Tag: Facebook

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Supplier Report: 10/18/2019


Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

Facebook’s eCurrency platform Libra continues to lose support with payment vendors as scrutiny increases from the Government.

Huawei remains a security concern both in the US and EU as nations and communities try to figure out a way to replace billions of dollars of Huawei infrastructure.

Large corporation’s leadership is still in a season of change.  SAP’s Bill McDermott is stepping down and more details are being shared in Red Hat’s CFO Eric Shander’s dismissal.

Acquisitions/Investments

None this week

Artificial Intelligence

  • IBM unveils Sterling Supply Chain Suite

    The “IBM Sterling Supply Chain Suite,” built on the foundation of Sterling B2B Network and Sterling Order Management, enables manufacturers and retailers to integrate critical data, business networks, and supply chain processes, Armonk, New York-based IBM said. The system’s open-architecture capabilities are a result of IBM’s recent acquisition of enterprise open-source solution provider Red Hat.

    These intelligent, self-correcting supply chains can continually learn from experience, creating greater reliability, transparency, and security while providing new competitive advantages, according to the company.

    “Supply chains are the central nervous system of global trade,” Bob Lord, IBM’s senior vice president for Cognitive Applications and Developer Ecosystems, said in a release. “Many organizations have risen to the top of their industries by building efficient and agile supply chains. But the technical infrastructure underlying many of these systems is still largely based on siloed, monolithic applications, which leads to inefficiencies throughout the supply chain.”

    https://www.dcvelocity.com/articles/20191008-ibm-unveils-sterling-supply-chain-suite/

Cloud

  • Texas attorney general, Google’s new competition cop, says everything is ‘on the table’

    Since then, Paxton said, Washington has failed to pursue key signs that Google and Silicon Valley are in violation of federal law. “Antitrust seems like it hasn’t been focused on for decades, through several administrations, not just Democrats but also Republicans,” he said, later adding: “I think this should have been looked at sooner than it is.”

    The result is a significant legal and political challenge on the horizon for Google and its executives. Bipartisan in nature, and born out of a belief that the tech industry has escaped government accountability for too long, Paxton and his team said nothing is off limits — words that threaten a broad review of Google’s business in a way that could reshape not only the company but the rest of Silicon Valley.

    “If we end up learning things that lead us in other directions, we’ll certainly bring those back to the states and talk about whether we expand into other areas,” he said.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/08/texas-attorney-general-googles-new-competition-cop-says-everything-is-table/

  • Oracle Hiring Cloud Experts, Despite Cloud Chaos

    The announcement of these cloud-based hires comes four months after Oracle reportedly laid off hundreds of employees from the Seattle facility that served as the nucleus for much of its cloud operations. At the time, Business Insider suggested that the layoffs stemmed from vicious infighting among the cloud teams, along with a broader struggle to determine the company’s direction.

    Indeed, a new article in Bloomberg suggests that Oracle is retreating from its previous vision of competing directly against Amazon Web Services in the cloud-infrastructure arena. Instead, Oracle is focusing on cloud-based platforms and applications that serve its clients’ database and analytics needs. On top of that, the company is reportedly abandoning its previous strategy of going it alone in favor of partnerships with companies such as Microsoft, Box, and VMware.

    https://insights.dice.com/2019/10/10/oracle-hiring-cloud-experts/

Security/Privacy

  • No one could prevent another ‘WannaCry-style’ attack, says DHS official

    Jeanette Manfra, the assistant director for cybersecurity for Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF that the 2017 WannaCry cyberattack, which saw hundreds of thousands of computers around the world infected with ransomware, was uniquely challenging because it spread so quickly.

    “I don’t know that we could ever prevent something like that,” said Manfra, referring to another WannaCry-style attack. “We just have something that completely manifests itself as a worm. I think the original perpetrators didn’t expect probably that sort of impact,” she added.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/06/government-prevent-wannacry-style-dhs/

  • EU Warns of 5G Risks Amid Scrutiny of Huawei

    The new assessment has raised alarm among officials in European capitals over Huawei, in particular, according to officials familiar with the report. Huawei has been a big supplier of network gear in large European economies like the U.K. and Germany. European leaders will lay out specific guidelines for member states on how best to approach issues of security within 5G networks later this year.

    “These vulnerabilities are not ones which can be remedied by making small technical changes, but are strategic and lasting in nature,” said a person familiar with the debate inside the European Council, the bloc’s top political policy-making body.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/eu-warns-of-5g-risks-amid-scrutiny-of-huawei-11570814799
    Huawei helped bring Internet to small-town America. Now its equipment has to go

    Other rural telecom companies face a similar predicament. About a dozen small rural carriers have purchased gear over the years from Huawei or ZTE, another Chinese company that has raised security concerns, according to their trade group, the Rural Wireless Association. The carriers often bought the equipment with U.S. government subsidies intended to help bring Internet service to sparsely populated areas that larger telecom companies deemed unprofitable.

