an ambitious campaign to redefine working styles for its employees in Japan in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic,» the company said. 

«As part of this ‘Work Life Shift» campaign, Fujitsu will introduce a new way of working that promises a more empowering, productive, and creative experience for employees that will boost innovation and deliver new value to its customers and society through the power of digital transformation.»

The «Smart Working» approach offers Fujitsu employees to the option of planing their time around the contents of their work, their role within the company and their lifestyle. This will also include the company changing its policies for commuting expenses to offer more support for remote working and establishing a system that allows employees to work from locations far away from the Fujitsu offices.

As well as reducing its office footprint, Fujitsu is also shifting away from conventional spaces, allowing its employees to freely choose the place they want to work, be it from home, hub, or satellite offices. Hub offices will be set up in different places around Japan, with each having a designated function in the businesses.

The company will also make changes to its style of management, to aid the changes and boost productivity. 

«Fujitsu will continue to seek ways to optimise working styles by continuously listening to the voices of its employees regarding the dramatic shift toward physically separated working spaces, and by leveraging a digital platform that visualises and analyses working conditions,» Fujistu said. 

Google has officially launched its enterprise communications tool Currents, marking the long-awaited death of Google+. 

Currents is available now to G Suite customers, offering organisations a tool where employees can post and comment on discussions and view content in a news feed called «home stream».

The new service has replaced the Google+ icon in G Suite and also Google’s apps for Android and iOS. Google+ accounts were shut down last year after failing to attract users and repeated security issues.  

Despite not having enough users for its parent company’s liking, Google+ still managed to suffer a data leak that affected up to half a million users in 2018. An internal review found that a flaw in the social network’s APIs allowed malicious apps to extract data from users profiles and the service was shut down shortly after. 

Rather than delete the whole thing, Google has opted to rebrand and reposition the services as an enterprise comms tool – similar to Facebook’s Workplace. As such, any lingering Google+ Enterprise users will be transitioned to Currents from 6 July and Google+ links will redirect to Currents URLs.

The Currents interface, which includes Home Stream, can be ordered chronologically or by relevance and allows links, images, text, polls and content from Google Drive accounts to be shared throughout your organisation. 

These are not the only changes to G Suite, as Google is also rolling out a dark mode for Docs, Sheets and Slides on Android. The tech giant said this should be available within the next two weeks, with users required to go into the respective app’s settings to make the change. If you already have a dark mode theme on your system, the apps will have it enabled automatically. 

It follows an announcement the company made last year to deliver dark mode to all of its first-party apps. It has slowly added the capability to a number of services, including Gmail and Google Calendar. 

The function has become very popular on Android and iOS apps for reportedly reducing battery consumption and also its sleek look on mobile devices. 

Imperial College has partnered with several organisations to build a globally-sourced COVID-19 data hub designed to offer AI-powered insights to medical professionals to fight future infections. 

Using Amazon Web Services (AWS) machine learning tools, the REaltime Data Analysis and Synthesis (REDASA) platform aims to help the healthcare industry with real-time insights to help medical action and policymaking. 

The hub has been developed by PanSurg, a surgical network comprising Imperial health professionals and academics, in collaboration with a consortium of tech firms including Cloudwick and MirrorWeb alongside AWS.

It has been launched to pool together the insights and expertise of professionals working to fight the spread of infection by joining up a huge mass of material scattered across more than half a million different sources.

“Healthcare professionals are facing huge volumes of academic literature, public information and noise on COVID-19, making it challenging to extract key insights and translate these into best clinical practice,” said clinical senior lecturer and lead for PanSurg James Kinross.

“We are excited to collaborate with Cloudwick, MirrorWeb and Amazon Web Services to create a reliable, accurate information source with REDASA, for healthcare professionals seeking guidance during the pandemic.”

The project has recruited MirrorWeb’s website-capture technology to harvest large volumes of data at pace, with the organisation using machine learning to ensure the information gathered from public sources is accurate. These would include medical journals, healthcare literature and news sources.

This data is then stored and processed on Cloudwick’s Amorphic data and analytics platform, with advanced data science techniques used to generate automated insights and provide a secure way for users to access the intelligence.

Machine learning services by AWS, alongside an element of human curation, then allows REDASA to perform deep data analysis and extract the most important and relevant insights. Teams would, therefore, be able to process and make sense of the huge amounts of data flooding into the system.

The hub is centred on ‘live systematic review’ which means information is continuously updated and analysed, with data provided to private and public sector healthcare organisations and physicians to improve treatment and boost research.

