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Posted by: HotViews Editor at 11:15
Tags: research marketanalysis competitivelandscape
Dell’s revenue fell sharply in Q1 as it continues to face a challenging market environment due to cautious customer spending and falling demand for PC’s.
Q1 FY24 revenue was $20.9 bn, down 20% yoy, with operating income of $1.1bn, down 31%. Demand softened across all major lines of business, regions, customer sizes, and most verticals. It says customers are staying cautious and deliberate in their IT spending. In response Dell has been looking to be disciplined on its pricing, reducing expenses and normalising supply chains.
The Infrastructure Solutions Group was down 18% yoy to $7.6bn, driven by soft demand in servers and storage. Storage revenue was $3.8bn, with demand growth in the company’s software-defined storage and midrange storage arrays. Servers and networking revenue was $3.8bn, with demand growth in AI optimized high value workload servers. The Client Solutions Group was down 23% to $12bn. The PC market has continued to slow since June 2022, and the market declined sharply in calendar year Q4 and again in Q1.
As Dell seeks to identify new areas for growth it is focusing on helping orgasniations navigate the complexities of multi-cloud, edge, AI, data management and hybrid work. It announced Project Helix, making Dell the first to collaborate with NVIDIA on full-stack solutions that help customers deploy generative AI on-premises at scale using their own proprietary data. It also introduced Dell NativeEdge, an edge software platform that helps customers manage, simplify and secure their entire edge estate with a single solution.
Looking ahead, management expect the cautious IT spending environment to continue in Q2 with ISG spending expected to remain muted as customers scrutinise and prioritise spend. Q2 revenue is forecast to be between down 3% and up 1%. For the full year, the management is maintaining FY24 revenue expectations, down between 12% and 18%.
Posted by: Simon Baxter at 09:38
VMware continues to focus on driving growth in its cloud offerings and shift the revenue profile towards recurring revenue and away from its license and services business, which continues to decline.
Revenue for Q1 FY243 was $3.28bn, an increase of 6% yoy. Subscription and SaaS were the key drivers for growth with revenue of $1.22bn, up 35% yoy. Subscription and SaaS revenue constituted 37% of total revenue for the quarter. Services revenue fell 4.5% to $1.54bn, and License revenue fell 9.6% to $517m. Net income was $224m, down 9%.
By geography its international business outperformed the US, growing 9.7% (vs US growth of 2.4%) and now represents 53% of WW revenue.
At Mobile World Congress 2023, VMware announced several new innovations, enhancements and partnerships including:
Posted by: Simon Baxter at 09:31
Life and pensions specialist, Standard Life is using open finance technology from UK fintech Moneyhub to power a new service for its customers. Money Mindset is targeted at Standard life’s 1.5m workplace pension scheme members and will enable users to manage all of their finances in one place. Money Mindset will also provide education on topics such as savings, investments, and insurance and will link with some of the other tools provided by Standard Life.
Founded in 2014, Moneyhub provides a variety of offerings built around open banking and API dataflows. The vendor has worked with a number of major financial services organisations including Schroders, AON and Mercer (Marsh Mclennan). In August 2022, the UK’s largest building society, Nationwide, adopted Moneyhub’s sweeping technology to streamline its account opening process (see: Moneyhub streamlines processes for Nationwide).
In December 2022, Standard Life’s parent company, Phoenix Group, invested £15m in Moneyhub as part of a successful £55m fundraising effort by the fintech that was also supported by Lloyds Banking Group and Legal & General. (see: Phoenix Group backs Moneyhub).
As open banking continues to evolve, vendors such as Moneyhub look set to have a key role to play in the ongoing disaggregation of financial services. As a result, customers are gaining easy access to an increasingly wide range of services, including those that were once the sole preserve of the banking sector.
Posted by: Jon C Davies at 09:01
A change at the top will see Shaheen Sayed taking up the reins as head Accenture UK & Ireland and member of the firm’s Global Management Committee on the 1st September. She will succeed Simon Eaves who, after three years in the role, is relocating to the US to become the North America Strategy & Consulting lead for Accenture.
