Digital Bulletin

Feature

Apart but together

How outsourcing giant Teleperformance has transitioned nearly a quarter of a million staff to remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic
Case Study

IKEA's DesignOps revolution

Karolina Boremalm and her team have introduced a new DesignOps strategy to IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)
Thought Leader

Transforming IT support

Insight’s Karen McLaughlin says COVID-19 has highlighted the key role of IT support workers in ensuring business resiliency

The Bulletin All news

19H

Digital payments firm PhonePe raises $700m
Flipkart is partially spinning off PhonePe after the digital payments arm of its business raised $700m from existing investors. The funding was led by Walmart and is aimed at helping PhonePe better compete with the likes of Google and Amazon. PhonePe reported 835 million UPI transactions in October. Flipkart will remain its majority stakeholder, keeping 87% of its shares.

SOURCES:

Tech Crunch Reuters Bloomberg Quint Economic Times

TWEETS:

@newsindia5 @techno_disc

20H

Appvia wins contract to build out Bank of England cloud
The Bank of England has appointed Appvia as a partner to assist in design, construction and assurance of a new cloud environment. During the two-year partnership, Appvia will be supporting development and project teams within the Bank in testing and deploying code in cloud environments, working with security teams to integrate the cloud into existing operational and security processes.

SOURCES:

Finextra Bank of England Government Computing

TWEETS:

@andy_lucerne @Finextra @FinanzlinksUS

21H

Siemens Smart Infrastructure moves its SAP infrastructure to AWS
Siemens Smart Infrastructure has become the company's first division to move all of its SAP instances on AWS. It will shift 20 ERP and SCM (supply chain management) systems to the cloud before the end of next year. The systems will be able to integrate with AWS features around analytics and machine learning. Siemens Smart Infrastructure focuses on energy distribution and intelligent buildings.

SOURCES:

AWS Devdiscourse

TWEETS:

@dev_discourse @carlos98

22H

5G networks 90% more energy efficient than 4G, say Nokia and Telefónica
Nokia and Telefónica have found that 5G networks are up to 90% more energy efficient per traffic unit than legacy 4G networks. The research, conducted over a three-month period, focused on power consumption of Radio Access Networks in Telefónica’s network. The rollout of 5G networks is set to increase traffic dramatically making it critical that the energy consumed does not rise at the same rate.

SOURCES:

Nokia ITPro Developing Telecoms

TWEETS:

@ETTelecom @nokia @VerdictUK

22H

Uber in talks to sell its air taxi service to Joby Aviation
Uber Technologies is reported to be in advanced talks to sell its Uber Elevate unit to Joby Aviation, according to Axios. Uber Elevate's goal was to develop a network of self-driving air taxis. The company also had a helicopter service running in New York City. Las month, Uber also announced the sale of part of its stake Uber Freight, in an effort to raise profitability during COVID-19.

SOURCES:

Axios Reuters The Verge

TWEETS:

@Reuters @axios @bsindia @GregBensinger

22H

Google to acquire Actifio to boost data protection capabilities
Google is to acquire Actifio to beef data protection for Google Cloud. Google said the deal will increase business availability by simplifying and accelerating backup and DR at scale, across cloud-native, and hybrid environments. It will also automatically back up and protect a variety of workloads, including enterprise databases like SAP HANA, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

SOURCES:

CRN ITPro TechCrunch

TWEETS:

@TechCrunch @shanebrighton @googlecloud

Mindtree and Databricks team up on cloud-based data intelligence
Mindtree and Databricks have teamed up to help customers implement cloud-based data platforms for advanced analytics. The combined service will support use of the Databricks platform from implementation throughout the customer journey. Databricks offers a solution for data engineering, collaborative data science, machine learning, and business analytics through a lakehouse architecture.

SOURCES:

Mindtree ITPro

TWEETS:

@CNBCTV18Live @InformationAge @BloombergQuint

TuSimple, a self-driving trucks startup raises $350m
Self-driving trucks startup TuSimple has raised $350 million in funding. The round was led by VectoIQ LLC, with participation from Goodyear, Union Pacific, CN Rail, freight company U.S. Xpress and retailer Kroger. TuSimple has raised $648 million since its founding in 2015 and has said repeatedly that it will put a fully autonomous truck on the road in 2021.

SOURCES:

TechCrunch Freight Waves TechCratic

TWEETS:

@FreightWaves @TechCrunch

Monzo closes $60m funding round
UK challenger bank Monzo has closed a $60m funding round, according to a TechCrunch report. It said that the round was priced the same as and effectively an extension of the its previous top-up round in June. New funding comes from Deliveroo and Stripe investor Novator, Kaiser, and TED Global, as well as existing investor Goodwater and values Monzo at $1.2bn.

SOURCES:

TechCrunch

TWEETS:

@TechCrunch

AWS re:Invent: Cloud giant releases raft of new features
AWS has used its re:Invent conference to announce a series of new features which boost its cloud portfolio. Alongside five machine learning features and three new analytics tools, CEO Andy Jassy revealed Amazon DevOps Guru, a system that detects operational IT problems. The firm also took the covers off four new container capabilities, four storage innovations and multiple compute improvements.

SOURCES:

AWS CRN Silicon Angle

TWEETS:

@ajassy @TechCrunch @SiliconANGLE @shefalidua