• The release also said that Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president for the Cloud and AI Group, will be appointed as a non-executive director of LSEG.
• LSEG's shares were seen up 4% or 5% ahead of the market open in Europe on Monday.

© Provided by CNBC Microsoft logo seen at their building in Redmond, Washington.

LONDON — U.S. tech giant Microsoft on Monday announced a 10-year partnership with the London Stock Exchange Group and took a near 4% stake in the U.K. bourse operator.

The partnership involves next-generation data and analytics, as well as cloud computing products, according to a statement by the LSEG. It includes a new data infrastructure for the London exchange and analytics and modelling solutions with Microsoft Azure, AI, and Microsoft Teams.

LSEG's shares were up 4% in Europe on Monday.

"This strategic partnership is a significant milestone on LSEG's journey towards becoming the leading global financial markets infrastructure and data business, and will transform the experience for our customers," David Schwimmer, CEO of LSEG, said in the statement.

Microsoft will purchase an approximately 4% stake in the U.K. firm from the Blackstone/Thomson Reuters Consortium.

The deal will see various Microsoft products used across different parts of LSEG's business. Microsoft will migrate the bourse's data platform and other key tech infrastructure into its cloud built on Azure, the U.S. giant's large public cloud product.

LSEG has a contractual agreement over the 10-year period to spend a minimum of $2.8 billion on cloud-related products with Microsoft.

The stocks exchange said this is "consistent with existing long-term" spending plans.

Microsoft and LSEG will also work together in developing new professional collaboration tools. LSEG has developed a product called Workspace, a data and analytics platform. The two companies will be working on advancing this product and integrating it with Microsoft Teams, the firm's messaging app.

Microsoft deal will more than likely close despite FTC lawsuit, says Raymond James' Marok

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The release also said that Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president for the Cloud and AI Group, will be appointed as a non-executive director of LSEG.

Satya Nadella, the chairman and CEO of Microsoft, said: "Advances in the cloud and AI will fundamentally transform how financial institutions research, interact, and transact across asset classes, and adapt to changing market conditions."

The London Stock Exchange agreed to buy financial information firm Refinitiv back in 2019 in a deal that was valued at $27 billion.

The MarketWatch News Department was not involved in the creation of this content.

Dec 14, 2022 (The Expresswire) -- Pre and Post Covid Report Is Covered | Final Report Will Add the Analysis of the Impact of Russia-Ukraine War and COVID-19 on This Industry.

[107 Pages Report] "X86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure Market" size is projected to reach Multimillion USD by 2026, In comparison to 2023, at unexpected CAGR during 2023-2026 and generated magnificent revenue. The market is segmented on the basis of End-user Industry (Application availability, Application security, Application scalability), By Type (Virtual computing, Virtual network, Virtual storage), and Geography (Asia-Pacific, North America, Europe, South America, and Middle-East and Africa). The X86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure Market Report includes a complete table of contents, tables and figures, a chart with key analysis, an analysis of the pre- and post-COVID-19 market outbreak's effects, and a situation by region.

The MarketWatch News Department was not involved in the creation of this content.

© Marketwatch

DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

By Michael Susin

(Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. has made its largest push into financial services in a deal with London Stock Exchange Group Plc where the software company will co-create analytics products and integrate LSEG’s products into its own software suite. 

LSEG’s Workspace platform — along with a messaging service used by traders, bankers and analysts — will be integrated into Microsoft 365 and Teams, the Redmond, Washington-based company said in a statement on Monday. Microsoft said it will also work with the stock-exchange operator on a financial-data platform, and will develop analysis and modeling services using its machine-learning capabilities. 

LSEG Chief Executive Officer David Schwimmer said in a phone interview that the deal will see Microsoft partner with a market infrastructure and data provider “that works with almost every bank and asset manager in the world.” The tie up will help Microsoft “unlock access to financial markets,” he said.

