It’s been 12 months since lockdown became our reality. Every aspect of our lives has been impacted. Almost every educational institution has faced unprecedented disruption as the pandemic pushed them online much earlier than planned.

As a result, the edtech sector grew by 72% last year, driven largely by cloud computing. At its core, cloud computing refers to running workloads remotely using fully managed computing resources over the internet. These resources primarily consist of computing power and data storage which can be used to run any kind of computer system.

While not traditionally associated with the education sector, cloud computing has helped keep the education market going throughout the pandemic.

1. It opened up education material to the masses
One of the biggest challenges institutions have faced has been making education materials available to students. With libraries closed and no face-to-face teaching since March last year, many students have struggled to access the resources they need to complete their studies.

As a result, the market for digital textbooks has grown significantly. Many universities have partnered with online services such as Perlego to provide their students with access to digital textbooks. Rather than trek to the library or seek out illegal versions, students can now access over 500,000 academic, professional and non-fiction eBooks in one place.

2. It provides students with additional support
There has been a real drive for technology that supports students and staff; a common example being chatbots which are integrated into existing learning management systems (LMS) to assist students and free up teachers’ time. The capacity of this cloud technology allows universities to store information about student preferences and provide customisable solutions to their problems, delivering a bespoke learning experience for each individual. However, we are still at the very early stages of this technology, and there is so much more that can be done for the benefit of learning communities.

3. It saves universities thousands of pounds
Thanks to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing, organisations are no longer having to buy and maintain their own IT infrastructure. Everything can be hosted within the cloud, making it cost efficient, on-demand, secure, fast, reliable and scalable. This is why most organisations, including educational institutions, have been slowly migrating their on-premise infrastructure to the cloud in recent years. There is a large cost implication with buying and maintaining physical infrastructures, and due to the pandemic, many universities unfortunately experienced massive budget cuts, accelerating their move towards cloud-based technology.

4. It allows people to work at their own pace
With the removal of in-person teaching, many students have suddenly been left to create their own work schedule as they can no longer go to campus for lectures. Cloud computing makes it possible for students to access the most up-to-date version of assignments and receive updates when changes have been made. Students are able to continue to access the best material they need to complete their studies and learn at their own pace.

5. It’s here to stay
The pandemic has pushed educational institutions online earlier than planned, but many of the technologies will remain in place when the pandemic subsides. As students become accustomed to the newly adopted way of learning, educational institutions will want to keep them in place – especially if they are found to be useful and contribute to a better student experience. While students will eventually return to campus and resume in-person teaching, many universities may take the opportunity to offer more online courses and expand their remote student base. Geography will no longer be as big of a barrier to international students seeking higher education from institutions in different countries.

6. It enables collaboration
Cloud technology is enabling students to collaborate with each other more easily online. From video conferencing tools to document sharing, note sharing and collaborative revision tools, these sorts of technologies are being adopted by universities and, in many cases, directly by students themselves. It has been important for universities to be proactive about this shift towards the digital in order to help their students succeed in the best way possible online. Many of these tools are going to completely change the way in which students learn and collaborate with each other for good.

Navigating this new landscape of possible cloud technologies that can facilitate learning to meet the short-term needs brought on by the pandemic, as well as putting in place solutions that will work for the long-term, is a challenge that all universities face – but one that’s worth pursuing.

The company’s shares rose 5% in extended trading after gaining about 41% in 2020 as COVID-19 shifted computing to areas where the software maker has bet big. It also saw a surprise recovery in sales on the LinkedIn professional social network and navigated a chip shortage that had threaten to hold back its Xbox business.

The shift to work from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated enterprises’ switch to cloud-based computing, benefiting Microsoft and rivals such as Amazon.com Inc’s cloud unit and Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud.

On a conference call with investors, Microsoft executives said they expect a midpoint of $14.83 billion in revenue from the company’s “Intelligent Cloud” segment for the fiscal third quarter, compared with Wall Street expectations of $14.12 billion, according to Refinitiv data. For the company’s productivity segment and its personal computing segment, sales are expected to have a respective midpoint of $13.48 billion and $12.50 billion, compared with estimates of $12.90 billion and $11.60 billion, according to Refinitiv data.