A 20-year company veteran, Shaheen is currently the lead for the Accenture’s Technology business in UK&I business having previously run the firm’s Health & Public Service division here. She is a recognised thought leader on inclusive business cultures and talent and is a guest lecturer for the London School of Economics Global Masters Programme. Shaheen was voted woman of the year at the Women in IT Awards London 2020 in recognition of her contribution to the tech industry, and she also serves as an Honorary Colonel for the 3 Military Intelligence Battalion.
Shaheen takes the helm of a region in fine fettle. Following a rare yoy top line decline in FY20, Accenture UK&I has bounced back strongly over the last couple of years. FY22 saw the unit revenues grow by 30% to c.£3.6bn and the geography is on track to deliver another double digit increase in turnover for the current fiscal which ends on 31st August (see here). We will seek to catch-up with Shaheen soon to get a better view of her plans and priorities for the business here.
Posted by: Duncan Aitchison at 08:47
Tags: accenture appointment
Late last week, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) published a £934m opportunity. It relates to the Synergy Programme, part of the Shared Services Strategy for Government. DWP is the lead contracting authority for the Synergy Cluster, which also includes MoJ, DWP, DEFRA and Home Office.
The 2018 Government’s Shared Services Strategy (see Government Shared Services: Lacking courage or realistic? | TechMarketView) was refreshed in March 2021 (UK Government Shared Services: The Opportunity | TechMarketView). The Cabinet Office’s stated aim is to have five cloud-based shared services centres by 2028 at the latest. The Synergy Cluster represents one of those shared services centres.
The new procurement, which is for a contract running for 12 years (plus a potential 24-months) highlights that the need to drive business transformation across departments has been heightened due to the pandemic and the related tough fiscal environment. The hope is that the new approach will allow the Synergy Cluster – which services 250,000 of Whitehall’s 450,000 civil servants – to capture, manage, and improve the quality of finance and HR data and support better informed decisions.
The Synergy Cluster is seeking cloud-based services leveraging the capabilities offered by a SaaS ERP platform and associated technologies, as well as the systems integration service to enable the transition. The aim will be to separate the technology from the services centres in pursuit of value and efficiency. It is what is being referred to as a “bundled procurement”, i.e., the technology (including ERP) and SI suppliers are expected to work in partnership from the outset to “jointly propose a cohesive solution and delivery approach which meets the… outcome-based requirements and demonstrates they are a compatible supplier partnership”.
As things stand, all the Synergy cluster departments use the same outsourced BPS partner: SSCL, the joint venture (JV) between the Cabinet Office and Sopra Steria. SSCL provides the current Single Operating Platform (based on Oracle e-Business Suite). It has recently migrated to hosting on a PaaS Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The Home Office have a direct contractual relationship with Oracle having already migrated on to an instance of their ERP SaaS (Software as a Service) platform as part of their METIS Programme (Home Office renews £31m Oracle Cloud contract | TechMarketView).
The procurement notice comes only a few weeks after the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) published the findings of its inquiry based on the NAO investigation into Government shared services. The report has numerous concerns surrounding the programme. With back-office functions costing the taxpayer “over £500m a year”, PAC is keen to ensure the deliverability of the programme. It wants to be sure that costs will be reduced and back-office resources will be freed up to provide better front-line services.
PAC has made numerous recommendations based on its findings and concerns (mainly around the budget and the ability to deliver on the benefits): having contingency plans in case the current strategy encounters problems; securing the level of funding required to implement current plans; quantifying the benefits of the strategy; and having measures in place to monitor the overall progress of the strategy. Within the Synergy procurement, DWP states that the design of the Common Operating Model for the cluster will evolve over the five programme delivery phases and benefits will also evolve over that time. It states that this “will help identify additional benefits for the Programme and provide more robust data and narrative to justify the current benefits profile.”
The deadline for tenders is 26th June.
Posted by: Georgina O'Toole at 08:38
Tags: erp cloud sharedservices Oracle public+sector central+government
The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth 11 took place 70 years ago today – on 2nd June 1953.
I was 6 at the time and it is my very first memory involving technology. My parents had spent a fortune on a television set in a smart wooden cabinet with a 7 inch black and white screen. The children of the road were sat on a long bench in our front room to watch. Afterwards we had a street party and were all given Coronation mugs.
