After a year of forced remote working, lockdown restrictions are finally starting to ease, and organisations are starting to plan their return to the office. But once physical workspaces reopen, will we even want to go back - or has the last year given us a taste for the benefits of working from home? In this episode, we speak to IT Pro staff writer Sabina Weston to discuss our experiences of remote working, the impact of generational differences on attitudes to office culture, and whether or no...
Apr 23, 2021•34 min
Silicon Valley’s community of leaders are frequently hailed as visionaries, and while it’s hard to argue with the fact that the innovation’s they’ve produced have changed the world, the qualities that make them so unique aren’t always positive ones. In the first episode, we examined some of the better aspects of Silicon Valley CEOs, but this week, we take a look at the negative elements of the common Silicon Valley CEO mindset. We also discuss the key learnings that CEOs and business leaders can...
Apr 16, 2021•25 min
Whatever your thoughts on the products that come out of Silicon Valley, it’s hard to argue with its impact. The region is frequently hailed as a cradle of innovation, and the companies within it are frequently set the agenda for the rest of the world’s technological development. But it’s often said a company is nothing without a leader, so what is it that makes the CEOs of these organisations so successful? In the first episode of this two-part special, we’ll be talking about the qualities that ...
Apr 09, 2021•25 min
Over the course of its 110-year history, IBM has been at the cutting edge of a number of advancements, including inventing mainframes, kick-starting the PC revolution and birthing the first AI to beat humans in chess. It’s a storied history, but what does the company do these days? The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot. In this episode of the IT Pro Podcast, we look at how IBM’s various divisions work together, what its priorities are over the next few years, and why it should bring back its ...
Apr 02, 2021•36 min
Data collection has become a social and political hot potato in recent years, with social networks and tech providers under fire for aggressive data harvesting tactics. However, not all data collection is based on mining people’s information. In fact, some of the most useful datasets companies can use to feed their decision making has nothing to do with individuals, and are publicly available online. In this IT Pro Podcast Special Edition, we talk to Or Lenchner, CEO of web data collection platf...
Mar 30, 2021•27 min
Ask any tech company, and they’ll tell you that diversity is a major priority for them. Nevertheless, when it comes to technical teams, there are still many women who find themselves becoming the first female employee to join a division full of men. This week, we’re speaking to Cloudera senior solutions engineer Ana Gillan about her experience as the first woman in Europe to join one of the company’s technical teams. We discuss what it’s like to be a trailblazer, the importance of self-confidenc...
Mar 26, 2021•30 min
When you stop to think about it, satellite TV is an astonishing technical achievement - a communications relay in orbit around the planet which allows us to beam live footage from across the world directly into our homes. While this is a staggering accomplishment, however, there’s more to running a satellite television network than the satellites themselves. In this week’s episode, we sit down with Peter Simpson, CTO of UK satellite network Freesat, to discuss the challenges involved, how to bal...
Mar 19, 2021•25 min
“We can rebuild him. We have the technology.” From Robocop to the Six Million Dollar Man, popular fiction has fantasised for years about the potential possibilities of augmenting human capabilities with technology to make us faster, stronger and more intelligent. Recent improvements in fields like robotics, prosthetics and artificial intelligence have brought that dream closer than ever to being a reality - but what does human augmentation really mean? Where do we draw the line between tools and...
Mar 12, 2021•25 min
The tech skills gap is something that gets brought up again and again, as organisations lament their struggles to find talented developers, engineers and security professionals. The problem, so they claim, is that there just aren’t enough potential employees in the industry to meet demand for these positions. But are companies struggling to fill roles because there aren’t enough qualified candidates, or does the real reason have more to do with hiring practises, company culture and attitudes tow...
Mar 05, 2021•28 min
Floppy disks. Fax machines. Cassette tapes. All are commonly thought of as obsolete technology, but are they really that outdated, or have their applications and use-cases simply become more niche? In this episode, we take a look at the concept of obsolescence, asking what truly qualifies a technology as being past its sell-by date and exploring why some of the oldest technology out there still has a place in modern business. For more information about the topics in this week's episode, head to ...