“COVID-19 has made it clear just how challenging it is to find critical information quickly and easily in an ‘infodemic’ situation, with the noise of millions of articles to sift through,” said international healthcare data science lead at AWS EMEA SARL Dr Matthew Howard.

“This solution we are developing with PanSurg, and AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners, Cloudwick and MirrorWeb, combines the best of expert human review with AWS machine learning technologies. 

«Our aim is to provide a new approach that will put the most accurate information possible in the hands of healthcare professionals, help improve medical knowledge, and develop more effective methods of patient care that will make a difference to frontline healthcare workers.”

The product is expected to launch in the coming months and will become a key legacy project with applications that stretch beyond coronavirus. While the main focus, for now, is to support the healthcare response to COVID-19, the team behind REDASA believes the model can be adapted and extended to encompass many other diseases, including cancer.

Deutsche Bank has agreed a multi-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud to redefine the bank’s financial services. 
 
The two firms have signed a letter of intent and plan to sign a multi-year contract within the next few months. The partnership will include co-innovation between the two companies to create technology-based financial products. 

The agreement will accelerate the German bank’s cloud migration and transform its IT architecture, including optimisation of the bank’s current systems in a phased approach. Both parties said they were committed to compliance with privacy and data protection regulation maintaining confidentiality, integrity and availability of customer data and the bank’s information assets.
 
Deutsche will also gain direct access to data science, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning services with potential use cases for cash flow forecasting, improved risk analytics and advanced security services.

For its private banking business, a more digital focus will be used to simplify interactions between customers and employees.
 
«The partnership with Google Cloud will be an important driver of our strategic transformation,» said Christian Sewing, CEO, Deutsche Bank. «It demonstrates our determination to invest in our technology as our future is strongly linked to successful digitisation. It is as much a revenue story as it is about costs.»

Bernd Leukert, chief technology, data and innovation officer at Deutsche Bank, added: «This cooperation with Google Cloud is a significant step forward for our technology strategy, and will transform the way we produce and deliver our client services.

«By bringing together the best of both cultures, we look forward to creating new business models leveraging artificial intelligence, data analytics, and more, with an established technology and innovation leader.»
 
The partnership follows an «intensive discussion and due diligence», according to Deutsche. The bank began talking to major cloud providers in February seeking a partnership as part of its multi-vendor cloud strategy. 

Twitter is dropping the terms «master», «slave» and «blacklist» in favour of more inclusive language in its programming. 

The social media site is following in the steps of a number of tech firms that have already pledged to ditch the terms in light of the black lives matter protests.

The terms are very common in programming, with «master» referring to the main version of code that often controls other «slave» protocols. «Blacklist» is a label for items that are automatically denied or for forbidden websites. These were included in a set of words posted by Twitter’s engineering division that it will remove on the recommendation of two of its black engineers, Regynald Augustin and Kevin Oliver.

DevOps specialist The Scale Factory removed references to master and slave in its code a few years ago. The company’s CEO and CTO Jon Topper told IT Pro that it was fairly straightforward to change the names of variables and methods in its own code and configuration files, but it wasn’t possible to entirely remove this language.

«If you’re working with MySQL replication, for example, that software itself uses master/slave terminology and so it has to appear in your code too,» Topper said. «Renaming Git branches from «master» to «main» is similarly straightforward, though might require changes to CI servers and other systems you work with.

«The real question here is whether, as an organisation, you’re also working on the human side of the problem. Dismantling structural racism in our organisations will take more than just a couple of cosmetic code changes… I’ve heard black voices say that it’s good to challenge our use of this language in tech, but way more that say this isn’t enough on its own. We all need to do better.»

There have been calls within the tech industry to drop the terms long before the death of George Floyd and the black lives matter protests. In 2018, Red Hat programmer Victor Stinner issued a change request for avoiding the terminology in Python, which is often thought of as one of the world’s most popular programming languages.

«For diversity reasons, it would be nice to try to avoid ‘master’ and ‘slave’ terminology, which can be associated with slavery,» he wrote, also citing a number of complaints in the thread.

Despite a heated debate breaking out, with some Python developers suggesting that only «slave» should be removed because they didn’t deem «master» an offensive term, Stinner’s request was upheld. «Slaves» was subsequently changed to «workers» or «helpers», while «master process» was changed to «parent process».

CNN reported back in 2003 about a discrimination complaint concerning the use of the words «master» and «slave» on a videotape machine in Los Angeles. The complaint led to a request from County officials for electronics manufacturers to remove the terms from their products when doing business in the county.