Tausi Insider

Britain’s competition watchdog said on Tuesday U.S.-listed oil field services firm Baker Hughes Co’s acquisition of Altus Intervention could reduce competition among U.K. oil and gas operators. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it was concerned that the loss of rivalry between the merging companies could lead to higher prices, reduced choice and lower quality services for businesses in the U.K. that purchase coiled tubing and pumping services. In the U.K., both Baker Hughes BKR-Q and Altus supply various well intervention services – essential services used by oil and gas operators to manage well production. Baker Hughes said it was reviewing the regulator’s findings and would work constructively with the CMA. The U.S. company added that the regulator had not questioned the deal rationale but only highlighted overlapping businesses in the areas of coil tubing and pumping services in the UK. Altus did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. The CMA said...

According to research conducted by Gartner, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services increased nearly 19 per cent in 2022. pcess609 Cloud services were originally billed as a more cost-effective way to manage information technology (IT). As a rising number of companies flock to them it’s becoming clearer that, left unchecked, cloud costs can accumulate quickly. According to research conducted by Gartner, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services increased nearly 19 per cent in 2022, and it is projected to grow an additional 20.7 per cent in the year ahead. In another recent study from Toronto-based cloud-managed services provider Aptum, 73 per cent of IT decision makers said cloud computing has resulted in higher-than-expected costs, up from 57 per cent last year. Sixty-five per cent admit to having wasted money on cloud-related inefficiencies. “We are beginning to see the kickback, where customers are starting to say ‘wait, this isn’t working the way I thoug...

Katrina Ingram, CEO of Ethically Aligned AI, at home in Edmonton on Dec. 19, 2022. Amber Bracken/Tausi Insider As Katrina Ingram watched the internet explode with AI-powered text and image generators in late 2022, her mind returned to questions she’d been asking the tech sector for years. What values are baked into these artificial-intelligence systems, the chief executive of Ethically Aligned AI wondered , that might give rise to ethical quandaries? All over the internet recently, people have been prompting OpenAI’s text generator ChatGPT to churn out passages and essays, and processing selfies and other photos with apps such as Prisma Labs’s Lensa to look like portraits done by professional artists. While the trend seemed to many as a fun, participatory technological advance, it’s also restoked long-standing fears in the ethical AI community and among creative professionals. Many hands have been wrung over how ChatGPT, for one, could upend the very concept of academic essays, since...

Microsoft MSFT-Q said on Wednesday it had recovered all of its cloud services after a networking outage took down its cloud platform Azure along with services such as Teams and Outlook used by millions around the globe. Azure’s status page showed services were impacted in Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. Only services in China and its platform for governments were not hit. By late morning Azure said most customers should have seen services resume after a full recovery of the Microsoft Wide Area Network (WAN). An outage of Azure, which has 15 million corporate customers and over 500 million active users, according to Microsoft data, can impact multiple services and create a domino effect as almost all of the world’s largest companies use the platform. Businesses have become increasingly dependent on online platforms after the pandemic caused a shift to more employees working from home. Earlier, Microsoft said it had determined a network connectivity issue was oc...