Monthly Archives: March 2022

Microsoft is rolling out its revamped Office.com to its business and education customers with a new-look Home screen, improved search and the new Create pane.

Microsoft unveiled the revamp of its Office.com portal and Office app for Windows in November at its Ignite conference and is now ready to show it to customers. Customers should see the new experience after logging in to their Microsoft Account, Microsoft says in a blogpost.

The Office app and Office.com web portal are meant to help users quickly switch between Word, OneNote, Excel and and other Office apps to more easily find recently used documents stored on a local machine, in OneDrive, or SharePoint. They're the successors to "My Office".

SEE: What is cloud computing? Everything you need to know about the cloud explained

The changes are aimed at boosting worker productivity and reducing the mental load of deciding which app is the most appropriate to create a particular type or content and remembering where content was stored, be it locally, in the cloud, email or in an app.

The new Home screen uses Microsoft 365 to anticipate relevant files a person needs and at the top of the screen are Recommended Actions based on recent @mentions, To Do list items, and upcoming meetings. It also features a Quick Access section to help find documents being worked on.

There's also a new My Content pane that aims to help users find various file types, regardless of where it's stored, or how it was shared. There are "Browse by" views to help find attachments, meeting records, Loops and other files associated with colleagues and meetings.

My Content offers new filters for people and meetings. Clicking on People displays cards of work contacts and documents related to them while the Meetings button brings up content related to meetings. It returns files regardless of whether it was stored locally, in email, or an app like Teams. Microsoft reckons it's better than Quick Access because it returns all a person's content rather than just recent activity.

The revamped online experience includes a new Create page to help users quickly create content from any of their Office apps. Users can click the Create button on the left panel to open a new document or the template tool which suggests template options that could be used in numerous apps.

Microsoft says it working on "similar enhancements" for people using Office.com and the Office app through a personal Microsoft Account. It plans to announce more updates in the coming months.

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Microsoft: We've given Office.com this big update - ZDNet

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cloudreach, an Atos company, the leading multi-cloud services provider, today announced the launch of the Cloudreach Talent Academy in Atlanta. Originally launched in London in 2021 in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the immersive program of accelerated, hands-on learning intends to help diverse candidates start their technical career in cloud computing.

Diversity in tech has been an ongoing issue in the industry, and just 5.5% Black candidates and 6.6% Latinx candidates are being hired by major companies. Cloudreach is focused on bridging this gap by attracting talent in major tech hubs around the US, starting with Atlanta which boasts the 10th most tech jobs per capita according to Metro Atlanta CEO. The two-year courses are available to anyone passionate about a career in the quickly-evolving cloud market, and applicants with a wide range of tech and non-tech experience are encouraged to apply.

I had heard about opportunities in cloud technology but realized there werent a lot of young Black women in the industry. When I was self-learning, I emailed over 30 companies but received no responses. Cloudreach has given me an opportunity to learn on the job. The things they've taught me, I would not have found anywhere else, said Esther Awolesi, Associate Cloud Systems Developer at Cloudreach.

The inaugural Talent Academy cohort was welcomed into the Cloudreach community in late 2021, with many graduates now holding jobs as Associate Cloud Systems Developers at Cloudreach. Many members of the original training program did not have formal training and had varied work experience including marketing, social services, etc. And those who had experience in tech were not originally working in cloud technology. Through the program they were able to learn new skills and have resume-ready experience.

Were excited to be kicking off in Atlanta, a region full of untapped talent in technology, said Poonam Flammarion, Head of Talent Academy. We are utilizing decades of cloud computing experience to bring world class education, certification, and mentorship to underrepresented communities and passionate professionals.

Maureen Lonergan, Vice President, AWS Training and Certification added; Organizations need individuals with cloud skills to help transform their business, and there is a growing demand for IT professionals with AWS Cloud skills. AWS Training and Certification, along with our AWS Training Partners like Cloudreach, aims to equip the builders of today and tomorrow with the knowledge they need to leverage the power of the AWS Cloud. AWS Training, designed by the experts at AWS, teaches in-demand cloud skills and best practices, and helps learners prepare for AWS Certification exams so they can advance their careers and transform their organizations.