Feb 26, 2021•22 min
Software is eating the world, and the developers who build it have been called ‘the new kingmakers’ – but creating a truly engaged dev team is about much more than just finding people who are able to hammer out code. The best development organisations are made up of brilliant, passionate individuals for whom programming isn’t just a job, but a craft. In this episode of the IT Pro Podcast, we’re joined by Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, to discuss whether old devs can learn ne...
Feb 19, 2021•30 min
For the past several years, advances in fields such as 5G, IoT, autonomous vehicles and AI processing have promised to unlock major new innovations for civic planning and public sector management. Technology vendors and local governments alike have laid out visions for glittering, high-tech utopias where next-generation systems manage everything from traffic flow to collecting the bins. For the past year, however, COVID has reduced cities up and down the country to veritable ghost towns, strippe...
Feb 12, 2021•29 min
On 31 December 2020, the UK’s Brexit transition period came to a close, taking us firmly out of the EU. Many issues have been raised over the flow of goods between Britain and its former partners, but the flow of data is a different matter altogether. Data has become an intrinsic part of modern business and with previous rules on international data transfers now at risk of irrelevancy, many organisations are considering how they can adjust their data practises to avoid falling foul of regulators...
Feb 05, 2021•35 min
Healthcare has always been a vital industry, but for obvious reasons, it’s more important now than it’s ever been. Hospitals are being faced with an environment in which they must do all they can to limit physical contact, and technology is playing a key role in making that possible. On top of the COVID-19 crisis, however, healthcare organisations still have to grapple with everyday IT challenges like improving operational efficiency and maintaining their security. To discuss these issues, and h...
Jan 29, 2021•29 min
Migrating to a new technology is always challenging, but it's even more daunting when your estate includes 2,000 engineers, 10,000 applications and 50 million lines of code. That was the challenge faced by FinTech powerhouse Bloomberg when it made the transition from JavaScript to TypeScript, but with the migration process now well underway, the organisation is reaping big benefits in the hygiene and maintainability of its codebase. This week, we're joined by Thomas Chetwin, the co-chair of Bloo...
Jan 22, 2021•34 min
Of all the sectors impacted by the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the air travel industry has been among the hardest hit. With international travel highly restricted and video conferences set to supplant a large amount of business meetings for the foreseeable future, the airline industry is having to re-assess its flight path. Rather than sitting on its hands, however, the industry has been using this downtime to spin up a number of digital transformation initiatives, in the hope that when it ...
Jan 15, 2021•24 min
For those of us who don’t get excited over teraflops and motherboard specifications, hardware is just something that we use to get our jobs done, and up until last year, most of us probably didn’t think too much about the devices we use at work. COVID-19, however, threw all of that into sharp relief, as mass remote working suddenly made having the right hardware setup a crucial enabler. Laptops, webcams and headsets were suddenly a hot commodity, and moving to a non-office environment exposed th...
Jan 08, 2021•24 min
The last 12 months have been something of a struggle, but with the strange and miserable year that was 2020 now behind us, it’s time to look forward at what 2021 has in store. As the dust settles and life begins to return to normal, we’re going to have to reckon with the ramifications of the momentous events 2020 brought, including the election of a new president, the continuation of remote working, and the effects of Brexit – whatever those may be. We’re sure to see some significant shifts thro...
Jan 01, 2021•31 min
It’s not overstating matters to say that this year has been the most eventful and unusual in the history of IT. As the COVID-19 pandemic developed and spread, cloud technology was thrust to the forefront, providing the infrastructure to allow business to continue while workers isolated themselves in their homes and, in many ways, saving the day. Aside from the pandemic and its manifold impacts, however, this year has been extremely eventful in other ways. We saw a flurry of high-profile corporat...
Dec 25, 2020•37 min
Silicon Valley has long been the US tech industry’s ‘shining city on a hill’, building a seemingly unassailable reputation as the heartland of IT innovation. In recent weeks, however, HPE and Oracle have become the latest in a growing list of companies to announce that they will be moving their official headquarters out of the valley and into Texas. But what does this mean for the west coast techno-utopia? Why are these companies suddenly getting cold feet, and will there be more to follow? In t...