The deal centers on the products LSEG acquired when it bought Refinitiv in a $27 billion takeover last year. Refinitiv, which competes with the parent company of Bloomberg News to provide financial news, data and information, serves more than 40,000 financial organizations. Many of those are already Microsoft customers, Bill Borden, Microsoft’s corporate vice president in charge of financial services, said in an interview. 

Microsoft said it expects to generate $5 billion in the next decade from the partnership, which also involves moving LSEG’s data platform and other technology infrastructure to the cloud via Microsoft Azure. The company’s also taking an approximately 4% stake in LSEG valued at about $2 billion as of Friday’s close. 

Read More: Microsoft to Buy 4% of London Stock Exchange Group on Cloud Deal

Microsoft shares gained 1.4% in New York at 9:40 a.m. LSEG’s shares rose as much as 4.9% in London trading.

Microsoft Corp. has acquired Lumenisity Ltd., a startup developing high-speed optical cables for data center and carrier networks. 

Microsoft announced the acquisition today. The company didn’t disclose the transaction’s financial terms, but detailed that it plans to use Lumenisity’s networking technology to enhance its cloud infrastructure. 

“The acquisition will expand Microsoft’s ability to further optimize its global cloud infrastructure and serve Microsoft’s Cloud Platform and Services customers with strict latency and security requirements,” said Girish Bablani, corporate vice president of Azure Core at Microsoft. “The technology can provide benefits across a broad range of industries including healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, retail and government.”

U.K.-based Lumenisity was launched in 2017 as a spinoff from the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre. Since then, the startup has raised £12.5 million in funding to commercialize its technology. Lumenisity’s flagship product is a network cabling system called CoreSmart that promises to provide higher performance than traditional fiber optic links. 

Historically, data center operators used copper network cables to connect their servers with one another. Today, fiber optic cables are used instead of copper wiring in situations where optimizing speed is the priority. Fiber optic cables can transmit information faster and more reliably between servers.

A fiber optic cable consists of several parallel glass fibers coated with plastic. Data travels through the glass fibers in the form of light, whereas traditional copper wires transmit data as electricity. Light travels faster through glass than electricity through copper, which is why fiber optic cables provide higher network speeds.

Lumenisity’s CoreSmart technology promises to provide even better performance than fiber optic links. Moreover, the startup says, its technology can potentially make data center networks more secure. 

A CoreSmart cable is similar to standard fiber optic links in that it contains a collection of glass fibers. The primary difference is that the center of the cable is hollow. Data travels through a CoreSmart-powered network link’s hollow center 50% faster than via fiber optic links, according to Lumenisity.

The increased speeds promised by the startup are partly the result of reliability optimizations built into its technology. Thanks to those optimizations, companies can send more data over a CoreSmart cable at once than would otherwise be possible.

Data is encoded into beams of light before it’s transmitted over an optical network link. The more powerful the light beams, the more information can be sent over the network at once. In practice, however, data center operators must limit the amount of information that is sent via optical cables due to a phenomenon known as chromatic dispersion.

Chromatic dispersion causes the light beams that travel over a fiber optic link to interfere with one another, which leads to network reliability issues. According to Lumenisity, its technology mitigates the issue to a large extent. CoreSmart cables are less prone to chromatic dispersion, which allows them to transmit more powerful beams of light than fiber optic links support and thereby deliver faster network speeds.

Microsoft didn’t specify how it plans to apply Lumenistiy’s technology in its infrastructure. However, one possibility is that the company will use CoreSmart cables to optimize network traffic between its cloud data centers. Lumenisity claims that CoreSmart’s performance makes it possible to move network traffic between cloud locations with less latency than using competing technologies.

Besides increasing network speeds, the startup’s technology can potentially also Excellerate cybersecurity. According to Lumenisity, CoreSmart may make it simpler to implement an emerging breach detection approach known as quantum key distribution. The method applies concepts from quantum mechanics to detect hacking attempts.

“For the public sector, HCF could provide enhanced security and intrusion detection for federal and local governments across the globe,” Bablani said. “And with the rise of the digital economy, HCF could help international financial institutions seeking fast, secure transactions across a broad geographic region.” 

