After Infosys Topaz, Accenture announces $3 bln plan, to double AI workforce to 80,000

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant outage yesterday, affecting numerous major websites in the US, including The Boston Globe and the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York City. The outage disrupted the ability of news organizations to publish coverage of former President Donald Trump's court appearance in Miami.

Multiple news outlets, including The Verge, confirmed that their websites were also affected by the AWS outage. Southwest Airlines acknowledged customer complaints about accessing their website and stated that they were working with Amazon to address the issues.

The outage prompted around 12,000 reports of AWS service problems on DownDetector, which gradually decreased by 5 p.m. ET (2:30 a.m. IST). AWS acknowledged the incident, reporting increased error rates and latencies in its Northern Virginia hub. The outage has been resolved.

Accenture has announced a $3 billion investment over three years in its Data & AI practice, joining the list of global tech services and consulting giants investing heavily in generative AI, including Indian rivals Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services.

Accenture also plans to double its AI workforce to 80,000 professionals through hiring, acquisitions, and training, according to a press release yesterday.  This announcement comes three months after the company announced 19,000 job cuts to reduce costs.

As part of the investment, Accenture has launched a platform called AI Navigator for Enterprise, to help clients develop AI strategies, use cases, business cases, decision-making, and responsible policies. The company will also establish a Center for Advanced AI to maximize the value of generative AI and other emerging AI capabilities.

Infosys Finacle, the core banking software subsidiary of Infosys, has won a contract from Belgium's Keytrade Bank to modernize its core banking system to make the bank’s operations more efficient and provide a better customer experience.

This implementation will replace the bank’s legacy banking systems, Infosys said in a press release. The bank is also subscribing to Finacle via a software-as-a-service model on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. And among the capabilities that Finacle will enable is the ability for the bank’s IT team to compose and push a range of banking products to the market easily and independently.

Keytrade Bank will use Finacle's open API repository on the cloud to integrate with ecosystem partners, while the SaaS deployment on Microsoft Azure will ensure higher availability and resilience for the bank's core business.

Hyderabad is set to host the Second India Data Observability Conference this Friday, June 16, organized by Unravel Data, a data observability platform provider. The conference will feature over 14 prominent speakers addressing 200 delegates, including data engineers, leaders, architects, and operations engineers from top tech companies in and around Hyderabad, according to a press release.

Data observability and cloud data spend management will be the key topics discussed, with a focus on bringing financial operations (FinOps) to the modern data stack. The event aims to provide insights into the importance of observability, AI's impact on data observability and FinOps, and optimizing performance and reliability while managing costs.

Researchers from Macquarie University, in collaboration with teams from Japan, the Netherlands, and Italy, have achieved a new speed record for an industry-standard optical fibre.

The researchers successfully transmitted data at a rate of 1.7 Petabits, equivalent to the combined speed of 17 million NBN broadband internet connections, over a 67km length of fibre, according to a press release. The fibre contains 19 cores, each capable of carrying a signal, and meets global standards for size.

The breakthrough was made possible by a compact glass chip developed by Macquarie University, which allows signals to be fed into the fibre’s cores simultaneously with low levels of losses. The technology has numerous potential applications, ranging from subsea cables to disease detection and planetary exploration.

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