Podcast: The Computer Weekly Downtime Upload - Episode 1

In this first episode of the Computer Weekly Downtime Upload podcast, Brian McKenna, Caroline Donnelly and Clare McDonald dig a little deeper into some of week’s biggest tech stories and trends:

• Clare discusses the challenge retailers face while searching for future retail leaders with digital skills, while Caroline shares details her recent trip to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, prompting talk from the team about what particular technology roles entail.

• Caroline talks about BigCommerce’s migration of 60,000 of its merchants from IBM and AWS to the Google Cloud platform, and why this may signal further competition between the three big cloud firms.

• Brian fills us in on an interview he conducted with Tableau’s chief on “land and expand” v “discover and descend”, and discusses the ICO’s guidance for UK businesses should there be a no-deal Brexit.

• More on AWS: Caroline explains how many retailers are reluctant to use AWS’s cloud products due to potential direct competition with Amazon.com. Amazon’s shareholders have also been kicking off regarding the firm’s sales of image recognition software, Rekognition, to the US government, raising concerns surrounding the biases built into software by non-diverse teams and the dangers this may have if used by the wrong people.

• To round up, Caroline explains Majestic Wine’s purchase of Naked Wines in a bid to usher forward its digital transformation, catering to the modern fickle customer and eliminating legacy systems. Whether retailers can remain pureplay – operating in only one channel – is up for debate.