    Replacing the gear would cost roughly $1 billion, the association says, and Pine and other small companies are calling for federal funding to help. “If not, rural America takes a hit,” Whisenhunt said, adding that it would take Pine years and tens of millions of dollars to strip its Huawei equipment off more than 140 cell towers.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/10/huawei-helped-bring-internet-small-town-america-now-its-equipment-has-go/

Other

  • SAP’s Bill McDermott on stepping down as CEO

    SAP’s CEO Bill McDermott today announced that he wouldn’t seek to renew his contract for the next year and step down immediately after nine years at the helm of the German enterprise giant.

    Shortly after the announcement, I talked to McDermott, as well as SAP’s new co-CEOs Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein. During the call, McDermott stressed that his decision to step down was very much a personal one, and that while he’s not ready to retire just yet, he simply believes that now is the right time for him to pass on the reins of the company.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/10/saps-bill-mcdermott-on-stepping-down-as-ceo/

  • Mastercard, Visa, eBay Drop Out of Facebook’s Libra Payments Network

    The moves came after lawmakers, central bankers and regulators expressed deep concerns about the libra project.

    The loss of four of the largest payments companies in the world leaves Facebook without much of the muscle it assembled for libra, a digital currency it hoped would make it a player in e-commerce and global money transfers. The project now mostly hinges on smaller payments companies, telecommunications providers, venture-capital firms, e-commerce merchants and nonprofits.

    “I would caution against reading the fate of Libra into this update,” David Marcus, the Facebook executive overseeing the project, wrote Friday on Twitter. “Of course, it’s not great news in the short term, but in a way it’s liberating. Stay tuned for more very soon. Change of this magnitude is hard. You know you’re on to something when so much pressure builds up.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/mastercard-drops-out-of-facebook-s-libra-payments-network-11570824139

  • Red Hat CFO Loses Out on Retention Bonus Following Standards-Related Ouster

    Red Hat Inc.’s finance chief Eric Shander has been dismissed from the company, forfeiting a $4 million retention award that was agreed to ahead of Red Hat’s acquisition by International Business Machines Corp.

    The Raleigh, N.C.-based software company confirmed late Thursday that Mr. Shander was no longer working at Red Hat. “Eric was dismissed without pay in connection with Red Hat’s workplace standards,” a company spokeswoman said in a statement.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/red-hat-cfo-loses-out-on-retention-bonus-following-standards-related-ouster-11570825819

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Supplier Report: 10/4/2019


Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

September was the month of the failed CEO. Adam Neumann of WeWork has stepped down. Mark Hurd is out on sick leave. Devin Wenig of eBay quit. And Herbert Diess if Volkswagen is under investigation for fraud.

What is the takeaway? Nobody is perfect. And – the time of the unicorns is coming to a close (thankfully). A business has to have a profitable model and if they don’t… heads are going to roll.

With SoftBank coming under more scrutiny for these runaway business valuations, it will be interesting to see what the future holds for the darlings of Silicon Valley.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Facebook has acquired Servicefriend, which builds ‘hybrid’ chatbots, for Calibra customer service

    As Facebook prepares to launch its new cryptocurrency Libra in 2020, it’s putting the pieces in place to help it run. In one of the latest developments, it has acquired Servicefriend, a startup that built bots — chat clients for messaging apps based on artificial intelligence — to help customer service teams, TechCrunch has confirmed.

    Although Facebook isn’t specifying what they will be working on, the most obvious area will be in building a bot — or more likely, a network of bots — for the customer service layer for the Calibra digital wallet that Facebook is developing.

    Facebook’s plan is to build a range of financial services for people to use Calibra to pay out and receive Libra — for example, to send money to contacts, pay bills, top up their phones, buy things and more.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/21/facebook-servicefriend/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Ex-Google worker fears ‘killer robots’ could cause mass atrocities

    Nolan, who has joined the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and has briefed UN diplomats in New York and Geneva over the dangers posed by autonomous weapons, said: “The likelihood of a disaster is in proportion to how many of these machines will be in a particular area at once. What you are looking at are possible atrocities and unlawful killings even under laws of warfare, especially if hundreds or thousands of these machines are deployed.

    “There could be large-scale accidents because these things will start to behave in unexpected ways. Which is why any advanced weapons systems should be subject to meaningful human control, otherwise they have to be banned because they are far too unpredictable and dangerous.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/15/ex-google-worker-fears-killer-robots-cause-mass-atrocities

  • Microsoft launches its AI presentation coach for PowerPoint

    The new PowerPoint Presentation Coach aims to take the hassle out of practicing. In its current version, the tool looks at three things: pace, slide reading and word choice. Pace is pretty self-explanatory and looks at how fast or slow somebody is speaking. The “slide reading” feature detects when you are simply reading the words from your slides word for word. Nobody wants to sit through that kind of presentation. The “word choice” tool doesn’t just detect how often you say “um,” “ah,” “actually” or “basically,” it also gives you feedback when you are using culturally insensitive phrases like “you guys” or “best man for the job.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/25/microsoft-launches-its-ai-presentation-coach-for-powerpoint/

Cloud

  • Oracle reportedly funding anti-Amazon lobbying group

    Oracle Vice President Kenneth Glueck, who runs the company’s lobbying efforts out of an office in Washington, D.C., confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that Oracle has backed Free and Fair Markets. Oracle declined to comment on the report to CRN.

