NinjaOne has announced a new integration with ServiceNow, in a move the IT operations vendor said will give IT teams greater visibility across their environments while simplifying IT service desk workflows.

The move will enable organizations to share real-time endpoint data between the two platforms, helping IT teams automate incident management, improve asset visibility, and resolve issues faster without needing to switch between applications.

Texas-headquartered NinjaOne’s unified IT operations platform combines endpoint management, patch management, backup, and remote access through a single console.

According to the vendor, the offering supports more than 40,000 customers across 140 countries.

By integrating the offering with ServiceNow’s service management platform, NinjaOne said it is addressing the information gaps that can emerge when organizations rely on multiple IT management tools.

“NinjaOne’s integration with ServiceNow eliminates this problem by continuously updating IT data in ServiceNow as conditions change, providing real-time accuracy, and ensuring devices remain healthy,” explained Rahul Hirani, chief product officer at NinjaOne.

“As a result, our customers save time and resources, simplifying daily operations so they can deliver best-in-class IT support and services.”

Real-time visibility and proactive support

The new integration enables endpoint data from NinjaOne to flow directly into ServiceNow, allowing organizations to automatically update asset information, configuration management databases (CMDBs), patch status, endpoint records, and other configuration data.

According to the companies, alerts detected within NinjaOne can also automatically generate incidents in ServiceNow to help IT teams investigate and resolve issues before they affect end users.

Additionally, technicians can access and manage devices directly from within the ServiceNow platform, further reducing the need to move between multiple management tools.

NinjaOne said the move will provide customers with a single, real-time view of their IT environment that will help eliminate manual updates and improve data accuracy across service management and endpoint operations.

Commenting on the partnership, Alix Douglas, group vice president of global technology partnerships at ServiceNow, added that the integration will help organizations adopt a more proactive approach to IT support.

“The most resilient IT organisations are the ones that eliminate blind spots, and that starts with connecting endpoint intelligence to service management in real time,” he said.

“NinjaOne’s integration with ServiceNow gives IT teams a unified, current view of their environment, so they can move from reactive firefighting to proactive resolution.

“That’s the kind of seamless workflow intelligence that drives real productivity and delivers better experiences for employees.”

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Knowledge workers are secretly yearning for the days before AI entered the mix, with three-in-ten saying they preferred work before adoption of the technology.

In a survey of office workers by digital transformation firm Adaptavist, 65% said they preferred the pre-AI era and 38% would remove generative AI tools from the world entirely if they had the chance.

Younger workers in particular are among those most frustrated by AI, with 40% of Gen Z and Millennials saying they would scrap generative AI tools, compared with 32% of Gen X and 29% of Boomers.

The findings mark a shift in feelings about AI, the researchers said. While businesses continue to invest heavily in the technology, public concern is growing over its impact on jobs, workplace surveillance, privacy, and security.

Meanwhile, AI has introduced new pressures for workers, eroded the value of skilled work, and left employees feeling less engaged and less valued than before.

"These findings point to an underlying gap we see in most AI implementations," said Neal Riley, AI innovation lead at Adaptavist.

"It is much easier for organizations to focus on adoption metrics – who is using AI, how often they are using it – than it is to measure its impact on the work itself."

Just over three-in-ten (31%) of the workers who said they'd like to get rid of AI said it was because they believed it reduces creativity. Almost as many had ethical doubts, with 29% citing concerns over misuse and 28% worrying about surveillance and privacy.

‘AI slop’ is a leading frustration

Notably, nearly half (46%) said that dealing with low-quality 'AI slop' makes their job feel less meaningful and more repetitive. More than one-third (37%), for example, admitted it has made them less engaged at work overall.

It's not as if workers are seeing the big efficiency benefits often associated with AI, the study found. More than four-in-ten (42%) now spend more time verifying and fact-checking AI output than they actually save by using it.

Almost half said that poor quality AI-generated work is actively slowing down their projects, while 55% believe it is reducing overall team efficiency.

The findings from Adaptavist align with recent research from ISC2, which found nearly two-thirds (65%) of cyber professionals are spending more time deciding whether to trust or act on AI-generated recommendations.

A similar number (63%) said they now find themselves reviewing and validating AI outputs, creating larger workloads and essentially wasting time on a daily basis.

‘AI slop’ has become a recurring buzzword over the last 18 months. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella penned a blog post in January this year calling on the industry to disregard the term.

Yet research shows this is having a direct impact on workplace efficiency and productivity. As ITPro reported in January, analysis from Zapier found employees are working an extra four and a half hours each week cleaning up mistakes.

The consequences of not acting on low quality AI-generated outputs can be grave, the study noted. Respondents reported having had work rejected due to poor AI outputs, while others highlighted customer complaints and even security incidents.

AI is adding pressure

Workers are also feeling pressured, with half believing that their performance is now being compared – fairly or not – to AI-generated output.

Around a quarter are facing intense pressure to improve performance, improve quality, and be more efficient, just to keep pace in a machine-accelerated environment.

Another quarter said they use AI simply to meet workload demands, and 23% rely on the technology to keep up with colleagues.

"By understanding the nature of the work and the different value streams across your business, you can more accurately measure outcomes and impact rather than simply counting actions," said Riley.

"When AI is introduced thoughtfully, with the right guardrails and genuine support for the people using it, it can enhance rather than erode what makes work meaningful and impactful."

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Barracuda Networks has announced a series of enhancements to its Partner Success Program in a move the cybersecurity vendor said will help MSPs and channel partners strengthen expertise and accelerate growth.

The initiative now includes new enablement, marketing, and partner engagement capabilities designed to improve operational efficiency, deepen technical knowledge, and unlock new business opportunities through the BarracudaONE cyber resilience platform.

The update includes expanded demand generation tools, enhanced marketing resources, and partner experience improvements, alongside additional training and certification options via the Barracuda Mastery Program.

In an announcement, Michelle Hodges, senior vice president of global channels and alliances at Barracuda, said the latest enhancements reflect the company’s continued commitment to partner success.

“At Barracuda, our partners are at the center of every decision we make, from product innovation to go-to-market execution," she commented. "We’re creating more opportunities for partners to engage customers, sharpen differentiation and grow their business — and making it easier than ever to do so.”

Expanded partner capabilities

As part of the update, Barracuda is introducing a new through-channel marketing automation platform that features co-branded campaigns, social and email syndication, and turnkey campaign execution to help partners generate demand.

The company also revealed that it plans to launch a Partner Locator tool designed to connect customers with certified partners and help drive high-intent sales opportunities.

On the training front, the Barracuda Mastery Program has been expanded with additional role-based learning, technical labs, and advanced sales and technical badges aimed at strengthening partner expertise and validating specialist skills.

Elsewhere, the company has introduced new role-based experiences and automation within its Partner Portal, including guided onboarding journeys designed to simplify engagement, accelerate time to value, and help businesses scale.

Commenting on the refresh, Sean Furman, president at STF Consulting, said the enhanced program will help partners strengthen their expertise while tapping into new revenue opportunities.

“Barracuda’s expanded training, certifications and partner recognition programs give us the tools to build expertise and stand out in a crowded market,” he explained.

“These investments elevate our credibility as a strategic advisor and translate directly into greater customer value, stronger retention and new opportunities to grow high margin recurring revenue.”

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Databricks and Microsoft are forging deeper ties with an expansion to the duo’s decade-long partnership, with a fresh focus placed on data management.

As part of the move, Databricks said it plans to expand use of Azure Databricks in core business operations and build a new, unified data lakehouse.

The move will also see the firm adopt Microsoft’s Arm-based VM infrastructure, Azure Cobalt, to “improve performance and efficiency”.

Microsoft, meanwhile, plans deeper integration of Databricks’ Data and AI platform across core product lines in a bid to provide customers with new tools such as Genie, the company’s flagship AI chatbot.

Databricks CEO and co-founder Ali Ghodsi said the expansion builds on long-standing ties and aims to accelerate customer data transformation efforts.

“For nearly a decade, Databricks and Microsoft have helped enterprises innovate with data and AI,” he said.

“Today, our partnership is stronger than ever. With Databricks Genie and Unity AI Gateway deeply integrated across Microsoft’s products, we’re helping enterprises unify their data and ground AI in business knowledge.”

Delivering business context

The partnership expansion aims to address key recurring hurdles for enterprises dabbling in AI innovation: data preparation and management.

AI systems, particularly agents, require fine-tuned data grounded in domain-specific context, according to the duo. Simply put, this means AI systems need to understand enterprise products, customers, operations, and general business processes to run efficiently.

A significant portion of enterprises are still struggling to bridge these gaps, however, and it risks derailing adoption processes, according to Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business.

“The next generation of AI will be defined by how effectively organizations turn their unique knowledge into intelligence,” Althoff said.

“Microsoft and Databricks are helping customers connect data, AI, and business context to accelerate decision-making and drive measurable impact.”

Databricks targets performance gains

A key focus of the partnership rests on expansion of Azure Cobalt for Databricks. The company said this will help improve performance and efficiency for agentic AI and ‘data-intensive’ workloads for customers.

The data analytics firm currently uses Cobalt 100. Looking ahead, the company plans to adopt Cobalt 200, which Microsoft noted offers up to 50% better performance and includes memory encryption by default.

Expansion of core business operations through Azure Databricks will also deliver performance improvements, the duo noted, enabling the firm to scale up capabilities for customers.

Genie integration

Deeper integration of Databricks’ Genie AI service within Azure also aims to simplify data management capabilities for customers, according to the firm.

Running the AI system directly within Microsoft environments will enable customers to ground and operate agents on data hosted within the cloud service. This means the AI tool will be “deeply integrated” with key Microsoft products, including:

• Azure Data Lake Storage
• Power BI
• Microsoft Foundry
• Microsoft 365, Teams, and Copilot

“These capabilities bring governed, real-time data and AI into business workflows, giving organisations the context, control, choice, and cost efficiency needed to drive impact,” the company said in a blog post.

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Nebula has announced the appointment of Rob Kittler as partner acquisition manager, as the communications software specialist looks to expand its UK reseller and managed service provider (MSP) network.

Kittler will be responsible for growing the company’s existing community of more than 700 resellers and MSPs as it looks to build on recent growth.

He joins the business following seven years at Gamma, where he most recently served as head of connectivity practice. During his time there, he worked closely with the vendor’s network of channel partners across connectivity and mobile services.

In an announcement, Sam Giggle, managing director of channel at Nebula, said Kittler’s experience makes him well placed to support the company’s channel expansion ambitions.

"Partner acquisition isn't a numbers game for us, it's about finding MSPs who want a genuine growth partner, and giving them a platform and a programme they can build a business on,” he explained. “Rob has spent the best part of a decade at the heart of the UK channel, and he understands partners' businesses from the inside."

Headquartered in Guildford, Surrey, Nebula develops SaaS-based workplace communications software spanning voice, messaging, customer experience, AI, analytics, and collaboration services.

The firm’s proprietary CallSwitch One platform supports more than 200,000 daily active users and is delivered through its network of reseller and MSP partners.

Kittler’s appointment follows a year of strong growth for Nebula, which saw the company add 42,000 net new users to its CallSwitch One platform as well as complete the migration of almost 200,000 users onto its wholly owned IP network.

Commenting on his new role, Kittler described the channel as being at “an inflection point” as partners navigate a changing market landscape.

“M&A among partners is leaving resellers with sprawling product portfolios to rationalise, while at vendor level too much of the IP being sold is outsourced, owned and controlled by someone other than the vendor selling it,” he said.

“Nebula's position as an IP owner gives partners a level of influence over the roadmap they simply can't get elsewhere, and the pace of software development here made this an easy decision.”

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Google Cloud has recorded its best quarterly growth to date, with earnings reports showing revenue surging 82% to $24.8bn.

Across the wider company, Google-owner Alphabet saw revenue climb 24% to $119.8bn, with income up 30%.

Despite such gains, Google was still on the back foot, with share prices falling 3% after revealing a big boost in capital expenditure and being forced to defend delays to its top-end AI model.

"Q2 was an amazing quarter, with Alphabet revenues growing 24% year-over-year and Google Cloud revenues accelerating to 82% growth, driven by demand for AI infrastructure and AI solutions," said CEO Sundar Pichai in a statement. "It’s great to see wide adoption of Gemini Enterprise, with nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 using it."

"Our AI investments are redefining what’s possible across every part of our business."

Continued capex concerns

After the results were announced, Google admitted in a conference call it will increase its capital expenditure this year, which is largely focused on AI infrastructure spending such as data centers.

Last quarter, that was bumped up by $5bn to an already massive $180bn to $190bn, and it has now been increased to $195bn to $205bn.

Over the second quarter alone, Google recorded capex of $45bn, with most used to boost "technical infrastructure to support our investments in AI," said Anat Ashkenazi, senior VP and CFO, according to a transcript of the conference call.

"The increase in the range is primarily due to an acceleration in the delivery of capacity to meet growing demand," said Ashkenazi, adding that spending would "increase significantly" in 2027.

Google isn’t alone in dealing with surging capex rates. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is projected to spend $200bn and Meta plans as much as $145bn.

These huge outlays have sparked concerns about the cost of AI over the last 18 months, but industry leaders insist it's all part of the process. Pichai compared this stage of AI to the early days of the shift to the cloud.

"I do think it feels like we are in very early innings of what feels like a secular shift across multiple areas in our core information businesses just the possibilities when I see what all you can do with the absolute frontier capabilities, there's still a lot of work ahead to translate all that into experiences for our consumer users," he said, in response to an analyst question.

Ashkenazi added that "while we have increased our capacity quite significantly over the past 3 years, the demand still outpaces that investment."

AI delays

Google Cloud might be flying high, but concerns over AI model-related delays are rising among investors. The firm’s flagship model was once again delayed this week.

The company unveiled Gemini 3.6 Flash and a cyber-focused model, Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber this week, following the lead of competitors such as Anthropic in the space.

However, Gemini 3.5 Pro wasn’t included in the launch after initially being set for release in June. Google said it would be made available "as soon as it's ready".

"Gemini 3.5 Pro is currently in testing and our team is already building the next generation of models," Pichai said on the conference call. "We have started our most ambitious pretraining run yet for Gemini 4 and are excited by the progress we are seeing at the frontier."

That didn't convince one analyst, Douglas Anmuth from JPMorgan Chase & Company, who asked about Pichai's confidence in keeping Gemini models at the frontier — the front of the pack, the leading edge of AI development.

Pichai defended Google's AI efforts, saying the company was "very committed and very confident of being at the frontier, and, model releases aside, remains a leader on "many attributes" — though he admitted work was needed on coding and agentic coding.

"I am very excited by the progress I'm seeing internally on Gemini 4, and I'm confident that people will be pleased when we are putting it outside," he added.

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Palo Alto Networks has announced the acquisition of application monitoring provider Embrace as the security giant targets real-time observability gains.

The firm said the acquisition will add “high-fidelity real user monitoring (RUM) capabilities” to its existing observability platform and provide customers with deeper insights into user activity.

As part of the announcement, Palo Alto Networks has also introduced Synthetics, a new service built with its Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) team.

Synthetics will help enterprises proactively validate application performance, the company noted, with these capabilities also extending improved observability to digital experience monitoring (DEM).

“Customers will gain a complete, unified view, from end-user interactions and proactive app validation to backend software and infrastructure, all on the industry's leading, innovative, cost-effective platform,” the company said in a blog post.

The Embrace deal comes hot on the heels of the Chronosphere acquisition, which also aimed to bolster observability capabilities for Palo Alto Networks.

The $3.35 billion acquisition, first announced in November 2025 and closed in January this year, saw the cybersecurity vendor combine Chronosphere's observability platform with its own Cortex AgentiX offering.

Terms of the Embrace deal were not disclosed.

Palo Alto Networks wants the ‘whole picture’

Lee Klarich, chief product and technology officer at Palo Alto Networks, said this latest acquisition aims to provide users with a comprehensive overview of application performance.

“To truly understand how their applications are performing, organisations need to see the whole picture - from the moment a user taps or clicks to what exactly happened on the backend,” he said.

“By combining Palo Alto Networks' leading Observability platform with Embrace's innovative Real User Monitoring and the organically developed Synthetic Monitoring capabilities, we'll deliver exactly that.”

Klarich said the firm also plans to take things “a step further” by linking these new capabilities with Cortex AgentiX.

“Organizations will be able to both see and automatically fix issues across their ecosystem,” he added. “This is what true platformization looks like in practice.”

Observability in the spotlight

Palo Alto’s observability focus comes amidst a critical time for enterprises globally, particularly with the influx of AI tools and agents across IT environments.

Modern applications are “increasingly complex and autonomous”, the company said in a blog post, and enterprises require more detailed performance visibility to ensure reliability.

“Embrace’s proven RUM capabilities are built for modern environments, allowing customers to deliver applications that scale at the pace of AI,” the firm noted.

“Sythetics will leverage Palo Alto Networks’ globally distributed infrastructure to proactively validate application availability and performance from strategic locations across the globe.”

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When Allbirds, an eco-friendly luxury shoemaker, announced in April it had struck a $50 million (£37 million deal) to become an AI data center provider, its stock surged more than 580% in a single trading session.

Whether things aren't quite working out, or whether you've identified a brilliant opportunity, pivoting into a new space is often the best bet for surviving – and thriving.

The technology industry is rife with reinventions. Take Nintendo, which started out making handmade toys, or Amazon, which was a mere humble bookseller.

Plenty of companies have successfully made a transition from one line of business to another – sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes out of necessity, and sometimes so dramatically we've forgotten their original purpose. Here are some of our highlights.

1. BlackBerry: From phone maker to auto software developer

In February 2016, BlackBerry acquired the U.K. cybersecurity company Encription as it embarked on a dramatic pivot into cybersecurity consulting. It then broadened its horizons to the software space and now, with the QNX operating system, the firm develops critical software and services for more than 275 million cars around the world.

