Technology

Microsoft says its new version of Teams is twice as fast

Published

3 years ago

March 27, 2023

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks during an interview in Redmond, Washington, on March 15, 2023.

Chona Kasinger | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Microsoft said Monday it is starting to roll out a faster new version of its Teams communication app for Windows to commercial clients enrolled in a preview program. The software will become available to all customers later this year, and Microsoft also promises new versions of Teams for Mac and the web.

Since its 2017 debut, Teams has become the jewel of Microsoft 365, the subscription-based productivity software bundle formerly known as Office 365. Companies rushed to adopt Teams to keep workers connected through video calls and text chats during the Covid pandemic. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in January that more than 280 million people use Teams every month, even though many workers are again commuting to offices.

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Microsoft Teams had some performance issues in 2020, which the company resolved. In 2021, with Teams usage still rising, Microsoft began building a second generation of the software with an eye toward improving performance, Jeff Teper, president of collaborative apps and platforms at Microsoft, said in an interview with CNBC.

Reports of a new version of Teams circulated earlier this year. Teper said this prompted “a lot of agitation” but that he did not want Microsoft to announce the update until the program had achieved an internal goal of being twice as fast as before while using half the memory as before.

The new version also includes enhancements meant to simplify Teams, building on the more than 400 feature updates Microsoft delivered last year, some of them meant to help Microsoft catch up with rivals, Teper said. Competition comes from the likes of Cisco, Google, Salesforce-owned Slack and Zoom.

Instead of displaying a kind of ribbon of functions for a chat, Teams will hide several options behind a plus sign that people can click on. It’s a concept people have become accustomed to on other messaging applications, Teper said. For example, in Slack, users can upload documents or set reminders after clicking on a plus sign under the area where they type messages.

During Teams video calls, the software will show every participant on screen in a box of the same size, rather than giving more space to participants with their cameras on. Until now, Teams calls have sometimes resembled Piet Mondrian paintings characterized by their squares and rectangles of varying sizes and colors, Teper said.

Microsoft is also adjusting Teams so that people who belong to multiple organizations can more easily stay on top of what’s going on.

“Instead of logging in and out of different tenants and accounts, you can now stay signed in across them all — receiving notifications no matter which one you are currently using,” Teper wrote in a blog post.

Corporate workers who get access to the new version of Teams will see a switch at the top of the application window that will enable them to go back to what Microsoft is calling the classic version, he wrote in the blog post.

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Technology

Okta shares fall as company declines to give guidance for next fiscal year

Published

2 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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Okta shares fall as company declines to give guidance for next fiscal year

Cheng Xin | Getty Images

Okta on Tuesday topped Wall Street’s third-quarter estimates and issued an upbeat outlook, but shares fell as the company did not provide guidance for fiscal 2027.

Shares of the identity management provider fell more than 3% in after-hours trading on Tuesday.

Here’s how the company did versus LSEG estimates:

Earnings per share: 82 cents adjusted vs. 76 cents expected
Revenue: $742 million vs. $730 million expected

Compared to previous third-quarter reports, Okta refrained from offering preliminary guidance for the upcoming fiscal year. Finance chief Brett Tighe cited seasonality in the fourth quarter, and said providing guidance would require “some conservatism.”

Okta released a capability that allows businesses to build AI agents and automate tasks during the third quarter.

CEO Todd McKinnon told CNBC that upside from AI agents haven’t been fully baked into results and could exceed Okta’s core total addressable market over the next five years.

“It’s not in the results yet, but we’re investing, and we’re capitalizing on the opportunity like it will be a big part of the future,” he said in a Tuesday interview.

Revenues increased almost 12% from $665 million in the year-ago period. Net income increased 169% to $43 million, or 24 cents per share, from $16 million, or breakeven, a year ago. Subscription revenues grew 11% to $724 million, ahead of a $715 million estimate.

For the current quarter, the cybersecurity company expects revenues between $748 million and $750 million and adjusted earnings of 84 cents to 85 cents per share. Analysts forecast $738 million in revenues and EPS of 84 cents for the fourth quarter.

Returning performance obligations, or the company’s subscription backlog, rose 17% from a year ago to $4.29 billion and surpassed a $4.17 billion estimate from StreetAccount.

This year has been a blockbuster period for cybersecurity companies, with major acquisition deals from the likes of Palo Alto Networks and Google and a raft of new initial public offerings from the sector.

Okta shares have gained about 4% this year.

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Technology

Marvell to acquire Celestial AI for as much as $5.5 billion

Published

3 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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Marvell to acquire Celestial AI for as much as .5 billion

Marvell Technology Group Ltd. headquarters in Santa Clara, California, on Sept. 6, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Semiconductor company Marvell on Tuesday announced that it will acquire Celestial AI for at least $3.25 billion in cash and stock.

The purchase price could increase to $5.5 billion if Celestial hits revenue milestones, Marvell said.

Marvell shares rose 13% in extended trading Tuesday as the company reported third-quarter earnings that beat expectations and said on the earnings call that it expected data center revenue to rise 25% next year.

The deal is an aggressive move for Marvell to acquire complimentary technology to its semiconductor networking business. The addition of Celestial could enable Marvell to sell more chips and parts to companies that are currently committing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure for AI.

Marvell stock is down 18% so far in 2025 even as semiconductor rivals like Broadcom have seen big valuation increases driven by excitement around artificial intelligence.

Celestial is a startup focused on developing optical interconnect hardware, which it calls a “photonic fabric,” to connect high-performance computers. Celestial was reportedly valued at $2.5 billion in March in a funding round, and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan joined the startup’s board in January.

Optical connections are becoming increasingly important because the most advanced AI systems need those parts tie together dozens or hundreds of chips so they can work as one to train and run the biggest large-language models.

Currently, many AI chip connections are done using copper wires, but newer systems are increasingly using optical connections because they can transfer more data faster and enable physically longer cables. Optical connections also cost more.

“This builds on our technology leadership, broadens our addressable market in scale-up connectivity, and accelerates our roadmap to deliver the industry’s most complete connectivity platform for AI and cloud customers,” Marvell CEO Matt Murphy said in a statement.

Marvell said that the first application of Celestial technology would be to connect a system based on “large XPUs,” which are custom AI chips usually made by the companies investing billions in AI infrastructure.

On Tuesday, the company said that it could even integrate Celestial’s optical technology into custom chips, and based on customer traction, the startup’s technology would soon be integrated into custom AI chips and related parts called switches.

Amazon Web Services Vice President Dave Brown said in a statement that Marvell’s acquisition of Celestial will “help further accelerate optical scale-up innovation for next-generation AI deployments.”

The maximum payout for the deal will be triggered if Celestial can record $2 billion in cumulative revenue by the end of fiscal 2029. The deal is expected to close early next year.

In its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday, Marvell earnings of 76 cents per share on $2.08 billion in sales, versus LSEG expectations of 73 cents on $2.07 billion in sales. Marvell said that it expects fourth-quarter revenue to be $2.2 billion, slightly higher than LSEG’s forecast of $2.18 billion.

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