    Glueck has been the chief architect of Oracle’s strategy to lobby the U.S. government against AWS winning the entirety of the looming JEDI contract—the centerpiece of the military’s potentially $10 billion cloud transformation initiative from which Oracle has been knocked out of contention. Only AWS and Microsoft remain on a short-list, but delivery of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure award has been delayed because of political factors.

    https://www.crn.com.au/news/oracle-reportedly-funding-anti-amazon-lobbying-group-531322
    Reminder: Oracle did the same thing against Google in Europe

  • Oracle speaking with Google’s antitrust investigators

    The House Judiciary Committee has asked for information from dozens of companies potentially harmed by anti-competitive actions of the tech giants. The committee will issue subpoenas based on how many voluntarily answer the requests.

    Oracle and Google have a long-standing legal battle over whether Google infringed on Oracle’s Java copyright to make the Android OS. The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether to take up a Google appeal to the suit.

    https://seekingalpha.com/news/3502058-oracle-speaking-googles-antitrust-investigators

Security/Privacy

  • DoorDash confirms data breach affected 4.9 million customers, workers and merchants

    The breach happened on May 4, the company said, but added that customers who joined after April 5, 2018 are not affected by the breach.

    It’s not clear why it took almost five months for DoorDash to detect the breach.

    DoorDash spokesperson Mattie Magdovitz blamed the breach on “a third-party service provider,” but the third-party was not named. “We immediately launched an investigation and outside security experts were engaged to assess what occurred,” she said.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/26/doordash-data-breach/

  • Facebook’s Suspension of ‘Tens of Thousands’ of Apps Reveals Wider Privacy Issues

    The social network said in a blog post that an investigation it began in March 2018 — following revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British consultancy, had retrieved and used people’s Facebook information without their permission — had resulted in the suspension of “tens of thousands” of apps that were associated with about 400 developers. That was far bigger than the last number that Facebook had disclosed, of 400 app suspensions in August 2018.

    https://news.yahoo.com/facebooks-suspension-tens-thousands-apps-140153504.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&uh_test=2_11

Other

  • CEO of WeWork, Which Has Lost an Unfathomable Amount of Money, Is Stepping Down

    Adam Neumann, the eccentric co-founder of WeWork, is stepping down as CEO after a torrent of news cycles that read like pulp fiction, the New York Times reported. The Times reports that pressure came from investors and board members, and Neumann will stay on as the nonexecutive chairman of WeWork’s parent, the We Company.

    In a press release, Neumann said “While our business has never been stronger, in recent weeks, the scrutiny directed toward me has become a significant distraction, and I have decided that it is in the best interest of the company to step down as chief executive.”

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne8dbw/ceo-of-wework-which-has-lost-an-unfathomable-amount-of-money-is-stepping-down

    The Week the C.E.O.s Got Smacked

    Adam Neumann stepped down as chief executive of WeWork after a botched attempt to take the company public. Devin Wenig left his role as chief of eBay after the company’s board grew impatient with poor performance. And Herbert Diess, the chief executive of Volkswagen, was charged with stock market manipulation and misleading investors. Mr. Diess remains in his job, but all week, smartphone push alerts seemed to ping with the news of executive heads rolling.

    Those three executives joined the recently departed chiefs of Juul, Nissan, comScore and HSBC as reminders that at the end of the trading day, corporate chieftains are there to make shareholders money.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/28/business/wework-juul-ebay-ceo.html

  • Poll: Two-thirds of Americans want to break up companies like Amazon and Google

    Across political party identification, Americans are pretty consistent about breaking up Big Tech. The poll shows that on the more extreme ends of both the left and the right, there is more enthusiasm on the matter.

    Forty-two percent of Americans who consider themselves very liberal and 40 percent of those who say they’re very conservative strongly support breaking up tech companies to foster competition, while about 30 percent of those who identify as liberal or conservative say the same. (Moderates and people unsure of their political affiliation showed the lowest support). On breaking up for content, 56 percent of people who say they’re very liberal and 47 percent of people who say they’re very conservative back breaking up Big Tech.

    https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/18/20870938/break-up-big-tech-google-facebook-amazon-poll

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Supplier Report: 8/30/2019


Photo by Priya Berks on Unsplash

August was a hot month for M&A. There is even more purchasing activity by Microsoft, Splunk, and WordPress (reinforcing how inept Yahoo leadership was during their last few years of independence).

Oracle is facing a revolt from their shareholders over the 2016 acquisition of NetSuite (which Oracle founder Larry Ellison had a significant personal stake in). Oracle isn’t making the strides they need to in the cloud space and NetSuite has not yet become the sales driver it was promised to be.

President Trump (and the rest of the US) and China seem destined for a trade war.  Cisco and Apple have cited China as a cause for sales projections to drop.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Splunk acquires cloud monitoring service SignalFx for $1.05B

    SignalFx, which emerged from stealth in 2015, provides real-time cloud monitoring solutions, predictive analytics and more. Upon close, Splunk argues, this acquisition will allow it to become a leader “in observability and APM for organizations at every stage of their cloud journey, from cloud-native apps to homegrown on-premises applications.”