Through Talent Academy, Cloudreach and AWS want to help diversify the information technology industry by expanding its talent pool. Candidates include those with legacy technology skills looking to switch to the cloud, those returning to work after time off, technology enthusiasts not currently in an IT role, and engineering graduates looking for a step up.

This talent program further strengthens Atos OneCloud, a ground-breaking initiative offering an end-to-end set of services to help organizations navigate their cloud journey securely and with speed, bringing together and continuously upskilling thousands of cloud experts.

To join the North America cohort of Talent Academy, please visit: https://www.cloudreach.com/en/aws-talent-academy/.

***

About Talent Academy

Cloudreach Talent Academy is an immersive program of accelerated, hands-on learning, intended to help diverse candidates launch their technical career in cloud computing. The program is designed to discover and nurture new cloud talent in-line with our joint mission to create a more diverse and inclusive technical community. For more information about Talent Academy, visit http://www.cloudreach.com/en/aws-talent-academy/.

About Cloudreach

Cloudreach, an Atos company, is the worlds leading multi-cloud services company. Our mission is to deliver the promise of cloud and drive extraordinary value for our customers. Cloudreach helps enterprises win competitive advantage through successful cloud transformation. With more than 10 years of cloud native experience, weve built an unmatched depth and breadth of expertise in cloud technologies and their application to business. For more information about our work, visit http://www.cloudreach.com.

With a practice of well over 10,000 people, Atos OneCloud is a ground-breaking initiative that blends cloud advisory consulting, application transformation expertise, prebuilt cloud accelerators, and innovative talents in an end-to-end set of services to help organizations navigate their cloud journey securely and with speed.

About Atos

Atos is a global leader in digital transformation with 109,000 employees and annual revenue of c. 11 billion. European number one in cybersecurity, cloud and high-performance computing, the Group provides tailored end-to-end solutions for all industries in 71 countries. A pioneer in decarbonization services and products, Atos is committed to a secure and decarbonized digital for its clients. Atos is a SE (Societas Europaea), listed on Euronext Paris and included in the CAC 40 ESG and Next 20 Paris Stock indexes.

The purpose of Atos is to help design the future of the information space. Its expertise and services support the development of knowledge, education and research in a multicultural approach and contribute to the development of scientific and technological excellence. Across the world, the Group enables its customers and employees, and members of societies at large to live, work and develop sustainably, in a safe and secure information space.

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Cloudreach, an Atos Company, Works With AWS to Launch Talent Academy in the U.S. - Business Wire

KARACHI: A global tech giant SAP has announced to leverage cloud computing technology in Pakistan as part of its plans for 2022, The News learnt on Friday.

The facility would help organisations reduce complexity, optimise costs, enable real-time decision making, and support new digital business innovation, SAP informed.

The decision has been taken to support and accelerate digital transformation in the country, announced Saquib Ahmad, managing director SAP Pakistan, during a media session organised at a local hotel in Karachi.

Cloud computing, which involves delivering hosted services over the internet, is recognised as a core technological building block for digital innovation, and businesses prefer adopting a cloud-first strategy in their IT operations.

Talking about SAPs existing portfolio for the promotion of cloud strategy across public and private sectors, Ahmad explained how SAPs cloud offerings enable companies optimise their end-to-end processes and innovate with new capabilities in the cloud, while reducing operating costs, improving productivity, and unlocking new opportunities for growth.

He further underscored SAPs plans to increase its efforts to provide better online security for its clients, highlighting security as one of the persistent issues organisations face in an online world.

The rest is here:

SAP to offer cloud computing - The News International

Some of the most important luminaries in the HPC sector have spoken from on high, and their conclusions about the future of the HPC market are probably going to shock a lot of people.