"It's been a large transformation over the course of the last decade as we've divested businesses and really narrowed our focus towards the B2B segments of QNX and Secure Communications," BlackBerry CEO John Giamatteo told Richard Quest in an interview with CNN in January this year.

"So that narrowing of focus has allowed us to simplify, reduce our costs, divest ourselves from subscale businesses, and really put ourselves in a much better position for profitability and long-term growth."

2. Nokia: From paper mill to handsets to next-gen networks

Like BlackBerry, Nokia gained worldwide recognition for its outstanding mobile phones – manufacturing devices from 1982, starting with the Mobira Senator, and now continuing in spirit under the spun-off HMD Global brand.

The origins of the Finnish technology icon, however, stretch back to 1865, when engineer Fredrik Idestam established the company as a paper mill.

It wasn't until a significant merger more than 100 years later — where Nokia, Kaapelitehdas, and Finnish Rubber Works merged to create the Nokia Corporation — that electronics became a key line of business.

Although its reputation faded in the 2000s with the birth of the smartphone — and the eventual sale of its mobile and devices division to Microsoft in 2013 — Nokia continued to make waves under the radar, and under the ground.

It began focusing on networking in 2014 and is now undergoing a major pivot away from sluggish telecom hardware toward AI-native networks, data center networking and 6G tech.

3. Samsung: From groceries to electronics and beyond

Samsung is among the world's most widely known brands and one of the 21st century's biggest technology success stories. The South Korean institution deals in all kinds of goods from fridges to smartphones to laptops to speakers.

In fact, it's hard to find an electronic device that Samsung doesn't manufacture. But the company didn't always start this way.

The company actually started life as a small grocery trading company in 1938, with the 40-employee-strong entity dealing in dried fish, local groceries and noodles. Amazon may have pivoted into this space recently with its Fresh stores, but for Samsung, groceries have always been in its lifeblood.

Samsung didn't enter the electronics industry until the late 1960s, when it started manufacturing black-and-white TVs. It's now a trillion-dollar company that comprises 80 separate companies, spanning construction, financial services, medical services, and many other areas.

In the future, Samsung is hoping to focus on the technologies of tomorrow, including agentic AI and 6G communications.

4. Slack: From gaming to workplace collaboration

Slack is one of the most widely used collaboration platforms on the planet, with the multi-billion dollar business boasting tens of millions of daily users each day.

Well before its massive acquisition by Salesforce for a tidy sum of close to $30 billion (£22.5 billion) – and indeed before it rose to prominence – the company's origins lay in the world of gaming.

When co-founder of photo-sharing site Flickr, Stewart Butterfield, attempted to get his new venture Tiny Speck off the ground in 2009, he developed an internal communications platform to help the team as it was developing its computer game Glitch.

This fanciful 2D MMORPG launched in 2011 and was eventually shut down roughly a year later — with these efforts to make it big in the gaming world ending in tears.

From these ashes, however, Butterfield pivoted the company and instead focused his team's efforts on making their internal communications tools public. Hence, Slack Technologies — and the widely used platform we now know today — was born.

Why Slack? It stands for "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge". Glitch is long dead, but you can still find a wonderful homage to Slack's origins on its website.

5. YouTube: From dating site to video hosting

The video-sharing platform YouTube has become a giant force in the technology industry, especially since its acquisition by Google, and it's become a hub for businesses across the world.

Millions of users have created businesses using the site, and many existing organizations use the hosting platform as an extension of their own businesses to push video content to billions of viewers.

But before the first video, 'Me at the zoo', was uploaded more than 20 years ago, its founders originally aimed to create a video dating site. The vision, according to co-founder Steven Chen, was to build a platform that allowed people to upload videos of themselves describing their ideal partners.

"We always thought there was something with video there, but what would be the actual practical application?" Chen said at SXSW 2016 in Austin, Texas, according to CNET.

"We thought dating would be the obvious choice."

Writing recently in ChannelPro, Lutz Lambrecht, chief partner officer at SNP Group, observed that strong partnership ecosystems show greater resilience in the face of economic turbulence and market disruption. He highlighted value alignment, versatility, and adaptable technology as key factors that build partners’ and vendors’ resilience.

Lambrecht described how stronger alignment on solution positioning, definitions of customer success, and the measurement of outcomes puts partners in a stronger position to communicate value and build credibility with customers.

The power of partner and provider alignment resonated with me as the CEO of a transatlantic digital agency that aims to help UK and US organizations in the public, private, and membership sectors to navigate cloud, digital, and AI transformation.

Looking for strong leadership

Many of our customers are seeking support to implement generative AI tools within their membership organisations.

Data from the Professional Associations Research Network (PARN) report 2025 [pg33) revealed that members expect their professional body to guide how to safely implement AI, and even which LLMs to select:

• 82% told PARN that they want best practice guides and case studies on AI implementation
• 67% want training on AI
• 64% want their professional body to regulate the use of AI in their profession
• 63% want their professional body to vet and provide access to approved AI tools

There is clearly a chain of trust at work. Members are looking for AI guidance from their professional bodies. In turn, professional bodies seek trustworthy support from their digital platform providers. And, finally, digital platform providers rely upon their technology partners.

Navigating change together

When you’re responsible for the performance, stability, and security of an organization’s website or e-commerce platform, you need full confidence in the technologies that you select to build it. But it goes deeper than that. You must also have faith in the people within the vendor’s organization and its core values.

During the recent Codegarden conference in Copenhagen, Karla Santi, CEO of American digital agency, Blend Interactive, presented the findings from the platinum partner’s survey of 40 small, medium, and large digital agencies, undertaken by Promethean Research. This revealed:

• The average revenue growth over the past year was 7.5% compared to 20% in previous years
• Sales cycles are extending
• Clients are seeking more business case framing and asking ROI questions earlier in engagements
• Agency leaders are feeling the strain of navigating market disruption
• agencies that reduced services and specialized achieved above-average growth

Based on the survey data, Santi encourages fellow digital agency leaders to refine their services and protect their relationships.

In the first episode of the Loom podcast, I sat down with Mats Persson, CEO of the open source CMS platform company, Umbraco, to discuss how business leaders can remain confident in such uncertain times.

We discussed how the vendor’s values of transparency and flexibility are tightly aligned with our own, and how this helps us to build trust with customers.

An open culture opens doors

Referring back to Lambrecht’s point about value alignment, it was Umbraco’s openness that first attracted us to become a partner. We were able to make an informed decision about whether it was the right organization and technology for us to partner with because, to a large degree, we were permitted to look behind the curtain.

We could see what the company was really like, what its enterprise aspirations were, and how central partners really are to its growth strategy.

As Persson commented during the podcast discussion, “You gain more trust if you're open and willing to share your challenges. Partners can handle the truth. If you're transparent with them, it’s an opportunity to fix something, and that becomes more trustworthy.”

Gaining confidence in the cloud

Vendor trust was a really important aspect in my decision to put Umbraco Cloud forward when speaking to our clients about their projects. The company’s transparency solidified my decision to move from us hosting customers’ sites to building enterprise customers’ projects on Umbraco Cloud.

There was an established feedback loop of Umbraco listening to partners and customers. This is not merely performative. Umbraco has demonstrably acted upon feedback. That gave us enormous confidence that when we saw a pain point, we knew it would get fixed.

We didn't switch everything over all at once. We started to feel it out, to see how the support functions. We explored what the challenges were and what we needed to change to get the best out of it. We liked what we saw and started to build increasingly complex sites on Umbraco Cloud.

Quality beats quantity

As Lambrecht wrote in ChannelPro, “The strength of a partner ecosystem is not defined by the number of partners in a network, but by how effectively partners are aligned, enabled, and equipped to deliver value in changing conditions. At the core is a shared value narrative that brings together complementary strengths of vendors and partners, with both combining to create a joint proposition that is clearly differentiated.”

We talk about trying to build a culture of openness within our organization and with our stakeholders. But if we were dealing with a CMS vendor that didn't share those values, wasn't providing the necessary level of support, and wasn't adapting the product based on feedback, that would show to the end client.

Ultimately, carefully choosing who you work with is a major consideration as we all navigate these uncertain times together.

We are not unique. Indeed, many other companies are on the same journey of discovery to get to a point of established trust and create the foundations of current and future success.

NetApp has announced the acquisition of California-based AI data infrastructure specialist DataPelago, in a move the company said will improve performance for AI and analytics workloads.

The deal will see DataPelago’s technology integrated into NetApp’s portfolio, enabling GPU-accelerated processing directly within the storage layer rather than requiring data to be moved into separate compute environments.

According to NetApp, the move will help customers reduce their infrastructure costs while improving performance for AI and analytics workloads by processing data at its source.

In an announcement, NetApp CEO George Kurian said the acquisition strengthens the company’s aim of giving customers “full command” of their data.

"As AI models and the chips that power them get ever more effective, enterprises need data infrastructure that is just as intelligent and powerful to harness the potential of their data," he commented.

"With DataPelago, we are extending our ability to help customers understand and process their data with the agility required to unleash competitive advantage.”

Founded in 2021, California-based DataPelago develops AI data infrastructure designed to accelerate data processing for AI and analytics workloads. Its technology focuses on reducing the complexity and cost of preparing enterprise data for AI by enabling processing closer to where data is stored.

At the heart of DataPelago’s offering lies its Nucleus engine, which uses GPU and CPU acceleration to process data directly where it resides.

According to the company, the technology eliminates the need to copy enterprise data into separate AI environments, reducing infrastructure costs by up to 80% while delivering performance improvements of up to ten times compared with conventional approaches.

By embedding the technology into its storage platform, NetApp said customers will be able to prepare, govern, and activate enterprise data for AI without moving it between environments, helping to remove one of the biggest bottlenecks facing AI deployments.

"NetApp manages more enterprise data across more environments than anyone in the industry," said Syam Nair, Chief Product Officer at NetApp.

“The next phase of AI will be won by those who make that data work at the source, and the DataPelago team brings the technical depth and velocity to get us there faster."

Upon completion of the acquisition, DataPelago will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of NetApp.

Commenting on the acquisition, DataPelago founder and CEO Rajan Goyal said joining NetApp would allow the company to bring its technology to a wider enterprise customer base.

"Joining NetApp gives us the opportunity to combine our breakthrough processing technology with the industry's best data infrastructure portfolio,” he explained.

“Enterprises have invested billions in GPUs and AI models, but their data remains fragmented, leaving valuable computing resources to sit idle rather than putting these investments to work.

“Together, we’re positioned to help customers simplify and accelerate AI deployment at scale."

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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As AI continues to rewrite job roles, an increasing number of employers are encouraging their employees to gain AI certification.

Back in April, Korean media and network services provider SK Broadband announced plans to train its staff as AI natives. It comes on the back of an AI proficiency certification program last year.

"We will establish a culture where employees independently develop AI agents to transform productivity and create real business value,” an SK Broadband spokesperson told The Korea Times.

More than a third of employees (35%) are interested in gaining AI certification, according to Pearson’s annual Value of IT Certification report released in April, which surveyed 505 IT and HR leaders. This figure is up from 17% in 2025.

The rising interest in AI certification should come as no surprise, according to Imran Akhtar, head of academy at talent and training partner, mthree.

“Many employers are looking for existing talent who can say they understand AI by spotting problems clearly, questioning its outputs, applying their own judgement, working safely with data, and using it effectively to improve how work gets done," Akhtar explains.

For employees, the value of AI certification is that it gives them ”a recognized way to evidence their knowledge of AI”, Akhtar adds. Certification helps to put theory into practice by testing employees’ knowledge in real-world scenarios.

The AI certifications to choose from

With so many AI certifications available, it may seem hard to know where to start. The right certification, however, is going to depend on an employee’s job role and which AI tools they need to perform that role more efficiently.

Another factor is an employee’s career plans and what AI knowledge and skills they may need as they climb the career ladder.

“Some jobs may demand certification because the role directly involves AI systems, data, risk, or governance. For others, it supports broader AI literacy and bolsters day-to-day work more holistically,” says Akhtar.

Here are a few starter AI certifications to choose from.

AWS Certified AI Practitioner

Structure: Online, 65 questions

Price: $100

Valid for: 3 years

AWS Certified AI Practitioner covers the basics of AI, genAI and machine learning (machine learning) concepts and use cases. The certificate is ideal for business analysts, IT managers and IT support, as well as product and project managers.

Google Generative AI Leader

Structure: Online, 50-60 multiple-choice questions

Price: $99

Valid for: 3 years

Google Generative AI Leader is for anyone looking to boost their business-level knowledge of generative AI (GenAI). The exam covers the fundamentals of genAI, Google’s genAI offerings, techniques for improving genAI output, and business strategies for successful genAI deployment.

Databricks Certified Generative AI Engineer Associate

Structure: Online, 45 multiple-choice questions

Price: $200

Valid for: 2 years

Databricks Certified Generative AI Engineer Associate is for anyone who wants to validate their ability to design and implement large language model (LLM) solutions using Databricks. It’s recommended that those taking the certification have at least six months of hands-on experience performing genAI tasks outlined in the exam guide.

Nvidia Certified Associate Generative AI LLMs

Structure: Online, 50-60 multiple-choice questions

Price: $125

Valid for: 2 years

Nvidia Certified Associate Generative AI LLMs is aimed at those who are looking to build on their basic understanding of AI and LLMs and learn how to develop and integrate AI applications using AI and LLMs with Nvidia solutions. It covers data visualization, neural networks, prompt engineering, and Python libraries.

These four certifications are considered foundation-level, but there are next-step certifications that employees can take to advance their knowledge and skills further.

For example, AWS suggests that those pursuing careers in AI, data and machine learning (ML) gain the AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate. Those going down the cloud path could take the Certified Solutions Architect - Associate.

Certification can boost career and salary prospects

Research published by Revelio Labs last month found that the average salary for workers who had gained a foundation-level certification in AI or generative AI is $79,800. For comparison, the average for workers who hadn’t gained one is $72,300.

The data also showed that certification gainers were more likely to be hired for a more senior role for their next position (38.9% had received one) than non-certification takers (32.5%).

Given the tight job market, employees are looking for anything that can give them an advantage. AI certification can improve their job mobility and help them to stand out from the competition, Faye Ellis, principal training architect at tech skills provider Pluralsight, tells ITPro.

“Certifications demonstrate a commitment to continuous development and validate that skills are up to date and workplace-ready. For many, this can provide a route to new opportunities or higher-paid roles,” says Ellis.

To mandate or not to mandate

The question employers may be asking themselves is whether they should mandate AI certification.

Ellis explains that while every employee “needs a baseline level of AI literacy, mandatory certification will depend on the role and technical depth required.

She cites the example of software developers. Companies should be more inclined to make certification mandatory for them because they’re involved in building and governing AI systems. For employees whose roles are less technical, certification needn’t be mandatory, but they should be encouraged to “support a foundation in responsible AI use, prompt quality and output validation”.

Akhtar agrees, but cautions that certification doesn’t always guarantee future career success.

“Certification can boost a career, but only when it builds the capability an employee can apply in their role,” he says.

“It’s unlikely to support career progression if AI training doesn’t reflect the core business objectives.”

AI minister Kanishka Narayan has been given a seat in incoming prime minister Andy Burnham’s cabinet following a reshuffle.

Narayan described the move as a sign of Burnham’s “deep commitment to AI’s importance” to the UK economy.

“AI is likely the most significant technology in human history. Its impact will dwarf other things,” Narayan said in a post on X.

“The best case for it is compelling beyond our dreams: a reindustrialised Britain, stronger national security, public services transformed for the better. The risks, too, are real: it is right that the British public shares those worries, for jobs, for the pace of change.”

The move comes as the UK's Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT), where the AI minister role used to sit, has been scrapped in the wake of Burnham’s appointment.

Under the new setup, DSIT responsibilities will be merged with the freshly minted Department for Business, Innovation, Science, and Trade (DBIST), led by Jonathan Reynolds.

The role of technology secretary has also been cut.

AI focus welcomed

Mark Boost, chief executive of UK-based cloud computing firm, Civo, said retaining and elevating Narayan is a reassuring signal for UK businesses.

“Giving the AI minister direct access to cabinet decisions demonstrates that the government recognizes AI’s existential importance to our future economy,” he said.

“Positioned inside a high-powered business and trade department, an AI Minister with Cabinet authority will have real leverage to break down cross-Whitehall silos, accelerate national AI infrastructure, and give British tech companies the proactive backing needed to maintain a competitive global advantage.”

Andy McLean, CEO of the UK Semiconductor Centre, echoed Boost’s comments, noting that Narayan’s new role is a “positive signal of the importance being placed on AI at the center of government”.

Boost added, however, that any delays to AI-related initiatives caused by the DSIT shake-up could have a significant impact on global competitiveness.

“Any Whitehall restructuring brings administrative friction, and because the global tech and AI arms race is moving so quickly, the UK simply cannot afford a pause,” he said.

“Critical initiatives like the AI Opportunities Action Plan and sovereign infrastructure investments must be ring-fenced from bureaucratic delays.”

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Nearly three-quarters (74%) of companies have reworked security team structures due to the influx of AI tools, and that’s sparking high demand for cyber pros with dedicated skills.

New research from SANS Institute found the rise of dedicated, AI-focused roles in cybersecurity is driving up salaries across the industry.

High-end salaries for AI security roles now top $260,000 (£194,000), with positions such as Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration Specialists and AI governance leads in high demand.

Pointing to a review of UK vacancies on LinkedIn, SANS Institute noted that there are thousands of AI security positions being advertised online, suggesting that hiring for such roles has "moved from prediction to present-day reality".

That suggests that AI isn't taking over cybersecurity jobs, but changing which skills are necessary for the work, the organization said.