I’ve ringed my sister, Carol, and I in the photo.
The tech advances in the last 70 years are truly amazing. I wonder what the next 70 years will bring?
Posted by: Richard Holway at 00:00
The University of Surrey’s creative AI teams in vision, sound and language understanding, with Royal Holloway StoryFutures’ innovators in immersive storytelling, audience experience, diversity & inclusion, are calling for industry, government and 3rd sector collaborators interested in creating a doctoral training centre to develop AI solutions that improve inclusion, accessibility and personalisation for modern media. The centre aims to train 80 PhD research students in AI, design for inclusion, accessibility and other topics, creating a new wave of talent that will transform the reach of film, TV, written word, audio and other forms of media. We will shape future generations of creative AI workers by addressing three key areas:
Personalisation – Using AI to understand user needs recognising that everyone has requirements that are unique to them, addressing barriers to inclusion, issues of bias, and defining new ways to preserve the user’s privacy, security, and dignity;
Design Thinking – Creating AI solutions that help media creators and consumers interact with digital content easily and intuitively, that help creators understand other’s needs, or improving the ways in which people absorb and understand information;
Automation – Developing AI that automatically transforms content, such as real-time language simplification, scene understanding and description while preserving narrative, live language translation, intelligent subtitling and non-speech sound description. We are seeking partners who want to improve inclusion and accessibility of media. Your organisation might create media, software tools, distribution infrastructure or be a vital part of the modern media value chain. Participation takes a variety of forms: Provide informal advice, insights, and mentoring; Arrange data or access to facilities; Offer placements; Sponsor PhD projects; among other contributions. We’re also making participation more agile, and the benefits more immediate, than traditional academic research programmes. To find out more, contact: a.rogoyski@surrey.ac.uk
Posted by: University of Surrey at 00:00
Salesforce has announced results for its first quarter of 2024 (ending 30 April 2023), showing revenue up 13% year-over-year (in constant currency) to $8.25bn (£6.8bn), slightly beating expectations set at the end of FY2023 ($70m above the upper end) and keeping the company on track for its predicted revenue for the full year of between $34.5bn and $34.7bn (representing year-on-year growth of around 10%) – that guidance remaining unchanged.
It’s a far more tempered picture than this time last year, when the company kicked off its FY2023 (see Salesforce growth continues in Q1, trims FY23 guidance) with Q1 growth at twice that rate (26% in constant currency), but that was then… and this is now. The intervening 12 months has seen something of a shift in the macroeconomic environment.
However Q1/2024 has nonetheless seen strong growth across Salesforce’s Data segment (comprising the Mulesoft and Tableau businesses) – up 20% in constant currency (with Mulesoft the star performer, up 26%)… continuing a story we saw unfold across FY2023.
Regionally-speaking, EMEA outperformed the company’s global growth average (up 17% in constant currency year-over-year), beating the Americas (10%) but somewhat behind APAC’s 24%.
Non-GAAP operating margin stood at 27.6% for the quarter – up 1,000 basis points year-over-year, showing that the company’s focus on profitability as it began FY2024 (the figure stood at 22.5% for FY2023) – see Salesforce puts profits at the heart of its strategy – appears to be paying off. To that end, Salesforce has raised its FY2024 guidance for that metric to a 550 basis point increase year-over-year.
Recent product announcements have seen Salesforce embed generative AI across its offerings – with March seeing the launch of Einstein GPT – fusing its proprietary AI models with technology from OpenAI and an ecosystem of generative AI partners and real-time data from the Salesforce Data Cloud; and a ChatGPT app for Slack (developed with OpenAI). The company’s betting big on its generative AI / CRM combo to maintain an edge with customers, innovating their processes and driving productivity gains for the year ahead. Time will tell if this potential for innovation brings the level of predicted customer benefit, and if that translates into more sales. Or if it instead serves more to protect Salesforce’s established position, whilst everyone else seemingly also adds generative AI to their products on an almost weekly basis (in an effort to keep their own seats at the table).
Posted by: Craig Wentworth at 09:28
Tags: results profitability generative AI
US HQ’ed Cybersecurity platform providers CrowdStrike and Okta both reported Q1 FY24 results yesterday showing slowing growth, which is expected to continue for the rest of the year.
