Microsoft has told managed service providers (MSPs) that it will charge a 20% premium on Microsoft 365 products unless customers choose to be billed annually.

The news has angered many in the MSP community, saying they stand to lose out if a customer goes bankrupt or chooses to decrease the number of licenses they need, for example. In this case, the MSP will still have to pay Microsoft, regardless of the alterations or complexities on the customer side.

Month-to-month billing affords customers the flexibility they often need and in some cases allows MSPs to budget more efficiently with other month-to-month billing products in their stacks.

The news comes as prices for individual products are also set to be increased too by a margin of up to 15% each.

Recently delayed until 1 March 2022, Microsoft’s New Commerce Experience (NCE) will soon increase the prices of Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Microsoft 365 Business Premium, Office 365 E1, Office 365 E3, Office 365 E5, and Microsoft 365 E3.

First reported by CNBC, the move to force customers into either paying a higher price for flexibility or a lower price for a longer-term has not been greeted warmly and a Change.org petition protesting Microsoft’s decision has reached more than 1,000 signatures.

Discussions between MSPs have taken place on a Reddit thread where the feedback has been largely negative, though some recognised the move could provide some benefits to larger value-added resellers (VARs) but may hurt smaller businesses.

IT Pro contacted Microsoft for comment on the community’s reaction, but it did not reply at the time of publication.

The Pax8 reseller said the NCE can help businesses prepare for future growth «thanks to improved revenue predictability, reduced licensing complexity, multiple term options, and features that enable new sales capabilities and operational efficiencies.»

One of the key pushbacks MSPs are lobbying Microsoft to implement is for it to allow pooling of licenses.

In doing so, it will allow the partner to re-distribute a license should a tenant leave the company without having to pay Microsoft for an unused service after they leave during a one-year commitment period, for example.

Salesforce announced a change to its leadership structure on Tuesday with Bret Taylor appointed to co-CEO alongside founder Marc Benioff. 

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 Taylor joined the cloud giant in 2016 after his productivity software startup, Quip, was acquired by Salesforce for $142 million.

In just under five years, Taylor has quickly moved up the ranks at Salesforce and has become close with Benioff. Taylor even described the Salesforce boss as a «mentor and trusted friend» and the feeling appears to be mutual.

«Bret is a phenomenal industry leader who has been instrumental in creating incredible success for our customers and driving innovation throughout our company. He has been my trusted friend for years, and I couldn’t be happier to welcome him as co-CEO,» said Marc Benioff, chair and co-CEO of Salesforce. 

«We’re in a new world and Salesforce has never been more relevant or strategic for our customers. Together, Bret and I will lead Salesforce through our next chapter, while living our shared values of trust, customer success, innovation and equality for all.»

Taylor has a varied background. Before starting Quip he helped to create Google Maps and also sold a social networking startup, FriendFeed, to Facebook, where he spent three years as its chief technology officer. He also sits on Twitter’s board of directors and was named chairman shortly after Jack Dorsey’s departure.

The move to having co-CEOs is also not new for Salesforce; in 2018, Benioff shared the role with former Oracle executive Keith Block, but Block stepped down just before the pandemic. 

«Marc has been my mentor, my greatest supporter and my trusted friend for years,» Taylor said. «Partnering with him to lead the company he co-founded 22 years ago is an enormous privilege. I’m thankful for our Salesforce employees, our Trailblazers, our customers, and all of our stakeholders who help us make our company and our world a better place.»

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The new head of Amazon Web Services, Adam Selipsky, made his Re:Invent debut as CEO on Tuesday with a glut of announcements for compute, networking and data. 

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The former Tableau boss returned to the cloud giant earlier in the year to take over from Andy Jassy, who has now taken over the top job of its parent company, Amazon. 

Jassy’s Re:Invent keynotes were notoriously long and always full of new products. Selipsky gave a much shorter presentation than his predecessor, but there was no skimping on the announcements. 

It started with a new in-house processor – Graviton 3 – which will power new Amazon Ec2 C7g instances. Available in preview, EC2 C7g instances will provide the best price performance in Amazon EC2 for compute-intensive workloads such as high-performance computing, gaming, video encoding, and CPU-based machine learning inference, according to Selipsky. 

What’s more, these instances are the first in the cloud to feature cutting edge DDR5 memory technology, which AWS said will provide 50% more bandwidth than DDR4 memory. C7g instances will provide 20% higher networking bandwidth compared to previous generation C6g instances based on the Graviton 2 processors. 