"Routine analytical work is increasingly automated, while demand is accelerating for professionals who can secure AI systems, govern AI risk, conduct AI red teaming and orchestrate AI-powered security operations," the institute said.

A new wave of cybersecurity roles

Dedicated AI roles spanning a range of security-related areas are popping up across the industry, SANS noted. AI security engineers, for example, are in hot demand, now commanding salaries of around $185,000 on average.

Roles focused on specific areas and threats are also emerging, the study noted. Ads for AI Identity Deepfake Defense Specialists have been identified. While it’s a wordy job title, the study noted that this shows the impact of trends such as deepfake voice fraud.

Professionals in these roles can command salaries of between $130,000–$175,000 (£97,000–£131,000), the institute noted.

Long-term, the organization expects these new specialist careers will lead to premium salaries due to intensifying demand for skills.

Other new AI-related roles identified by SANS Institute include:

• AI Governance, Risk & Compliance Lead ($240,000 salary)
• AI Red Team Specialist (up to $220,000)
• AI Supply Chain Security Engineer (up to $185,000)

Intriguing new roles include AI Incident Response Orchestrator, AI threat intelligence analyst, and AI SOC Orchestrator were also highlighted by the institute.

Growing quantum focus

It’s not just AI reshaping roles and sparking heightened demand for cyber pros with specific skills, however.

Dedicated quantum-related cybersecurity roles are also growing in frequency, the study found, as organisations ramp up preparations for ‘Q-Day’.

This is the point at which quantum computers can break traditional encryption techniques. While the debate on when this comes still rages, many enterprises are looking ahead to this point - and job ads reflect this.

SANS Institute pointed to roles such as Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration Specialists – a position focused on reacting to looming mass breaking of current encryption by quantum computers – saying it could earn above $260,000.

Reshaping team structures

The study from SANS Institute isn’t the first to highlight the impact AI is having on team structures. As ITPro reported earlier this month, the same shift is occurring in software development due to the influx of AI tools.

Research from Gartner predicts that 60% of enterprises will rework software development units into ‘tiny teams’ by 2030.

While this shift toward ‘smaller’ teams may have alarm bells ringing for developers, the consultancy noted that this won’t necessarily spell bad news.

This transition won’t be a cost-cutting effort or attempt to reduce headcount, but will instead focus on creating more focused, specialized units.

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Cohesity has announced the appointment of Seb Fitzjohn as vice president of partner channel sales and go-to-market for Europe, as the data security specialist looks to strengthen its partner ecosystem across the region.

Fitzjohn will leverage two decades of international sales and channel experience to lead Cohesity’s partner and channel strategy across European markets.

The firm said he will work to drive growth through its Aspire Partner Program while expanding go-to-market partnerships and helping deliver data resilience and security solutions to customers.

He joins the business from ServiceNow, where he spent seven years serving in senior leadership positions – most recently as group vice president of sales for Europe North, and previously as head of the company’s EMEA partner organization.

The appointment follows a recently announced partnership between Cohesity and ServiceNow, which aims to deliver real-time recovery and resilience capabilities for enterprise AI agents.

In an announcement, Olivier Savornin, Cohesity’s group vice president of sales for Europe, said the appointment highlights the company’s continued investment in talent and its partner organization.

“Seb is a great example of the high calibre of leader we want driving our business forward,” he explained. “His experience and track record put him in a strong position to support our customers and accelerate mutual growth for Cohesity and our Partners across Europe, as well as provide new perspectives and leadership approaches for the benefit of the entire Cohesity team.”

California-headquartered Cohesity specializes in AI-powered data security and cyber resilience, offering a platform that helps organizations protect, secure, manage, and recover data across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.

The vendor launched its Aspire Partner Program in August 2025, introducing a unified framework designed to simplify engagement across different partner types. The initiative offers tiered benefits, financial incentives, training, certifications, and go-to-market support to help partners expand recurring revenue opportunities.

In his new role, Fitzjohn will focus on expanding the program across Europe, while working with partners to strengthen the delivery of Cohesity’s data resilience and security offerings.

Fitzjohn said organizations require “absolute confidence” that they can protect, secure, and harness greater value from their data as AI adoption continues to reshape the IT landscape.

“Cohesity and our partners are uniquely positioned to help customers build true data resilience while also enabling AI-driven business insights,” he commented. “I look forward to working closely with our partners and the Cohesity team to expand our sales and delivery capacity across Europe in service to our joint customers.”

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UK tech industry stakeholders have hit back at alleged plans to scrap the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).

TechUK, a trade association for the country’s digital sector, described the rumoured move as a “terrible signal” for a burgeoning industry, which it noted is growing at a rate of 10% per year.

“Breaking up the work of DSIT endeavours such as the world-leading AI Safety Institute, the Sovereign AI Fund, GDS, and UKRI would slow momentum at a time when pace is essential for both the growth of the economy and our standing on the global stage,” techUK said in an open letter published on 19 July.

The backlash comes after the Financial Times reported on 17 July that incoming prime minister Andy Burnham plans to abolish the department.

Sources told the publication that advisers are creating plans to hand over technology policy to a larger business department, led by former business secretary Jonathan Reynolds.

ITPro approached the DSIT for comment, but did not receive a response by time of publication.

The move would see a return to a similar setup for science and technology policy prior to the foundation of the department in 2023.

The DSIT was formed under Rishi Sunak’s premiership and given direct responsibility for policy on these fronts. The department now plays a key role in driving growth in key digital sectors and leading digital transformation across public services.

According to Dom Hallas, executive director of the Startup Coalition, attempts to incorporate DSIT within a broader business department could dilute its influence and negatively impact the broader technology sector.

“A mega department would mean British tech competing with British steel for attention. And waste 6 months reorg-ing when time is of the essence. Not good,” Hallas said in a post on X.

Matt Clifford, AI adviser to outgoing prime minister Keir Starmer, echoed Hallas’ comments in a post on X.

“This would be a big mistake,” he wrote. “Right now is a critical moment for tech as an economic and national security issue. Tying up our most senior science and tech officials in a reorg wastes time and energy that’s desperately needed for the actual substance.”

Tim Flagg, CEO of trade association UKAI, took a different view, however, saying that while an overhaul of the department might cause disruption, the creation of a “super-department” could ultimately sharpen the country’s focus on AI.

“AI has the potential to transform Britain’s economy, our public services, and our security for a generation. Rethinking which department oversees this industry does not necessarily mean Burnham’s Britain is turning its back on that potential,” he said.

“It could even signal an ambition to go further: AI elevated into a super-department or placed at the very heart of the Cabinet Office. The real danger isn’t the ambition; it’s the distraction and the delay.”

All-in on AI

A recurring theme in the pushback to the proposals lies in the timing and current tech sector trends.

The UK government has placed a strong focus on supporting the UK’s burgeoning AI sector over the last two years under the premiership of Keir Starmer, with the aim of positioning the country as a leading economy on this front.

When Downing Street announced the AI Opportunities Action Plan, Starmer described the technology as the “defining opportunity of our generation”.

2025 saw a host of major global tech firms, including Nvidia and Microsoft, pledge billions in support for the UK tech sector, with a particular focus on infrastructure build-outs.

Additional hardware and skills-related investment was unveiled by Downing Street at London Tech Week last month.

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Data is treated as a source of untapped riches for businesses, promising a world of better insight and easier management. What's less discussed is how it's possible to drown in this ocean of information – more data sometimes just means more noise, and this is as true in IT as in any other profession.

Why doesn't more data produce better results? Is there a better way forward? And what does this mean for the end users? On this episode of the ITPro Podcast, Bobby Hellard and Ross Kelly talk to Fernando Castanheira, the CIO of Riverbed.

Castanheira's career has struck a balance between tech and finance, and how data is used to power businesses. He talks us through the mismatch between the amount of data available and how it's being used.

Highlights

"If I'm a service desk person, my job is to kind of make sure that everyone's able to do their jobs. There's no interruption, etc. I can come in and say, we have just introduced our third iteration of AI. We call it a Q. Q is basically you're going away from dashboards, which everybody's got to go look at dashboards, to come across as more conversational. I can come in and say, "Hey, I'm the desk guy. What are the three or four items that I should focus on today so that I can improve my you know my my environment? And then based on the data that we've collected over the last 24 hours, a week, whatever it is, we come back with some suggestions."

"These dashboards all look green, right? All look green on the outside, but you open things up on the inside, a lot of red. Because a lot of things are not working, even though the dashboards are looking green. So I think our approach is to make sure we kind of solve that by having very specific data, very specific recommendations, or very specific automation."

"The key thing is to have that foundation in place, and then we can act and enable things as you go forward, but it's a journey. You don't like go from zero to 100 overnight. You start with the easier stuff and then continue on that journey."

Links

• Data quality worries are holding back AI adoption among manufacturers, despite optimism over its growth potential
• AI projects are faltering as CDOs grapple with poor data quality
• Everpure wants you to get your data AI-ready

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says only the United States is up to the task of keeping AI safe – but it's unclear why technology rivals, notably China, would heed an American standards body.

Hassabis has called for a framework for testing frontier models, on the grounds that he believes progress has been faster than expected and artificial general intelligence (AGI) will arrive imminently.

He argues that such work should be led by the US because of its technical and economic standing.

"This US-initiated effort would provide a strong starting point for creating shared international standards on Frontier AI," Hassabis noted in a social media post.

"Since this technology is going to affect the entire planet, ideally this framework would spur the international community to reach a consensus on how to manage the most serious risks while ensuring everyone has access to and can benefit from the opportunities that AI brings."

Hassabis' call for a US-led framework for managing AI follows similar calls by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Following a meeting on the subject last month, China called for a global AI organization open to all countries, rather than one led by the US.

The US has pushed for AI developers to submit models a month before release for testing, while the UK has its own testing regime via its AI Security Institute; Hassabis is British, and DeepMind was founded in London before being acquired by Google.

It's unclear why international AI companies would submit to US approval. The only motivation given by Hassabis is that frontier models would be required to pass this standards body's assessment in order to be deployed in the US.

Hassabis’ comments come after Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models were hit with a temporary export ban by the White House amidst security concerns.

How would it work

Beyond being US-managed, Hassabis described a standards body that was federally overseen, such as a public-private partnership or self-regulatory organization, pointing to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).

"The Standards Body would be responsible for developing assessment protocols and working with appropriate federal agencies and the US National Labs to conduct testing in areas relevant to national security," he said.

Anyone making a "frontier model" – as defined by a set of benchmarks – would be considered a "frontier lab", and be "encouraged" to adopt certain best practices.

This would include publishing technical details, ensuring internal security is up to standard, vetting key personnel, and adequate resourcing safety research.

Non-frontier models, such as those made by startups or academia, would not be expected to take part.

Hassabis also called for frontier labs to share new modes with the standards body 30 days before release, something the US government has pushed key developers to do with their AI models.

"Once the assessment protocol is shown to be effective and robust, formalisation could quickly follow, meaning that Frontier Models would be required to pass it to be deployed in the US market," Hassabis said. "Labs would also work with the Standards Body to address any critical post-release vulnerabilities."

Assessments conducted by the standards body would evaluate security, biological, and other threats, and check how well they withstood attempts to dodge guardrails. The tests would be regularly updated.

"The strength of this approach is it would be technically focused, while at the same time supporting innovation and incentivising responsible behaviour," he said.

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Delinea has cut the ribbon on a new global partner program designed to improve partner profitability and simplify engagement with the identity security vendor.

The Delinea Partner Advantage Program introduces a range of new incentives and operational changes, including protected discounts, published deal registration rules, AI-powered training, and streamlined quote-to-cash processes.

Developed following partner feedback gathered through a global listening survey, the initiative aims to address ongoing channel concerns around margin erosion, channel conflict, and unclear rules of engagement, while providing partners with a more structured framework geared towards long-term growth.

In an announcement, Scott Goree, Delinea’s senior vice president of channel and alliances, said the company has avoided unnecessary complexity and focused on combating the practical challenges faced by partners.

“Partners don’t care about your partner program,” he commented. “They care about technology that works, protected discounts, and a vendor that’s easy to work with. We built this program around what partners told us they actually need.”

Inside the Partner Advantage Program

California-headquartered Delinea’s identity security platform governs access for human users, machines, and AI agents across on-premises and cloud environments, continuously working to discover identities, analyze risks, and apply least privilege access controls.

The firm said its new channel program has been built around three pillars – Protect, Align, and Scale – and includes codified rules of engagement, AI-driven enablement, and greater channel autonomy to help partners drive growth through the platform.

According to the vendor, partners will benefit from published deal registration policies, teaming protections, and earned incumbency discounts designed to reward them for maintaining and expanding customer relationships.

The program also includes AI-powered training and certifications alongside a new partner portal that offers guidance throughout the sales cycle.

Elsewhere, Delinea is also providing simplified tools and automation to help reduce administrative complexity across the quote-to-cash process, allowing partners to spend more time on customer engagement.

AI adoption fuels channel opportunity

The launch of the Delinea Partner Advantage Program comes as organizations continue to adapt to identity security challenges driven by the increasing presence of AI technologies.

According to the vendor’s 2026 Identity Security Report, 92% of surveyed organizations said they expect AI to amplify identity-related threats in the coming years, while 42% said that AI expansion has already increased their non-human identity risk in the past 12 months.

Delinea said its new program will help partners tap into this growth opportunity and benefit from a new revenue stream backed by its identity security platform.

Commenting on the launch, Mark Thornberry, senior vice president of partnerships at GuidePoint Security, a Delinea partner, said the vendor’s new initiative “reflects a strong commitment” to building successful, long-term channel collaboration.

“The program provides a clear framework that supports how we work together in the market, while recognizing the value partners bring through the customer relationships we cultivate and support," he said.

Enrolment for the Partner Advantage Program is now open for selling partners, with roles for MSPs, GSIs, advisory, and technology partners to follow.

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Stephen Wood, chief operating officer at Rathbones Asset Management (RAM), faced a challenge. His organization wanted to build strong data foundations to help deliver fresh insight to its professionals and embrace emerging technologies, such as agentic AI.

The solution to this challenge came via technology specialist Snowflake’s data platform.

“We wanted to create a golden source of data for each of our foundational domains,” he says.

“We wanted to overlay the data quality checks, the business rules, all those good things, and then everything would be built off that data lake. That's where we found ourselves working with Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud.”

Taking a long-term view

Wood, who spoke with ITPro at the recent Snowflake Summit 2026 conference in San Francisco, says this process began two years ago, when RAM, which is part of the Rathbones investment group, was looking for a way to manage its information assets more effectively.

The shift to Snowflake is part of a broader digital transformation to support business growth. The organization’s assets under management grew quickly before the move to Snowflake. However, RAM was still using a portfolio management system that was customized for the wealth management element of the wider Rathbones group.

Fortuitously, a solution came from within the broader Rathbones group. The firm was in the first phase of its Snowflake deployment, and Wood suggested to senior executives that the technology could help his organization manage its data headache:

“We said, ‘Look, we can take advantage of this technology,” he adds. “We want to lead the way in terms of building out our core foundational data domains in a Snowflake environment.’”

Transformational stages

Stage one of the transformation project involved a point-to-point data share between the existing Charles River investment management solution and the Snowflake platform. Wood says this data-sharing process covered a trading view of the organization’s funds, such as securities bought and sold.

Stage two, meanwhile, involved building out RAM’s data store and the static reference information for its funds. Wood says this process allowed his team to build the Open Funds template, which external vendors use as a standard for consuming the organization’s data.

The success of this initial work meant senior executives could see further opportunities, with Wood adding: “Then we started to get into conversations where we were saying, ‘Okay, now we need historical fund performance, our quant risk calculations, what we call subscriptions and redemptions, and the cash flow in and out of our funds from clients.’”

Today, RAM has nine domain-related data sets established in its Snowflake data platform. These data sets cover a range of areas, including performance, risk, sustainability, and unstructured information, such as the decisions behind the firm’s investment activities.

Foundation for future success

Wood says the integrated data sources provide a foundation for change, including potentially embracing emerging technology. Work undertaken so far means his team can start exploring AI, including Snowflake’s agentic services. At the San Francisco event, Snowflake announced new features for CoWork, its personal agent for knowledge workers, and CoCo, its coding agent for developers and data engineers. Wood can see the agentic technology’s potential.

“When you combine all the information, you can start to do some powerful things,” he says.

“We're now in a scenario where we can say, ‘Looking over all this data, we can start to analyze the performance of our investment decisions and give product specialists new insights.’”

RAM’s agentic explorations are already underway. The organization has a test environment for CoCo and CoWork that’s running with millions of rows of data. “At this stage, the outputs look very decent, so it's a near-production environment,” Wood says of the explorations, before outlining other potential applications.

He adds: “The future direction is that you start to get into sales and distribution. The most valuable data in our CRM system today is the call notes written up after every meeting that say clients are interested in some funds and pulling away from others. No one could analyze that data until now, because, after you've had two or three calls with the client, the information disappears down the chain in Salesforce.

“Now we're looking at the idea of using agentic technologies to consider the long-term buying trends of clients. The salespeople know their clients, and they know what they're buying. But if we see the general trends, then that insight can go into a product cycle that makes us think, ‘Do we need to be looking at new funds, do we need to broaden our horizon? Are we at risk in certain areas?’”

Fuelling innovation

The work Wood’s team has undertaken means they can investigate native applications and emerging technologies with confidence, rather than focusing on point-to-point data shares with Snowflake. That investigatory work is crucial because, as a smaller business, RAM will never have a team of engineers to build out a big AI platform.

“That approach doesn't make any sense,” he says. “What does make sense is that we've got Snowflake technology that is central to our data strategy. Now, our work is about how we can find the tools that interplay with the platform, so we reduce the Frankenstein's monster of connectivity and integrations that can slow projects down.”

