I have been making jokes for weeks that companies haven’t been making acquisitions, and this week we saw Google announce the purchase of two companies, Microsoft picking up one, and Workday snagging a company founded by former Google employees.
As Microsoft celebrates a new acquisition, they are also dealing with the fallout of a very bad review for their new Surface laptops by Consumer Reports. Meanwhile Oracle is getting compliments on the overhaul of their sales teams to better sell cloud services.
Acquisitions
- Google acquires AIMatter, maker of the Fabby computer vision app
The search and Android giant has acquired AIMatter, a startup founded in Belarus that has built both a neural network-based AI platform and SDK to detect and process images quickly on mobile devices, and a photo and video editing app that has served as a proof-of-concept of the tech called Fabby.
We’d had wind of the deal going down as far back as May, although it only officially closed today.
- Microsoft acquires Cycle Computing
Microsoft today announced that it has acquired Cycle Computing, a twelve-year-old Connecticut-based company that focuses on helping enterprises orchestrate high-performance computing jobs, large data workloads and other “big computing” jobs in the cloud. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
While Microsoft plans to use the company’s expertise to improve its Azure service for these kind of high-end workloads, Cycle Computing’s flagship CycleCloud service always supported a wide range of cloud and on-premises platforms, including AWS and the Google Cloud Platform. Microsoft notes that the Cycle Computing tech will help it improve its support for Linux-based high-performance computing workloads.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/15/microsoft-acquires-cycle-computing/?ncid=rss
- Google buys health monitoring startup
Google on Monday bought Senosis Health, a startup that creates products used to monitor diseases.
The startup makes tools focused on tracking lung function, taking hemoglobin counts and helping treat newborn jaundice, according to Geekwire.
According to Geekwire, Senosis will not be part of the Verily team, even though the company also makes smartphone-based health apps.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
http://thehill.com/policy/technology/346485-google-purchases-healthcare-startup
- WeWork acquires Israeli startup Unomy to boost its enterprise sales efforts
Global co-working behemoth WeWork is best known for providing flexible office rentals to startups and other small businesses, but enterprise clients are becoming an increasingly large portion of its business. With that in mind, WeWork has acquired Israeli startup Unomy to help its team sell enterprise clients on the idea of opening offices in its workspaces around the world.
With plenty of new funding, WeWork has been investing heavily in opening new shared co-working spaces in places like China, Japan and Southeast Asia. In the meantime, it’s hoping to get more large businesses using its real estate.
- Workday acquires the team behind Pattern, a young startup founded by ex-Googlers
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Pattern CEO Derek Draper, who announced the acquisition to his network on LinkedIn, declined to comment further. As part of this transition, Pattern ended the Pattern service late last week.
Pattern had aimed to lighten the load of managing customer relationships for salespeople and was backed by Felicis Ventures, SoftTech VC, First Round Capital, and various angel investors, who last year provided the company with $2.5 million in seed funding. (If Pattern raised subsequent funding, it never announced it.).
Artificial Intelligence
- Google hires a legendary Apple engineer to tackle AI
Legendary programmer Chris Lattner has had a roller coaster of a year. He left Apple (where he developed the Swift programming language) to help build Tesla’s Autopilot technology, only to leave months later after realizing that he wasn’t a good fit. However, Lattner might be settling down. He just announced that he’s joining Google (namely, the Brain team) to make AI “accessible to everyone.” While Lattner doesn’t specify exactly what he’ll be doing, Bloomberg sources say he’ll be working on the TensorFlow language Google uses to simplify AI programming.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/14/google-hires-apple-swift-creator-for-ai/
- Why Everyone Is Hating on IBM Watson—Including the People Who Helped Make It
But the “cognitive computing” technologies under the Watson umbrella aren’t as unique as they once were. “In the data-science community the sense is that whatever Watson can do, you can probably get as freeware somewhere, or possibly build yourself with your own knowledge,” Claudia Perlich told Gizmodo, a professor and data scientist who worked at IBM Watson Research Center from 2004 to 2010 (at the same time Watson was being built), before becoming the chief scientist at Dstillery, a data-driven marketing firm (a field that IBM is also involved with). She believes a good data-science expert can create Watson-like platforms “with notably less financial commitment.”
http://gizmodo.com/why-everyone-is-hating-on-watson-including-the-people-w-1797510888
Thanks JD! - How Watson’s AI is helping companies stay ahead of hackers and cybersecurity risks
Cloud
- How Oracle Engineered Its Sales Staff for the Cloud
In four years, more than 4,500 representatives have gone through the five-week Class Of program. Mr. Hurd figures that in a decade or so all of Oracle’s sales leaders will be graduates of Class Of
The program didn’t initially sit well with some Oracle veterans, who worried mentoring duties would pull them away from managing their own accounts.