In a paper called Reinventing High Performance Computing: Challenges and Opportunities, written by Jack Dongarra at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory Jack, didnt you retire? and Dan Reed at the University of Utah and Dennis Gannon formerly of Indiana University and Microsoft, we get a fascinating historical view of HPC systems and then some straight talk about how the HPC industry needs to collaborate more tightly with the hyperscalers and cloud builders for a lot of technical and economic reasons.

Many in the HPC market have no doubt been thinking along the same lines. It is in the zeitgeist, being transported on the cosmic Ethernet. (And sometimes InfiniBand where low latency matters.) And by the way, we are not happy about any of this, as we imagine you are not either. We like the diversity of architectures, techniques, and technologies that the HPC market has developed over the years. But we also have to admit that the technology trickle down effect where advanced designs eventually make their way down into large enterprises and then everywhere else did not happen at the speed or to the extent that we had hoped it might over the decades we have been watching this portion of the IT space.

As usual, the details of the scenario painted in this paper and the conclusions that the authors draw are many and insightful, and we agree wholeheartedly that there are tectonic forces at play in the upper echelons of computing. Frankly, we founded The Next Platform with this idea in mind and used the same language, and in recent years have also wondered how long the market for systems that are tuned specifically for HPC simulation and modeling would hold out against the scale of compute and investment by the hyperscalers and cloud builders of the world.

The papers authors have a much better metaphor for contrasting large-scale HPC system development, and that is to look at it like a chemical reaction. HPC investments, especially for capability-class machines, are endothermic, meaning they require infusions of capital from governments and academia to cover the engineering costs of designing and producing advanced systems. But investments in large-scale machinery at the hyperscalers and cloud builders are exothermic, meaning they generate cash among the Magnificent Seven of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, it is enormous amounts of money. We would go so far as to say that the reaction is volcanic among the hyperscalers and cloud builders, which is exothermic with extreme attitude. Enough to melt rock and build mountains.

The geography of the IT sector has been utterly transformed by these seven continents of compute, and we all know it, and importantly, so does the HPC community that is trying to get to exascale and contemplating 10 exascale and even zettascale.

Economies of scale first fueled commodity HPC clusters and attracted the interest of vendors as large-scale demonstrations of leading edge technology, the authors write in the paper. Today, the even larger economies of scale of cloud computing vendors has diminished the influence of high-performance computing on future chip and system designs. No longer do chip vendors look to HPC deployments of large clusters as flagship technology demonstrations that will drive larger market uptake.

The list of truisms that Dongarra, Reed, and Gannon outline as they survey the landscape is unequivocal, and we quote:

There is no question that the HPC and hyperscaler/cloud camps have been somewhat allergic to each other over the past decade or two, although there has been some cross pollination in recent years, with both people and technologies from the HPC sector being employed by the hyperscalers and cloud mostly to attract HPC simulation and modeling workloads, but also because of the inherent benefits of technologies such as MPI or InfiniBand when it comes to driving the key machine learning workloads that have made the hyperscalers and cloud builders standard bearers for the New HPC. They didnt invent the ideas behind machine learning the phone company did but they did have the big data and the massive compute scale to perfect it, and they are also going to be the ones building the metaverse or metaverses that are really just humungous simulations, driven by the basic principles of physics, done in real time.

What it comes down to is that standalone HPC in the national and academic labs takes money and has to constantly justify the architectures and funding for the machines that run their codes, and that the traditional HPC vendors so many of them are gone now could not generate enough revenue, much less profit, to stay in the game. HPC vendors were more of a public-private partnership than Wall Street ever wanted to think about or the vendors ever wanted to admit. And when they made any profits, it was never sustainable just like being a server OEM is getting close to not being sustainable due to the enormous buying power of the hyperscalers and cloud builders.