Wood reflects on the digital transformation program he’s overseen and says that, as with any financial services firm, the key challenge is ensuring exploratory projects are prioritized in an industry that often contends with a regulatory burden and technical debt. Sometimes, due to these intractable challenges, innovation gets stifled because of people and budget constraints. Wood says his organization has circumvented these issues.

“I think Snowflake, and how Rathbones operates, has allowed us to take control of our environment,” he says, referring to the split between the group implementation of the platform and his organization’s deployment. “There's a broad Snowflake environment, and then we've got a ring-fenced environment, with all our data sets, which means the implementation has been built in a way that allows more self-service capability.”

Wood suggests the key to long-term success will be staying on top of Snowflake’s product advances. For example, his team received buy-in for its CoWork and CoCo explorations by explaining how a trial of the agentic technologies could benefit the group.

“There are good ways to try and ensure that you get that prioritization if you need to,” he says.

“When you've got a real-world business case and value proposition that is going to materially benefit the business, versus just being a nice technology idea, the investment ultimately comes through.”

The IBC event is back again for another year, with that, we’re pleased to announce that our IBC Best of Show Awards program is now open for entries.

The Amsterdam-based event, which runs from 11-14 September, is designed to recognize the most outstanding broadcast products and solutions. ITPro's Best of Show awards aim to showcase the best of the best. Entries are open now until the extended closing deadline of 23:59 CET on Friday, Aug 28. You can enter via the website here.

ITPro is joined by other key Future B2B sites - AV Technology, Installation TV Tech, TVBEurope, Radio World,, and Sound & Video Contractor - in hosting the awards program.

Nominations are reviewed by a panel of industry experts who consider the overall quality and relevance of a given product, its design and build quality, the business/operational benefits, and other key factors such as cost-effectiveness and innovation.

It's £525+VAT per entry but it really is worth entering to ensure your innovation gets the attention it deserves.

The benefits of entering are:

•  Fully-licensed nominee badges for all entries to use in both digital and print promotions.
• Dedicated editorial coverage across participating brands. Online, newsletter and social promotional activity for all winners from participating brands. 
• Winner marketing assets to further promote your success. You will receive an official award winner's badge, fully licensed to be used with your winning product both domestically and overseas at no additional cost in addition to a winner's social assets.
• Complimentary winner trophies to display your success. Winners will receive a trophy to display their success to IBC attendees.

So don't delay, make sure you enter today! Or certainly before the closing deadline of 23:59 CET on Friday, Aug 28.

A group of current and former Meta employees is suing the company, claiming that it used AI to target those on medical or family leave for layoffs.

In May, Meta announced it was cutting around 8,000 staff, representing roughly 10% of its workforce. According to the lawsuit, the tech giant used AI systems to identify those set for redundancy.

These systems allegedly took into account keystroke monitoring data, AI token usage

“Meta did not assemble the termination list through the considered judgment of managers who knew the work,” court filings state.

“Instead, Meta used a constellation of internal artificial intelligence systems — including a system referred to internally as ‘Metamate,’ employee-trained ‘second-brain’ agents, keystroke- and activity-monitoring data, AI-token-usage dashboards, and algorithmically assisted performance ranking and calibration — to score, rank and select employees for inclusion on the list.”

Complainants allege this put employees on protected medical or family leave, or those whose output was reduced by a disability, at a disadvantage by penalizing them with reduced performance scores.

"The result was that employees who took protected leaves were disproportionately selected for layoff, based on scoring that not only failed to account for their protected leaves, but in effect penalized the employees for exercising their legal rights to these leaves."

In one example, an employee was laid off while on approved pre-birth pregnancy leave – the day before her waters broke, and just two days before she gave birth.

In another, a manager’s own performance review noted that his demotion followed his return from medical leave; he was put on the list sixteen days into a second medical leave.

The 26 plaintiffs claim that Meta has violated state-protected leave laws, the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

They're calling for a preliminary court ruling that would stop Meta from finalizing the layoffs while they pursue their ​claims.

“Once these separations are final, the harms are irreversible: employer-subsidized health coverage lost during pregnancy, postpartum recovery, and active medical treatment; time-bound leave rights extinguished; unvested equity forfeited; and immigration consequences triggered,” they said.

Plaintiffs are also seeking financial compensation that could include reinstatement, back pay, lost equity, benefits, and other damages.

AI in HR is a delicate balancing act

The use of AI systems in HR and recruitment has been a long-running point of contention, particularly with regard to the potential for bias or discrimination.

Workday, for example, is facing a class-action lawsuit amidst claims its AI software discriminated against job applicants. As ITPro reported in June, the company hit back at the claims, with a spokesperson insisting its AI solutions “don’t make hiring decisions”.

Ilia Kolochenko, founder of cybersecurity company ImmuniWeb and a lawyer practising in cybersecurity and data protection, noted that over-regulation of the use of AI in HR could cause long-term harm.

"With the current trend to restrict or even entirely ban AI in HR decision-making processes, most organizations will either conceal the use of AI or shift back to non-AI systems especially in those jurisdictions that have no GDPR-like protection against automated decision-making on human subjects," he said.

"Compared to AI-powered HR systems, their non-AI homologues are quite primitive, fail to consider the relevant context and often provide incorrect metrics or data,” Kolochenko added.

“For instance, a poor performance of a delivery truck driver will not be correlated with extreme summer heat or winter snowfalls, sudden family loss or simply a technical issue with the vehicle. Eventually, innocent persons are wrongly punished.”

ITPro approached Meta for comment, but did not receive a response by time of publication.

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British companies have doubled spending on AI, but they need to also invest in the basics to ensure real results.

That's according to research from ServiceNow, which ranked the UK 51/100 in terms of overall AI maturity despite companies spending 102% more than they did in the year prior.

ServiceNow pinned that on a failure to invest in the foundations needed for AI, including data management and governance processes, and updating legacy systems.

According to a service by the company, 73% of UK executives said they were finding inadequate data accuracy, access, and management a major barrier to rolling out and using AI.

Just 20% of UK businesses had implemented testing, auditing, and risk assessment for AI, for example. Under one-fifth (17%) of businesses surveyed in the UK had also replaced legacy systems with integrated platforms.

"UK organizations are investing heavily in AI, which tells us the challenge is not ambition," said Damian Stirrett, Group Vice President and General Manager for UK and Ireland at ServiceNow.

"It is connecting that commitment to the operational infrastructure that makes AI work across the enterprise."

The ServiceNow results follow similar research from Cisco earlier this year that found nearly all companies are expanding privacy and governance work in response to AI adoption.

Not ready for AI

While two-thirds of UK companies polled had used agentic AI, just 6% did so to create autonomous workflows, highlighting a lack of maturity in AI roll-outs.

That was echoed by findings showing that 15% of UK organizations have streamlined or integrated workflows using AI, which ServiceNow said showed a gap between AI investment and operational readiness

"Too many businesses are bolting AI onto fragmented systems, disconnected assistants and workflows that have not yet been reimagined," said Stirrett. "The next phase is about moving from isolated pilots to trusted, end-to-end workflows that can deliver at scale."

ServiceNow said improvements will require getting the right data, governance, and workflow foundations in place to scale AI.

You can't spend your way out of trouble

Despite the challenges, UK spending is largely on par with that across EMEA, which saw AI budgets leap by 113% over the last year. By 2027, AI spend will make up 20% of IT budgets, ServiceNow predicted.

However, the company noted that organizations that are succeeding with AI aren't necessarily spending more, pointing to 21% that are seeing strong returns.

Instead, they have the "most mature governance", including data management and risk controls, and that's helping to deliver a 164% return on investment now. The company predicts this could climb to a 199% return on investment within two years.

Governance, the company argued, doesn't slow innovation but is "operating discipline" that enables it, in particular when it comes to scaling quickly and ensuring systems are trusted and auditable.

That echoes comments earlier this year from Tenable co-CEO Stephen Vintz, who said enterprises need to consider the "responsibility gap" with regard to AI governance.

Speaking at RSAC Conference 2026, Vintz pointed to the fact that 90% of organizations had adopted AI and half have already had a related cyber incident.

"There is a fundamental mismatch between the exponential speed of AI adoption and the linear speed of traditional corporate governance, and things will only move faster and things will only become more complex," he said at the time

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European small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are bullish on generative AI, according to new research from SAS and IDC, and some are setting an example in how to nail adoption.

Analysis conducted by IDC on behalf of the data management firm shows SMBs across the region are executing AI deployments in a far more efficient manner to global counterparts.

In North America, for example, SMBs scored strongest in terms of planning and building, but many aren’t reaching full deployment.

This contrast suggests European organizations are making “stronger progress in operationalizing AI and embedding it into day-to-day operations”.

A key factor in European SMB successes lies in readiness, according to the report. IT leaders across the region are prioritizing areas such as governance before diving head long into adoption projects.

“Organizations treating governance as a foundation rather than an obstacle are often the ones best positioned to execute,” said John Carey, Senior Vice President of Global Channels at SAS.

“The findings suggest European SMBs are taking a more operational approach to AI adoption – focusing not just on experimentation, but on putting the right structures in place to scale AI effectively.”

Notably, Carey suggested that “stronger execution performance” among European SMBs may be due to regulatory considerations such as the EU AI Act.

Simply put, IT leaders at small businesses across the region are accelerating preparation to ensure compliance with the legislation.

It’s perhaps no surprise then that governance, risk, and compliance for AI has emerged as the top priority for SMB leaders, cited by 26%.

Progress on this front is easier said than done, however. The study noted that uncertainty is rife with regard to compliance, risk management, and security.

Nearly one-quarter (24%) identified this as their biggest execution barrier with AI adoption.

Still a long way to go

Despite positive signs for European SMBs, on a global scale the pace of AI adoption is still slow. SAS noted that many are “still struggling to move from experimentation to meaningful business impact”.

Nearly three-quarters (70%) of SMBs worldwide either remain in ‘experimental’ or ‘opportunistic’ stages of AI maturity, for example. Similarly, only 9% have fully embedded AI into daily operations or decision making.

Slow progress in AI maturity is, at least in part, due to traditional data-related problems such as silos and visibility. Nearly half (45%) of SMB leaders said their data remains “scattered across systems with no clear ownership”.

A similar number (46%) said AI tools are often still used in isolated environments across the business, preventing teams from aligning workflows.

Notably, 90% of those in experimental phases report having no formal AI strategy in place, which is impeding progress for IT leaders.

“To actually make something of their AI strategy, SMBs need to move from disconnected pilots to true alignments of their data, people, and resources,” said Daniel-Zoe Jimenez, VP of research at IDC.

“Experimenting with the technology is one thing. Deploying it strategically and sustainably is quite another.”

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The memory market continues to reel from shortages created by the diversion of resources to the manufacture of higher-margin AI infrastructure memory. DRAM (Dynamic Random-Access Memory) and NAND flash memory used in mainstream devices are now in such short supply that prices have been pushed up by 130% leading to PCs increasing by an average 21%.

While device shortages were also apparent during the COVID pandemic, prices then remained stable. Instead, today’s situation is more akin to the shortages in new car production which saw a spike in demand for second-hand cars with prices rising accordingly. OEMs are experiencing similar issues with respect to stock availability which means they are struggling to fulfil contracts, with shipments expected be down by between 6.6% to 23%, resulting in lead time slipping.

To make matters worse, geopolitical events are further compounding matters. The war in Iran is now disrupting the production of helium, which is essential for chip manufacturing, for example, with around a third of the world’s supply of helium comes from Qatar. The war is also seeing the oil needed by chipmaking nations such as South Korea and Taiwan delayed or rerouted. Consequently, there’s no real way of knowing when production might normalize.

Lack of supply chain resilience

What the shortages have revealed is a considerable lack of resiliency in the supply chain. Rigid procurement and device refresh strategies now seem woefully out of step and stockpiling inventory is not a viable option because it risks purchasing at the peak and saddling the organisation with too much stock. Instead, we need to look at how we can plan, buy and manage technology to accommodate these kinds of events.

Some organizations are playing for time by delaying device refreshes. They’re moving from a proactive three-year cycle to a “replace on failure” approach, with average life cycles then stretching to 4.3 years. But this can have a knock-on effect on efficiency and productivity, not to mention higher break-fix support costs. Others are considering second-hand devices or switching to vendors with more available stock, but they don’t necessarily have the market knowledge or the capability to put those devices through their paces.

Then there’s the software issue. The memory shortages are also forcing organizations to look at how and where they run their software and whether they can make changes to compensate for hardware shortages. For example, some are looking to load-balance servers to use capacity more effectively.

It’s these kinds of issues that Channel partners are ideally placed to help with. Their knowledge of the market can prove indispensable, as they can draw on their relationships with manufacturers to lock down shipment schedules and pricing. They can also provide flexible financing to ease budget constraints and source or even road-test equipment from alternative suppliers on behalf of their customers. That makes it more likely that organisations will end up with a ‘mixed estate’ of devices that those partners can then help to manage.

How the channel needs to adapt

But to fulfil those roles, the channel must adapt. Rather than continuing to focus on the same sourcing strategies, partners need to begin looking at where they can create efficiencies by offering advice, lifecycle management and ‘intelligent refresh’ strategies. The latter is particularly interesting because it steps away from the cyclical nature of the traditional refresh approach. Instead, it seeks to stagger and prioritise deployments by assessing device health, performance and user requirements.

Intelligent refresh uses a data-driven approach to lifecycle management. Tools such as benchmarking and Digital End User (DEX) solutions are used to assess device utilization and map personas and workloads, for example. Potential devices from different OEMs can then be tested to see if they will align with the performance requirements of the organization, and financial options explored such as CAPEX, leasing or DaaS. Once selected, the devices can be configured according to those personas, secured and asset tagged. Then DEX tools can be used to track health, usage and UX, ensuring high uptime and devices remain matched to the needs of the employees.

Taking a data-driven approach enables partners to utilize real-time performance data, which can then be used to help with planning for refresh. Because this forecasting is based on utilization, it sees blanket refresh cycles replaced with smaller strategic waves, making it easier to fulfil those orders and maintain a consistent inventory.

In addition to assisting with the sourcing of hardware, partners can also offer device lifecycle management. They can provide a range of support, from security covering patching, policy enforcement and endpoint analytics, through to rapid break-fix support such as field-based repair to keep employees productive, and device management by tracking warranties, managing spare or loaned devices and extending asset value. They can even help claw back revenue by assisting with the resale of second-hand components.

In this way, partners can step up to help their customers adapt to this new normal. The memory shortages, initially expected to last into 2027, could now last years, according to Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, which means organizations will have to become more strategic in how they manage, maintain, and replace their end-user devices. That will drive an uptick in demand for partners who can advise on the optimization of hardware and software to improve utilization and longevity, who can manage a mixed estate, and draw upon data to devise intelligent refresh programmes that then forecast exactly where and when new devices are needed.

Databricks has announced the appointment of Lee Stockwell as head of public sector for the UK and Ireland, as the data and AI specialist looks to accelerate adoption of AI and advanced analytics across government organizations.

Stockwell will lead the company’s public sector strategy across the region, working with government departments and public sector bodies to modernize data platforms, expand the use of advanced analytics, and scale AI to improve service delivery.

He brings more than 20 years’ experience across enterprise technology and the public sector, most recently serving as head of the National Security and Public Safety division at ServiceNow.

Prior to that, Stockwell spent more than eight years at the UK Home Office, where he led its Live Services and Shared Services division.

In an announcement, Databricks said the appointment highlights its continued investment in the region as public sector organizations increasingly look to AI to strengthen resilience, operational efficiency, and productivity.

“Lee’s experience at the intersection of technology and the public sector will be critical as we increase our support to meet the growing needs of organizations across the UK and Ireland,” explained Samuel Bonamigo, Databricks’ senior vice president and general manager for EMEA.

“Government agencies are under real pressure to deliver tangible outcomes from their data and AI investments, and Lee brings the expertise and experience to help organizations advance these priorities.”

Databricks provides a unified data and AI platform that enables customers to consolidate data, develop analytics workloads, as well as build and scale AI applications from a single environment. According to the vendor, the platform now serves more than 20,000 organizations worldwide.

In his new role, Stockwell will work to deepen partnerships with government agencies and public sector organizations in the UK and Ireland – including the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), Department for Education (DfE), and VisitBritain – to improve service delivery and increase productivity.

Commenting on his appointment, Stockwell said strong data foundations will be essential if government organizations are to scale AI successfully.

“I’m proud to join Databricks at such a pivotal moment for public sector organisations across the UK and Ireland,” he said. “Government departments can only accelerate their AI strategies if they have the right data foundations in place.

“Databricks enables public sector organizations to unify their data, govern AI, and build and deploy agents at scale.“

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Jitterbit has announced the appointment of Chris Stoddard as its new chief revenue officer (CRO), as the intelligent automation vendor looks to drive fresh growth and scale adoption of its AI-driven Harmony platform.

Stoddard will lead the company’s global go-to-market organization, with responsibility for international sales and revenue generation across the business.

A seasoned leadership veteran, he brings more than a decade’s experience across data analytics, enterprise IT infrastructure, and cyber security.

He joins Jitterbit from observability specialist New Relic, where he most recently served as senior vice president for the Americas, and has previously held senior sales leadership roles at Qlik, Pulse Secure, and Juniper Networks.

The appointment follows the recent launch of Jitterbit’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) gateway, which is designed to standardize how AI agents securely connect to enterprise applications, systems, and data sources.

In an announcement, Jitterbit CEO Bill Conner said the company is “at a pivotal moment” as organizations are increasingly prioritizing accountable AI and secure enterprise integration.

“Chris joins Jitterbit during a period of massive expansion, bringing an exceptional track record in data migration, infrastructure and enterprise security that directly aligns with our core mission,” he explained.

“His leadership will be instrumental as we scale our unified Harmony platform to defeat shadow AI, bridge the enterprise data divide, and securely deliver automation, integration and agentic workflows organizations can trust."