    Indeed, the acquisition will likely make Splunk a far stronger player in the cloud space as it expands its support for cloud-native applications and the modern infrastructures and architectures those rely on.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/21/splunk-acquires-cloud-monitoring-service-signalfx-for-1-05b/

  • Microsoft acquires jClarity, a Java performance tuning tool

    Microsoft announced this morning that it was acquiring jClarity, a service designed to tune the performance of Java applications. It will be doing that on Azure from now on. In addition, the company has been offering a flavor of Java called AdoptOpenJDK, which they bill as a free alternative to Oracle Java. The companies did not discuss the terms of the deal.

    As Microsoft pointed out in a blog post announcing the acquisition, they are seeing increasing use of large-scale Java installations on Azure, both internally with platforms like Minecraft and externally with large customers, including Daimler and Adobe.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/19/microsoft-acquires-jclarity-an-open-source-java-performance-tuning-tool/

  • Verizon to Sell Tumblr to WordPress.com Owner

    Verizon Communications Inc.  has agreed to sell its blogging website Tumblr to the owner of popular online-publishing tool WordPress.com, unloading for a nominal amount a site that once fetched a purchase price of more than $1 billion.

    Automattic Inc. will buy Tumblr for an undisclosed sum and take on about 200 staffers, the companies said. Tumblr is a free service that hosts millions of blogs where users can upload photos, music and art, but it has been dwarfed by Facebook , Reddit and other services.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/verizon-to-sell-tumblr-to-wordpress-owner-11565640000

    Does anybody want to guess how much Automattic is actually paying? I would say less than $100M. Yahoo was insane to pay $1B for this platform, and Verizon was insane to ban the thing that made people use it.

    Update: Tumbler was reportedly purchased for $3M

  • Oracle is suing Larry Ellison and Safra Catz over the $9 billion

    The subject of the lawsuit is Oracle’s $9.3 billion acquisition of NetSuite in 2016, a deal in which a company that Ellison controls — Oracle — paid a premium price to buy a company that Ellison owned. Ellison was NetSuite’s founder and largest shareholder, with a roughly 40% stake.

    The lead lawyer for Firemen’s Retirement System, Joel Friedlander, also said in a hearing in June “We’re seeking multiple billions of dollars in damages.”

    While tossing a multi-billion figure around a hearing is sometimes just lawyerly bravado, in this case, there’s some meat to that number. The NetSuite deal put about $3.5 billion in cash from Oracle’s coffers into Ellison’s pocket.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-board-members-support-lawsuit-against-larry-ellison-safra-catz-2019-8

  • VMware says it’s looking to acquire Pivotal

    VMware today confirmed that it is in talks to acquire software development platform Pivotal Software, the service best known for commercializing the open-source Cloud Foundry platform. The proposed transaction would see VMware acquire all outstanding Pivotal Class A stock for $15 per share, a significant markup over Pivotal’s current share price (which unsurprisingly shot up right after the announcement).

    Pivotal’s shares have struggled since the company’s IPO in April 2018. The company was originally spun out of EMC Corporation (now DellEMC) and VMware in 2012 to focus on Cloud Foundry, an open-source software development platform that is currently in use by the majority of Fortune 500 companies.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/14/vmware-says-its-looking-to-acquire-pivotal/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Amazon’s AI Can Now Identify Fear

    For those who haven’t heard of the Big Brother-esque Rekognition software, it’s basically a system of neural nets trained on big data (i.e. a ton of photographs and videos) to identify and label objects such as text, activities, “inappropriate behavior,” people, and faces. And if you think Big Brother-esque is a bit of a stretch to describe Rekognition, keep in mind that it’s already being deployed by law enforcement to identify people’s faces. Which isn’t necessarily a bad application in itself, but let your imagination run wild and things could quickly evolve into a Philip K. Dick novel.

    While fear was specifically noted by Amazon as a new emotion that Rekognition can identify, it’s actually only one addition to a number of improvements the AI is making. Along with identifying emotions, Amazon says that Rekognition is now also better at spotting gender and age range. Combined with the aforementioned list of other objects that Rekognition can identify, it’s clear that Amazon wants this software to be able detect and label absolutely any type of image you throw at it.

    https://nerdist.com/article/amazon-rekognition-ai-identify-fear/

  • IBM joins Linux Foundation AI to promote open source trusted AI workflows

    As a Linux Foundation project, the LF AI Foundation provides a vendor-neutral space for the promotion of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) open source projects. It’s backed by major organizations like AT&T, Baidu, Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei.

    IBM has a long history of supporting open source, and Moore explained why it’s the right way to quickly raise the bar when it comes to building trustworthy AI. “To get all of us working together, iterating quickly, can cover a lot more ground than any single company can,” he said.

    On top of that, supporting open source projects has the added benefit of expanding the market opportunity for AI vendors like IBM. The goal, Moore said, is to build tools that improve the credibility of AI — and “to do it together, in a way that everybody can inspect and contribute to.”