We will bet a Cray-1 supercomputer assembled from parts acquired on eBay that the hyperscalers and cloud builders will figure out how to make money on HPC, and they will do it by offering applications as a service, not just infrastructure. National and academic labs will partner there and get their share of the cloud budget pool, and in some cases where data sovereignty and security are particularly high, the clouds will offer HPC outposts or whole dedicated datacenters, shared among the labs and securely away from other enterprise workloads. And moreover, the cloud makers will snap up the successful AI hardware vendors or design their own AI accelerator chips as AWS and Google do and the HPC community will learn to port their routines to these devices as well as CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs. In the longest of runs, people will recode HPC algorithms to run on a Google TPU or an AWS Tranium. No, this will not be easy. But HPC will have to ride the coattails of AI because otherwise it will diverge from the same hardware path and not be an affordable endeavor.

As they prognosticate about the future of HPC, Dongarra, Reed, and Gannon outline the following six maxims that should be used to guide its evolution:

Maxim One: Semiconductor constraints dictate new approaches. There are constraints from Moores Law slowing and Dennard scaling stopping, but it is more than that. We have foundry capacity issues and geopolitical problems arising from chip manufacturing, as well as the high cost of building chip factories, and there will need to be standards of interconnecting chiplets to allow ease of integration of diverse components.

Maxim Two: End-to-end hardware/software co-design is essential. This is a given for HPC, and chiplet interconnect standards will help here. But we would counter that the hyperscalers and cloud builders limit the diversity of their server designs to drive up volumes. So just like AI learned to run on HPC iron back in the late 2000s, HPC will have to learn to run on AI iron of the 2020s. And that AI iron will be located on the clouds.

Maxim Three: Prototyping at scale is required to test new ideas. We are not as optimistic as Dongarra, Reed, and Gannon that HPC-specific systems will be created much less prototyped at scale unless one of the clouds corners the market on specific HPC applications. Hyperscalers bend their software to fit cheaper iron, and they only create unique iron with homegrown compute engines when they feel they have no choice. They will adopt mainstream HPC/AI technologies every time, and HPC researchers are going to have to make do. In fact, that will be largely what the HPC jobs of the future will be: Making legacy codes run on new clouds.

Maxim Four: The space of leading edge HPC applications is far broader now than in the past. And, as they point out, it is broader because of the injection of AI software and sometimes hardware technologies.

Maxim Five. Cloud economics have changed the supply chain ecosystem. Agreed, wholeheartedly, and this changes everything, even if cloud capacity costs 5X to 10X as much as running it on premises, the cloud builders have so much capacity that every national and academic lab could be pulling in the same direction as they modernize codes for cloud infrastructure and where it is sitting doesnt matter. What matters is changing from CapEx to OpEx.

Maxim Six: The societal implications of technical issues really matter. This has always been a hard sell to the public, even if scientists get it, and the politicians of all the districts where supercomputing labs exist certainly dont want HPC centers to be Borged into the clouds. But, they will get to brag about clouds and foundries, so they will adapt.

Investing in the future is never easy, but it is critical if we are to continue to develop and deploy new generations of high-performance computing systems, ones that leverage economic shifts, commercial practice, and emerging technologies. Let us be clear. The price of innovation keeps rising, the talent is following the money, and many of the traditional players companies and countries are struggling to keep up.

Welcome to the New HPC.

Authors Note: We read a certain amount of technical papers here at The Next Platform, and one of the games we like to play when we come across an interesting paper is to guess what it will conclude before we even read it.

This is an old and perhaps bad habit learned from a physics professor many decades ago, where he admonished us to figure out the nature of the problem and estimate an answer, in ours heads and out loud before the class, before we actually wrote down the first line to solve the problem. This was a form of error detection and correction, which is why we were taught to do this. And it kept you on your toes, too, because the class was at 8 am and you didnt know you were going to have to solve a problem until the professor threw a piece of chalk to you. (Not at you, but to you.)