Selipsky also unveiled Inf1 Instances for EC2, also in preview, which is a Trainium-based AWS service. AWS Trainium is the second machine learning chip built by AWS that is optimised for high-performance deep learning training. Selipsky said the Trn1 instances will deliver «best price performance» for training deep learning models in the cloud, which includes use cases such as natural language processing and image recognition. They support up to 16 Trainium accelerators, up to 800 Gbps of EFA networking throughput and ultra-high-speed intra-instance connectivity for the fastest ML training in Amazon EC2.  

Moving on to data, Selipsky announced AWS Mainframe Modernization, a new platform for mainframe migration. This will allow customers to shift and modernise their on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed and highly available runtime environment on AWS. This service currently supports two main migration patterns: re-platforming and automated refactoring.  

The announcements also included 5G, which is becoming increasingly prominent at AWS events. On Tuesday it was a preview of AWS Private 5G, a new managed service that helps enterprises set up and scale private 5G mobile networks in their facilities in just days. It takes just a few clicks in an AWS console for customers to specify where they want to build a mobile network and the network capacity needed for their devices. From there AWS delivers and maintains the small cell radio units, servers, 5G core and radio access network (RAN) software, and subscriber identity modules (SIM cards) required to set up a private 5G network and connect devices.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced three new database capabilities for business applications as part of this week’s Re:Invent 2021 event.

Customers now benefit from a managed database service that customises existing databases and operating systems, an optimised table class for Amazon DynamoDB for lowering storage costs, and a machine learning-powered service that diagnoses and remediates database performance issues.

According to AWS, the aforementioned database features will help businesses manage data cost-efficiently and at scale.

Amazon RDS Custom caters to business applications requiring customizable underlying databases and operating systems. The managed service automates administrative tasks such as capacity provisioning capacity, scaling, and backup, and is compatible with commercial databases including Oracle and MS SQL Server.

Furthermore, the Amazon DynamoDB Standard-Infrequent Access (Standard-IA) table class offers DynamoDB users a 60% reduction in costs for infrequently accessed table data. DynamoDB Standard table class, by contrast, offers up to 20% lower throughput costs than Standard-IA, making it the most cost-effective option for tables with high throughput.

Finally, Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS, a new machine learning-powered feature built into Amazon DevOps Guru, identifies and diagnoses performance bottlenecks and operational issues in a database, providing detailed recommendations on how to fix them.

NetApp SVP and GM of Cloud Volumes, Ronen Schwartz, said: “NetApp offers cloud services to enable organisations to easily run highly efficient, cost-effective relational database migration and operation programs from on premises to the cloud. However, some organisations running applications that require customisation to the database environment and operating system have been unable to move to a fully managed database service in the cloud due to the customisations these applications require”. 

“With Amazon RDS Custom, these organisations now have a managed database service for applications that require operating system and database customisation. Organisations can run Amazon RDS Custom on NetApp ONTAP to benefit from advanced data protection, autonomous efficiencies, and continuous optimisations.”

Meta has picked Amazon Web Services (AWS) to be its strategic cloud partner as it looks to expand its artificial intelligence capabilities.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said it will use AWS services to «complement» its on-premise infrastructure and also broaden its use of AWS compute, storage and security services.

Expanding on an existing partnership, Meta will now run third-party collaborations on AWS and use the cloud to support acquisitions of entities that are already powered by AWS. The use of AWS compute services will also be used to accelerate Meta’s AI research and development programmes.

Additionally, the partnership will also include work on PyTorch, which is an open source machine learning library developed by Facebook’s AI Research Lab. It’s based on the Torch library and used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing. AWS will work on improving performance for building, training, deploying and operating PyTorch AI and ML learning models.

«We are excited to extend our strategic relationship with AWS to help us innovate faster and expand the scale and scope of our research and development work,» said Jason Kalich, vice president of production engineering at Meta. «The global reach and reliability of AWS will help us continue to deliver innovative experiences for the billions of people around the world that use Meta products and services and for customers running PyTorch on AWS.»

The two companies will collaborate on new native tools for PyTorch and simplify the deployment of models in production. This will include enhancements to TorchServe, which is the feeding engine for PyTorch. By working on these open-source contributions, AWS and Meta aim to help organisations bring large-scale deep learning models from research to production faster and easier with optimised performance on AWS.

«With this agreement, AWS will continue to help Meta support research and development, drive innovation, and collaborate with third parties and the open source community at scale,» Kathrin Renz, vice president of business development and industries at AWS. «Customers can rely on Meta and AWS to collaborate on PyTorch, making it easier for them to build, train, and deploy deep learning models on AWS.»

Microsoft has launched a standalone tier of Microsoft Teams specifically aimed at small businesses.

