by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Technology
New Delhi : To accelerate big computing in the Cloud, Microsoft has acquired Cycle Computing, a leader in cloud computing orchestration, for an undisclosed sum.
With this acquisition, Microsoft can now leverage its expertise in extending and migrating Linux and Windows based High Performance Computing (HPC) jobs to the Cloud.
“The Cloud is quickly changing the world of Big Compute, giving customers the on-demand power and infrastructure necessary to run massive workloads at scale without the overhead,” the company said in a blog post recently.
“The acquisition of Cycle Computing will help make it easier for Azure customers to use HPC and other Big Computing capabilities in the Cloud and help customers accelerate their movement to the Cloud,” it added.
Customers are witnessing explosive growth on Azure in the areas of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and deep learning.
“As customers continue to look for faster, more efficient ways to run their workloads, Cycle Computing’s depth and expertise around massively scalable applications make them a great fit to join our Microsoft team,” the post read.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate Jobs, Employment, Private Jobs
New York, (IANS) : Hurt by a failed $7.6 billion Nokia experiment amid growing losses in the smartphone hardware business segment, Microsoft has announced to lay off an additional 2,850 workers to the previously 1,850 jobs it said it would cut.
In a regulatory filing, the tech giant said it will cut 4,700 jobs globally by the end of fiscal year 2017, PC World reported on Friday.
Last June, Microsoft had announced it will cut 7,400 jobs from the smartphone business unit.
Earlier in May, signalling the end of its Nokia experiment, Microsoft announced it was cutting 1,850 jobs and writing off $950 million of which $200 million will be used for severance payments.
“We are focusing our phone efforts where we have differentiation — with enterprises that value security, manageability and our Continuum capability, and consumers who value the same,” Indian-born Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement.
“We will continue to innovate across devices and on our cloud services across all mobile platforms,” Nadella added.
According to a report in The Verge, the latest job cuts mean that the majority of former Nokia employees will no longer be working at Microsoft.
Almost a year ago, Nadella had announced a “more effective and focused phone portfolio” with business, value phones and flagships gaining prominence.
“We’re scaling back, but we’re not out!” said Terry Myerson, Microsoft’s head of Windows and devices.
“Phone success has been limited to companies valuing our commitment to security, manageability, and continuum, and with consumers who value the same,” Nadella added.
Microsoft’s Lumia and Windows Phone strategy has failed as both sales and Windows Phone market share have declined since the tech giant’s mobile restructuring last year.
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Markets, Technology
Washington, (IANS) As the news of Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of the professional networking website LinkedIn made the headlines on Tuesday, the shares of micro-blogging website Twitter went up more than eight percent in early-morning trading.
Why? According to media reports, Microsoft-LinkedIn acquisition in the enterprise social media space has rekindled hope for Twitter which is affected by stalled user growth.
If Twitter shares stay up for some time, it is a clear signal that investors would rather see it in someone else’s hands, Re/Code reported on Tuesday.
Google is rumoured to be ahead in the race to acquire Twitter. Another key global media player Comcast may also join the race, the report added.
The 10-year-old Twitter is facing stalled user growth and growing competition for quite some time. A sequential decline in its monthly active users (MAUs) base triggered a sharp fall for Twitter shares as the company announced its fourth quarter results recently.
The micro-blogging site reported 305 million monthly active users for the fourth quarter, compared to 307 million in the third quarter that excluded SMS-only followers.
As many top-notch executives have quit the company in the recent past, Twitter is going through a major overhaul under Jack Dorsey, the new CEO.
According to Dorsey, the engagement on Twitter is growing. Direct messages are up about 50 percent year-over-year and tweets shared via direct message are up more than 75 percent quarter-over-quarter.
“We’ve seen increases in tweets and replies and retweets and also likes. We want to continue to make sure we are refining that timeline and making it better and better,” Dorsey was quoted as saying.
Dorsey has hinted that Twitter’s deal with the National Football League (NFL) to stream 10 games this fall will help the company earn better traffic.
Recent reports claimed that over 32 million Twitter passwords may have been compromised by locking accounts that demand extra protection and requiring a password reset.
LeakedSource said the cache of Twitter data contains 32,888,300 records, including email addresses, usernames and passwords.
It’s not clear how many accounts Twitter chose to lock, but the company told the Wall Street Journal the number was in the millions, and that those affected will have already received an e-mail explaining the situation.
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Reports, Entrepreneurship
New Delhi (IANS) Microsoft’s focus on India is to empower every citizen and organisation so that they can perform better than their potential and achieve more fopr themselves and the country, the US giant’s chief executive Satya Nadella said here on Monday.
“Every time I come here, I go back energised. Its infectious to see the creativity here. It’s important to dream big and create big,” Nadella told the media, after a meeting with Microssoft developers, as also entrepreneurs and students.
“I had only two passions that have driven my dreams — poetry and computer science,” said, who started his speech quoting Mirza Ghalib, the noted Urdu and Persian poet of the 19th century.
Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha, who was also present at the event, said “Microsoft is a platform for India’s growth.”
Looking at Nadella, the minister added: “The kind of innovation you do in Seattle, New York, London and other places will not work in Jhanda Chowk in Hazaribagh (a constituency represented by Sinha). We need to innovate in India for India.”
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Media, News, Technology
San Francisco, (IANS) Microsoft and Facebook have joined hands to build a new, state-of-the-art subsea cable across the Atlantic Ocean that will help meet the growing customer demand for high speed, reliable connections for cloud and online services for Microsoft, Facebook and their customers.
The 6,600 km MAREA cable will be the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic — eight fibre pairs and an initial estimated design capacity of 160 Tbps, the companies said in a statement on Friday.
The construction of the cable will commence in August 2016 and is expected to be completed in October 2017.
“As the world is increasingly moving toward a future based on cloud computing, Microsoft continues to invest in our cloud infrastructure to meet current and future growing global demand for our more than 200 cloud services, including Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live and the Microsoft Azure platform,” explained Christian Belady, general manager, datacenter strategy, planning and development, Microsoft Corp.
Microsoft and Facebook are collaborating on this system to accelerate the development of the next-generation of internet infrastructure and support the explosion of data consumption and rapid growth of their respective cloud and online services.
The submarine cable system, to be operated and managed by Telxius, Telefonica’s new telecommunications infrastructure company, will also be the first to connect the US to southern Europe — from the data hub of Northern Virginia to Bilbao, Spain and then to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Telxius will serve as the operator of the system and sell capacity as part of their wholesale infrastructure business.
This route is south of other transatlantic cable systems, thereby helping ensure more resilient and reliable connections for customers in the US, Europe and beyond.
The team has designed MAREA to be interoperable with a variety of networking equipment.
This new “open” design brings significant benefits for customers: lower costs and easier equipment upgrades which leads to faster growth in bandwidth rates since the system can evolve at the pace of optical technology innovation.
“The MAREA transatlantic cable we’re building with Facebook and Telxius will provide new, low-latency connectivity that will help meet the increasing demand for higher-speed capacity across the Atlantic. By building the cable along this new southern route, we will also increase the resiliency of our global network, helping ensure even greater reliability for our customers,” Belady noted.
According to Najam Ahmad, vice president of network engineering at Facebook, the company wants to make it possible for people to have deep connections and shared experiences with the people who matter to them most – anywhere in the world, and at any time.
“We’re always evaluating new technologies and systems in order to provide the best connectivity possible. By creating a vendor-agnostic design with Microsoft and Telxius, we can choose the hardware and software that best serves the system and ultimately increase the pace of innovation,” Ahmad added.
