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Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is scouting locations for a second European data centre to better compete in the cloud services market dominated by Amazon Web Services.

The first data centre was opened in Frankfurt last November - leading locations for the new data centre include London and somewhere in Sweden, it is reported.

The company currently has 14 data centres and has already announced new ones in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Alibaba held onto 2.6% of the cloud infrastructure services market in Q2, according to reports. The company is narrowing the gap with Google's 5.9% share but falls far behind the 30.3% AWS market share.

JPMorgan analysts Alex Yao and Gokul Hariharan think the division could account for 15% of Alibaba revenues by 2021.

BT Agile Connect brings next generation control, agility and cost efficiency to enterprise networks
 
BT has launched BT Agile Connect, a new software defined wide area network (SD-WAN) service designed for large organisations.

According to BT, customers using this new service will benefit from greater control and understanding of their infrastructure and traffic flows, a much faster, simpler and more secure way of setting up new sites, reduced network complexity and lower costs.

Agile Connect is built on technologies from BT and Nuage Networks from Nokia, and comes with the security and resiliency of BT's global network infrastructure.

Agile Connect equipment is currently live within the networks of several large global organisations and is now ready for volume deployment for existing and new customers.

Agile Connect uses software-defined networking (SDN) on a national or global scale to dynamically determine the most effective route for traffic to take across a customer's wide area network. 

Its dynamic routing allows organisations to meet bandwidth demand by making it significantly easier to introduce new access services to their network or by making better use of what previously were back-up connections. 

It also ensures that traffic from high-priority business applications always takes the best performing route.

Customers prioritise applications or manage use of access services via an interactive portal. They also gain an improved visibility of application performance. Changes are implemented centrally without the need for expensive local technical support. 

Agile Connect includes a BT pre-built controller infrastructure hosted on the internet and on BT's multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) network.

It also uses BT pre-built MPLS Internet gateways to offer simple cloud-based connectivity between Internet-connected and MPLS-connected sites.
And it benefits from BT's investments in the security of both the controller and gateway infrastructure.

Together, these features save customers from having to undertake time-consuming and costly design, delivery and on-going maintenance of controllers, interconnection gateways, security and monitoring systems critical to the performance of a SD-WAN.

Through a touch-control interface on the self-service portal, customers can set up new sites in minutes rather than months without costly, on-location, technical support.

The service can also be used to aggregate network connections, bringing together services from different providers and different network types. This feature is particularly valuable for companies integrating networks following a merger or acquisition.  

Agile Connect is part of BT's Dynamic Network Services programme, which brings together BT's global network infrastructure with the latest network technologies, including SDN and network functions virtualisation (NFV) to underpin large organisations' digital transformation. 

Agile Connect is delivered as a single box located on the edge of their network, with further services added as additional devices. 

In the future, Agile Connect will support virtual network functions (VNFs), with new services deployed virtually to the Agile Connect device, removing the need to install multiple boxes.

Worldwide server shipments grew 2.4% annually in the second quarter, while total revenue went up by 2.8%, according to Gartner.

Jeffrey Hewitt, an analyst at Gartner, said the growth was down to a strong regional performance in Asia/Pacific as a result of data centre infrastructure build-outs - mostly in China - and global ongoing hyperscale data centre growth.

As organisations continue to turn to hybrid cloud deployments and increasingly use on-demand software and services through managed service providers, the data centre server growth may well continue.

Gartner said shipments for x86 servers increased 2.5% and 6.9% in revenue terms. RISC/Itanium Unix servers fell globally for the period, down 21.4% in shipments and 24.9% in vendor value terms. The other CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a revenue decline of 29.5%.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) continued to lead in the worldwide server market based on revenue. Despite a decline of 9.4%, the company posted $3.2bn in revenue for a total share of 23% for the second quarter of 2017.

Dell EMC maintained the number two position with 7% sales growth and 19.9% market share, although it was slightly ahead of HPE when it came to shipments.

Huawei experienced the highest revenue growth in the quarter with 57.8%.The total global server market for the second quarter was worth just under $14bn, and the total number of shipments was 2.8 million servers.

With unemployment at its lowest level for 40 years and wages rising, employment prospects for skilled job seekers are bright. The big issue now is the quantity of active jobseekers, or rather the lack of them, writes Clive Jefferys of recruiter JMA Network.