So when we came across the paper outlined above, we immediately went into speculative execution mode and this popped out:

Just like we cant really have a publicly funded mail service that works right or a publicly funded space program that works right, in the long run we will not be able to justify the cost and hassle of bespoke HPC systems. The hyperscalers and cloud builders can now support HPC simulation and modeling and have the tools, thanks to the metaverse, to not only calculate a digital twin of the physical world and alternate universes with different laws of physics if we want to go down those myriad roads but to allow us to immerse ourselves in it to explore it. In short, HPC centers are going to be priced out of their own market, and that is because of the fundamental economics of the contrast between hyperscaler and HPC center. The HPC centers of the world drive the highest performance possible for specific applications at the highest practical budget, whereas the hyperscalers always drive performance and thermals for a wider set of applications at the lowest cost possible. The good news is that in the future HPC sector, scientists will be focusing on driving collections of algorithms and libraries, not on trying to architect iron and fund it.

We were pretty close.

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Will HPC Be Eaten By Hyperscalers And Clouds? - The Next Platform

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Dublin, March 11, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "2022 Global PC and Server Industry Development Trends and Key Issues" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Enterprises return-to-office plans have stimulated demand for commercial PCs but have reduced demand for consumer and education PCs.

The global notebook PC and desktop PC market volumes are expected to decline slightly to 240 million units and nearly 80 million units, respectively, in 2022. Since the motherboard market development is always highly correlated with desktop PCs, global motherboard market volume is estimated at between 85 million to 95 million units in the next five years.

Meanwhile, the global server market continues to grow and the increasing cloud computing applications based on 5G, AI, and edge computing technologies will become a major growth enabler for the server market in the next five years.

This report provides an overview of the global notebook PC, desktop PC, motherboard, and server markets with market volume forecast for the period 2022-2025; looks into the latest industry and market trends and examines the major strategies of key players.List of Topics

Development of the global economy, touching on global economic growth rate predictions, pandemic development, and global inflation

Development of the global PC market, touching on key determinant factors for the market development in 2022

Global notebook PC and desktop PC market volume forecast for the period 2022-2025 with shipment share breakdown by brand and by ODM

Global motherboard market volume forecast for the period 2022-2025

Development of key PC products, touching on Chromebooks, gaming notebook PCs, gaming monitors, AIO (All In One) PC, etc.

Development of key PC brands, touching on Apple's in-house chip M1 and the deployment of Arm-based processors in macOS, Chrome OS, Windows OS ecosystems, and includes global notebook PC market share by CPU supplier

Development of the global server market and server market volume forecast for the period 2022-2025, identifying key components in short supply such as PMIC, BMC, and more

Global server shipment share by brand for the period 2020-2022, with shipment share breakdown by overall processor and by ODM Direct processor

Development strategy of major brands such as Dell, HP, and Inspur

M&A and in-house chip development strategies of major cloud service providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud

Development of key server products and applications, touching on HPC (High Performance Computing), net zero carbon emissions, information security compliance,

Outlook for the 2022 IT industry, touching on product trends, market trends, and brand strategies of server brands and PC brands

Story continues

Key Topics Covered:

Global Economic Development

Global PC Market Development

Development of Key PC Products and Applications

Global Server Market Development

Development of Key Server Products and Applications

Conclusion

Companies Mentioned

Acer

Actifio

Adobe

ADRM

Affirmed Networks

Alibaba

Alooma

AMD

Anvato

Apigee

Apple

AppSheet

Arm

ASUS

Avere Systems

Bebo

Bitium

BludData

BlueTalon

Bonsai

Cask Data

Citus Data

Cloud 9

Cloud Knox

CloudSimple

Cloudyn

Compal

CyberX

Cycle Computing

DataSense

Dell

E8 Storage

ECS

Elastifile

Fitbit

Foxconn

GameSparks

Genee

Github

Google

Harvest.ai

Hexadite

HP

Huawei

IBM

Intel

Inventec

JClarity

Kaggle

Lenovo

LinkedIn

Lobe

Looker

Maluuba

MediaTek

Metaswitch

Microsoft

Movere

Movial

MSI

Nice

North

Nuance

Nvidia

Oracle

Orbitera

Orions

Pegatron

Pointy

QCI

Qualcomm

Quanta

Qwiklabs

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Global PC and Server Industry Report 2022: PC and Desktop PC Market Volumes are Expected to Decline Slightly to 240 Million Units and Nearly 80...