“Everybody thought, ‘What the hell is this?’” said Mike Mansouri, a manager in the company’s El Segundo, Calif., office, who has worked two decades in sales, the last three years at Oracle. “I thought it would do more harm than good.”
Two years later, Mr. Mansouri said he was wrong. Recruits he managed were scooping up smaller customers, and he received commissions from deals they closed. He estimated his commission compensation has jumped 25% since the program began.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-oracle-engineered-its-sales-staff-for-the-cloud-1502875803
- Oracle’s Hurd, AT&T’s Donovan on their massive cloud migration deal
In this case we didn’t buy what Mark was selling off the shelf. We didn’t look at where Oracle was. We looked at what we were trying to accomplish as a company, how vast the job at hand was, and then we looked at the evolution and the architecture of what Oracle was doing in their cloud strategy in order to find a territory where we could buy and they had to build. Oracle is going to address our specific need: How do you tear down a massive database and regionally distribute it so that you can be really fast in how you’re managing your IT application changes that rest on top of this data?
Datacenter/Hardware
- Surfacegate: Microsoft execs ‘misled Nadella’, claims report
Veteran Microsoft-watcher Paul Thurrott has made the sensational allegation that Microsoft’s senior management “misled” their CEO about the cause of serious launch issues with its flagship Surface Pro 4 PC.
Microsoft defended the reliability of the Surface range after Consumer Reports withdrew its Buy recommendation last week. Microsoft said return rates have fallen, and don’t resemble anything like the 25 per cent breakdown figure cited by the publication.
The launch of the Surface Pro 4 was plagued with high returns caused by thermal issues, dubbed “Surfacegate”. Our SP4 review unit was swapped out after dying, and the replacement overheated.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/14/surface_reliability_claims_microsoft_execs_misled_nadella/
Other
- Amazon, SoftBank Battle for One of Last Untapped Internet Markets
After failing to capture much of the market in China, Mr. Bezos is investing $5 billion to expand Amazon’s India operations. Since launching in 2013, the firm has used its technological expertise and slick advertising campaigns to pull neck-and-neck with homegrown e-commerce leader, Flipkart Group, in a country where many consumers are only now shopping online for the first time via inexpensive smartphones.
Meanwhile, Mr. Son’s conglomerate is set to inject roughly $2.5 billion into Flipkart, a person familiar with the matter said on Thursday. While declining to confirm the amount, Flipkart said the investment, combined with $1.4 billion raised in April from Tencent Holdings Ltd. , eBay Inc. and Microsoft Corp. , would lift Flipkart’s cash level to more than $4 billion.
- Dell Says CEO Will Continue to Advise Trump Even After Defense of Racist Rally
His words apparently had little impact on Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell Technologies. The company tells Gizmodo that Trump’s press conference changed nothing, and that Dell will continue to advise Trump as a member of the White House manufacturing council—even as #QuitTheCouncil began trending on Twitter and another of his peers abandoned the president citing personal moral obligation
Also:
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced his departure from the council on Tuesday, writing in a blog that his decision was intended to “call attention to the serious harm our divided political climate is causing to critical issues, including the serious need to address the decline of American manufacturing.” He added: “Politics and political agendas have sidelined the important mission of rebuilding America’s manufacturing base.”
Kenneth Frazier, chief executive of the drugmaker Merck, was the first to step down on Monday. As usual, Trump responded with an angry tweet, saying Frazier would now have “more time to LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES!”
http://gizmodo.com/dell-says-ceo-will-continue-to-advise-trump-even-after-1797876463
Photo: Samuel Scrimshaw