CrowdStike reported total revenue of $692.6m, a 42% yoy increase, with subscription revenue of $651.2m. This was down from the 61% yoy growth the business saw in Q1 FY23, with around 35% growth forecast for the full FY24. The company’s share price fell around 11% after hours. The business did however post a small profit, with Net income of $0.5m, compared to a loss of $31.5m in Q1 FY23. Earlier this week the company announced the launch of its AI assistant (analyst) Charlotte AI – See CrowdStrike introduces AI assistant Charlotte AI. The company is also working with AWS to develop powerful new Generative AI applications that help customers accelerate their cloud, security and AI journeys. In April, they also announced the launch of Falcon Insight for IoT an EDR/XDR solution for Internet of Things assets .
Identity and access management focused Okta by comparison reported revenue of $518m for Q1 FY24, an increase of 25% yoy, with subscription revenue of $503m, up 26%. This was down from 65% yoy growth in Q1 last year and Okta’s share price responded accordingly, falling 18% overnight. Unlike CrowdStrike the business continues to post a hefty loss, with an operating loss of $160m, or (31)% of total revenue, compared to $240m, or (58)% of total revenue in Q1FY23. Growth rates are expected to continue to fall this year with growth of 17-18% expected for the full FY24
The time of extraordinarily high growth for platform security providers seems to be coming to an end with growth rates expected to slow for the rest of the year. Cost pressures, delayed purchasing and a focus on security product consolidation are all contributing factors.
Posted by: Simon Baxter at 09:21
I feel it is often instructive to compare and contrast the profitability of a marketplace business model with that of a traditional retailer business model serving the same customer base. Let’s take the UK vehicle sales market for example (you knew I was going to say that, didn’t you).
Today, UK-listed ‘legacy’ vehicle marketplace Auto Trader reported its annual results (to 31st March 2023). They made a ‘real’ operating profit of £278m on revenues of £500m. That’s a (+)56% operating margin. In contrast, US-listed (but UK HQ’d) ‘upstart’ hybrid car retailer Cazoo managed to lose £668m on revenues of £1.25bn last year (to 31st December 2022 – see Cazoo: Onwards and upwards (losses, I mean)). That’s a (-)53% operating margin.
Now you may say this is not a fair comparison, and I say why not? They both sell cars to the great British public (and buy them, too), though with Auto Trader, you are buying from car dealers or private citizens, so the retail proposition – and arguably risk – is different from Cazoo’s. But there’s literally one hundred times more choice with Auto Trader, which claims over 485,000 vehicles listed each day vs 4,036 vehicles on Cazoo (at time of writing).
My point is this.
Cazoo founder Alex Chesterman set out to ‘disrupt’ the vehicle sales industry by targeting traditional car dealers. He tried to do this by seemingly copying Carvana, a US-listed, founder-led hybrid car retailer launched in 2012, some six years before Cazoo. Carvana is – and always has been – massively loss-making (see Carvana: Pile ‘em high, Sell ‘em (too) cheap).
If you really want to disrupt an industry, then you need to go after the market leader. Chesterman chose the wrong target.
Posted by: Anthony Miller at 09:18
The annual Enterprise Awards – organised by ScaleUp Group in association with the WCIT – is celebrating and recognising the very best of the UK’s technology entrepreneurial talent with ‘The Oscars of the Technology Industry’.
Each year, hundreds of the movers and shakers of the UK technology sector – including entrepreneurs, investors and advisors – come together to honour the best of the best.
The Enterprise Awards Dinner sponsored by Evelyn Partners, ScaleUp Group, Silverpeak and TechMarketview is taking place on 21st June 2023 at Drapers’ Hall in the City of London. The evening is a great opportunity to entertain your clients, associates and staff in a very energising, entertaining environment.
Please note that the Dinner is a not for profit, charity benefitting event and your participation would contribute to funding good causes also.
For further information or to book, please visit www.enterprise-awards.co.uk
Posted by: tx2events at 00:00
Founded in 2022, UK carbon-removals start-up CUR8 has raised £5.3m in a pre-seed funding round, led by Google Ventures (alongside CapitalT).