Microsoft said GamePass, the company’s $10 monthly gaming subscription, has 18 million users, up from 15 million disclosed in September. The Xbox Live online gaming service has more than 100 million monthly active users. Microsoft did not give an update on the 115 million Teams daily users it disclosed in October but did say that the mobile version is used by 60 million daily users.

Microsoft said revenue in its “Intelligent Cloud” segment rose 23% to $14.6 billion, with 50% growth in Azure. Analysts had expected a 41.4% growth in Azure, according to consensus data from Visible Alpha. The previous quarter Azure grew 48%.
This was really driven by continued customer demand, with stronger-than-expected consumption as customers have increased their focus on digital transformation,” Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood told Reuters in an interview.

Atlantic Equities analyst James Cordwell said that last year, “economic weakness and delays in implementation had masked the extent to which Azure was benefiting from the accelerated shift to the cloud caused by the pandemic. But with these results that benefit is now plain to see.”
LinkedIn revenue growth, which dipped as the pandemic shut down businesses, reached 23%, near its pre-pandemic rate of 24% a year earlier. Hood said advertisements on LinkedIn drove the increase.

“We continue to see advertising market recovery,” she said.

Microsoft bundles several sets of software and services such as Office and Azure into a “commercial cloud” metric that investors watch closely to gauge the company’s progress in selling to large businesses.

Commercial cloud gross margins – a measure of the profitability of its sales to large businesses – were 71% in the quarter, compared with 67% a year earlier.

Revenue from its personal computing division, which includes Windows software and Xbox gaming consoles, rose 14% to $15.1 billion, driven by strong Xbox content and services growth, beating analysts’ estimates of $13.5 billion, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

Microsoft in November released two new Xbox consoles, its most visible non-work and non-school brand, but the hardware proved difficult to find as a global semiconductor shortage contributed to tight stocks as many retailers. Xbox hardware sales were up 86% despite the shortages, and Hood said growth is likely to continue, with older models also contributing to sales.
“Demand still outpaces supply, and we do expect that to continue,” Hood said. “The team did a nice job of getting consoles, both of this newest generation as well as continuing to sell the older generation, which provides a great value for gamers.”

Microsoft’s gaming business topped $5 billion in quarterly sales for the first time ever and was propelled by gaming subscriptions and sales as well as new consoles. Microsoft said Xbox content and services revenue grew 40% in the quarter.

The software giant’s overall revenue rose to $43.08 billion in the second quarter ended Dec. 31, from $36.91 billion a year earlier, beating analysts’ estimates of $40.18 billion, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

Autodesk has gone through many changes in the nearly 40 years since it introduced its flagship product, AutoCAD, in 1982. In the years since, the company has expanded its portfolio with software solutions that automate the entire design-through-build process for designers, architects, manufacturers, construction firms, and media/entertainment companies.

Still, few of the company’s changes have rivaled its transitions of the past few years. Autodesk recently shifted to a fully subscription-based business model, and the company’s IT department is in the process of migrating all of its on-premises data center infrastructure and applications to the cloud.

As of early 2020, “We had already moved more than 50% of our enterprise workloads to the cloud, and we were on a path of not having any on-premises enterprise infrastructure in the next 12 to 18 months,” says Autodesk CIO Prakash Kota. Then the COVID-19 pandemic materialized virtually overnight, disrupting business operations across the globe and forcing millions of workers out of company offices and into remote-work settings.

Adapting to the “New Normal”

While no company could have been fully prepared for the pandemic’s sweeping impact, those with strong cloud-based initiatives and operations already in place were better able than others to quickly adapt to the new business realities.

Pre-pandemic, “My primary goal from a corporate standpoint was to digitize Autodesk, with the goal of removing friction for our customers, partners, suppliers, and employees,” Kota said.

Kota’s second objective: “At the end of the day, fast time to value was, and remains, our key focus.”

With much of its workforce now working remotely, Autodesk has benefited from its early investments in cloud-based services, including software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. By their nature, these services can be more easily accessed from anywhere, at any time, and from any device, reducing friction for employees and also giving remote employees a means to interact both with their coworkers as well as Autodesk’s customers.

Even so, capitalizing on the potential value of SaaS and other cloud-based solutions has a catch: user experience and adoption.

“You can deliver a lot of capabilities rapidly, but if nobody uses the technology, then there’s no value,” Kota notes.

