Monday 12 October 2020

Amazon-like megacorps dominating various online sectors could become norm for pandemic-stricken planet

Certain business models work better than others when most people avoid human contact

Shifts in consumer behaviour could see a handful of companies come to dominate the online food, education and leisure industries, as Amazon has in e-commerce, according to research.…



via The Register - Data Centre: Cloud
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/12/rsa_covid_19_work_automation/

Comms API merchant Twilio spanks $3.2bn in stock to gobble data slurper Segment

Spending spree continues in the 'customer engagement' space as online sales segment grows and grows

Cloud communications outfit Twilio has found a way to spend some of its lockdown money, snapping up "customer data" specialist Segment in a cash-free deal worth approximately $3.2bn.…



via The Register - Data Centre: Cloud
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/12/twilio_segment/

AWS makes its own Arm CPUs the default for ElastiCache in-memory data store service

Bills home-brewed silicon as the upgrade path to better Redis or memcached

Amazon Web Services has made its home-brewed Arm-powered Graviton2 CPUs the default for its ElastiCache service.…



via The Register - Data Centre: Cloud
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/12/aws_makes_graviton2_default_for_elasticache/

Friday 9 October 2020

Google contractor HCL America accused of retaliating against unionized techies by shifting US jobs to Poland

Pittsburgh workforce erosion, punitive policies cited in labor complaint

The US National Labor Relations Board has bundled a series of complaints alleging labor law violations against IT services firm HCL America (HCL Technologies), which supplies contract workers like data analysts to a Google office in Pittsburgh, into a case to be heard in February.…



via The Register - Data Centre: Cloud
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/09/hcl_union_challenge/

How’s everyone else managing their data amid all this upheaval? Find out here…

Stay home, log into Druva’s DxP virtual summit – and still get the t-shirt

Promo  A lot has changed over the past six months, but one thing hasn’t: your company’s data is still its most important asset, and protecting it is crucial.…



via The Register - Data Centre: Cloud
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/09/data_management_druva/

Alibaba and pals grab £35m in Jisc contracts to give overseas students access to UK courses during pandemic

Bulk of deal focuses on secure, high-performance connectivity to China

IT services nonprofit Jisc, which runs the UK's academic network Janet, has awarded framework contracts worth up to £35m to provide remote access to British research and courses, including from China.…


via The Register - Data Centre: Networks
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/09/uk_academic_service_provider_lets/

Thursday 8 October 2020

UK ISP TalkTalk confirms it will MullMull go-private takeover offer valuing it at £1.1bn

Nobody expects the Telco Consolidation

UK ISP TalkTalk has confirmed it is considering a takeover offer from Toscafund Asset Management that values the broadband and TV provider at £1.1bn.…


via The Register - Data Centre: Networks
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/08/talktalk_to_consider_takeover_offer/

Britain should have binned Huawei 5G kit years ago to cuddle up with Trump, says Parliamentary committee

Plus: MPs call for more OpenRAN-based work in UK

The British government should rip out Huawei's 5G mobile network equipment regardless of the facts because doing so would curry favour with Donald Trump's US, Parliament's Defence Committee has said in an extraordinary new report.…


via The Register - Data Centre: Networks
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/08/defence_committee_parliament_5g_report/

Tableau continues to pursue monogamish marriage a year after Salesforce nuptials

Sure, Salesforce is our main squeeze but we're open to suggestions

Analysis  Entering a marriage, it might be tough to keep old flames alive but that's what Tableau is trying to do as it gets closer to Salesforce, the enterprise application company which announced a $15.7m merger in June last year.…



via The Register - Data Centre: Cloud
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/08/tableau_salesforce_plans/

ICANN begs Europe: Please fill in the blanks on this half-assed GDPR-compliant Whois we came up with

We can’t get our community to agree, perhaps you’ll do our job for us?

After two years of failed policy work, ICANN has returned to Europe, dropped to its knees, and begged the continent to finish the rest of the DNS overseer's half-done Whois domain-name database so that it doesn't fall foul of GDPR.…


via The Register - Data Centre: Networks
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/08/icann_whois_plans/

Wednesday 7 October 2020

Yes, it's down again: Microsoft's Office 365 takes yet another mid-week tumble off the edge of the internet

Come back, Word 97, all is forgiven

Microsoft says it is working on figuring out why its cloud-based unproductivity suite Office 365 is down yet again for unlucky subscribers.…



via The Register - Data Centre: Cloud
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/07/office_365_outage/

A freshly formed English council waves £18m at UK tech industry, asks: Can somebody design and run pretty much everything for us?