California-based Jitterbit provides AI-driven automation that enables organizations to integrate applications, data, and business processes while building and managing AI-powered workflows.

Its Harmony platform is designed to simplify integration while providing centralized governance across increasingly complex modern IT environments.

Harmony combines integration platform as a service (IPaaS), API management, application development, electronic data interchange (EDI), and model context protocol capabilities into a single, unified platform.

According to the vendor, the offering provides organizations with greater visibility and control over AI-driven automation while reducing reliance on disconnected point solutions.

Commenting on his appointment, Stoddard said he believes Jitterbit is “perfectly positioned” as the growing adoption of autonomous AI agents drives demand for secure, enterprise-grade integration capabilities.

“Businesses are undergoing a massive paradigm shift, and the market is realizing that autonomous AI agents cannot succeed without robust, secure, and context-aware integration underpinning them,” he explained.

“I am thrilled to partner with our talented global teams to help organizations accelerate data transformation by unifying accountable AI agents, apps, and automation.”

Jitterbit also announced that Luca Taglioretti will focus on expanding its regional growth strategy in his role as vice president of sales for EMEA and APAC.

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Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora has issued a stark warning to workers reluctant to adapt to generative AI: they face a “Darwinian moment”.

Speaking during a recent appearance on the 20VC podcast, Arora suggested a significant portion of workers globally lack necessary AI skills, which raises questions about how leaders can implement change and build workforces capable of meeting future demands.

“The challenge right now is 90% of enterprise employees are not AI savvy. They’re not,” he said.

“They have to learn. I can’t send them to university. There’s no course you can take in school anywhere. They have to be able to learn on their own. I think we’re back to a Darwinian moment where everybody has to figure out who’s really good.”

In some cases, building an AI savvy workforce has prompted some drastic action by executives. Nikesh pointed to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s approach of penalizing workers who refused to adapt or embrace the technology.

During a podcast appearance last year, Armstrong admitted to firing workers who refused to engage with the technology after paying for enterprise licenses for GitHub Copilot and Cursor.

Other organizations, such as Jack Dorsey’s Block, reportedly introduced AI mandates for workers. Both companies laid off staff this year amidst claims that the technology is changing how they operate.

“You’ve seen people like Brian Armstrong and Jack Dorsey go out and say, ‘I’m going to decimate my organization, and I’m going to start building from scratch’ and they’ve gone to some version of 30, 40% fewer people because they figured out there is no redemption,” Arora said.

As ITPro reported last year, punitive measures to spur AI adoption in the enterprise is a sure fire way to create workforce pushback.

It’s a similar dynamic to the return to office (RTO) mandates that caused widespread upheaval at a range of big tech firms in recent years. Encourage, but don’t push, or else it could come back to bite you.

Palo Alto Networks’ approach leans toward a gradual shift, Arora noted. The company, which has roughly 20,000 staff, has a “natural attrition of 2% a month. The focus now is on replacing these staff with people who are indeed AI-savvy.

Elsewhere, the company actively seeks out AI talent from events such as hackathons, Arora revealed. These are lucrative talent pools that the company can draw from to acquire staff.

“We hire from hackathons,” he said. “Give me 12 months, I’ll have sort of transformed 20, 25% of my team. Give me three years, I’ll hopefully have enough AI-savvy people working at Palo Alto.”

Top-down encouragement

Building an AI-savvy workforce also requires accountability on the part of leadership, Arora said. Delivering change requires leaders across an array of functions to have ambition and actively engage with the technology.

Arora has regular conversations with leadership figures aimed at establishing their progress with AI, allowing them to showcase potential wins.

“You have to make sure your leaders are ambitious. You have to make sure they're competitive. You have to make sure they want to win. You have to make sure that they have a learning mindset,” he said.

“When they watch their peers around them do cool [stuff], they want to show up and do cool [stuff] the next time. So for me, it's getting 14 people together and saying, ‘Hey, Harry, tell me today, what have you done for AI the last three days since I last talked to you in your organization, and whatever motivates you?”

This gives Arora a clear understanding of the direction some leaders are going in with the technology. Moreover, it appears to act as a springboard for motivating others across the company.

“It creates a little bit of Darwinian competition amongst them. It creates this urge to go embrace this new technology, and I think hopefully I get 14 people fully motivated, and then they go do that with the next set of people because I need to transform from the top down, not from the bottom up on this topic.”

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Barracuda Networks has announced the acquisition of identity and access management (IAM) specialist Evo Security, in a move that will bring expanded capabilities to its BarracudaONE platform.

Founded in 2018, Texas-based Evo Security provides a platform that combines IAM capabilities with privileged access management (PAM) technology into a single, multi-tenant platform tailored to the needs of MSPs.

The acquisition will see the firm’s technology integrated into BarracudaONE, creating a unified offering that brings together access management, identity protection, and identity threat detection and response.

According to Barracuda, the expansion will provide partners with a single platform for delivering identity resilience while helping customers simplify identity security by reducing the need to manage multiple point solutions.

In an announcement, Barracuda CEO Rohit Ghai said combining Evo Security's technology with BarracudaONE will help customers stay ahead of identity-centric attacks as AI continues to reshape the threat landscape.

“In the agentic AI era, protecting both human and non-human identities is imperative for delivering cyber resilience,” he explained. “Existing enterprise identity solutions are complex, costly and fail to meet the needs of MSPs that must scale to securely manage millions of identities across thousands of customer environments.

“We are thrilled to combine Evo Security’s partner-first innovation with our vision of BarracudaONE and offer a complete, intelligent, easy, and open platform that closes this gap.”

According to the vendor, Evo Security’s integration into the BarracudaONE platform will provide partners with a unified identity security architecture that spans privileged access management, access control, identity protection, and identity threat detection and response.

MSPs will be able to manage customer identities from a single multi-tenant environment while enforcing authentication, access policies, identity protection, and identity threat detection.

Barracuda builds on resilience goals

The acquisition also builds on Barracuda’s wider cyber resilience platform, which already includes solutions that cover email security, data protection, network security, cloud security, and managed extended detection and response (MXDR).

For customers, Barracuda said the expanded offering will deliver integrated identity security that is designed to be easier to deploy and manage than traditional enterprise identity platforms, while allowing organizations to retain their existing security infrastructure rather than replacing it.

Alongside the technology integration, Evo Security’s team has joined Barracuda as part of the acquisition and the vendor said it will continue to support Evo’s existing MSP customers as the platform continues to expand.

Commenting on the acquisition, Evo Security founder and CEO Michael Roth said joining Barracuda will enable the business to expand its identity-first approach to a wider global partner base.

“We built Evo Security to solve the identity challenges MSPs face every day,” he explained. “Joining Barracuda gives us the scale, reach and resources to accelerate that mission globally.

“Our identity‑first approach was designed from day one for MSP operations, and now, together with BarracudaONE, we can bring modern identity security, privileged access management and automation to far more partners and the customers they protect.”

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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Cyber resilience firm Rubrik is set to invest more than £375 million in the UK over the next five years, which will include opening a new EMEA headquarters in London.

According to Rubrik, the plans for the new HQ reflect the country’s role as one of its fastest-growing and “most strategically important markets”.

The site will act as a springboard to scale regional operations and access the country’s “deep technology talent pool”, the company said.

“The UK is one of the world’s leading technology markets, and has become increasingly important to Rubrik’s long-term growth,” said Bipul Sinha, CEO, chairman, and co-founder of Rubrik .

“As organizations accelerate AI adoption, cyber resilience is now an urgent business imperative. This investment strengthens our UK ecosystem, helping EMEA customers address the critical need for European data sovereignty, quickly recover from cyber attacks, and safely scale AI.”

Rubrik’s new London office will provide a “collaborative workspace” for staff, including an ‘executive briefing center’ designed to support engagement with customers and partners, the firm said.

Kanishka Narayan, minister for AI and Online Safety, said the move by Rubrik is a “vote of confidence” in the UK’s technology sector, with the country establishing itself as a prime destination to “invest, hire, and grow”.

"It will create high-skilled jobs and deepen our strengths in the fast-growing fields of cyber and AI, another sign that the UK is where the world's leading tech companies are choosing to build their future,” Narayan said.

Rubrik eyes EMEA expansion

The company has secured several large customers for its cyber resilience platform in recent years, including Manchester City Council, Harbour Energy, and the Scottish Government.

Across the EMEA region as a whole, Rubrik now serves roughly 2,000 customers and has launched a series of EMEA-focused product ranges, including Rubrik Security Cloud on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

To meet growing demand, the company said it plans to accelerate hiring in the region for roles such as sales, marketing, and customer support.

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Ten years ago, a server outage might have affected a single office or application. IT was simpler, stakes were lower and customers were willing, and able to accept a reactive relationship. Managed Service Providers (MSPs) built their value on ticket closure rates, uptime stats, and how quickly they could put out fires. It worked. But that era is over.

Today, a single point of failure can ripple across hybrid cloud environments, disrupt customer experiences globally and trigger regulatory risk. Businesses aren’t looking for faster helpdesks anymore; they’re demanding strategic IT partners that can provide true visibility into their environments and clear guidance on how to use technology to drive business outcomes. And they want all of this while budgets tighten and risk intensifies.

IT leaders are also operating under financial pressures. They’re no longer judged solely on system stability, but are expected to help drive revenue, support innovation and manage risk.

At the same time, many IT leaders are being asked to deliver AI projects, strengthen cybersecurity and drive digital transformation projects, without proportional increases in IT budgets. This is resulting in a more detailed examination of infrastructure spending, particularly around refresh cycles and long-term support strategies.

In this landscape, MSPs that still rely on a break-fix model aren’t just behind the curve; they’re becoming irrelevant. Support capabilities are still important, but the real difference now is made by those who go beyond fixing issues to become more of a strategic partner to their clients.

From visibility to insight

Today’s enterprise estates are fragmented by design, spanning on-premises infrastructure, colocation, multiple public clouds and an expanding edge. Layer in legacy systems, cloud-native applications and a patchwork of vendors and operating models, and the result is an environment that isn’t just complex; it’s opaque.

It is that opacity that’s the real challenge.

It’s no longer sufficient to detect when something breaks. By the time an alert triggers, the damage is often already underway. What IT leaders need now isn’t more monitoring noise; it’s clarity. They need partners who can cut through the sprawl to reveal how infrastructure is actually performing, where risk is accumulating and where inefficiency is quietly draining value.

This is where infrastructure intelligence comes in. Infrastructure intelligence goes beyond traditional monitoring tools to bring together data from across hybrid environments and layers in analytics, automation and contextual awareness. Rather than generating more noise, infrastructure intelligence is about filtering, correlating and interpreting signals in real time.

This enables MSPs to understand not just that something is happening, but why it’s happening and what the downstream impact will be. For example, instead of flagging a spike in CPU usage as an isolated event, it can tie that signal to broader workload behaviour, capacity trends or emerging resource constraints across environments.

This shift allows MSPs to move away from reactive incident management and towards predictive and preventative operations. Patterns can be identified before they escalate into outages, capacity can be optimised ahead of demand, and risks can be surfaced long before they impact users. In this model, insight replaces hindsight, giving both the MSP and the customer far greater control over performance, cost and resilience.

Redefining infrastructure lifecycle strategy

Traditional OEM-led refresh cycles are also coming under scrutiny. It no longer makes financial sense to replace hardware on a fixed timeline when it’s still running effectively. As a result, organizations are more likely to extend infrastructure lifecycles, provided they have the expertise to manage risk and performance. For MSPs, this creates an opportunity.

Partners that can help customers balance performance, reliability and cost optimization are playing a far more strategic role in IT decision-making. Third-party maintenance (TPM), once seen as purely a cost-cutting tactic, is now playing a key part in broader infrastructure optimisation. In hybrid environments, it gives organizations the flexibility to keep reliable systems in place longer, while putting their investment into the areas that really need it.

This allows MSPs to go beyond service delivery and play a more strategic advisory role, helping customers understand what to replace, what to keep and how to align support with what the customer actually needs. By combining lifecycle data, performance insights and support histories, MSPs can make far more informed recommendations about when to extend, when to replace and where to optimize.

This evolution doesn’t diminish the role of OEMs or traditional managed services. It reflects a shift towards the idea that customers now expect flexibility. In multi-vendor, hybrid environments, MSPs are increasingly judged not by vendor alignment, but by their ability to deliver outcome-driven, objective guidance.

The future of the MSP

The definition of value in managed services is being fundamentally rewritten. Closed ticket metrics still matter, but they no longer define the leaders in the market. Value is now measured by what doesn’t happen - outages avoided, inefficiencies eliminated, and unnecessary spend reduced. It’s reflected in better utilization, longer asset lifecycles and infrastructure that performs predictably under pressure.

To meet these expectations, MSPs need to evolve both what they offer and how they deliver it. They also need a mindset shift away from simply managing infrastructure and towards making sense of the data it generates and turning it into meaningful business insight.

This shift is changing the growth trajectory of the channel. MSPs that stick to a break-fix model risk being reduced to a commodity, competing primarily on price as margins continue to shrink.

The next phase of growth belongs to MSPs that can move upstream, translating data into insight, insight into action, and action into measurable outcomes. That requires building infrastructure intelligence capabilities that go beyond visibility, integrating optimisation and lifecycle management into a continuous, insight-driven model of service delivery.

As IT estates continue to expand and fragment, success will depend on the ability to provide direction as much as delivery. MSPs that can simplify complexity and help organisations make better decisions will move beyond day-to-day operational support to become true strategic partners, trusted not just to run infrastructure, but to help shape how it develops over time.

Databarracks has announced the acquisition of business continuity consultancy Acumen Business Services, in a move the company said will expand and strengthen its managed resilience offering.

The deal follows Databarracks’ purchase of PlanB Consulting in 2024 and continues the firm’s strategy of bringing business continuity and technology resilience services together under a single managed service model.

Founded in 1997, Acumen specializes in business continuity consulting services and serves more than 100 customers across sectors such as financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing.

Upon completion of the acquisition, Acumen’s customers will gain access to Databarracks’ Business Resilience Managed Service and Recovery Confidence assurance framework, which combines business continuity planning with technology resilience and recovery capabilities.

In an announcement, Databarracks’ resilience director Chris Butler said the two companies share a common approach to ensuring business continuity is practical for customers.

“Acumen has delivered business continuity and resilience services to some of the largest organizations in the UK and around the world,” he commented. “We share a common vision of embedding resilience and making BC practical and simple, while adding real value for our customers.”

Headquartered in London, Databarracks specializes in technology and business resilience services, providing managed backup, disaster recovery, cloud, and continuity solutions.

The company said its Business Resilience function has seen rapid growth following the previous acquisition of PlanB Consulting in 2024, as customer demand for integrated resilience services continues to grow.

Commenting on the deal, Acumen founder Andy Osborne said the companies’ combined abilities will help customers better address the growing overlap between business continuity and technology resilience.

“Technology and cyber risk are absolutely central to business continuity, and Databarracks is leading the industry in an approach that brings them together,” he explained.

“This is the right next step for Acumen and our clients, combining our business continuity expertise with Databarracks’ strength in business and technology resilience and recovery solutions.”

Databarracks chairman Mike Osborne praised Acumen’s depth of expertise and long-standing contribution to the wider business continuity industry.

“I’ve known Acumen for a very long time,” he commented. “In addition to the great work the team has been delivering for decades, Andy has been prolific in contributing to the progress of the industry, authoring books and generally sharing his expertise.”

Osborne added that the deal reflects the growing demand for the company’s own managed resilience offering following its expansion in recent years.

“Databarracks’ Business Resilience function is growing rapidly following our previous acquisition of PlanB Consulting in 2024,” he explained. “Given the sheer pace of change in risk, there has been a fantastic response to our approach of delivering resilience as a managed service.”

Financial terms of the Acumen acquisition were not disclosed.

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Accenture and Google Cloud have announced a new partnership aimed at driving AI adoption rates for mid-market firms amid sluggish deployment progress.

As part of the scheme, the duo will provide firms with a suite of six industry-specific agentic AI solutions designed to help push projects from pilot to production.

These solutions cover intelligence and growth, customer experience, cybersecurity, business operations, industry solutions, and workforce enablement.

"The companies that will define the next decade aren't waiting — they're building,” said Rajendra Prasad, technology reinvention engine lead at Accenture.

“Accenture Edge offerings built with Google Cloud technology help mid-market organizations do exactly that. They can deploy solutions in weeks and get measurable outcomes at the scale, budget and speed that they need to grow."

The collaboration will see Google Cloud provide the underpinning infrastructure and AI solutions to support organizations, including the Gemini Enterprise app, Gemini Enterprise Agent platform, and Agentic Data Cloud.

Accenture, meanwhile, is set to provide forward deployed engineers (FDEs) to offer guidance and technical support for participating firms.

Forward deployed engineers are in vogue

The move by the duo comes amidst a sharpened focus on driving enterprise adoption of AI and agents. The use of FDEs, in particular, has taken off as providers look to embed specialists within customer teams to support projects.

Last week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft both announced plans to invest heavily in FDE-related efforts, with the aim of hiring thousands of engineers in the coming years.

As ITPro reported, FDEs could become a key growth area for the industry moving forward, with big tech providers providing more bespoke support for customers.

Kevin Ichhpurani, president of Google Cloud’s global partner ecosystem, said the scheme will provide businesses with the “full power” of the hyperscaler’s product portfolio.

“We’re seeing tremendous demand as mid-market enterprises adopt AI agents to fundamentally reinvent their business workflows," Ichhpurani said.

"The launch of Accenture Edge brings the full power of Google Cloud’s entire portfolio including enterprise AI, our Agentic Data Cloud and AI Threat Defense directly to this sector. Together, we’re enabling mid-market companies to confidently scale AI across their organizations for growth.”