The company curates (get it?) a mixed portfolio of carbon removal schemes – designed to drawn down CO2 from the atmosphere and lock it away for “at least 100” (and sometimes thousands of) years, through activities from enhanced weathering of silicate rock, planting forests, “re-wilding” soil biomes, and turning biomass residue into biocharcoal (and not burning it!); to using timber in large-scale construction projects, and direct air capture on an industrial scale.
Although carbon footprinting and reduction is the primary way in which countries, companies, and individuals should be addressing their environmental impact (see Deepki acquires Nooco to enhance its carbon footprinting); when that method alone can’t hope to bring emissions down in time, there are also carbon removal schemes – designed to take out some of what’s already gone into the atmosphere.
It’s worth saying that that these shouldn’t be seen as a lazy pathway to net zero that enables companies (who can afford it) to greenwash their ongoing and unchanging operations by offsetting what they emit through investing in other companies’ more climate-positive actions. Rather these initiatives – at least the genuine ones that can evidence their actual climate impact (and CUR8 boasts a due diligence process designed establish third-party verification of scientific claims, tracking over 100 data points across impact, integrity and scalability) – can contribute to an overall reduction package as the world transitions to a lower environmental impact economy.
However, the carbon removal industry is still in its infancy, with innovations in need of investment and scaling assistance. As well as growing its team and scaling up platform capacity in the short team, CUR8 is looking to develop financial tools to help the industry scale longer term.
Full disclosure: A long time ago, in a career far, far away, your author used to run a record company (and a gigging band) with one of CUR8’s co-founders. However, there hasn’t been a technology invented yet that can offset the effect our music had on gig-goers and record-buyers of a certain age.
Posted by: Craig Wentworth at 10:36
Tags: fundraising Carbon removal
While I was away on my hols (Australia, since you asked), the UK government published its much anticipated National Semiconductor Strategy. I’m sure the timing was entirely coincidental.
The strategy has the bold aim to ‘double down on design, research and advanced chip leadership – securing the UK’s position as a global science and technology superpower’. This is all fine and dandy. However, I question the term ‘double down’ when what is actually required is an order of magnitude boost to transform the UK semiconductor industry from a clutch of brilliant startups into a ‘technology superpower’.
The funding that the government plans to invest seems meagre: ‘up to’ (note, not ‘a minimum of’) £1bn over the next decade with the first £200m deployed between 2023-2025. The UK media makes the point that these sums pale into insignificance compared to the US government’s $52bn commitment in the Washington Chips Act, and indeed the EU’s €43m of state aid to the industry. However, huge chunks of their support will go towards building chip fabrication plants (‘fabs’), a strategy which the UK government eschews. I think that is broadly the right decision in terms of mass manufacturing, though I think we need local prototype manufacturing capability to be able to test chip designs ‘in house’ – or at least, ‘in country’.
What concerns me most about the government’s National Semiconductor Strategy is that is thick on ‘vision’ and broad-brush objectives (growing the domestic sector; mitigating the risk of supply chain disruptions; protecting our national security), woolly on ‘process’ (investment schemes; incubator programmes, working parties, et al), but thin – in fact all but absent – on targets and measures.
At first blush, I think the National Semiconductor Strategy hits the right issues. However, without specific targets and measures, there will be no means to ensure that the funding (in particular) will go to those who can really make a difference rather than those who shout the loudest.
Posted by: Anthony Miller at 09:45
Tags: semiconductor
London-based construction tech company Qflow has announced a £7.2m Series A round, led by Systemiq Capital (with participation from Ascension Ventures, Bridge Investment Group, Gravel Rd, and others), bringing it funding total to £9.6m since founding in 2018.
The company’s platform enables construction teams collect data on materials usage and waste in real time, at the source, and then apply analytics to provide insights into the efficiency, carbon impact, and financial cost of operations. It can provide real-time alerts on materials and waste non-compliance, and also integrates with third-party tools to contribute to a more complete and transparent record of building construction.