Photo: Microsoft

The meaning of resilience in IT systems is being redefined.

Dell Technologies Inc. has embarked on a strategy to deliver “Trusted Infrastructure” to its clients, as enterprises have come to accept the fact that not every potential threat can be stopped. The harsh reality of today’s cyberworld is that attackers will still penetrate the compute environment. It’s what enterprises do to build in cyber resilience that will make the difference between disruption or dismissal of the threat.

Data is what the modern cybercriminal covets. Most companies have become ultra-aware of the need for data protection and Dell’s approach has focused on protection, detection, response and, ultimately, data recovery for businesses who must guard customer information.

“If you look at anything that is interesting in the world today, at the center of it is data,” said company co-founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell, in an interview with SiliconANGLE in May. “You need to be able to protect it, secure it, and that’s what we do.”

Air-gapped options

Dell’s concept of a Trusted Infrastructure had been in development over several years. Many of the elements behind the approach were outlined as far back as 2015 that highlighted core themes of orchestration, recovery and root of trust.

The company has been active on several fronts to implement its Trusted Infrastructure approach. A key element in this strategy has been Dell APEX, which delivers cloud services for a range of data and workload requirements.

Dell introduced its Cyber Recovery solution in 2018 and incorporated APEX into the service earlier this year. The cyber-recovery offering loads sensitive data into off-premises vaults and protects it in the event of a ransomware event. According to one Dell executive, the company’s cyber-recovery service has grown from $50 million in revenue three years ago to over $400 million today.

The APEX solution uses air-gapped vaults to store data outside of a client’s system, and protection mechanisms are provided through Dell’s data domain backend.

“In the event of a security-related event and ransomware attack, you could lose all of your data,” said Sid Nag, vice president of cloud, edge services and technologies at Gartner Research, in an interview with SiliconANGLE for this story. “Dell’s approach is to say: ‘If you can keep all of that data elsewhere, we’ll make sure you have an insurance policy.’”

Storage security

Dell has also extended cyber resilience through the most exact releases of PowerStore and PowerMax. The all-flash PowerStore storage solution was enhanced with a hardware root of trust capability to secure systems at a foundational level.

Dell’s PowerMaxOS 10 enterprise data storage array release contained over 200 new features, including secure boot and digitally signed firmware updates. Cybersecurity capabilities were also extended though multifactor authentication and continuous ransomware/malware anomaly detection as part of Dell’s zero-trust architecture approach.

One of Dell’s strategic initiatives has been to invest in and expand its cloud Managed Services platform. Remote infrastructure monitoring and support for servers and storage are part of the package when it comes to optimizing IT operations for clients.

A key element in Dell’s Managed Services is the firm’s cybersecurity-as-a-service offering. Dell’s Managed Detection and Response solution combines the company’s security experts with the Secureworks Taegis XDR security analytics platform to stop attacks across endpoint, network and cloud.

“We’re bringing the best of the industry and Dell Services together to provide them a one-stop-shop managed service,” said Patrick Mooney, senior vice president of services product portfolio management at Dell, in a exact interview with SiliconANGLE. “Let us watch for you so that you can run your business. And when we detect something, we’ll advise you and help you respond.”

Cross-platform protection

In addition to maximizing its APEX solution and updating security features for storage and managed services offerings, Dell has been systematically adding cybersecurity protection across its portfolio of products over the past year. Last fall, the company announced new software and services to accelerate virtual machine backup data availability. Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager added a new feature, “Transparent Snapshots,” which can protect VMware virtual machines at scale.

With Kubernetes becoming an integral part of IT infrastructure, Dell has also taken steps to build in security at the Elastic Cloud Storage API level. The company released file and object storage with integrated cyber protection for containerized applications nearly a year ago as part of the release of Dell EMC Container Storage Modules. Through an expansion of its unstructured data portfolio specifically tailored of the Kubernetes space, Dell is offering cyber defense at data’s read/write level.

