7 Questions for Microsoft’s New Channel Chief
By: Scott Bekker Gavriella Schuster was named the corporate vice president for the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group (WPG) on Thursday, putting her in charge of coordinating Microsoft’s channel efforts across all customer segments and country subsidiaries. RCP editors Scott Bekker, Barb Levisay and Gladys Rama caught up with Schuster for a Q&A about her plans […]
Microsoft’s Partner Competency Changes Signal End of an Era
By: Scott Bekker Microsoft has long favored its licensing partners — until now. The upcoming retirement of a dozen MPN competencies, including Volume Licensing, marks a turning point in how Microsoft does business through the channel. There were prophets and portents enough that Microsoft was driving its partners to cloud. You’d have to be willfully […]
Google adds image recognition to growing AI portfolio
By: Jamie Davies Google has continued its charge on the artificial intelligence market through purchasing French image recognition startup Moodstocks, reports Telecoms.com. Moodstocks, founded in 2008, develops machine-learning based image recognition technology for smartphones, which has been described by developers as the ‘Shazam for images’. Financials of the agreement have not been confirmed to date. […]
Symantec acquires Blue Coat for $4.65 billion
By: Business Cloud News Symantec has announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire cloud security specialists Blue Coat for $4.65 billion. Blue coat is generally accepted as the market share leader and share gainer in web security and the deal is expected to close in Q3 this year. For the year ending […]
How to survive in the CISO hot-seat
By: Doug Drinkwater The CISO is a precarious job. Research studies indicate that CISOs typically survive just 18 months to two years in a job which is increasingly complex and multi-skilled. After all, information security is no longer solely about managing firewalls and patch management, but rather a varied role encompassing business and technical skills. […]
U.S. Cyber Command struggles to retain top cybersecurity talent
By: Kenneth Corbin Top official in Defense Department’s cybersecurity unit says organization is doing an ‘effective job’ at recruiting, but keeping up with the evolving threat landscape remains a challenge. At U.S. Cyber Command, the top brass has made recruiting top talent a leading priority, but those efforts have been slowed by challenges in attracting […]
Microsoft launches Spark for Azure HDInsight and pushes into consumer AI
By: Jamie Davies Almost 12 months after releasing the public preview of Spark for Azure HDInsight Microsoft has announced general availability of the proposition to the industry, as well as extending Cortana’s offering to the Xbox. Making the announcement on the Azure blog, Oliver Chiu, Product Marketing Manager for Hadoop/Big Data and Data Warehousing, outlined […]
Oracle employee says she was sacked for refusing to fiddle cloud accounts
By: John Ribeiro Svetlana Blackburn was working as senior finance manager in Oracle’s cloud business. A senior finance manager in Oracle’s cloud business has complained to a federal court that she was terminated from her job because she refused to go along with accounting principles she considered unlawful. In a complaint in the U.S. District […]
Microsoft brings advanced security management to Office 365
By: Thor Oluvsrud Microsoft aims to give IT more visibility and control into Office 365 environments with advanced security features that leverage behavioral analytics and machine learning for threat detection. Security in the cloud is all about visibility and control, and Microsoft is aiming to give Office 365 customers more of both with Wednesday’s introduction […]
Citrix and Microsoft team up to tackle enterprise mobility
By: Business Cloud News Citrix has expanded its partnership with Microsoft as the team aim to capitalize on flexible working and enterprise mobility trends. Speaking at Citrix Synergy in Las Vegas, CEO Kirill Tatarinov outlined objectives to meet the needs of the modern workforce with application and desktop virtualisation in the cloud, network delivery and […]