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-joins-linux-foundation-ai-to-promote-open-source-trusted-ai-workflows/

Cloud

  • IBM updates cloud-native software with Red Hat OpenShift

    Overall, IBM has unveiled more than 100 new and/or updated software products and services across its Red Hat OpenShift-optimized software portfolio. These new solutions will be delivered on IBM’s hybrid multicloud platform, which is built using open source technologies just like Red Hat OpenShift.

    Some of the new services that are optimized for this open source environment include Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud and Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE. Additionally, IBM has unveiled new consulting and technology services delivered by Red Hat certified consultants and application services practitioners. These services are designed to help users better move, build, and manage their workloads in various cloud environments, while also providing a consistent and simplified experience across clouds.

    http://techgenix.com/red-hat-openshift/

Security/Privacy

  • Huawei employees reportedly aided African governments in spying

    The report cites unnamed senior surveillance officers. The paper adds that an investigation didn’t confirm a direct tie between the Chinese government or Huawei executives. It did, however, appear to confirm that employees for the tech giant played a part in intercepting communications.

    The list includes encrypted messages, the use of apps like WhatsApp and Skype and tracking opponents using cellular data.

    A representative for Zambia’s ruling party confirmed with the paper that Huawei technicians have helped in the fight against news sites with opposing stances in the country, stating, “Whenever we want to track down perpetrators of fake news, we ask Zicta, which is the lead agency. They work with Huawei to ensure that people don’t use our telecommunications space to spread fake news.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/14/huawei-employees-reportedly-aided-african-governments-in-spying/

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Cisco drops on poor guidance, says China business dropped 25%

    “What we’ve seen is in the state on enterprises … we’re just being — we’re being uninvited to bid,” Robbins said. “We’re not being allowed to even participate anymore.” Sales to carriers declined more forcefully as well, he said.

    The majority of Cisco’s revenue comes from sales of data center networking products, including switches and routers. That business is represented by Cisco’s Infrastructure Platforms segment, which came up with quarterly revenue of $7.88 billion, above the $7.84 billion consensus among analyst polled by FactSet.

    The Applications segment had $1.49 billion in revenue, in line with the $1.49 billion FactSet analyst consensus. Cisco’s Security business contributed $714 million in revenue, less than $739.9 million FactSet consensus estimate.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/14/cisco-falls-on-soft-guidance.html

Other

  • How Facebook Is Changing to Deal With Scrutiny of Its Power

    Late last year, Facebook halted acquisition talks with Houseparty, a video-focused social network in Silicon Valley, for fear of inciting antitrust concerns, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. Acquiring another social network after Facebook was already such a dominant player in that market was too risky, said the people, who spoke on the condition they not be identified because the discussions were confidential.

    Facebook has also begun internal changes that make itself harder to break up. The company has been knitting together the messaging systems of Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp and has reorganized the departments so that Facebook is more clearly in charge, said two people briefed on the matter. Executives have also worked on rebranding Instagram and WhatsApp to more prominently associate them with Facebook.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/technology/facebook-antitrust.html

  • Trump retaliates in trade war by escalating tariffs on Chinese imports and demanding companies cut ties with China

    Trump initially directed his ire at Powell in Friday tweets, painting the Fed’s lack of monetary easing as a greater threat to American workers and businesses. “My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?” he tweeted.

    Moments later, he demanded American companies cut ties with China.

    “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA,” Trump tweeted.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/23/china-hits-us-with-tariffs-billion-worth-goods-reinstates-auto-levies-state-media-report/

  • HP CEO steps down, citing ‘family health matter’

    HP Inc. announced this afternoon that Dion Weisler is stepping down as president and CEO. The executive cited a “family health matter” in his decision, noting that he will be returning home to Australia.

    The company already has a successor lined up, as its president of Imaging, Printing and Solutions, Enrique Lores, got unanimous approval from its board of directors. Lores will be assuming the top spot on November 1.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/22/hp-ceo-steps-down-citing-family-health-matter/

Posted on

Supplier Report: 7/19/2019


Photo by Runde Imaging on Unsplash

Remember when Foxconn was supposed to bring 13,000 jobs to Wisconsin? The number is down to 1,500 according to the current Governor. Meanwhile Amazon thinks they are going to have a talent shortage in the future and is committed to re-training 1,000 workers in more advanced technical skills.

Oracle has lost their legal challenge to the Pentagon over their treatment in the never-ending JEDI cloud contract. With this ruling, Oracle is officially done and everyone can move on with our lives.

Finally – Facebook got fined $5B for all the security flaws and election issues it caused over the last few years (Facebook made $55B last year).

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Cisco to Buy Acacia Communications for About $2.6 Billion

    Acacia, a Maynard, Mass.-based maker of optical interconnect technologies like modules and semiconductors, derived roughly 14% of its $339.9 million in revenue last year from Cisco. Acacia was formed in 2009 and went public in May 2016.

    Cisco said Acacia’s technology will enable users of its hardware to drive more data over high-speed internet networks. Cisco executives said the company is looking to take advantage of a growing trend of customers migrating to pluggable technology from chassis-based systems. Pluggable modules give network operators a more efficient way to increase the data that runs over networks.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/cisco-to-buy-acacia-communications-for-about-2-6-billion-11562675698

  • Google acquires enterprise cloud storage provider Elastifile

    Google today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase Elastifile, a Santa Clara, California-based provider of enterprise cloud file storage solutions, for an undisclosed price. (CTech cited an anonymous source as saying Google is paying around $200 million.) Assuming the acquisition passes regulatory muster, the search giant expects it to be completed later this year, at which point the Elastifile team will join Google Cloud.