Generally speaking, the staff supply implications of Brexit will pass the telecoms industry by. Ours is not an industry that particularly needs to employ foreign workers so the fracas about freedom of travel is largely immaterial. Instead, the emphasis is specifically focused on people with experience of UK systems for sales, support and billing. It's very much a home-grown industry.

People have become conservative about their career intentions. Typically, they are staying put in their jobs because it's better with 'the devil you know', and doubt whether the 'grass is greener' elsewhere.

Meanwhile, employers are desperate to recruit more staff across all job types to bring the business in and then service it once it's arrived.

We've seen a dramatic change in the nature of our work over the last year. Instead of companies giving us specific vacancies they are asking us to send whoever we have available. Never has our private network of contacts been more crucial to the growth of their businesses.

This is not to say our job has become easier. Far from it. But we are generating success with the companies that understand how recruitment works today.

These employers are glad of our help and ask us how they can assist the process to get what they need.

Our job offers are generating an average 10% uplift on current salaries, in return for bigger roles with more responsibility.

So, if you are wishing you had a better job or need to expand your business, now is the time to act.

Barracuda Networks is rebranding its acquired Intronis business as Barracuda MSP, tightening its focus on managed service provider partners.

The company's MSP business has increased billings and expanded its partner base by 25% over the past two years, it says, as well as moved into the European market.

The firm is also building two new education initiatives for channel partners - a website and an educational and networking programme for VARs and MSPs (Ready, Set, Managed!).

Vodafone is putting around €2bn in investment into ultrafast fibre connections in Germany, the UK company's biggest European market.

The investment will move Vodafone toward 13.7 million new connections to homes and businesses in Germany by the end of 2021.

Vodafone says the incremental spending will boost growth of service revenues in Germany by 1-2 percentage points in the medium term.

Veritas Technologies has named David Noy as VP of Product Management. He will oversee product management for the Veritas Software-Defined Storage (SDS) and Appliances portfolios as well as the appliances support, manufacturing and supply-chain functions.

Noy joins from Dell EMC Isilon where he was vice President of Product Management and Marketing, leading the product management team to develop and execute on product strategy and roadmaps.

Before joining Dell EMC, he was Director of Product Management at NetApp and was responsible for NetApp's big data strategy and competitive insights teams. Prior to that, he was Director of Product Management for the Veritas Storage Foundation product line at Symantec.

Leaders of European artificial intelligence and robotics firms are among over 100 signatories to a letter to the United Nations calling for action to prevent the development of 'killer robots'.

In the letter to the organisation, AI leaders, including billionaire Elon Musk, warn of 'a third revolution in warfare'. AI is already getting a bad press in some quarters as a result of predictions that large numbers of jobs will disappear as a result of robots taking people's jobs.

The UN letter claims the human race now faces a rather more serious threat: being wiped out by lethal autonomous robots used in warfare. The letter says the world is now facing a 'Pandora's Box'.

AI leaders state, 'As companies building the technologies in artificial intelligence and robotics that may be re-purposed to develop autonomous weapons, we feel especially responsible in raising this alarm.

'Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare. Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at time-scales faster than humans can comprehend.

'These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways. We do not have long to act'.

The many European technology leaders signing the letter include Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google's AI company DeepMind, headquartered in the UK. In 2015, in another letter, over 1,000 technology experts warned about the dangers of autonomous weaponry, including scientist Stephen Hawking, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and, again, Elon Musk.

Mark McHale has been promoted as the new VP of Arrow's Enterprise Computing Solutions business in the UK and Ireland.

McHale was previously MD for Arrow's Data Centre Solutions division.

McHale succeeds Jesper Trolle who has been promoted to president Americas of Arrow's Enterprise Computing Solutions business.

McHale joined Arrow just over 30 years ago and became a member of the UK and Ireland management team over a decade ago.

Snom's new C520-WiMi conferencing solution is targeted at companies of all sizes requiring flexibility and independence as a key benefits when conferencing.

DECT and Bluetooth technology aids teamwork and three microphones ensure voice quality. One microphone is integrated into the base unit together with the full-duplex speaker, while two other cordless DECT microphones can be set up anywhere in the room and/or passed on to whoever is speaking.

The C520-WiMi features a Bluetooth interface which enables mobile or DECT telephones, such as smartphones, to be connected and used.

The C520-WiMi conference system can be extended to facilitate telephone conferences with large teams. The additional C52 speaker units are paired with the base unit in this case, thereby increasing the range of the speakers and microphones.