Qflow’s sustainability angle has been what’s garnered the lion’s share of attention – and indeed its ability to calculate, report on, and identify opportunities for greenhouse gas reduction across the supply chain is welcome. Especially in an industry with such a significant climate impact – the UN Environment Programme’s 2022 Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction found that building materials accounted for around 9% of worldwide energy-related CO2 emissions; and construction, renovation and demolition activities generated 100 billion tonnes of waste – of which around 35% is sent to landfills.
However, what gives the platform even more adoption potential (if the dire warnings of a widening gap between the sector’s “necessary decarbonisation pathway” and its actual climate performance alone weren’t enough of a driver), is the fact that it’s not just a carbon accounting tool. It’s designed to slot into logistics and accounting processes so that it can also add value by providing quality control and finance assistance, and also highlight potential supply chain risks.
And as we’ve said before (see Tracking emissions and changing habits: Pledge and SaveMoneyCutCarbon), any sustainability investment that delivers on multiple fronts – rather than just being bolted-on to serve a single (not directly revenue-generating) purpose – stands a much better chance of not subsequently being sheared-off again when times get tough (or management regimes – and corporate priorities – change).
Posted by: Craig Wentworth at 09:31
Tags: funding construction PropTech GHG carbon accounting
Second quarter results from Hewlett Packard Enterprise show the firm grew revenue 9% (constant currency) over the comparable period last year to $7.0bn. That dollar figure is below the firm’s own outlook range of $7.1bn-$7.5bn.
Gross margins (GAAP and Non-GAAP) hit an all-time record with HPE raising operating profit and EPS guidance for the full year.
Inside the firm’s portfolio mix, the shift to higher growth and higher margin market areas continues. Intelligent Edge revenue was +56% to $1.3bn, with the operating margin expanding from 12.6% to 26.9%. High Performance Computing & Artificial Intelligence revenue was +22.0% to $840m with the margin moving closer to break even. Elsewhere, Compute declined (-3%) while Storage grew 2.0%; these businesses still account for a large chunk of the total revenue mix (54%).
The Annualised Revenue Run Rate (ARR is a financial metric to assess growth in consumption services – i.e., GreenLake) was up 38% to $1.1bn having first hit the $1bn milestone in Q1 (see HPE enjoys record Q1 and raises guidance).
The firm expects FY23 revenue growth to be in the 4-6% range (constant currency).
Posted by: Kate Hanaghan at 09:30
Tags: results HPC consumptionmodels
The generative AI trend continues across all industries, with most tech companies looking to exploit it by finding their own way to integrate ChatGPT or their own proprietary LLM’s into their solutions. Security providers have long been investing in AI, and indeed AI for threat detection and threat hunting is a common feature.
Now it would seem cybersecurity providers are looking to add generative AI to the mix with CrowdStrike announcing the released of Charlotte AI, an integrated generative AI chatbot (analyst). User can ask questions in plain English and dozens of other languages to receive intuitive answers from the CrowdStrike Falcon platform.
CrowdStrike give an example of a CIO or a CISO preparing for a board meeting. Rather than reaching out to the security teams, the executive could instead ask a few simple, straightforward questions to the AI. Charlotte AI can then provide real-time insight into an organisation’s risk profile, including its threat landscape, risk level against critical vulnerabilities, current security posture, compliance requirements, cybersecurity performance metrics and much more.
Another use case they give is for less experienced IT and security professionals. Charlotte AI can help them make better decisions faster, reducing response time to critical incidents. So, a new security analyst for example, such as a Tier 1 member of a SOC, can use the generative AI to help them operate like a more advanced analyst with simple queries.
I can see how adding generative AI to most IT solutions will add some value, though in lots of cases it is somewhat of a gimmick, but the technology is still in its early stages of development, despite all the hype around ChatGPT. In a security platform context I can’t see it being used heavily be experienced professionals, and for board members and other users probably fairly limited also.
Posted by: Simon Baxter at 09:27
Goodbye Tina
Welcome Nvidia as the new FAANG
Given that I have posted articles every time one of my rock legends has died since I ‘invented’ HotNews some 25 years ago, I should have featured the death of Tina Turner at the age of 83 last week. I’ve been a fan since the Nutbush days and ‘Simply the Best’ and ‘What you see is what you get’ are two permanent tracks on the Holway ‘get them up dancing’ music mix.