    Perhaps uncoincidentally, this news comes on the heels of the launch of Elastifile File Service on Google Cloud Platform, a fully managed version of Elastifile optimized for Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian wrote in a blog post that Elastifle will be integrated with Google Cloud Filestore in the coming months.

    https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/09/google-acquires-enterprise-cloud-storage-provider-elastifile/

  • IBM closes Red Hat acquisition for $34 billion

    IBM originally announced its intent to acquire the Linux developer in October of last year. The U.S. Department of Justice gave its stamp of approval in May, and the last big potential roadblock was removed when the EU gave its unconditional approval at the end of June.

    IBM says that Red Hat will stay under the watch of CEO Jim Whitehurst, with Whitehurst joining IBM’s senior management and reporting directly to IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/09/ibm-closes-red-hat-acquisition-for-34-billion/

Artificial Intelligence

  • AI smokes 5 poker champs at a time in no-limit Hold’em with ‘relentless consistency’

    With six players, the possibilities for hands, bets and possible outcomes are so numerous that it is effectively impossible to account for all of them, especially in a minute or less. It’d be like trying to exhaustively document every grain of sand on a beach between waves.

    Yet over 10,000 hands played with champions, Pluribus managed to win money at a steady rate, exposing no weaknesses or habits that its opponents could take advantage of. What’s the secret? Consistent randomness.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/11/ai-smokes-5-poker-champs-at-a-time-in-no-limit-holdem-with-ruthless-consistency/

Cloud

  • Oracle loses court challenge to $10 billion cloud contract

    Federal Claims Court Senior Judge Eric Bruggink dismissed the company’s argument that the contract violates federal procurement laws and is unfairly tainted by conflicts of interests.

    Bruggink said that because Oracle didn’t meet the criteria for the bid, it “cannot demonstrate prejudice as a result of other possible errors in the procurement process.”

    The decision is a major blow to Oracle, which risks losing a share of its federal defense business if the Pentagon awards the contract to another cloud company. The ruling also eliminates a headache for the Pentagon, which has been fending off challenges to its winner-take-all strategy in the cloud contract for more than a year.

    https://www.unionleader.com/news/business/oracle-loses-court-challenge-to-billion-cloud-contract/article_95e0b592-3b67-539f-923a-523fa9ced138.html

Security/Privacy

  • Facebook’s $5 billion FTC fine is an embarrassing joke

    That’s actually the real problem here: fines and punishments are only effective when they provide negative consequences for bad behavior. But Facebook has done nothing but behave badly from inception, and it has only ever been slapped on the wrist by authority figures and rewarded by the market. After all, Facebook was already under a previous FTC consent decree for privacy violations imposed in 2011, and that didn’t seem to stop any of the company’s recent scandals from happening. As Kara Swisher has written, you have to add another zero to this fine to make it mean anything.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20692524/facebook-five-billion-ftc-fine-embarrassing-joke

Other

  • Amazon to Retrain a Third of Its U.S. Workforce

    Amazon’s promise to upgrade the skills of its workforce—reported by The Wall Street Journal Thursday—represents one of the biggest corporate retraining initiatives on record, and breaks down to about $7,000 per worker, or about $1,200 a year through 2025. By comparison, large employers with 10,000 workers or more that were surveyed by the Association for Talent Development reported spending an average of $500 per worker on training in 2017.

    Amazon said it would retrain 100,000 workers in total by expanding existing training programs and rolling out new ones meant to help its employees move into more-advanced jobs inside the company or find new careers outside of it. The training is voluntary and mostly free for employees and won’t obligate participants to remain at Amazon, the Seattle-based company said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-retrain-a-third-of-its-u-s-workforce-11562841120

  • Foxconn will only create 1,500 jobs, says Wisconsin governor

    The Foxconn factory in Wisconsin will only create 1,500 jobs when it starts production next May, Gov. Tony Evers told CNBC yesterday. That’s the same number Foxconn has been saying since it shifted plans for the factory a few months ago, and far short of the 13,000 jobs that were promised when President Trump broke ground a year ago. Evers has been negotiating with Foxconn since he replaced former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, and he says he now has “clarity” on Foxconn’s plans.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20689021/foxconn-wisconsin-governor-jobs-tony-evers-manufacturing

  • The Fortune 500 has a new woman CEO: Accenture’s Julie Sweet

    The consulting company said Thursday that Sweet, 51, will take the top job in September. She’s currently the head of Accenture’s North America business, which accounts for almost 50% of the company’s global revenues.

    “Julie is the right person to lead Accenture into the future, given her strong command of our business and proven ability to drive results in our largest market,” David Rowland, the company’s interim CEO and incoming executive chairman, said in a statement.