Teams Essentials, which is available now, offers video meetings and chat features for the «lowest price in the market today», according to Microsoft.

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The Essentials tier offers unlimited group meetings for up to 30 hours and can support up to 300 participants at a cost of $4 (£3) per user, per month. Each user will also have 10GB of cloud storage. On the free tier of Teams, users are only able to host 100 participants for 60 minutes at a time.

The service also includes «existing and new capabilities», some of which are already available in the free version of Teams, to meet the needs of small businesses, according to Microsoft. This includes a new Google Calendar integration, which Microsoft said will be available «soon», and in-meeting tools like meeting lobby, virtual backgrounds, Together mode, and live reactions.

Essentials will also have a «Small business group chat template», which is a collaboration hub where users can manage projects, assign tasks and create polls.

«We know how difficult the past 20 months have been for small businesses. They’ve had to demonstrate extreme flexibility to adapt, often with limited access to tools and technology,» said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of Modern Work at Microsoft. «Teams Essentials is built specifically to meet the unique needs of small businesses, enabling them to thrive in this new era of work.»

There are small business-focused tiers on other platforms but Microsoft appears to have found a way to undercut rivals by offering better value-for-money than competitor options. The «Pro» version of Zoom, for instance, comes at a monthly cost of £11.99 per user and only accommodates 100 participants per meeting. The video-conferencing giant has also launched an advertising pilot for it’s free package as a way to find more revenue streams, rather than reducing the price on its middle-tier. Workplace from Meta (formally Facebook) offers a «Core» tier for the same price as Teams Essentials, but users need to opt for a number of «add-ons» to match the offerings available on the Microsoft service.

There is a free tier for Google Meets, but all participants need an account to join and the next tier is only available as part of a £7.99 monthly Workspace subscription.

Essentials is also being offered as a standalone service, with no need for users to subscribe to an Office 365 bundle. Invites can also be sent to anyone with an email address, so there is no need to sign in or install Teams to participate in meetings.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a new IoT-based platform that signals an expansion into robotic fleet management.

IoT RoboRunner, which was revealed on the first day of the company’s annual Re:Invent conference, is designed to help enterprises build and deploy applications so that their robotic fleets all operate as one. 

RoboRunner is an expansion of the RoboMaker cloud-based simulation service launched in 2018. It addressed developer frustrations around the challenge of operating different robot types, such as autonomous guided vehicles (AGV) and robotic manipulators.

«When a new robot is added to an autonomous operation, complex and time-consuming software integration work is required to connect the robot control software to work management systems,» AWS principal developer advocate, Channy Yun said.

«AWS IoT RoboRunner lets you connect your robots and work management systems, thereby enabling you to orchestrate work across your operation through a single system view.»

RoboRunner includes tools to create a programme in the AWS Management Console to build repositories for storing robot and task data. Developers can also integrate codes for connecting robots and systems via RoboRunner’s Fleet Gateway Library and also tools from managed applications services such as AWS Lambda and Greengrass.

Additionally, the cloud giant has also launched the AWS Robotics Startup Accelerator, which will offer mentorship to robotics startups. This accelerator will include a four-week programme with hands-on AWS training and $10,000 in promotional credits for use of AWS services. 

The first day of Re:Invent saw a plethora of new services launched for AI, machine learning, storage and quantum computing.

Amazon Braket Hybrid Jobs, for example, was launched as a new offering to help reduce extensive infrastructure and software management and confidently execute algorithms quickly and predictably, with on-demand priority access to QPUs.

There was also an expansion of CodeGuru Reviewer with an automated tool to help developers detect secrets in source code or configuration files, such as passwords or access tokens. 

Accenture has revealed it will expand its UK workforce with 3,000 new roles over the next three years, as the company’s clients aim to capitalise on growth while the UK is recovering from the pandemic.

Half of the new roles will be based outside of London, expanding the company’s presence in Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, and Glasgow and adding to its existing UK workforce of around 11,000 people.

The company said that the new roles are being driven by increased client demand for services in platforms, cloud engineering, cyber security, and data and intelligent operations.

The UK economy is rebounding swiftly following the pandemic and Accenture is seeing strong demand from clients seeking to capitalise on this growth opportunity, said Simon Eaves, market unit lead at Accenture in the UK and Ireland. 

“We are committed to growing our footprint across the UK which is why I am particularly excited about our plans across Scotland and northern England where we see some of the best technology talent in the country,” added Eaves.

Accenture’s initiative to create thousands of new cyber security roles over the next three years has been called “promising” by John Fokker, head of cyber investigations for McAfee Enterprise’s Advanced Threat Research team.