Dec 18, 2020•31 min
The internet has been one of the most revolutionary technologies of our age, and most agree that the transformation it’s brought to our society has been beneficial. Social media – one of the more recent arrivals on the scene – has also generally been a good thing, allowing us to connect with friends and family across the world, find people who have similar interests to us, and rapidly share jokes, memes and information. This latter element, however, has slowly turned from a benefit into a proble...
Dec 11, 2020•27 min
Data can be a huge enabler of transformation and efficiency for every sector, and healthcare is no different. However, there can be some significant challenges when it comes to implementing a complete data strategy when it comes to health and medicine, particularly within the framework of the NHS. This is why the Bradford Institute for Health Research established the Connected Yorkshire programme, in an effort to create a data-sharing platform to speed up research and improve community health th...
Dec 04, 2020•31 min
The COVID-19 crisis has had a profound impact on all of us, but one of the most drastic changes has been to business IT. Digital transformation and remote collaboration have been catapulted to the top of CIOs’ priority list, and companies have found themselves supporting scores of remote workers. But with a vaccine tantalisingly close to rollout, how will these trends evolve once it’s safe to go back to the office? Joining us this week to discuss the potential long-term impact of COVID on the UK...
Nov 27, 2020•28 min
2020 has been a challenging year, to say the least; businesses around the world have had their plans upended, and been forced to enact dramatic shifts to home working and digital-first business models. However, there are valuable lessons that can be learned from the last six months, and with lockdowns set to continue, now is the perfect time for business leaders to examine how they can use these to better prepare for any uncertainty that the future might hold. In this IT Pro Podcast Special Edit...
Nov 24, 2020•24 min
Banking is changing; the financial services industry is no more immune to digital transformation than any other sector, and new technologies like cloud platforms, APIs and continuous integration have allowed new challengers to emerge and old incumbents to revitalise their practices. One company that’s helping transform money management is Yolt, an ING-backed startup that has recently added current accounts and contactless cards to its offering. In this week’s episode, we speak to Yolt CTO Roderi...
Nov 20, 2020•21 min
The 2020 US presidential election has been one of the most divisive in recent memory, but after a seemingly endless wait for results, last Saturday saw Joe Biden predicted as the winner, and 46th president of the United States. Although current president Donald Trump still has three months left in the White House, the focus is now on the incoming leader and what his policy stances may be. But how will a Biden administration approach the tech sector, and all the myriad social issues that intersec...
Nov 13, 2020•32 min
If you’ve spent any time around the PC gaming community in the last thirty years, then you’re almost certainly familiar with Nvidia’s Geforce graphics cards. What you may not now, however, is that the company is also strongly focused on solving next-generation computing challenges - and has been since it was first founded. In this episode, we take a look at Nvidia’s history, its business model and its strategy, including why it’s focusing on AI development, what it plans to do with recently-acqu...
Nov 06, 2020•26 min
In this special bonus episode, we talk to Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton about the Raspberry Pi 400, the company's newest device, including what makes the Pi 400 so special, how long it's been in development, and how the company is planning to break into the business market.
Nov 02, 2020•19 min
Data is a vital commodity in modern business, but there’s a growing movement based on openly sharing it for mutual benefit. This trend has neatly intersected with the ongoing coronavirus crisis, in the form of the track and trace efforts which are being used to measure and limit the spread of the virus - but how exactly is open data being used to fight the pandemic, and what lessons can we learn about the use of open data in a business setting? In this week’s episode, we’re joined by Amanda Broc...
Oct 30, 2020•29 min
Passwords are the foundations of our digital identity, which makes them rich targets for cyber criminals. With the right password, a hacker can accomplish all sorts of nefarious tasks, including theft, fraud and impersonation. So how exactly do hackers manage to make off with our passwords, and what can be done to stop them? In this episode, we discuss the methods - both simple and complex - that cyber criminals can employ to pilfer our credentials, including data breaches, watering hole attacks...
Oct 23, 2020•27 min