    Sweet joined Accenture (ACN) in 2010. She served as the company’s general counsel after 10 years as a partner at the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

    https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/12/business/accenture-julie-sweet/index.html

Posted on

Supplier Report: 5/24/2019

Foxconn offices in Wisconsin are still empty. This is after the company assured the press that said emptiness was not the case. With recent news that AT&T did not live up to terms to get a large tax refund, should we be asking if these rebate programs are a good thing for the cities and states that leverage them?

SalesForce had a massive outage last week due to a database configuration gone wrong. The company shut down services to address a configuration that “broke access permission settings across organizations and gave employees access to all of their company’s files.”

Finally – AI voice replication is getting really good.  Google voice translation has improved the ability to detect tone and intent and there is a company called Dessa that published a voice cloning of podcaster Joe Rogan that is eerily good (NSFW).

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Buy Supercomputer Maker Cray

    Hewlett Packard Enterprise on Friday said it agreed to buy supercomputer maker Cray Inc.  for $35 a share in cash in a deal valued at about $1.3 billion, net of cash.

    The deal represents a 17.4% premium to Cray’s Thursday closing price of $29.81.

    HPE said it expects the acquisition will add to adjusted operating profit and earnings in the first full year. The company said integration costs associated with the deal will be absorbed within its fiscal 2020 free cash flow outlook, which remains unchanged at $1.9 billion to $2.1 billion.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/hewlett-packard-enterprises-to-buy-supercomputer-maker-cray-11558094554

  • Amazon leads $575M investment in Deliveroo

    London-based Deliveroo operates in 14 countries, including the U.K, France, Germany and Spain, and — outside of Europe — Singapore, Taiwan, Australia and the UAE. Across those markets, it claims it works with 80,000 restaurants with a fleet of 60,000 delivery people and 2,500 permanent employees.

    It isn’t immediately clear how Amazon plans to use its new strategic relationship with Deliveroo — it could, for example, integrate it with Prime membership — but this isn’t the firm’s first dalliance with food delivery. The U.S. firm closed its Amazon Restaurants UK takeout business last year after it struggled to compete with Deliveroo and Uber Eats. The service remains operational in the U.S, however.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/16/amazon-takes-a-bite-into-deliveroo/

  • Apptio Acquires Cloudability Multi-Cloud Spending Management Software

    Bellevue, Washington-based technology business management software company Apptio Inc is acquiring Cloudability, a Portland, Oregon company that makes software to manage public cloud spending across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    https://www.channele2e.com/news/apptio-buys-cloudability/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Google’s prototype AI translator translates your tone as well as your words

    Although capturing the inflection of a speaker’s voice is what’s most impressive to laypeople, Translatotron’s attraction for AI engineers is that it translates speech directly from audio input to audio output without translating it into the usual intermediary text.

    This sort of AI model is known as an end-to-end system, because there are no stops for subsidiary tasks or actions. Google says making translation end-to-end produces results faster while avoiding the risk of introducing errors during multiple translation steps.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18628980/google-ai-translation-tone-cadence-voice-translatotron

  • Microsoft invests in seven AI projects to help people with disabilities

    Microsoft is awarding grants to AI projects meant to make the world more inclusive. The grants are part of a five-year initiative that will invest $25 million in AI-based accessibility tools. This year, seven recipients will receive access to the Azure AI platform (through Azure compute credits) and Microsoft engineering support.

    Over the next year, the recipients will work on things like a nerve-sensing wearable wristband. That device detects micro-movements of the hands and arms and translates them into actions like a mouse click. Another project seeks to develop a wearable cap that reads a person’s EEG data and communicates it to the cloud to provide seizure warnings and alerts. Other tools will rely on speech recognition, AI-powered chatbots and apps for people with vision impairment.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/16/microsoft-ai-accessibility-grants/

  • IBM Unveils Watson-powered Supply Chain Management Tool at Gartner Summit

    The Business Transactional Intelligence (BTI) service is powered by Watson and aims to help businesses detect anomalies that could potentially interrupt a company’s supply chain distribution.

    BTI uses machine learning to identify velocity, volume and value patterns in an organisations data by ingesting all of the supply chain documents and transactions. Using this data it learns to spot patterns about which it can suggest optimisations, or it may detect anomalies causing it to send an alert to the client.

    https://www.cbronline.com/news/ibm-supply-chain-business-network-business-transactional-intelligence

Cloud

  • Faulty database script brings Salesforce to its knees

    At the heart of the outage was a change the company made to its production environment that broke access permission settings across organizations and gave employees access to all of their company’s files.

    According to reports on Reddit, users didn’t just get read access, but they also received write permissions, making it easy for malicious employees to steal or tamper with a company’s data.

    In a status update, the company blamed the issue on “a database script deployment that inadvertently gave users broader data access than intended.”

    Salesforce customers in Europe and North America were the most impacted by the company shutting down access to its own service.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/faulty-database-script-brings-salesforce-to-its-knees/

Security/Privacy

  • San Francisco Bans Facial Recognition Technology

    The action, which came in an 8-to-1 vote by the Board of Supervisors, makes San Francisco the first major American city to block a tool that many police forces are turning to in the search for both small-time criminal suspects and perpetrators of mass carnage.