Even with its cloud-based foundation, Autodesk has had to rethink and retool many of its operations to ensure that its employees—as well as its customers—can continue to work efficiently and securely across today’s highly distributed landscape. Those efforts have included heavier reliance on SaaS solutions that enable broader visibility and control, collaboration, and team productivity, for example.

Also of critical importance is the need to provide enough virtual private network capacity to support the large numbers of remote workers. Furthermore, many of Autodesk’s employees and customers need to be able to virtually access physical PCs and workstations located in vacated offices or other locations. While business users can perform most of their work on home-based PCs or even smartphones, many of Autodesk’s users must access more powerful remote platforms to run computer-aided design and other data- and compute-intensive workloads.

Standardization via the cloud

While the global pandemic has highlighted many of cloud computing’s benefits, those benefits have been broadly understood for years. Among them: standardization and better cross-industry benchmarking, Kota says. He notes that, in the pre-SaaS and pre-cloud days, there was a huge amount of diversity and inconsistency across the IT landscape. Different companies upgraded software on their own schedules and had their own unique technology stacks.

The ongoing “SaaS-ification” of the industry has reduced this variability, according to Kota.

“With SaaS, upgrades and other improvements happen naturally all the time for all users,” he says. “That means you’re better able to benchmark the value across industries, and you can then make better business decisions. That’s a huge positive factor that we’ve seen with the emergence of SaaS and cloud.”

And that benefit has become even more apparent in the era of Covid-19.

Microsoft Corp’s cloud computing business slightly re-accelerated and its Teams messaging and collaboration software won new users, as a pandemic-driven shift to working from home and online learning drove quarterly results

COVID-19 has speeded up a move toward cloud-based computing, helping companies such as Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc’s cloud unit and Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud. For Microsoft, it has also boosted demand for its Windows operating systems for laptops and its Xbox gaming services as families work, learn and play from home, leading to profit that was about 30% above expectations.

Daily users of its Teams messaging and collaboration software have risen to 115 million from 75 million in April, the company said.

It was another healthy quarter, with continued demand for remote offerings continuing to power results,” Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood told Reuters in an interview.

Revenue growth for Azure, the company’s flagship cloud computing business, was 48%, up 1 percentage point from the previous quarter and ahead of Wall Street estimates of 43.45%, according to consensus data from Visible Alpha. Hood said the rise in the fiscal first quarter ending in September was driven by “an increase in larger, long-term Azure contracts.”

On an investor call she forecast “continued strong growth” for Azure.

Microsoft has shifted to selling many of its products via recurring subscriptions, which investors like because it generates stable revenue flows. The value of Microsoft’s future recurring revenue contracts with big business customers was flat from the previous quarter and its proportion of one-time deals rose slightly after two quarters of growth.

Microsoft bundles several sets of software and services such as Office and Azure into a “commercial cloud” metric that investors watch closely to gauge the company’s progress in selling to large businesses. Microsoft’s commercial cloud gross margins – a measure of the profitability of its sales to large businesses – was 71%, compared with 66% a year earlier.

Hood said some of the rise was explained by a change in accounting rules for Microsoft’s servers, but the better margins were also driven by sales of lucrative software such as Dynamics 365, which competes with Salesforce.com.

“That Dynamics 365 revenue growth of 38% was better than we thought and quite good,” Hood told Reuters.

Microsoft said 93% of commercial cloud products were sold as subscriptions, compared with 94% the quarter before. The company’s remaining performance obligations – a measure of how much revenue has been booked for the future in sales contracts but not yet formally recognized as revenue – stayed flat at $107 billion in the fiscal first quarter but was up from $86 billion a year prior.

Microsoft said revenue in its “Intelligent Cloud” segment rose 20% to $13 billion in the most recent quarter. Analysts had expected revenue of $12.7 billion, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

Revenue from its personal computing division, which includes Windows software and Xbox gaming consoles, rose 6% to $11.8 billion.

The company’s revenue rose 12% to $37.2 billion in the quarter ended Sept. 30, beating analysts’ estimates of $35.72 billion.

“Microsoft’s strong earnings beat shows its market share in cloud computing is expanding while its legacy software products such as Windows and Office are in great demand during the pandemic,

Despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, companies around the world are continuing to seek IT workers with proven skills in open source software to fill job vacancies that consistently remain open due to a lack of qualified candidates.