Technology is constantly evolving, and enterprises must keep pace with the latest innovations if they hope to remain competitive. Cloud computing is a perfect example. Today, businesses can provision cloud services through the internet, and that technology allows them to scale more quickly and operate more efficiently because they don't have to make sizable upfront investments in infrastructure or pay to maintain costly hardware.

As a result, research company Gartner believes enterprises will spend over $540 billion on cloud services this year, and that figure will surpass $915 billion by 2025. Companies like DigitalOcean ( DOCN -3.35% ) and Arista Networks ( ANET ) are well-positioned to benefit from that unstoppable trend, and both stocks could produce monster returns over the next decade.

Here's what you should know about these two unstoppable stocks.

Image source: Getty Images.

DigitalOcean is a cloud-services provider. Its portfolio includes infrastructure services like compute, storage, and networking, and a growing number of platform services, like a selection of fully managed databases, including MongoDB. More importantly, those products are designed with a click-and-go interface that simplifies cloud computing for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Thanks to DigitalOcean, clients can quickly build, deploy, and scale applications without specialized training, even if they don't have an IT department.

Doubling down on that niche, the company also provides 24/7 customer service and tech support to all clients, as well as an extensive collection of learning materials, including thousands of tutorials and community-generated questions and answers. In short, its focus on simplicity and support makes its platform perfect for SMBs, and that differentiates DigitalOcean from rivals like Amazon and Microsoft. While both cloud titans undoubtedly have a more robust lineup of services, their products are designed for large enterprises backed by big IT departments.

So far, DigitalOcean's approach is working. It now has 609,000 customers, and the average customer spent 16%more over the past year. During that time, revenue rose 35% to $428.6 million, and the company generated free cash flow (FCF) of $24 million, marking its first full year of positive FCF. Even so, DigitalOcean has hardly scratched the surface of its true potential.

The company puts its market opportunity at $145 billionby 2025, a figure that accounts for the 100 million SMBs globally. And with the stock trading at 11.1 times sales -- below its historical average of 15.1 times sales -- now looks like a good time to buy. Over the next decade, I wouldn't be surprised to see DigitalOcean grow tenfold in valuation, from $5.5 billion today to $55 billion by 2032.

Cloud computing has fundamentally changed the world, allowing businesses and consumers to access software and services through the internet. But it requires powerful IT infrastructure. Data centers owned by companies like Microsoft or Meta Platforms see traffic in the millions (and even billions) of users each day. Therefore, the underlying network must be fast and flexible. Arista Networks provides that technology.

Arista's core innovation is the Extensible Operating System (EOS), the software that powers its lineup of switching and routing platforms, allowing clients to deploy a seamless network across public clouds and private data centers. That approach differs from legacy vendors like Cisco Systems, which use multiple operating systems, making network management more costly and complex for clients. Additionally, Arista relies exclusivelyon merchant silicon, sourcing chips from suppliers like Broadcom and Intel. That means Arista can equip its devices with the latest silicon without spending money to develop those solutions in house.

As a result, while Cisco still leads the broader data-center switching industry, Arista is the leader in the high-speed category, with ethernet switches that offer throughput of 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) and above. And that dominance has made Arista a financial machine. In 2021, revenue rose 27% to $2.9 billion, and free cash flow jumped 32% to $951.1 million.

More importantly, Arista's edge in the high-speed category bodes well for the future because that's where the industry is headed. As cloud computing becomes more common and applications become more data-intensive, data centers will need faster networking solutions. With that in mind, Arista puts its market opportunity at $35 billion by 2025, leaving plenty of room for growth. I wouldn't be surprised to see this $36 billion business grow fourfold over the next decade. That's why this unstoppable tech stock could supercharge your portfolio.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis even one of our own helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

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Want Monster Returns? 2 Unstoppable Tech Stocks to Buy and Hold for the Next Decade - The Motley Fool