From multi-billion dollar investments to UK workers’ opinions on hybrid working, here are some extracts from popular news stories this week.
Microsoft Teams Monthly Users Hits 280 Million
Redmond-based Microsoft released its figures for FY23 Q2 with news that Teams hit more than 280 million monthly active users in the quarter.
It also revealed that over the last 12 months, 5 million PSTN seats were added to Teams Phone.
More of the tech giant’s latest Microsoft Teams statistics were listed in the earnings call:
- Within Teams, the third-party apps with 10,000 users and above rose nearly 40 per cent year-over-year
- The number of Teams Rooms active devices went up by 70 per cent year-over-year to 500,000
- The figures for customers with more than 1,000 rooms doubled from last year
- Microsoft 365’s subscription tally of 63 million consumer users is up 12 per cent year-over-year
Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella stated: “We continue to take share across every category, from collaboration, to chat, to meetings, to calling. Teams has emerged as a first-class platform. Apps from Adobe, Atlassian, Polly, ServiceNow, and Workday have each surpassed half a million active users.”
“Novo Nordisk will deploy Teams Rooms to 5,000 meeting rooms globally in our largest deal.
“With Teams Premium, we’re meeting enterprise demand for advanced features like end-to-end encryption and AI-powered recaps. We’ve seen strong interest in the preview and will make it broadly available next month.”
Microsoft Bets on AI to Transform Cloud
The tech firm’s results for the quarter ending December 31, 2022, revealed that revenues were up 2% to $52.7 billion.
In the earnings call, Microsoft put on a confident front by stating the second quarter results were driven by the strength of the cloud.
The Microsoft Cloud exceeded $27 billion in quarterly revenue, up 22% and 29% in constant currency. However, although Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud segment went up 18% in the quarter and its Azure services rose 31%, this compares to a drop in last year’s Q2 figures of 26% and 46%, respectively.
The market responded well with a 5% increase in shares (NASDAQ, MSFT), buoyed by cloud business and AI plans and subsequent online hyperbole. However, cloud growth was down from last year.
Logitech Reports Sales Down by 22% in Q3
Logitech has recorded a sales figure of $1.27bn for the third quarter of the fiscal year 2023, a 22 per cent drop from the same quarter in 2022.
The company revealed the figures to investors during its Q3 earnings call on Tuesday, January 24.
The loss in sales has been attributed to the challenging macroeconomic environment in the market, with the threat of recession looming.
Bracken Darrell, Logitech President and Chief Executive Officer, said:
“These quarterly results reflect the current challenging macroeconomic conditions, including currency exchange rates and inflation, as well as lower enterprise and consumer spending.
“With these external headwinds, we continued to aggressively manage our costs in the quarter while at the same time growing market share in key categories.
“Our long-term strategies remain unchanged, and we remain committed to the growth trends that fuel our business.”
Video Collaboration
Logitech saw a decline in sales across all its product categories during Q3, with video collaboration sales dropping by 21 per cent.
The company saw its sales of conference cam units decline year-over-year; however, it did see a rise in the average selling price (ASPs) per room kit.
Darrell stated: “The mix of our conference room sales is skewing to higher-end cameras.
“And the attach rate of accessories and services to our conference room cam sales is growing, which drives our sales revenue per room higher, evidence that our strategy of developing integrated room systems is working.”
Video collaboration accounted for the most significant negative swing in Logitech’s portfolio compared to Q2 FY 2023 after the category had previously consecutive quarters of growth.
Logitech put the decline in sales across all its product lines down to consumer purchasing was concentrated on promotional weeks throughout the quarter, combined with lower overall spending from consumers and enterprises.
Microsoft Extends Multi-Billion Dollar Investment in ChatGPT Creator OpenAI
Microsoft has officially revealed that it is extending its long-term partnership with OpenAI through a multi-billion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs.
The company’s partnership with the ChatGPT creator has already been in place since 2019 and will now continue in this multiyear deal as the organisations look to share AI technology with the world.
The partnership extension ensures that Microsoft will be the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI, Microsoft will deploy OpenAI models to its customer base, and Microsoft will increase investments into OpenAI’s independent AI research.
Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, commented: “We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratise AI as a new technology platform.
“In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organisations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications.”
It is unconfirmed how much money Microsoft will be investing into OpenAI following the latest partnership extension; however, reports earlier this month have suggested that it could be up to $10bn.
Microsoft has already put big money into OpenAI in 2019, investing $1bn with the small San Francisco-based firm and reportedly adding another $2bn over the following two years.
Despite not revealing the exact investment figure, Microsoft has set out what the third phase of its partnership with OpenAI will aim to achieve.
- Supercomputing at scale: As mentioned, Microsoft will increase its investments in the development and deployment of specialised supercomputing systems. This will accelerate OpenAI’s research in AI technology and build out Azure’s AI infrastructure to help customers build and deploy AI applications globally.
- New AI experiences: The partnership will see Microsoft deploy OpenAI’s models across its consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology. The company has confirmed that this will include Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, designed to empower developers to make cutting-edge AI applications by giving them direct access to OpenAI models.
- Exclusive cloud provider: The third phase of the partnership between the two organisations will see Azure power all of OpenAI’s workloads across research, products and API services.
Google In ‘Code Red’ AI Response to ChatGPT
Google has announced it is to trial a version of its search engine with an AI chatbot and plans to showcase 20 new AI products in 2023.
Following its much-reported management declaration of a ‘Code Red’ response to Microsoft’s repeated and increasingly more substantial OpenAI investments and the startup’s creation, ChatGPT, it has been widely presumed that this latest announcement is part of a strategic commercial countermeasure.
According to The New York Times, Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were brought in for a significant C-suite meeting to discuss the threat of ChatGPT to the ubiquitous search engine’s hold on the internet.
Google is reportedly worth $149 billion, and although it filed a net profit of $13.9 billion in its third quarter of the last fiscal year, this was down 27 per cent on the previous year. Like Microsoft, it is in cost-focus mode during the current downturn. Recently parent company Alphabet shed 12,000 jobs. Microsoft also cut 10,000 workers. Both are hot to trot on being the first to lead the market by implementing the cost-efficient modelling of AI.
Google CEO’s Tough Choices and Huge Opportunity
In a message to the company where he broke the “difficult news” of having to “reduce the workforce by approximately 12,000 roles”, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, stated: “Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”
Calling on Google’s long-standing history of AI development, he added:
“I am confident about the massive opportunity in front of us thanks to the strength of our mission, the value of our products and services, and our early investments in AI. To fully capture it, we’ll need to make tough choices. So, we’ve undertaken a rigorous review across product areas and functions to ensure that our people and roles align with our highest company priorities.
Google has various UC technology products, mostly built upon Google Search, the number one search engine in the world, which according to StatCounter, stood at 91.88% market share in June 2022.
The implications for an AI-roll out for its UC&C offering are seismic. With its ever-ongoing AI research investigations, the search leader will look to translate its research investment into commercial existence. Plus, it currently has more than twenty sets of developer tools; where one of them, Google Developers, for example, uses open source code, has lists of API services and provides project hosting for free.
UK Workers Prefer Hybrid Working – RingCentral Research
One in ten workers in the UK currently feels unproductive in their current role, according to research commissioned by RingCentral.
The company surveyed 1,002 UK workers aged between 21 and 65 to look into the productivity benefits of a hybrid working model over jobs that are based in an office full-time.
Louise Newbury-Smith, Country Manager, UK and Ireland, RingCentral, said: “Productivity is the backbone of the UK economy, and business leaders need to ensure they are doing everything they can to maximise output, given the gloomy economic forecast.
“With ten per cent of the workforce currently feeling unproductive, businesses should consider anything that has the potential to improve workforce productivity.
“The data sends a clear message: businesses that want to keep their workforce productive must cater to modern needs and offer a hybrid working environment, or risk suffering during the recession.”
“The pandemic proved that with the right collaboration tools, it is possible to connect and empower the workforce and build highly productive teams, all the while giving employees the flexibility to manage work around other commitments.”
The study found that despite ten per cent of workers feeling unproductive, more than half of UK workers (51 per cent) feel more productive when they work from home.