That’s the conclusion of the 2020 Open Source Jobs Report from The Linux Foundation and learning platform vendor edX, which surveyed 175 hiring managers and more than 900 open source professionals to examine the demand and prospects for open source skills in the marketplace.

“Ninety-three percent of hiring managers are still having trouble finding open source talent,” Clyde Seepersad, the director of training and certification for The Linux Foundation, told EnterpriseAI. “Cloud is super-hot.”

The problem, said Seepersad, is that many job candidates continue to lack the specific open source skills that companies are desperately seeking.

The 18-page report is the latest update since the organization’s 2018 open source jobs report, when 87% of hiring managers said they were having a difficult time finding qualified open source talent for their companies. Some 37% of the hiring managers say they will hire more skilled IT professionals in the next six months.

DevOps Skills in Greater Demand

One area where skilled open source job candidates are needed in particular is in DevOps, where 65% of the companies surveyed said they are looking to hire more DevOps talent. DevOps was the most-sought-after job role mentioned in the study, surpassing software developers for the first time among respondents, according to The Linux Foundation. Software developers with open source skills are being sought by 59% of the respondents.

Also notable is that 52% of hiring managers are more likely to hire candidates with open source certifications, which is up from 47% two years ago.

Some 70% of the hiring managers said they are more likely to hire an IT pro today who has open source cloud skills in particular, which is up from 66% in 2018.

“We’re seeing signs that the long-rumored prominence of DevOps is really starting to happen among people who are getting serious about hiring DevOps talent and implementing DevOps philosophy and culture in their organizations,” said Seepersad. “What we’re seeing is that IT has been resilient and open source in particular [during the COVID-19 pandemic].”

Interestingly, the report also says that 80% of the surveyed employers now provide online training courses for employees to learn open-source software skills, allowing them to boost the skills of existing workers to help solve their job vacancy issues. That’s an increase from 66% two years ago, according to the report.

“More and more companies are realizing that acting on that upskilling is an important part of recruiting,” said Seepersad. “You don’t have to just bring in external candidates. There’s a viable path to growing skills in an organization to fill the evolving gaps. I suspect that’s going to become one of the big changes we’ll continue to see.”

Also important, he said, is that an increasing number of companies are looking at hiring remote workers around the globe, especially due to the pandemic, which can allow them to find qualified talent more flexibly.

More Companies Supporting Open Source Projects to Lure Talent

Some 63% of the business respondents said their organizations have begun to support open source projects with code or other resources just so they can more easily recruit IT workers with those software skills, the study reported. That’s an increase from the 48% who did this in 2018. About 74% of the employers surveyed said they are also now paying for employee open source certifications to encourage workers to bolster their skills. That’s up from 55% in 2018, 47% in 2017, and 34% in 2016.

For companies specializing in AI, machine learning and related technologies, finding talent with open source skills continues to grow in importance, said Seepersad.

“Everything that’s running in the cloud is running on Linux, including 99% of Amazon EC2, and the majority of Azure instances,” he said. “So, whether you knew it or not, everybody’s an open source technologist now.”

And in AI in particular, hundreds of different open source tool sets and frameworks have bloomed and are available for use, he said. “We’re all Linux admins now, because if you lift the covers it’s what’s underneath the cloud and everything. And we’re all Kubernetes people now because that’s how everybody orchestrates and instruments the cloud. And open source tools are what are powering the DevOps revolution, so whether that’s Puppet or Chef or Jenkins or Spinnaker, there’s a plethora of tools out there that are the new normal for how code gets developed and deployed.”

The group’s 2020 Open Source Jobs Report was conducted for the first time with the help of edX, an education and learning platform that was founded by Harvard and MIT.

The report includes data from more than 175 hiring managers at corporations, small and medium businesses (SMBs), government organizations, and staffing agencies across the globe, as well as responses from more than 900 open source professionals worldwide. Thirty-nine percent of the companies are based in North America, while 24% are based in Europe. Another 15% are in Asia, 7% are in Africa, 4% are in Mexico and Central America, 4% are in South America, 2% are in the Middle East and less than 1% each are in other regions. The respondents must have hired at least one open source professional in the last year or plan to hire open source professionals in 2020 to participate in the survey. Seventy-four percent of the 900 open source professionals who responded worked in those jobs for three years or more.