The IT services wish list is about what you'd expect from an 18-month-old

Barely 18 months old, newly formed Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council has offered £18m to private sector IT and consultancy firms, asking if they can take on, well, almost everything.…



via The Register - Data Centre: Cloud
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/07/bcp_council_18m_tender_notice/

DigitalOcean decides to head rivals off at the PaaS, floats App Platform to deploy, run code without juggling servers

If you fear you'll drown in AWS, GCP, Azure, etc, maybe this is a wave you'd like to catch

Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider DigitalOcean dipped its toes into the Platform-as-a-Service waters on Tuesday with the launch of App Platform.…



via The Register - Data Centre: Cloud
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/07/digitalocean_paas_app_platform/

Big Tech faces its Ma Bell moment: US House Dems' report demands break-up of internet 'monopolists'

'These once scrappy, underdog startups have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons'

A long-awaited congressional report into Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google has been published – and it concludes the online giants are monopolists that need to be broken up.…



via The Register - Data Centre: Cloud
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/06/tech_giants_antitrust/

Tuesday 6 October 2020

The WAN of opportunity: Funnily enough, home Wi-Fi sales see 'sudden spike' amid pandemic, not so much for biz

Analyst predict five good years as homeworking and refresh cycles meld

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven fruitful for the consumer Wi-Fi sector, according to analyst house ABI Research, with shipments this year set to increase and long-term growth forecast.…


via The Register - Data Centre: Networks
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/06/home_wifi_sales/

New Workspace for your WFH office? Nah, it's just Google shooting G Suite with the rebrandogun

Microsoft isn't the only company to fiddle with its iconography

Google has fired a rebrandogun loaded with fresh icons at its G Suite platform. Prepare to relinquish the suite life and put nose to the grindstone in Google's "Workspace".…



via The Register - Data Centre: Cloud
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/06/google_workspace/

Yorkshire authority seeks £3m 'modern, cloud-based, future-proof ERP solution' in as few products as possible

No pressure

West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) is on the hunt for a new £3m ERP system amid an IT services revamp.…



via The Register - Data Centre: Cloud
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/06/yorkshire_authority_seeks_3m_erp/

Nominet refuses to consider complaint about its own behaviour, claims CEO didn’t mean what he said on camera

Dot-UK overlord descends into farce

The operator of the .uk registry has descended into a farce after refusing to accept a complaint from one of its members – and claiming its CEO didn’t mean what he is recorded on camera saying.…


via The Register - Data Centre: Networks
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/06/nominet_refuses_to_accept_complaint/

Cisco ordered to cough up $2bn – yes, two billion dollars – plus royalties after ripping off biz's cybersecurity patents

Centripetal Networks uses lawsuit against Switchzilla. It's super effective

Cisco has been hit with a massive $1.9bn patent-infringement bill for copying cybersecurity tech from Centripetal Networks and pushing the company out of lucrative government contracts.…


via The Register - Data Centre: Networks
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/05/cisco_patent_bill_centripetal_networks/

Monday 5 October 2020

Fujitsu gets ready to eat its own dogfood as company-wide digital transformation project kicks off

Project 'Fujitra' includes One ERP project to rule 'em all: What could go wrong?

Japanese computing veteran Fujitsu is embarking on a company-wide digital transformation, including a particularly complex-sounding piece of work to standardise operations using a single system for business processes, data, and IT.…



via The Register - Data Centre: Cloud
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/05/fujitsu_project_fujitra_transformation/

TalkTalk marches OneTel users into a brave new email world

You will be upgraded, whether you want to be or not

The UK's favourite* telecoms outfit, TalkTalk, has continued its impressive track record of delighting customers with a forced upgrade of legacy OneTel.com users to the shiny new TalkTalk Mail.…



via The Register - Data Centre: Cloud
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/05/talktalk_onetel/

IBM manager had to make one person redundant from choice of two, still bungled it and got firm done for unfair dismissal

You can't make this stuff up

An IBM manager unfairly sacked a third-line IT support engineer despite having a pool of just two people to make redundancies from, a UK employment tribunal has ruled.…


via The Register - Data Centre: Networks
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/05/ibm_unfair_dismissal_birmingham/

Friday 2 October 2020

Microsoft says bug, sorry, 'a latent defect' in Safe Deployment Process system downed Azure Active Directory

We're taking steps to prevent this from happening again, says Redmond

Microsoft has blamed a software bug for the service disruption on Monday and Tuesday that affected customers using Azure Active Directory-dependent applications.…



via The Register - Data Centre: Cloud
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/02/microsoft_azure_bug/

Thursday 1 October 2020

Think tank warns that any further delay to 5G rollout will cost the UK multiple billions – but hey, at least Huawei is out

This is what you wanted, right?

The UK will take a multibillion-pound blow to productivity and economic prosperity should the 5G rollout be held up further, a new report from the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) claims.…


via The Register - Data Centre: Networks
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/01/uk_5g_rollout_delay_report/

O2 cuts ribbon on UK's first commercial driverless car lab where it'll blend satellite and 5G signal to stay on the road

Better improve its coverage then

Mobile network O2, notable for its occasional outages, has opened the UK's first commercial lab for connected, driverless cars.…


via The Register - Data Centre: Networks
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/01/o2_driverless_cars_5g/

Where are we now? Microsoft 363? 362? We've lost count because Exchange Online isn't playing nicely this morning

That's the second Redmondian outage this week

Microsoft's Exchange Online service fell over in the early hours of this morning.…



via The Register - Data Centre: Cloud
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/01/microsoft_exchange_online_outage/

US comms watchdog calls for more scrutiny of submarine cables that land in 'adversary countries'

And then mentions China 18 times and calls for dedicated agency to regulate international data links

One of the four commissioners of America's communications regulator has called for more scrutiny of submarine cables between the Land of the Free and “adversary countries.”…


via The Register - Data Centre: Networks
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/10/01/geoffrey_starks_submarine_cable_reform/