Driving mid-market adoption

According to Accenture, mid-market firms – or those with revenues of between $300 million and $3 billion – have largely been locked out of large-scale AI transformation due to complexity and integration barriers.

A recent study from Klarus highlighted the significant challenges faced by mid-market enterprises on this front. While nearly three-quarters (73%) have deployed AI solutions, around 90% of projects remain stuck or stalled in the pilot stage.

Although up to 94% of leaders feel confident about AI deployment, lack of expertise and governance concerns are causing projects to fail.

Mid-market firms aren’t alone in AI deployment challenges, however. Research from MIT last year found around 90% of all generative AI pilots fail, while similar research from Gartner warned up to 40% of agentic AI adoption programs are expected to fail.

These organizations are in a prime position to fully capitalize on the technology, however. Klarus CTO Alper Gunaydin said mid-market firms have the advantage of agility compared to larger competitors.

“Mid-market companies have a real advantage because they can often move fast, particularly when it comes to technology transformation. We see this agility in action when companies are turning to AI and automation to address productivity and accelerate growth," Gunaydin commented.

"However, our research shows that too many pilots stall because companies lack AI expertise, quality data and effective governance. Making that agility count requires clear priorities, strong foundations and access to senior expertise, all of which will help translate investment into tangible business outcomes and unlock growth without increasing the cost base.”

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Stronger powers could be needed to regulate the use of AI in financial services as consumers flock to the technology for advice, according to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

Following an investigation into the technology and its impact on consumer finance activities, the regulator has recommended a formal review into how to regulate the use of general-purpose LLMs across the industry.

The FCA report – known as the Mills Review after its author – noted that companies and consumers are increasingly delegating decisions about finances to AI and AI-powered systems.

A survey by the regulator found that one-in-five adults were already open to the idea of general-purpose AI tools – such as Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini – making financial decisions on their behalf, in particular around debt advice, pensions, and investments.

While that could help reduce existing challenges such as "advice gaps" and friction around switching services, the FCA warned about risks including fraud and scams, as well as disrupting market structure and competition.

"AI offers a once-in-a-generation chance to close the information asymmetries and frictions that have long left people making poor financial decisions," said FCA executive director and report author Sheldon Mills in the forward to the review.

"The right spur, in retail financial services, is ensuring consumers can make healthy ones; regulation, whether supportive or restrictive, should serve that outcome."

The FCA noted that many consumers may not be aware that they have no formal recourse if something goes wrong, and said some assume they receive equal protection akin to traditional sources of advice.

Emma Banymandhub, CEO of The Payments Association, agreed that the gap in understanding could cause issues and urged caution on the part of consumers.

"Consumers may be increasingly comfortable using AI agents for routine tasks such as weekly shopping, but AI-driven savings and investment decisions present a very different set of challenges," Banymandhub commented.

"While AI can increasingly explain investment concepts and analyse financial information, personalised investment recommendations remain subject to important regulatory constraints."

AI gains traction in financial services

The financial services sector has rapidly emerged as one of the key growth spaces in terms of the use of AI, with a host of major providers across the UK ramping up adoption of the technology.

As ITPro previously reported, high street lenders such as Nationwide, Lloyds Banking Group, and Yorkshire Building Society have all made significant strides on this front over the last six months.

A parliamentary inquiry into the use of AI in financial services, published in January 2026, found that the sector “substantially outpaces” others with regard to AI adoption.

Indeed, around 75% of UK-based financial services firms are now using the technology, with insurers and large banks among the most aggressive in their pursuit of AI adoption.

Running parallel to this, the use of AI by consumers is also surging, according to research from Lloyds Banking Group. The firm’s 2025 Consumer Digital Index found that AI has “rapidly become a financial tool for millions across the UK".

56% of adults – equivalent to around 28 million people – revealed they’d used AI over the preceding 12 months for financial advice. ChatGPT, for example, was referenced as the most popular platform in this regard, used by six-in-10 consumers.

What the Mills Review recommends

With this in mind, the Mills Review recommended that the existing "regulatory perimeter" needs to be secured and adapted to take in AI's impact on retail financial services – and that should come via a review within the next six months into how AI is affecting the market.

"The review should examine how consumers use AI including general purpose LLM tools for personal financial management across savings, investments, pensions, mortgages and debt management, and the implications for competition, innovation and growth," the Mills Review said.

"It should examine the risks of consumer harm, including how far its usage has or will move along the autonomy spectrum, and any impacts on market integrity and the potential for regulatory arbitrage."

Based on that review's guidance, the FCA could tweak regulation as necessary, the report said. Beyond that, the review called for the FCA to monitor for evidence of harm and new consumer models, engage with providers for better insight into changes, and be ready with intervention tools and mechanisms as necessary.

Frontier model monitoring in finance

In the longer term, the Mills Review called for the FCA to keep an eye on frontier model capabilities and AI adoption, considering its impact on its regulatory work, in particular where use of AI falls outside of existing protections and once AI agents start taking more action on behalf of consumers.

The review also called for stronger powers for the FCA so it can look at these issues more widely.

"As is clear in the report, we need to keep pace with a rapidly changing environment and the principles-based, outcomes focussed approach we’ve taken on AI – relying on the Consumer Duty and Senior Managers Regime – has been critical to us doing so," said Ashley Alder, chair of the FCA.

"The recommendations build on work the FCA has been doing – not least allowing firms to test their use of AI with us – and our own use of AI to be a smarter regulator, more efficient and effective."

Banymandhub added that walking that balance between enabling AI and protecting consumers and companies was key.

"The FCA’s Mills Review reinforces that firms should treat agentic AI as an accountability and governance issue now, while providing greater confidence to innovate responsibly as AI adoption accelerates," she said.

"AI has enormous potential for financial services, but realising that potential will depend on strong governance, clear accountability and maintaining consumer trust."

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a series of changes to Amazon OpenSearch aimed at streamlining data log analysis.

A new purpose-built log analytics engine for the service will provide users with marked performance gains and up to 70% lower storage costs, according to the firm.

OpenSearch allows users to search, analyze, and visualize data in real-time, and is typically used for application monitoring, observability, and AI/ML search applications.

The hyperscaler said the update comes in direct response to surging volumes of log data handled by enterprises in 2026, largely due to AI.

Research from AWS shows that log volumes have grown between 30-40% year over year, which is stretching budgets and creating bottlenecks.

Amazon OpenSearch overhaul

As part of the update, Amazon revealed OpenSearch will now store data in the Apache Parquet format. This is a column-oriented data file format designed specifically for more efficient data storage and retrieval purposes.

The service previously relied on inverted indexing. Amazon noted the shift will deliver significant efficiency gains and faster search and retrieval capabilities.

“Apache Calcite parses and optimizes each query, then routes operations to the engine best suited to execute them: Apache DataFusion for analytical operations on columnar data, or Lucene for search predicates,” the company explained in a blog post.

“The two hand off mid-query, so a single query can search log content and aggregate the results without additional roundtrips.”

Amazon noted that OpenSearch now also supports the Piped Processing Language (PPL) and SQL query languages, both of which “execute natively” through the platform.

Amazon eyes optimized log analytics

From a performance perspective, Amazon noted users can expect significant improvements alongside lower costs.

OpenSearch now boasts up to four-times price improvements compared to the existing engine, based on internal benchmarks.

Users can also capitalize on two-times faster analytics queries due to the fact the engine processes data in columnar batches, even across larger data sets. A two-fold improvement on ingestion rates also aims to reduce bottlenecks.

“The optimized engine sustained 1.78 million documents per second at matched concurrency, approximately 2x the throughput of the Lucene baseline, while consuming less CPU,” the hyperscaler explained.

“Both domains ran with zero write rejections. For teams ingesting terabytes per day, the throughput advantage translates to fewer nodes for the same volume, or longer retention on the same infrastructure.”

How to access Amazon OpenSearch

The new log analytics engine is available now for enterprises in AWS regions where OpenSearch Optimized instances are supported, the company noted. Similarly, there will be no additional premium for the optimized engine.

It’s worth noting that the new engine is a setting selected at creation time, meaning users can’t add this to an existing domain or enable it within individual indices or fields within a general-purpose domain.

“To adopt the optimized engine, create a new domain and migrate your ingestion pipelines into it,” the company explained.

“Create a new domain in the Amazon OpenSearch Service console and select Observability as your use case. The optimized engine is enabled by default.”

The in-built console will provide users with a side-by-side comparison of capabilities based on individual needs.

“After your domain is ready, ingest JSON documents through the same Bulk API and client libraries you use today. No changes to your ingestion pipelines or application code are required.”

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Yorkshire Building Society (YBS) is using AI agents to help reduce admin and improve customer service – and the high street lender said it's recording solid results so far.

Three AI agents named Penelope, Sam, and Alf are supporting customer service teams by summarizing complex complaints, searching policies and past cases, and drafting member communications, all with human oversight.

Penelope helps draft final responses for complaints, while Alf supports this process by searching policies, procedures, and past cases. Sam, meanwhile, summarizes long or detailed complaints.

According to the building society, Sam is saving an estimated seven minutes per use, with Penelope saving up to 26 minutes when supporting more complex complaint responses.

“That time really adds up,” said Polly Conner, senior manager of customer relations at YBS. “We’re able to minimize the amount of time staff are spending on admin tasks and actually spend that time talking to our customers, helping them resolve the challenges they’ve faced.”

The high level of regulation around financial services means that handling complaints from the building society's three million members and customers requires a lot of admin.

That can mean switching between multiple systems, searching for policies, summarizing long histories, and drafting detailed responses in advance of any conversation.

"This technology is going to give our members more choice and better access to information when they need it most,” said Simone Fox, director of customer support at YBS. “But there will always be a human available to speak to them when they need it.”

AI in banking

The results highlighted by YBS come amidst a sharpened focus on AI in the financial services sector, with a host of major providers ramping up adoption of the technology.

In January this year, Nationwide announced a partnership with Moneyhub to launch an AI-powered transaction analytics platform for customers across the UK.

Lloyds Banking Group, meanwhile, is also accelerating AI innovation internally in a bid to drive customer support capabilities. The bank unveiled plans to launch a new AI Academy earlier this year, with the aim of providing 67,000 staff with practical skills.

Building the foundations for AI

Before rolling out new tools, YBS built a cloud native data platform with Microsoft Fabric and strengthened data governance through Microsoft Purview.

It also enhanced its security with Microsoft Sentinel, expanded infrastructure foundations in Azure, and introduced Windows 365 remote desktops to enable secure, flexible working.

“Our ambition with data and AI is to improve our organization, help our colleagues be more efficient, make better decisions, and ultimately, serve our members better,” said Rebecca Fitzgerald, YBS director of data and AI. “All built on trust, with responsibility built in.”

Elsewhere, YBS is piloting AI agents to support internal risk and control testing, with early results suggesting efficiency savings of around 40%.

The high street lender is also rolling out a new customer service platform built using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact-Centre-As-A-Service. This brings customer history, previous self-service activity, and relevant guidance into one place for colleagues.

An AI assistant can summarize cases, highlight relevant knowledge and help draft responses, reducing the need to search across multiple systems.

“The platform is really going to help our colleagues better serve our members,” Fox commented. “It’s going to enable them to have a 360‑degree view of our members, so they’re not having to move between various platforms.”

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Arrow Electronics has signed a new pan-EMEA distribution agreement with ABB Electrification that will see the distributor add ABB’s uninterruptible power supply (UPS) portfolio to its enterprise computing offering.

The agreement builds on a long-standing relationship between the two companies and will enable Arrow to distribute the vendor’s critical power technologies to channel partners across key European markets – including the UK and Ireland.

Arrow said the deal will help partners deliver more comprehensive IT infrastructure projects by combining ABB’s power resilience capabilities with its existing portfolio of compute, management, and security solutions.

Initially, the deal covers ABB’s UPS portfolio, although the companies said the range is expected to expand over time to include additional electrification technologies designed for demanding enterprise and data center environments.

In an announcement, Mike Worby, head of strategic alliances at Arrow’s enterprise computing solutions business in EMEA, said the move opens up a range of “important new capabilities” for channel partners.

“Power protection is a vital part of any modern IT design and the addition of ABB uninterruptible power supplies means our customers can work with a broader and more complete set of solutions,” he explained.

“It is a strong addition to our existing portfolio and creates new opportunities for channel partners to support their customers’ evolving needs.”

Arrow provides technology distribution, integration, and supply chain services for channel partners across areas including enterprise computing, networking, cybersecurity, cloud, and data center infrastructure.

The firm said that adding ABB’s critical power portfolio will enable its partners to source technologies designed to support secure uptime and energy efficiency, while helping customers improve operational continuity and meet sustainability goals.

The agreement will initially be available across the Benelux region, France, Germany, Spain, the UK, and Ireland, with additional countries expected to be added over time.

“Working with Arrow enables us to reach a wider IT channel audience and support channel partners with high-quality electrification and critical power solutions suited to modern digital infrastructure,” commented Sebastien Surply, head of ABB Electrification’s Critical Power business line.

“Our technology is trusted by tech giants and data center operators worldwide, and we are seeing strong demand across a range of critical environments.”

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Workday has appointed HR Path as an authorized value-added reseller (VAR) partner for the UK and Ireland, as part of the vendor’s ongoing ecosystem expansion across EMEA.

The agreement will see HR Path directly sell Workday’s HR and finance platform to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) across Ireland and Scotland, as well as provide consulting, implementation, and operational support.

According to Workday, its expanded VAR strategy aims to help growing organizations adopt enterprise-grade HR, finance, and AI capabilities, while simplifying complex digital transformation projects through a single partner relationship.

As an authorized VAR, HR Path will act as a single point of contact for clients and will manage the full customer lifecycle – including strategic advisory, software procurement, implementation, and long-term optimization.

In an announcement, Daniel Pell, Workday’s vice president and country manager for the UK and Ireland, said the partnership is intended to accelerate time to value for businesses’ digital transformation initiatives.

“HR Path brings deep local experience and hands-on delivery, Workday brings a secure, AI-powered platform, and together, we can give customers one trusted route to modernising their HR and finance functions,” he commented.

Workday’s hybrid go-to-market strategy

The announcement marks the latest stage of Workday’s shift away from a purely direct sales model to a hybrid go-to-market approach, at a time when demand for advanced AI capabilities continues to grow.

The vendor said regional VAR partners will combine localized implementation expertise with its own AI-powered enterprise platform, enabling organizations to deploy advanced AI capabilities while ensuring compliance with local regulatory and market requirements.

The model is also designed to provide customers with continuous support as business requirements evolve, rather than focusing solely on initial software deployment.

To support the expansion, HR Path said it is investing in consultant training, Workday certifications, as well as joint enablement programs to provide earlier access to new AI capabilities and product developments.

Commenting on the expanded partnership, Angelo Gallo, partner at HR Path, described Workday’s VAR model as “the next logical step” in being able to provide more comprehensive support to SMBs in Ireland and Scotland.

“Our strength lies in combining world-class technology with local market knowledge and hands-on execution,” he explained.

“Together with Workday, we are creating an offering that delivers greater guidance, security, and trust throughout the entire transformation process.”

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ITPro is 20 this month. To celebrate, we've taken a look back at the team's favorite stories from the beginning to now.

2008: Science fiction's influence on technology: ideas made real

"The influence of Sci-Fi on technology has become increasingly apparent in the years since Simon Bisson wrote this piece from CES 2008 – just 12 months after the launch of the iPhone. In 2026, futuristic technology like wrist-worn devices and voice activated computers from Star Trek, the IoT and generative AI from the novels of Philip K Dick have evolved into the mundane: smart watches, home assistants, white goods, and chatbots.

"Perhaps the biggest change, though, is not the influence of sci-fi on hardware development but on tech leaders themselves. Mark Zuckerberg has spoken of his love for Snowcrash, which in part influenced the Metaverse. The influence of The Morning Rocket on Elon Musk was even documented in a BBC podcast series."

Jane McCallion, managing editor

2019: Is AMD finally winning the chip wars?

"Tim saw what was coming with AMD and Intel really early on. This article is a fantastic showcase of the subject matter expertise our team and extended team have. We not only report on what's happening, but also use our real-world experience to anticipate what may come next."

Bobby Hellard, reviews editor

2016: Why are women such a problem?

"I wrote this piece a few months after ITPro's 10th birthday. While much has changed for the better since publication, we still have a long way to go when it comes to being able to say the IT industry really embraces diversity.

"Sure there are some organizations leading the way and the fact more conversations are happening can only be a good thing. However, we need action not just talk. And we ALL need to be part of the discussion and the doing."

Maggie Holland, global content director

2023: Hybrid cloud comes into its own with GenAI

This was an exclusive interview with NetApp CEO George Kurian at the company's annual Insight event in 2023. Less than a year after the launch of ChatGPT, the fledgling GenAI industry was well and truly booming. After several years of gradual shifts toward hybrid cloud approaches, Kurian argued that this strategy was ideal for generative AI due to security and flexibility capabilities.

Ross Kelly, news & analysis editor

One Identity has announced the appointments of Marianne Van Der Pluym and Tracey Mead as its new channel and alliances directors for EMEA and North America, respectively.

The pair bring extensive channel and cybersecurity experience and will lead the vendor’s regional channel strategy as it continues to strengthen its partner-first go-to-market model.

Van Der Pluym joins from Cryptomathic, where she served as global head of partnerships, having previously held senior channel leadership roles at OpenText Cybersecurity, Micro Focus, NetIQ, and IBM.

Meanwhile, Mead joins from Contrast Security, where she held the role of vice president of global alliances and channels. She also previously served in channel and alliances leadership positions at OpenText Cybersecurity, Micro Focus, NetIQ, Novell, and CA Technologies.

One Identity said the seasoned leaders add complementary experience across global alliances, managed services, and partner-led go-to-market programs as it continues to adapt its channel strategy to meet evolving customer and partner needs.