News of Tina’s death hit the headlines on the same day as Nvidia truly stunned the market by telling investors that it expected revenues of $11b in Q2 which was hugely in excess of the $7.2b analysts had been expecting. Nvidia stock rose 24% on the day and yesterday Nvidia’s value touched $1 trillion for a short while (it ended the day at $990b) Nvidia stock is up 175% YTD.
I’ve been covering the FAANGs for many years. A for Amazon, A for Apple and G for Google (owned by Alphabet) are all $1 trillion companies. Now we have a 4th. Indeed I’ve long been uncomfortable including N for Netflix. So maybe it is now N for Nvidia!
Nvidia is seen as one of main beneficiaries of the AI revolution. In any revolution there will be two kinds of winners. Just like in the goldrush, there will be the makers of the ‘picks and shovels’ and the miners who strike gold by coming up with the killer apps that utilise AI. Nvidia is currently one of the former.
The news media today is dominated by warnings from hundreds of the world’s AI experts that AI could lead to the ‘extinction of humanity’ with risks akin to a nuclear war or pandemic. We have faced warnings before about the effect of the internet and then of social media. But the risks from AI are in another, higher league. The one real surprise is the speed at which AI has taken off. I was one of the million who signed up for ChatGPT in the first week – an all time record. It has quickly become part of my everyday, life as I ask it all manner of things. So far it has been benevolent. But it could easily turn malevolent - maybe without me noticing.
One thing is certain. AI is no ‘flash in the pan’. It is the most significant ‘new thing’ in the tech world which will have a profound effect on all of us. Same applies to Nvidia which, if it plays it cards right, could well become the leading FAANG of the next decade.
Posted by: Richard Holway at 08:58
Our digital identities are now one of the most valuable things we possess, and are regularly being targeted by cyber criminals intent on fraud or other nefarious purposes. But the challenges of digital identities extends beyond the individuals to organisations, especially when it comes to employee screening and onboarding – after all you want to make sure that person you are hiring is who they say they are.
UK digital identity company OneID has announced it has teamed up with HR tech and fintech firm, Avvanz, to enable frictionless employee screening and onboarding using identity technology. The integration will add essential digital identity verification to background screening, enabling firms to digitally verify identities in just a few seconds, reducing recruitment times and speeding up onboarding.
Screening and onboarding new hires are critical parts of an Employee Lifecycle Management process. They can be cumbersome and time-consuming and hence leveraging technologies can help the process immensely, reducing turnaround time whilst simplifying the process and staying compliant with the data privacy acts and other regulatory requirements.
A common challenge in background screening industry, is having absolute certainty in who an individual claims to be. The service from OneID and Avvanz uses bank-verified data, meaning organisations can be confident that their applicants are who they say they are, right from the outset. It also improves the reliability and security of checks, providing a fast, safe, streamlined experience for both hiring organisations and applicants.
Posted by: Simon Baxter at 08:45
Microsoft and Fujitsu have announced a five-year strategic partnership that will see the two firms “significantly expand” their existing alliance.
By working together, the firms hope to grow Fujitsu’s Uvance business (which is focused on delivering sustainability transformation) to ultimately become a $5.4bn annual revenue stream. Through a combination of Microsoft’s cloud platforms (Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform and Viva) and Fujitsu’s industry expertise in manufacturing, retail, and healthcare, the two plan to help more organisations respond more rapidly to environmental changes. More broadly, the objective is to transform citizen experiences (e.g., hospitals patients) and build resilience into systems and processes (e.g., supply chains) to create better outcomes for people and organisations.
Under the agreement, Fujitsu will also leverage its advanced computing and network capabilities and together the firms will jointly develop solutions and undertake joint go-to-market activities. As part of the agreement, Microsoft will become Fujitsu’s Premier Cloud Partner.
Between them, Microsoft and Fujitsu are deeply embedded into the enterprise and government landscapes. Customers are looking for solutions that will enable them to become more sustainable – in the broadest sense of the word. While this means these tech giants will be pushing on the open door of many a global firm, we expect that further clarification of precisely what Uvance is and what it can do will be required.
Tags: alliance partnership sustainability
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