“We’re able to go and actually infer … that something bad is happening and where we think it’s happening and lock it down even more securely than, for example, just saying, ‘Hey, we provide object lock capabilities,’” said David Noy, vice president of product management at Dell, in an interview with SiliconANGLE.

Partnerships with major hyperscalers have emerged as a central element in Dell’s Trusted Infrastructure approach. In December, Dell announced plans to bring its anti-ransomware solutions to the Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud platform through PowerProtect Cyber Recovery. The agreement provided AWS users with a path to an air-gapped cyber vault for isolating critical data.

Dell followed that up with the launch of CyberSense for PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for AWS in May. The service offered an ability for customers to scan metadata through the use of adaptive analytics. In July, Dell expanded its PowerProtect Cyber Recovery footprint to include users of Microsoft Azure. The software to automate and orchestrate the data vaulting process runs within an Azure virtual network where it is isolated from normal access.

Dell has also announced a collaboration with Kyndryl, the IBM spin-off of its managed infrastructure business, to jointly develop cybersecurity resilience services. Kyndryl recently launched its own cybersecurity resilience assessment service, offering workshops, expert consultation and infrastructure recovery capabilities.

Dell’s comprehensive Trusted Security initiative addresses a fundamental issue for organizations in a highly distributed computing environment. The mission to protect data where it resides has become infinitely more complicated in a multicloud, multiplatform world.

In Dell’s 2021 “Global Data Protection Index”, a survey of over 1,000 IT professionals found that 60% of organizations had suffered from data loss due to an exploited vulnerability and 65% did not express confidence that data/systems could be fully recovered in the event of a breach. Numbers such as these underscore Dell’s interest in providing Trusted Infrastructure to avoid the loss of an asset that has become central to business operations.

“The security angle makes sense, but the heart of the matter is to keep data in a safe, reliable storage platform so you can recover it in case you are attacked,” said Gartner’s Nag. “They are playing on an interesting narrative around security. Everyone is afraid of losing data.”

Image: Getty Images

© MT Newswires Primary Image Microsoft (MSFT) agreed to acquire a roughly 4% stake in London Stock Exchange Group, or LSE, as part of a 10-year partnership under which the exchange operator will invest at least $2.8 billion in the technology giant's cloud products, they said.

Microsoft will purchase the LSE stake from a consortium made up of Blackstone (BX), Thomson Reuters (TRI), and affiliates of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Singapore's GIC. The share-purchase deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2023. Thomson Reuters said it intends to use the gross proceeds from the share sale to explore opportunities in its "key growth segments."

© Bloomberg David Schwimmer, chief executive officer of London Stock Exchange Group Plc, speaks during the Institute of International Finance (IIF) annual membership meeting in Washington, DC, US, on Friday, Oct. 14, 2022. This year's conference theme is "The Search for Stability in an Era of Uncertainty, Realignment and Transformation."

(Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. has made its largest push into financial services in a deal with London Stock Exchange Group Plc where the software company will co-create analytics products and integrate LSEG’s products into its own software suite. 

The deal centers on the products LSEG acquired when it bought Refinitiv in a $27 billion takeover last year. Refinitiv, which competes with the parent company of Bloomberg News to provide financial news, data and information, serves more than 40,000 financial organizations. Many of those are already Microsoft customers, Bill Borden, Microsoft’s corporate vice president in charge of financial services, said in an interview. 

Microsoft said it expects to generate $5 billion in the next decade from the partnership, which also involves moving LSEG’s data platform and other technology infrastructure to the cloud via Microsoft Azure. The company’s also taking an approximately 4% stake in LSEG valued at about $2 billion as of Friday’s close. 

Read More: Microsoft to Buy 4% of London Stock Exchange Group on Cloud Deal

Microsoft shares gained 1.4% in New York at 9:40 a.m. LSEG’s shares rose as much as 4.9% in London trading.

(Adds share prices in last paragraph.)

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