“Partners play an increasingly important role in helping organizations adopt and manage modern identity security solutions, and strong channel leadership is essential to supporting that success,” commented Ian Sutherland, One Identity’s chief revenue officer.

As the channel continues to move away from traditional resale models, Sutherland said One Identity’s new hires will help ensure its partner strategy reflects that shift.

“Marianne and Tracey both have a clear point of view about where partners are heading: away from resale, toward managed services and outcome-based engagement, and into depth around specific domains like identity,” he added. “That direction is where we are taking our partner program.”

One Identity wants to reshape identity governance

The double appointment follows shortly after One Identity announced plans to become an independent company headquartered in Cork, Ireland, in a bid to accelerate growth in the identity security market.

According to the company, the decision was designed to bring a faster, more focused approach as AI and non-human identities continue to reshape the unified identity governance space.

Commenting on her new role, Van Der Pluym said her immediate priority will be supporting partners across EMEA that are investing heavily in identity security expertise.

“Across EMEA, the partners growing fastest are the ones who have picked a lane,” she explained. “My focus is making sure we deliver a partner program and engagement that supports the partners who are going deep on delivering identity security outcomes.”

Mead added that One Identity’s partner-first culture and collaborative approach to the channel have made it well-positioned to support both customers and partners.

“I look forward to working closely with our partner ecosystem to build joint solutions that help customers secure their environments, address AI challenges, and achieve stronger security outcomes,” she said.

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Most UK business leaders have a “limited understanding” of their AI budgets, and they're struggling to turn AI investment into measurable business outcomes.

KPMG’s latest Global AI Pulse report found that 26% of UK companies are now using AI as part of everyday work, up from 18% in the first quarter of this year.

This increased adoption means that managing usage costs is becoming both more complex and more critical to realizing value.

Three-in-ten UK leaders told the firm that they struggle with usage-based costs, while 42% have only partial visibility into AI spending. One-third, meanwhile, cited “limited understanding” of AI cost structures, including tokens, as a challenge to deploying AI agents.

“AI is moving rapidly into everyday work, but scaling it responsibly brings a new set of challenges," said Dr Leanne Allen, head of AI at KPMG UK.

"Leaders now need to show not just that AI can be deployed, but that it can be trusted, financially controlled and clearly linked to value. Cost visibility is central to that."

Enterprises need a clear path with AI

According to KPMG, companies where CEOs are accountable for AI decisions often report higher confidence in their AI strategy, and are more likely to unlock meaningful business value and stronger returns on investment.

"As organizations use more AI tools and agentic systems, they need to understand how costs build, where value is being created and where governance controls are needed. Without that clarity, it becomes harder to make confident investment decisions or demonstrate returns," said Allen.

“Clear accountability, practical governance, and workforce adoption must move together if businesses are to turn AI momentum into sustained value.”

To help manage AI costs, the survey found organizations are implementing stronger governance controls, including monitoring and spending controls.

More than half (57%) of UK leaders report having AI cost monitoring dashboards, with 61% embedding cost reviews as part of AI approval processes to enable stronger control and decision-making.

Notably, organizations with stronger cost visibility are four-times more likely to report established ROI, at 25% versus 6%.

“AI cost management cannot sit as an afterthought. If businesses want to scale AI responsibly, they need to build financial discipline into the way AI is approved, monitored and governed from the start," said Allen.

"The organizations that can see their AI costs clearly are better placed to understand what is working, what is not and where to keep investing.”

AI costs are spiralling

Surging AI costs have become a recurring pain point for enterprises across a range of industries in recent months. As ITPro reported in June, these surging costs are the result of AI provider shifts toward consumption-based billing combined with increased usage rates.

The ‘tokenmaxxing’ trend, whereby users are encouraged to ramp up their use of AI tools, has already caused serious issues for some major companies, such as Uber.

Uber revealed that it used its entire annual AI budget in just four months after encouraging staff to use the technology, prompting a rethink of how AI is used internally. This included the introduction of a $1,500 monthly cap per employee, which is tracked through an internal dashboard.

Accenture has also urged staff to stop using AI for needless tasks in a bid to tackle mounting costs.

Last week, analysts at Gartner told ITPro that tackling this problem will require a concerted focus on cost optimization practices, including the use of context engineering techniques to maximize the use of the technology.

This call to action by Gartner came after research found AI token costs could exceed developer salaries by 2028.

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Louise Newbury-Smith, head of UK&I at technology specialist Zoom, describes her role as busy and exciting. With a remit to help the firm’s customers make the most of its technology and a general management responsibility for the business across the UK and Ireland, Smith says the busyness in her role comes with a side order of variety.

“What's rewarding is when we're doing amazing things for customers, very real things for customers, and actually, that's where you know the power of the platform comes in,” she says.

“Technology for technology's sake is fine, but it only gets really interesting when it's delivering something for people.”

Newbury-Smith joined Zoom in May 2025, having previously held senior-level positions at BT Engage IT, Daisy Group, and RingCentral. She reports to Steve Rafferty, Zoom’s head of APAC and EMEA. On a day-to-day basis, she manages 40 people directly but also oversees the work of 400 employees across the UK and Ireland.

“I’m supporting the team to deliver what they need to do for their customers, representing the brand, and making sure that Zoom is front of mind for people and businesses,” she says.

“We're doing quite a lot with the UK government, as an example. We're on one or two task forces looking at how AI can support small businesses.”

Innovation at speed

Newbury-Smith says there’s a rapid pace of innovation at Zoom. While many people associate the technology company with its video-conferencing tools, the breadth of the platform, including its AI-powered capabilities, continues to extend. A pull factor for joining the firm was the chance to help shape this strategy across the UK and Ireland.

“What really attracted me was the opportunity to take our strong brand awareness and increase the perception,” she says.

“The platform takes all the data we're producing through our interactions with other human beings and turns that into actions to support the employee in an AI-centered workplace. It was exciting for me to be part of that process.”

While the broader business strategy is set at Zoom’s San Jose headquarters in California, Newbury-Smith says there’s a high degree of autonomy for executives in the UK and Ireland to make important decisions. To support this process, the company has built a dedicated UK data center that’s designed to align with the country’s data residency requirements.

“We've now got all the services live on the UK data center,” she says.

“Zoom has empowered its regions to deliver what they need for their own markets. Clearly, having control over where your data is stored is hugely important, not just for public sector organizations in the UK, but beyond that sector in areas like healthcare and financial services because of all sorts of global data sensitivities.”

The combination of rapid technological transformation and geopolitical challenges means data residency is a key consideration for digital leaders in the age of AI and cloud. Newbury-Smith says her team’s approach and the provision of the UK data centre mean CIO requirements can be considered effectively.

“Our customers have got that choice with us about how they want to operate and what level of AI they want to tap into, and whether that's delivered locally or part of the global infrastructure, so data sovereignty is very much top of mind,” she says.

“There's well-documented information that is available to customers, so that they can make the right choices in how we set up their accounts.”

What’s clear from the discussion with Newbury-Smith is the extent to which adaptability is a core element of the Zoom business strategy. Six years ago, during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the technology specialist went from being an enterprise staple to a brand that everyone around the world not only recognized but relied upon.

Newbury-Smith says her colleagues at HQ delivered great results in challenging circumstances. Now, the company faces a different challenge. Zoom must continue to hone its brand perception and develop innovative services in the AI era. She recognizes that the company faces a fresh burning platform for change and is eager to deliver for its customers.

“In its simplest form, our approach is about taking information and creating automated workflows,” she says. “There's an expression that I’ve been quoted on before about automating the predictable and humanizing the unpredictable. I think that's a powerful way of looking at the challenge. It’s about how we can enable those workflows and AI.”

Making a difference

Since joining Zoom last May, Newbury-Smith has worked to develop a culture where people on her team feel valued, and their professional and personal goals are recognized. She describes her leadership style as servant leadership, which aims to remove barriers so people can be the best version of themselves.

“I'm passionate about seeing the difference that we can make,” she says.

“We need to hit our KPIs and all those things, but will we be remembered for that achievement? Probably not. We’ll be remembered for how we make people feel, which is the folks around us, our colleagues, my team, and our customers.”

To that end, Newbury-Smith also recognizes her standing as a high-profile woman in the UK and Ireland technology sector. She’s eager for more women to step forward into senior IT roles and supports broadening diversity across the industry.

“That’s an easy thing to say, but it's what you do that makes a difference,” she says.

“I quite often ask the question in an interview: ‘What have you done to support diversity in your role?’ And it's interesting because some people think diversity is the responsibility of people and HR teams. And it's not, because we're all advocates for our industry, and we can all be evangelizing to encourage more people to join.”

Zoom runs events to encourage diversity, according to Newbury-Smith. One recent session focused on AI prompting. The event was run close to International Women's Day to encourage people to feel confident using AI. Her key message for other women looking to develop an IT career is to be themselves.

“There's a huge amount of pressure to be something else. I think women – as have all people – must be their genuine selves at work, because otherwise it's too exhausting. People need to know they don't need to fit into another persona. Being yourself is good enough,” she says.

“Success for any IT professional is about having that level of confidence in themselves, which is very easy to say, but not always easy to tap into. And I think if people feel they can be authentic, then that helps.”

‘Always on’ culture is placing significant pressure on workers across the UK, according to new research, with nearly half (42%) considering quitting roles due to stress.

A study from HR platform HiBob suggests the trend is “becoming the norm” for many employees, with workplace intensity building significantly in recent years.

More than half (58%) of respondents revealed pressure in their role has increased compared to two years ago, while 49% feel “expected to always be available”.

The result is that around one-third (36%) now work late on a regular basis, with 50% checking work messages while on holiday. Notably, the grind starts almost immediately on a daily basis for many, with 55% of respondents revealing they check work messages within just minutes of waking up.

Toby Hough, VP of people & culture for EMEA at HiBob, said the study highlights a concerning “structural shift in how work happens”.

“Many workers no longer feel there is a natural point where pressure eases or where they can properly switch off, while managers increasingly find themselves balancing rising performance expectations with protecting employee wellbeing,” he said.

“Left unaddressed, this shift poses a significant long-term risk to businesses.”

Workers can’t switch off

The study from HiBob suggests that mounting workplace intensity means workers are finding it “harder than ever” to switch off after their day is finished.

Around two-in-five (42%), for example, admitted checking work messages in the middle of conversations, while 29% do so on dates.

Managerial expectations are fanning the flames on this front, according to the survey, with nearly half (49%) highlighting a demand to always be available.

For some, these activities are warranted. More than one-quarter (27%) said they believe that failing to respond to work-related messages after hours could harm their career opportunities.

The source of this pressure often comes from senior leadership, however. Nearly three-quarters (72%) of managers said they’re now expected to maintain consistent high-performance levels, and many are absorbing this pressure.

HiBob noted that this spill over between work and personal life is having a serious negative impact on employee wellbeing. Nearly half (47%) feel mentally exhausted at the end of their working day while stress negatively affects sleep among 41%.

Managers are at breaking point

The top-down pressure at many organizations is causing significant stress across all seniority levels, according to the study. Around half (51%) of managers said they feel underprepared and out of their depth when it comes to dealing with heightened expectations.

Hough warned organizations that fail to tackle the issue could create huge downstream problems, particularly in terms of retaining talent.

“Companies therefore need to recognize that people-first cultures are performance-first cultures. Sustainable high performance cannot exist without the right support, recovery, and trust within teams,” he commented.

“Businesses now need to equip managers with the training, guidance, and tools needed to lead through this new era of constant pressure and help teams perform consistently over time.”

Crucially, around half (47%) of respondents noted there are no longer clear quiet periods at work, with employees locked in a state of constant activity. This tracks closely with a study from Twilio last year, which revealed that workers are calling for periods of ‘digital silence’.

That study found roughly half (47%) of workers are now prioritizing periods in their daily workflow that are free from distractions, email chains, and calls.

Twilio said the pushback comes largely due to the increasing array of communication platforms used by workers on a daily basis.

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Westcon-Comstor has announced the appointment of Olya Scekaturova as VP of regional sales for the UK and Ireland, as the distribution giant continues to roll out its revamped European go-to-market strategy.

The seasoned channel executive brings more than 15 years’ experience in sales and technology services leadership, alongside expertise in leading large-scale transformation programs.

She joins the business from digital infrastructure provider Black Box, where she served as vice president for UK&I and Europe, and has previously held leadership roles at Computacenter and Insight Enterprises.

In her new role, Scekaturova will be responsible for driving growth across the UK and Ireland, strengthening partner and vendor relationships while driving sales execution across the region.

She will also take charge of the distributor’s newly integrated sales operation in the UK and Ireland, which brings together its Westcon and Comstor teams under a single structure.

As part of the company’s announcement, Scekaturova said she joins the business at a key stage in its European growth plans.

“The business has strong foundations and momentum in the UK and Ireland, with a clear strategy focused on helping partners grow through deeper engagement and consistent execution,” she commented.

According to Westcon-Comstor, its new unified operating model is designed to deliver a more consistent route to market across technologies, geographies, and sales engagements.

The firm said its network of partners can expect to benefit from clearer account ownership, coordinated engagement, and improved visibility of opportunities, while vendors gain a more streamlined sales approach across the region.

“My priority is to ensure we support partners in capturing high-margin, repeatable and lifecycle-led opportunities while enabling vendors to accelerate their channel-led growth, harnessing emerging technologies and simultaneously retaining the focus on human relationships that are central to success in the channel,” Scekaturova added.

Scekaturova will report to Stéphane Reboud, Westcon-Comstor’s senior vice president of sales for Europe, whose own appointment last year marked a key milestone in the firm’s European go-to-market transformation.

She will also be supported by a team that includes John Nolan, who has been named as the new senior director of vendor sales. Nolan previously led the distributor’s Westcon business in the UK and Ireland.

“This appointment reflects a broader shift in how we are reshaping our offering and go-to-market strategy across Europe to meet the changing needs of partners and vendors in an era defined by platforms, marketplaces and ecosystems,” Reboud said.

“UKI is one of our most important markets and, by building on our high-performance sales culture with ambition and accountability at the core, Olya and her team have the capability and mindset to drive the next phase of growth.”

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Europe’s complex network of overlapping regulations is hitting startup founders hard and holding back business, according to a new research by startup support organization DutchBasecamp.

Some 79% of tech founders claim they've been hit by regulatory friction over the last year, according to the The Realities of Scaling in Europe report, which was launched in partnership with the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA).

More than half (58%) said they'd delayed entering another EU market, 45% have paused or canceled features, and 44% have experienced delayed or lost deals.

As negotiations on the Digital Omnibus continue, the CCIA warned that many meaningful simplification measures could fall by the wayside, which has the potential to further compound challenges faced by startups.

Some member states are resisting a proposal allowing businesses to report a cybersecurity incident once, rather than separately under seven overlapping frameworks.

Meanwhile, a fix that would establish legitimate interest as a legal basis for responsible AI training has been stripped out.

While postponing certain deadlines has provided some breathing room, many simplifications have been rejected, leaving developers with limited implementation time while essential codes, guidance, and standards are still missing.

“We warned from the start that the Commission’s proposals to simplify the patchwork of EU tech and digital rules were only the bare minimum. Instead of going further, Parliament and Council are now weakening, rejecting, or delaying even the most basic fixes," said Daniel Friedlaender, senior vice president and head of CCIA Europe.

“Europe’s innovators have shown remarkable patience in navigating today’s regulatory maze, but that patience is running out. EU institutions and member states need to wake up: 2026 must bring real improvements for tech companies. Europe knows the problems. If we refuse to fix them, we can’t be surprised if our founders look outside the EU for success.”

Growing regulatory friction

Nearly a quarter of survey respondents said they'd spent more than 30% of their budgets on compliance costs, while 24% are considering or have already relocated their headquarters due to regulation.

In January, the European Investment Bank, with the European Commission, found that roughly one-in-ten EU scale-ups have relocated abroad, with around 85% of those moving to the United States.

The Commission’s Joint Research Center put the headquarters-relocation rate for venture-backed startups at between 3.3% and 4.3%, ten times the rate for comparable non-VC-backed firms.

More than half of founders said they'd steered clear of an EU country because of regulatory concerns, and only 21% said they'd seen no material impact from EU or national rules.

"Europe is already losing tech founders, products, and growth," said Masha Moisseyeva, managing director of DutchBasecamp.

"When 45% of those surveyed have paused or cancelled features, 58% have delayed entering another EU market, and 44% have lost or delayed deals in a single year, the urgent need for regulatory simplification is no longer a theoretical debate about EU competitiveness. The damage is happening now.”

Regulatory confusion is rife

Much of the cost, the researchers found, comes not from compliance itself but from not knowing what compliance will require.

Indeed, founders often cite uncertainty surrounding future EU AI Act obligations before any requirement has formally bound them.

“Founders are not asking the EU to lower its standards. They are asking for clear, workable rules they can rely on across the Single Market," said Moisseyeva.

"Instead, uncertainty and overlapping obligations are dictating what they build, who they serve, and how fast they grow.”

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Dropzone AI has announced an exclusive EMEA distribution partnership with QBS Software, in a move the company said will expand the availability of its AI-powered security operations platform to MSSPs and VARs across the region.

The agreement will see QBS distribute Dropzone AI’s Agentic SOC platform, which uses a team of AI agents to automate security alert investigations across existing security environments.

According to the vendor, the partnership aims to help channel partners address the growing demand for security operations capabilities as organizations contend with rising alert volumes, increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks, as well as an ongoing shortage of skilled SOC analysts.

For MSSPs, Dropzone said the platform can help scale managed SOC services without requiring a proportional increase in analyst headcount, while VARs will be able to offer the technology to customers operating in-house security operations centers.