    The authorities used the technology to help identify the suspect in the mass shooting at an Annapolis, Md., newspaper last June. But civil liberty groups have expressed unease about the technology’s potential abuse by government amid fears that it may shove the United States in the direction of an overly oppressive surveillance state.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/us/facial-recognition-ban-san-francisco.html

  • Intel Zombieload bug fix to slow data centre computers

    Intel has confirmed that new problems discovered with its processor chips mean that some computer owners face a performance slowdown.

    The company has said that data centres are likely to be worst affected by the fixes required. But it added that the impact on most PC owners should be minimal.

    The so-called Zombieload vulnerability follows the disclosure of the earlier Spectre, Meltdown and Foreshadow bugs last year.

    The latest flaw could theoretically allow an attacker to spy on tasks being handled by any Intel Core or Xeon-branded central processing unit (CPU) released since 2011.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48278400

  • Hacktivist attacks dropped by 95% since 2015

    According to IBM, security incidents caused by hacker groups operating under hacktivism causes has been on a decline since 2015, when the company recorded a peak, with 35 publicly reported incidents.

    Since then, incidents have gone down at a steady pace, with only five reported in 2017, two in 2018, and zero during the first months of the year.

    Attacks from hacktivist groups have continued to happen, but the number of actual incidents (successful breaches) has gone down at a constant pace.

    Researchers blame two factors for this decline — the death of the Anonymous hacker collective and a sustained crackdown by law enforcement officials that have thinned out hacktivist ranks

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/hacktivist-attacks-dropped-by-95-since-2015/

Software/SaaS

  • Adobe Tells Users They Can Get Sued for Using Old Versions of Photoshop

    Adobe this week began sending some users of its Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Premiere, Animate, and Media Director programs a letter warning them that they were no longer legally authorized to use the software they may have thought they owned.

    “We have recently discontinued certain older versions of Creative Cloud applications and and a result, under the terms of our agreement, you are no longer licensed to use them,” Adobe said in the email. “Please be aware that should you continue to use the discontinued version(s), you may be at risk of potential claims of infringement by third parties.”

    Users were less than enthusiastic about the sudden restrictions.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3xk3p/adobe-tells-users-they-can-get-sued-for-using-old-versions-of-photoshop

Other

  • One month ago, Foxconn said its innovation centers weren’t empty — they still are

    At the event announcing the Madison project, Foxconn’s Alan Yeung said the innovation centers were “not empty,” which prompted laughter from the crowd. Yeung also said The Verge’s story contained “a lot of inaccuracies” and that the company would issue a correction soon. He did not say what those inaccuracies were, and Foxconn never issued a correction, nor has it responded to repeated requests to clarify Yeung’s statement.

    One month after Yeung’s comments and promise of a correction, every innovation center in Wisconsin is still empty, according to public documents and sources involved with the innovation center process. Foxconn has yet to purchase the Madison building Yeung announced, according to Madison property records. No renovation or occupancy permits have been taken out for Foxconn’s Racine innovation center, though a permit has been taken out for work on the roof of another property Foxconn bought for “smart city” initiatives. There has been no activity in Foxconn’s Green Bay building, either.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18565408/foxconn-wisconsin-innovation-centers-factories-empty-tax-subsidy

  • AT&T promised 7,000 new jobs to get tax break—it cut 23,000 jobs instead

    The corporate tax cut was subsequently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump on December 22, 2017. The tax cut reportedly gave AT&T an extra $3 billion in cash in 2018.

    But AT&T cut capital spending and kept laying people off after the tax cut. A union analysis of AT&T’s publicly available financial statements “shows the telecom company eliminated 23,328 jobs since the Tax Cut and Jobs Act passed in late 2017, including nearly 6,000 in the first quarter of 2019,” the Communications Workers of America (CWA) said yesterday.

    AT&T’s total employment was 254,000 as of December 31, 2017 and rose to 262,290 by March 31, 2019. But AT&T’s overall workforce increased only because of its acquisition of Time Warner Inc. and two smaller companies, which together added 31,618 employees during 2018, according to an AT&T proxy statement cited in the CWA report.

    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/att-promised-7000-new-jobs-to-get-tax-break-it-cut-23000-jobs-instead/

  • HCL to bring 2,000 IBM staff onboard as part of $1.8-billion deal

    As part of a $1.8-billion deal, HCL Technologies will take onboard nearly 2,000 employees of IBM. The deal between the two companies involved HCL acquiring some of IBM’s software assets. The move comes as the former company is strategising to shore up its IP-led business faster than the traditional software services.

    The deal is expected to be complete by June. The acquisition of IBM’s products would give HCL access to over 5,500 clients globally. Chief Human Resources officer for HCL Tech, Apparao VV said to Economic Times in an interview, “Mode 3, which is the products and platforms segment, has their own salesforce. (With the IBM products), we have inherited somewhere around 1,500-2,000 people.” Mode 2 and 3 are categories for the company’s emerging tech and IP-led businesses that garner more than 28 per cent revenue.

    https://www.businesstoday.in/current/corporate/hcl-2000-ibm-staff-part-1-8-billion-deal/story/346771.html

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash