To keep up with the firehose of news, we’ve decided to deliver some extra news to you on the side every Monday and Thursday morning. Some of it is an extension of our own reporting that didn’t make its way into a story, while others might be content we’ve bookmarked for later reading and thought of sharing with you. We’re doing a similar thing at Channel Daily News – check it out here. You can also view our previous ITWC Morning Briefing here. Today’s briefing is delivered by ITWC editorial director Alex Coop.
What you need to know, right now
It’s what you need to know right now in the world of IT and tech – ’nuff said. (Best taken with a side of Hashtag Trending)
iOS 14 is here, Facebook’s new VR headset, and an overseas Chinese information database has some inside scoops on influential people.
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Pure Storage acquires Portworx for $370 million
Portworx, a well-funded startup providing cloud-native storage and data-management platform based on Kubernetes, got scooped up by enterprise storage firm Pure Storage. This marks Pure Storage’s largest acquisition to date and signals the growing importance of multi-cloud data services.
Portworx’s bread and butter is its ability to help users migrate their data and create backups, creating a storage layer that allows devs to later access that data, no matter where it resides. According to its website, Portworx enterprise customers include the likes of Carrefour, Comcast, GE Digital, Kroger, Lufthansa, and T-Mobile.
“I’m tremendously proud of what we’ve built at Portworx: an unparalleled data services platform for customers running mission-critical applications in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The traction and growth we see in our business daily show that containers and Kubernetes are fundamental to the next-generation application architecture and thus competitiveness,” said Murli Thirumale, CEO, Portworx, in a Sept. 16 press release. “We are excited for the accelerated growth and customer impact we will be able to achieve as a part of Pure.”
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STIR/SHAKEN implementation deadline for carriers extended to June 2021
Carriers have nine extra months to implement STIR/SHAKEN technology, according to the CRTC. STIR/SHAKEN tech is meant to stomp out span and robocalls conducted over Voice-over-Internet-Protocol. It can also do the same for calls that come from services like WhatsApp.
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HP releases ProBook 600 G8 and ProBook 400 G8 business laptops [IT WORLD CANADA]
Yesterday, HP announced its refreshed ProBook laptop series designed for the mobile enterprise at Reinvent 2020. Both the ProBook 600 G8 and ProBook 400 G8 series received performance upgrades in processor and graphics.
In case you missed it
The recent news that we maybe didn’t get to yet, or it’s the news we’ve reported on and feel is worth resurfacing. Sometimes we’ll also feature awesome stories from other publications.
ServiceNow unveils Paris
ServiceNow this week announced the latest release of its workflow automation platform. ServiceNow says the update means new solutions for telcos and financial services organizations.
The release is called “Paris,” and is the first major release for the company since former chief executive officer Bill McDermott became ServiceNow’s president and CEO last November.
ServiceNow says the new release comes with six new enhancements:
- Business Continuity Management. Automated business impact analysis, business continuity plan development, and crisis management leveraging context within the ServiceNow platform to enable operational resilience.
- Hardware Asset Management. Hardware Asset Management automates the IT asset lifecycle by tracking the financial, contractual, and inventory details of hardware and devices to make smarter decisions from purchase to disposal – giving companies the ability to endure or have the ability to pivot if the time comes.
- Financial Services Operations. FSO helps retail banks connect teams and systems in the front, middle, and back-office to more quickly serve customers. It digitizes core workflows, such as payments and credit card applications.
- Legal Service Delivery. This new product provides legal operations the visibility they need to make decisions quickly and enhance productivity by eliminating manual emails and phone calls.
- Telecommunications Services Management. TSM connects and elevates services and operations on one native cloud platform.
- Telecommunications Network Performance Management. TNPM brings events captured by existing infrastructure monitoring tools into ServiceNow for consolidation, analysis, and resolution. This new product applies machine learning and analytics to significantly reduce the time and effort previously needed to manually correlate events.
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The end of the line for BlackBerry legacy devices
BlackBerry has extended the life span of BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 10, and PlayBook more than once. But it looks like we’ve reached the end of the line. As announced on their software lifecycle page, BlackBerry will be terminating legacy services for BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry PlayBook effective January 4, 2022.
In 2016, BlackBerry Executive Chairman and CEO John Chen announced that the company’s transition to a software company was complete. Since then, we’ve made great strides executing on our business strategy and today, we are focused on providing intelligent security software and services to enterprises and governments around the world.
As another milestone in the BlackBerry journey, we will be taking steps to decommission the legacy services for BlackBerry 7.1 OS and earlier, BlackBerry 10 software, BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.1 and earlier versions, with an end of life or termination date of January 4, 2022. We have chosen to extend our service until then as an expression of thanks to our loyal partners and customers.
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Listen to yesterday’s Cyber Security Today episode!
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Bell increases internet speeds for 80,000 rural homes by the end of 2020 [IT WORLD CANADA]
Bell recently announced that it will bring the 50Mbps download/10Mbps upload speeds–the ideal baseline internet access speed set by the CRTC–to 80,000 more homes by the end of 2020.
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Cogeco to expand internet service in Ontario and Quebec [IT WORLD CANADA]
Cogeco Connexion, a subsidiary of Cogeco Communications, has committed $7 million to offer its internet services to more than 4,600 businesses and homes in Hawkesbury and Southwestern Ontario.
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Cisco and the City of Toronto team up to deliver free Wi-Fi hotspots for underserved communities [IT BUSINESS CANADA]
Cisco Canada and the City of Toronto have come together to launch Digital Canopy, an investment of over $1 million of in-kind technology and services to expand Wi-Fi access in the city’s low-income residential tower communities.
Bookmarks of the week
A few bookmarked tweets that we think are worth sharing with you.
this electrical transmission tower has a little problem. can you spot it? actually, it’s not a small problem–it cost us 16.65 *billion* dollars and caused the deaths of 85 people. pic.twitter.com/RgmSwSC5kz
— Tube Time (@TubeTimeUS) September 16, 2020
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someone posted this beautiful repository of cheat sheets and i felt the need to share the wealth.https://t.co/FrJi1vKSZw
— gabsmashh | Advanced Persistent Brunette (@gabsmashh) September 17, 2020
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dear parents,
just because your child is smiling at their phone does NOT mean they have a boyfriend / girlfriend / partner. consider that MAYBE they are looking at pictures of really sexy cable management pic.twitter.com/RghygKrxHc
— christina zhu (@cszhu) September 14, 2020
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New: detailed images of GrayKey, the iPhone unlocking tech popular with federal, state, and local U.S. law enforcement https://t.co/mqdRLc2Oc6 pic.twitter.com/XlFHDHHcrD
— Joseph Cox (@josephfcox) September 14, 2020
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Hello Canada!🇨🇦
Here is our first snapshot of confirmed COVID-19 cases and outbreaks in schools, from one week of data collection. Updates nightly.SEP 13 2020:
🏫298 schools
🚨4 outbreaksMap at: https://t.co/Wddbjqdi8u
/1 pic.twitter.com/B9mA9RN2aU— COVID Schools Canada (@covidschoolsCA) September 14, 2020
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Hey, name a woman you personally know and you admire for her work. Bonus points for IT or STEM.
— Hana Dusíková 🍊 @cppcon2020 (@hankadusikova) September 13, 2020