"Security teams are under immense pressure to scale operations, meet increasingly stringent SLAs, and ensure regulatory compliance while maintaining resilience against rising alert volumes,” said Brett Candon, Dropzone AI’s vice president of international, in an announcement.

“Through this partnership with QBS, Dropzone AI will extend its reach to both MSSPs and VARs across EMEA. MSSP partners can scale service delivery and improve profitability, while VAR partners can help customers with in-house SOCs move from alert chaos to incident focus."

Dropzone’s Agentic SOC solution is built around its AI SOC Analyst, which investigates security alerts from across an organization’s existing security stack before escalating confirmed threats to human analysts for response.

The technology integrates with existing SIEM, SOAR, EDR, and case management platforms, allowing organizations to augment existing security operations without replacing current infrastructure.

Benefits for MSSPs and VARs

Dropzone said its platform will help MSSPs improve SLA performance, onboard customers faster, increase SOC capacity, and free up analysts to focus on high-value tasks while building higher-margin managed security services.

Meanwhile, VARs will be able to support customers operating their own SOCs by leveraging the offering to accelerate investigations, reduce false positives, ease alert fatigue, and address temporary cyber security skills shortages.

The companies said the agreement expands the channel opportunity across EMEA by enabling partners to support customers with managed, co-managed, and in-house security operations models while helping address the ongoing shortage of skilled SOC analysts.

"Our partnership with Dropzone AI strengthens QBS' security portfolio with advanced autonomous AI SOC capabilities that addresses a real challenge across the channel,” commented Tom Corrigan, chief revenue officer at QBS Software.

“By bringing category-defining AI SOC capabilities to our partner ecosystem, we're supporting growth, improving service delivery, and helping partners deliver stronger customer outcomes.”

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People in the technology sector often joke that anything new in winter will be obsolete by spring. This is especially the case in cybersecurity, where hacker groups and cybersecurity teams are locked in an ever-escalating war of attrition.

The speed of obsolescence far outpaces the legislative process: it can take up to two years for government bills to be enacted into law. This is due to the parliamentary process, where various readings, committee hearings and reports are required to ensure that bills are adequately scrutinized.

An outdated system

“The legislative process in this country is essentially a Victorian process, in the sense it takes a long time,” says James Morris, chairman of CSBR, who spoke to ITPro earlier this month at InfoSecurity Europe in London.

“Meanwhile, the world is changing every day. How you deal with that is, I think, a question of not wanting to try and do everything at once.”

Legislation tends to lag behind technology as the speed of technical innovation far outpaces the law-making process. Therefore, cybersecurity legislation risks becoming redundant before it is enacted.

Compounding this challenge is the intensification of cyber threats, in particular the problem of state-sponsored hacker teams and organized crime groups repeatedly targeting national infrastructure for financial or political gain.

“The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill represents a step change to our national security that will protect the services people rely on every day - reducing the risk of disruption to public services and businesses, and ensuring a faster national response when threats emerge,” said a spokesperson for the government.

“The Bill gives government powers to update cyber regulations as risks evolve, so our defences can keep pace with evolving threats. But there is also a lot we can do, and are doing, outside legislation. For instance, we're urging organizations across the economy to boost their resilience by signing up to the Cyber Resilience Pledge.”

As few politicians have an in-depth understanding of cybersecurity, they hence rely on committee hearings in order to become informed on the subject. However, the expert speakers have purely an advisory capacity, so governments are not bound to abide by their guidance.

As a consequence, there is often friction between government regulators and private enterprise. The government regulators could perceive emerging technologies as a potential risk to the public, whilst technology companies might consider that regulatory guard rails hamper development and innovation.

Regulation vs innovation

“There's a tension between regulation and innovation, and wanting the UK to be a technological cyber power in its own right,” says Morris.

“That’s a constant tension in policy, and that applies to the Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill as well, because as that regulatory system starts to get embedded, it's going to have an impact on small and medium-sized companies. We don't want to over-regulate markets which present the UK with growth opportunities.”

Given the rate of progress in technology, acts of law set broad expectations, with associated government regulation intended to give specific minimum expected requirements. Regulations are far easier to revise than government acts, as they often incorporate the so-called Henry VIII powers.

Henry VIII powers are clauses within government regulation that bestow upon government ministers the authority to change secondary legislation (such as regulations) without oversight from Parliament. However, the lack of transparency in Henry VIII powers means they often have restrictions on the extent of their authority, in order to limit potential abuse.

In order to ensure accountability for Henry VIII powers, the authorising partner can be cross-examined before a parliamentary committee on the reasoning behind regulatory updates they actioned.

Organizations can help by engaging with the legislative process, through offering their expertise to parliamentary committees, which regularly seek expert views.

“Any responsible government needs to be engaging. One of my concerns around the Cybersecurity and Resiliency Bill has been it's a bit top down. It gives government a lot of power and doesn't really talk about consulting with business,” says Morris.

“I'd like to see more of that because you're not going to make progress in improving standards across the board if you just impose stuff top down.”

The role of AI

AI is one of the key areas of current focus and technological development. It is one of the most rapidly developing fields of technology, and there are growing calls from many sectors for regulation.

“The challenge is about timescale and the rapidity of innovation, because when the Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill was introduced 16 months ago, AI was being talked about,” says Morris.

“But in that period, if you think of all the different innovations and things that have happened around AI, it's become much more of a central focus in discussions about resilience and critical national infrastructure.”

In addition to this, data sovereignty is coming to the fore as one of the key issues surrounding the use of AI. “I think we should be developing more sovereign technological capability, because we are very dependent on US data processing, and so on,” says Morris.

Many state-run organizations are colossal institutions with massive amounts of data, which could potentially be used to train AI tools to help government departments become more efficient. For example, Microsoft’s Dragon Copilot is being trialled to transcribe patient consultations with a clinician and automate the associated note-taking and form-filling.

Also, with current geopolitics, there is a question regarding whether the government and national infrastructure should move towards using systems developed within the UK. The UK government has previously found itself reliant on external technology providers, such as Huawei, which could potentially cause security concerns and data sovereignty issues.

“We need to look at how the legislative process could be improved, as it not just affects cybersecurity, but lots of other aspects, particularly around infrastructure development,” Morris adds.

“In the age we're living in, we need to look at how we can speed up legislation, because parliament is still operating like it was on a very traditional model.”

Amazon has hit back at EU lawmakers after the European Commission signalled its intent to designate the hyperscaler as a “gatekeeper” under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

In a statement on 25 June, the Commission noted that Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft “hold an entrenched and durable position” in the EU cloud computing sector, with both potentially harming competition across the region.

AWS and Microsoft have already been designated as gatekeepers in other business areas, and with cloud computing, lawmakers are equally concerned the duo could stifle competition.

“Their cloud computing services AWS and Azure have achieved significant turnover, and their operational capacity and investments seem to have significantly outpaced those of competitors,” the Commission said.

“They both have vast and entrenched user bases and appear to benefit from lock-in effects and high switching costs, in addition to a large ecosystem.”

The Commission also highlighted competition concerns regarding the influence of AI services on the broader market, noting that both firms’ AI tools have “become a decisive factor in cloud procurement”.

“Whilst AI is significantly increasing the demand for cloud-related services, AWS and Azure appear to retain a large proportion of this increased demand within their respective ecosystems.”

While the Commission noted that this is a “preliminary view”, the statement follows a seven month investigation into the influence of both companies.

If designated under the legislation, lawmakers could impose a series of obligations on both companies, such as the introduction of new interoperability and data portability features.

Teresa Ribera, the EU’s executive vice president for Clean, Just, and Competitive Transition, said both companies will have the opportunity to respond before “final decisions are taken”.

AWS hits back at EU claims

AWS has contested the claims made by the European Commission, with a spokesperson suggesting the preliminary findings “disregard the breadth of cloud services available to European customers”.

The spokesperson added that designation under the legislation could risk “deterring future European investment and innovation”.

“AWS faces healthy competition and customers across Europe have more choice, lower prices, and greater flexibility than ever before,” the spokesperson said.

“The EU already has comprehensive cloud regulation through the Data Act, and adding another heavy layer of overlapping regulation under the DMA undermines European competitiveness and access to cutting-edge information technology.”

AWS said it intends to work closely with the Commission to “reach the right outcome for customers”.

Long-running competition concerns

The move by the Commission comes as relations between US-based tech giants and the EU grow increasingly tense.

European regulators have made repeated attempts to limit the influence of US firms across the region, having been locked in a series of battles with Microsoft over its dominance in the productivity software market.

Geopolitical tensions, however, are adding fuel to the fire on this front, particularly with regard to data sovereignty.

Critics argue that European organizations have become over reliant on US technology services, prompting calls to seek alternative, home-grown options.

Earlier this month, the Commission unveiled the technological sovereignty package, a series of measures aimed at strengthening digital sovereignty capabilities across the EU - spanning areas such as AI, cloud computing, and semiconductor manufacturing.

Speaking at the time, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said the package comes in direct response to concerns about overreliance on foreign technology services.

“We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable, and our services secure,” she said.

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One Identity has announced plans to become an independent company, with the identity security specialist’s Cork office to become its new headquarters.

The company previously operated as part of Quest Software, which was acquired by Clearlake Capital in 2021.

By going solo, the vendor said it is looking to capitalize on growing demand for identity governance technologies as enterprise environments continue to grow in complexity due to increasing SaaS adoption, stricter regulatory requirements, and the rapid growth of both human and non-human identities.

According to the company, operating independently will provide greater focus and investment as it targets opportunities across identity governance and administration (IGA) and privileged access management (PAM) – with the combined market estimated to be worth $10 billion.

In an announcement, One Identity CEO Praerit Garg said identity has become the “control plane” for enterprise security as IT environments continue to grow in complexity.

“Almost all security breaches can be traced back to identity compromises,” he explained. “Most organizations are still governing it with tools that were built for a different era. AI is accelerating the problem faster than most organizations realize: every agent and every automated workflow are identities that need to be governed.”

As a result, Garg said that One Identity’s customers are now managing more distributed environments that are harder to govern using legacy frameworks.

“Operating as a standalone company gives us the focus this problem requires and the speed our customers demand,” he added.

European focus

As part of the transition, One Identity will designate its Cork office as its global headquarters as the firm looks to build on long-standing investment across Ireland, the UK, Germany, and the wider European continent.

The move highlights the increasing importance of the vendor’s European operations, with more than 80% of its engineering organization and a number of key leadership roles now based in the region.

The firm said that growing regulatory requirements, such as NIS2 and DORA, have also increased demand for identity governance capabilities across Europe.

“As a long-time regional office, Cork has been an important part of One Identity operations for many years,” commented Brid Doyle, One Identity’s Cork office leader and director of global sales operations. “This decision reflects the reality of how the company operates today and how we believe we can best serve our customers all over the world.”

As part of its ongoing evolution, One Identity recently strengthened its executive team with the appointments of chief financial and operating officer Mike Henricks, chief product and marketing officer Randy Menon, and chief technology officer Gihan Munasinghe.

The company said its transition to an independent company will continue throughout 2026, with further milestones to be shared in due course.

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Commvault has announced a new multi-year strategic partnership with Microsoft that will see its cyber resilience platform offered as a native independent software vendor (ISV) service on Microsoft Azure.

The agreement builds on a collaboration spanning more than 25 years and aims to simplify how Azure customers deploy and manage Commvault’s data protection and recovery capabilities.

The partnership will see Commvault Cloud become available directly through Azure, allowing customers to discover, provision, and integrate resilience services from within the cloud platform.

According to the software vendor, the move addresses growing demand for cyber resilience as organizations expand their cloud deployments, ramp up AI adoption, and contend with an increasingly complex security landscape.

Slated for public preview this summer, the native service will provide customers with a more unified experience across procurement, onboarding, and management – ultimately reducing the need for separate infrastructure, external tools, and manual integrations.

In an announcement, Commvault president and CEO Sanjay Mirchandani said the agreement will take the company’s long-standing relationship with Microsoft “to the next level.”

“Many of our customers rely on Microsoft Azure to scale their business in the cloud, use AI, optimise operations, and bring ideas to life,” he commented. “With this joint commitment, we can also make best-in-class resilience plug-and-play for Microsoft customers.”

Native Azure integration

Commvault said the native Azure service will introduce a number of operational benefits, including automatic resource discovery, faster deployment, simplified management, and reduced operational complexity.

The offering is also expected to help organizations improve their ability to recover data, applications, and identities in the event of cyber attacks, outages, or incidents of human error.

Additionally, customers will be able to purchase Commvault Cloud through the Microsoft Marketplace and apply spending towards their Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), helping to align resilience investments with existing cloud expenditure.

“Customers rely on Azure as a resilient foundation for their cloud and AI workloads,” said Girish Bablani, president of Azure Core at Microsoft. “Supporting Commvault natively gives them more choice in how they protect and recover their data, with a more seamless experience inside Azure.”

Alongside the technical integration, Commvault and Microsoft said they will collaborate on joint go-to-market initiatives, including co-selling activities, solution development, and integrated sales efforts geared toward accelerating customers’ cloud journeys and cyber resilience initiatives.

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UK Managed Service Providers (MSPs) have embraced flat-rate support because it’s made delivery scalable: standardize the stack, package the service, and give customers a predictable monthly cost.

However, support has expanded faster than fixed fees can keep up with. Users expect instant fixes, boards expect resilience, and compliance teams, insurers, and auditors increasingly expect proof.

At the same time, the modern customer estate - SaaS, cloud, remote endpoints, third parties, and integrations - creates more noise, more incidents, and more out-of-hours work.

The somewhat predictable result is margin erosion: more tickets, more tools, more engineer time, and the same recurring revenue.

That’s why, for MSPs, observability needs to become a clearly defined, billable capability focused on outcomes customers recognize - fewer avoidable incidents, faster resolution, better user experience, and evidence that stands up in audits and insurance questionnaires.

Flat-rate contracts stay profitable when demand is reduced, not just responded to, and managed observability is one of the most practical levers MSPs have to do that.

Support is scalable when demand is predictable

Flat-rate support only works when MSPs can predict and reduce demand. But customer estates keep getting more complex while contract values stay flat, so every extra ticket and escalation eats margin.The usual culprits are ticket volatility, tool sprawl that slows triage and drives up costs, and escalation creep that pushes routine issues onto senior engineers. When resolution slips, SLA penalties and reputational damage follow.

That’s exactly what observability should fix, preventing avoidable incidents and cutting time-to-resolution, but too often it’s treated as “free”, and the service desk absorbs the cost.

Observability becomes billable when it’s auditable

In the channel, monitoring can sound like a checkbox. Customers assume it’s already included, like antivirus used to be, until you translate it into outcomes they care about:

• Less downtime (and fewer productivity losses)
• Faster incident resolution (and fewer escalations)
• Better user experience (especially for SaaS and remote work)
• Evidence for audits, regulators, and cyber insurers (not just “we think it’s fine)
• Capacity and cost control (no surprise renewals, no shadow IT growth)

For many organizations, that evidence now affects audit outcomes and cyber insurance terms, including whether cover is available and how premiums are priced. That shift in language matters because it changes observability from a feature to a service line: something with a scope, deliverables, and a price.

Tier it: response vs assurance

MSPs don’t need to rip up contracts to monetise observability; they can add outcome-based tiers that make proactive work visible and separate reactive support from assurance.

A simple model:

• Baseline covers availability checks, basic alerting, and standard response
• Managed Observability is a paid add-on: alert tuning, SLOs, dependency mapping, service reviews, proactive fixes, plus monthly reporting that supports audits and insurer questionnaires
• Service Assurance is the premium layer for customers who need stronger governance: continuous optimisation, capacity planning, change-impact analysis, and board-ready resilience reporting

The key differentiator isn’t more alerts, it’s less noise and more action. Fewer false positives, faster diagnosis, and a credible narrative of what you prevented, not just what you fixed after the damage was done.

Packaging that doesn’t feel like platform marketing

The fastest way to make observability feel promotional is to centre it on a platform. The fastest way to make it feel valuable is to centre it on operations.

Three practical packaging moves MSPs are using:

1. Define the observable estate: Be explicit about what’s covered (networks, cloud, critical SaaS, key user journeys, core systems) so the scope is clear.
2. Make proactive work visible: A monthly assurance summary showing issues removed, top drivers, automation time saved, and early risks - reusable for audits and insurance.
3. Tie it to business-critical moments: Position it as risk control during migrations, site moA simple model: ves, mergers, major upgrades, and security hardening, not just BAU monitoring.

SLOs, not uptime: measure what users feel

Packaging won’t protect margins if the NOC is already drowning. Observability only becomes a revenue engine when it’s operationally credible, and that starts with alert quality. Duplicate, low-value alerts create noise, slow triage, and trigger unnecessary escalations, inflating delivery costs. Good alert hygiene means de-duplicating, setting thresholds that reflect real user experience, and tuning continuously based on what actually drives incidents.

Consistency matters, too: standard runbooks keep first-line triage predictable and reduce senior-engineer drag. Measure what customers feel with SLOs (latency, transaction time, failed logins, API errors), not uptime alone, and “single pane of glass” should mean one accountable operational picture, not one tool.

The unglamorous truth is that MSPs protect margin not by collecting more telemetry, but by turning telemetry into fewer tickets.

Compliance pressure is rewriting the value conversation

Budgets are tight, suppliers are being rationalised, and procurement is increasingly asking why they are paying if things still break.

Cyber insurance and regulation are sharpening that pressure. Insurers want evidence of monitoring and operational oversight, and frameworks like FCA operational resilience, DORA, and NIS2 are raising expectations for mapping and proof. In many cases, observability is moving from nice to have to a commercial or contractual requirement.

That’s why monetising observability works now: it shifts the conversation from reactive support to measurable assurance, differentiates you from low-cost providers, and protects margin without adding headcount by preventing failures from becoming tickets in the first place.