Fokker said this will help raise awareness of the skills needed to succeed in a cyber security role and help the industry take a step towards closing the cyber security skills gap.

“This will be particularly important in bolstering security teams when things get busy, with our research telling us that 75% of organisations struggle to maintain a fully staffed security team during peak periods,” he said.

Accenture’s move to create new jobs has been welcomed by the UK government, with digital secretary Nadine Dorries saying it was fantastic to see Accenture creating thousands of new high-skilled jobs in a number of the UK’s regional tech hubs. 

Dorries added that the investment is testament to the UK’s global reputation for innovation and talent and underlined the government is determined to level up opportunity across the country and is investing in digital skills and infrastructure so businesses can thrive.

A coalition of EU-based tech firms has filed a formal complaint against Microsoft alleging anticompetitive conduct related to the bundling of its productivity apps with Windows.

German content collaboration platform Nextcloud is leading the complaint and is joined by nearly 30 additional companies in the software and cloud sectors.

The formal complaint has been filed to the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition and Nextcloud has also reported the coalition’s concerns to German antitrust authorities, the Bundeskartellamt.

The tech firms driving the complaint are against Microsoft’s «monopolistic» practice of bundling the likes of OneDrive, Teams, and other services with Windows 10 and Windows 11.

The companies claim the practice is pushing consumers to register for the services and hand their data over to Microsoft, stifling consumer choice and genuine market competition. 

The coalition said Microsoft has grown its market share to 66% of the EU market in the last few years while smaller vendors have seen their shares shrink by as much as 26%.

«This is quite similar to what Microsoft did when it killed competition in the browser market, stopping nearly all browser innovation for over a decade,» said Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud. «Copy an innovators’ product, bundle it with your own dominant product and kill their business, then stop innovating.

«This kind of behaviour is bad for the consumer, for the market and, of course, for local businesses in the EU,» he added. «Together with the other members of the coalition, we are asking the antitrust authorities in Europe to enforce a level playing field, giving customers a free choice and to give competition a fair chance.»

IT Pro contacted Microsoft for comment but it did not reply at the time of publication.

Microsoft is currently the subject of an EU probe into its alleged anti-competitive practices, first brought to the Bloc’s attention more than a year ago by workplace collaboration company Slack.

Slack originally complained of Teams, Microsoft’s own workplace platform, and how it is bundled with the market-dominant Office 365 productivity suite illegally forced its software on users. 

The complaint and resulting probe into Microsoft’s business is the latest development in a long-running feud between the two companies. 

​Organizations in the education sector and local and state government are most at risk from email threats, according to a new report.

The report, published by IT security firm Cyren, also found that phishing remains the dominant form of attack against all industries.

Based on data gathered from nearly 45,000 incidents, researchers found that the education sector received over five threats per thousand emails received. State and local government bodies received just over two threats per thousand emails received, nearly double the amount received by the next most targeted industry, software.

The report also looked at the number of attacks per 100 users across a wide range of industries. It found that there were nearly 400 per 100 users in education compared to just over 150 in the construction industry.

Researchers said there was a surprisingly low rate for manufacturing, especially when compared to the construction industry, which is closely related.

“We observed 20 confirmed threats per 100 users in the manufacturing vertical. Without solid detection and automated incident response, a manufacturer with 100 Office 365 users would spend at least 16 hours manually investigating and remediating emails,” they added.

In a blog post, security researchers found that the data supported a widely held theory that phishing is a precursor to more damaging attacks such as business email compromise (BEC) and ransomware.

The report looked at phishing compared with malware and BEC attacks across four industries. Phishing remained the dominant threat in healthcare (76%), finance and insurance (76%), manufacturing (85%), and real estate (93%).

In healthcare, BEC attacks made up the remaining 24%. Researchers said that robust malware detection capabilities in the healthcare industry explains the high rate of BEC attempts. 

“Attackers understand that they can’t easily slip malware past automated defenses, so they have shifted to social engineering tactics,” said researchers.

Researchers said that when it comes to solving the email threat problem, user education is an important component, but several organizations have “over-rotated” on the idea that users are responsible for keeping sophisticated email threats at bay.

“The predominant trend is to use an email hygiene technology such as Microsoft Defender for Office 365 to catch 80% of threats, deploy a specialized add-on to catch and contain zero-day phishing and most BEC attempts, enable employees to perform initial analysis on the small percentage of emails that are classified as suspicious (rather than malicious or clean), and automate incident response workflows to save time and reduce exposure,” added researchers.