Supplier Report: 6/7/2019

Rumors are dominating the news this week…

Amazon reportedly wants to snap up the potential Sprint/T-Mobile merger castoff Boost to create their own phone service. Some are saying Amazon’s interest is “economically insane“.

Meanwhile the WSJ noted that the Department of Justice is looking into investigating Google for anti-trust practices. Google, who has been fined several times by the European Union, has not been given much scrutiny in the US to this point.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • LinkedIn Snaps Up Drawbridge, Its Second Known Acquisition In 8 Months

    Drawbridge helps companies better understand their customers using machine learning. It addresses user-focused issues like customer experience, digital security, and risk detection according to its website. The company, led by Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan has also been recognized for its focus on consumer identity, was awarded an early patent for identity resolution.

    LinkedIn plans to use Drawbridge’s strength in the area of observations around customers to better target professional audiences, it says.

    https://news.crunchbase.com/news/linkedin-snaps-up-drawbridge-its-second-known-acquisition-in-8-months/

  • Amazon is reportedly interested in buying Boost Mobile

    If helping to create a competitor is a necessary condition to get the Sprint/T-Mobile deal done, then perhaps Amazon can help. A report from Reuters suggests the retailer is interested in buying Boost Mobile from the combo, particularly because it would come with the ability to use T-Mobile’s network for six years. The unnamed sources also claimed the company could be interested in spectrum the newly-merged pair would have to divest.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/30/amazon-prime-boost-mobile/

Artificial Intelligence

  • IBM Sells Face Recognition Surveillance to a Dictatorship: Report

    The American technology titan IBM alongside Chinese tech giants Huawei and Hikvision are selling biometric surveillance systems to the UAE’s police and spy agencies, according to an extensive report in BuzzFeed.

    The UAE is a dictatorship famous for the oppression of dissent, human rights violations, abuse of laborers and migrants, an ongoing ban on international human rights workers and a fight against freedom of expression. It’s also a wildly rich Persian Gulf authoritarian regime that makes a hell of a customer for companies willing to do business with dictators.

    https://gizmodo.com/ibm-sells-face-recognition-surveillance-to-a-dictatorsh-1835101881

Cloud

  • Amazon Web Services Is Worth Half a Trillion Dollars, Analyst Estimates

    The survey found that 19% of IT workloads are now running in the public cloud. About 55% of the survey group is using cloud-based email systems, 53% rely on the public cloud for web hosting, 52% for sales and marketing applications, and 52% for e-commerce.

    Blackledge also nudged up his estimates for AWS—and for Amazon—this morning. He sees AWS revenues of $36.1 billion this year, growing about 31% a year to $140 billion in 2024. He raised his target price for Amazon stock to $2,500 from $2,400, and more remarkably, estimates the value of AWS alone as $506 billion. That is more than the current valuations of IBM, Oracle , and SAP—combined—and about even with the public market valuations for Facebook or Berkshire Hathaway.

    https://www.barrons.com/articles/amazon-stock-web-services-worth-half-a-trillion-dollars-51559060451

Security/Privacy

  • Microsoft Begs Windows Users To Update Now Citing ‘WannaCry 2’ Security Threat

    The warning, which reads almost as if Microsoft wrote it on bended knee, was posted on the Microsoft Security Response Center blog. Referring to the critical Remote Code Execution vulnerability, CVE-2019-0708, that has become better known as BlueKeep, Simon Pope, director of incident response at Microsoft, states that “Microsoft is confident that an exploit exists for this vulnerability.” What’s more, Pope says that such an exploit could “propagate from vulnerable computer to vulnerable computer in a similar way as the WannaCry malware spread across the globe in 2017.” An internet-scale port scanner has already determined that there are at least 923,671 internet-facing machines which are vulnerable to BlueKeep on port 3389 which is used by the Microsoft Remote Desktop feature.

    It is worth reading between the lines here, especially concerning that apparent confidence that a BlueKeep exploit exists. While it is not clear if Microsoft has intelligence that suggests active malware has been weaponized in this way, what we do know is that there is proof of concept (PoC) code available already. One BlueKeep demo on GitHub will crash a system that is vulnerable but does not execute the wormable threat that Microsoft is obviously so worried about.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2019/06/01/microsoft-begs-windows-users-to-update-now-citing-wannacry-2-security-threat/#1a5e8f4f60ca

  • Apple, Google and WhatsApp condemn UK proposal to eavesdrop on encrypted messages

    In practice, the proposal suggests a technique which would require encrypted messaging services — such as WhatsApp — to direct a message to a third recipient, at the same time as sending it to its intended user.

    Levy and Robinson argued the proposal would be “no more intrusive than the virtual crocodile clips” which are currently used in wiretaps of non-encrypted communications. This refers to the use of chat and call apps that can silently copy call data during digital exchanges.

    Opposing this plan, signatories of the open letter argued that “to achieve this result, their proposal requires two changes to systems that would seriously undermine user security and trust.”

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/30/apple-google-and-whatsapp-condemn-gchq-ghost-proposal.html

Software/SaaS

  • AWS announces general availability of its document reading service Textract

    Amazon says Textract is more of an “OCR++ service” because it can recognize tables with a document and understand that the data is placed in rows and columns.

    “The power of Amazon Textract is that it accurately extracts text and structured data from virtually any document with no machine learning experience required,” Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS’s vice president of machine learning, said in a statement. “Subsequently, developers can analyze and query the extracted text and data using our database and analytics services like Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Athena and integrate with other machine learning services like Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Comprehend Medical, Amazon Translate, and Amazon SageMaker to help customers derive deeper meaning from the extracted text and data.”

    Textract supports multiple image formats, including regular JPEG and PNG photo files, scans and PDF documents.

    https://siliconangle.com/2019/05/29/aws-announces-general-availability-document-reading-service-textract/

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Dell Technologies fiscal Q1 mixed as storage, server and networking sales fall

    The company reported first quarter earnings of $329 billion, or 38 cents a share, on revenue of $21.9 billion, up 3 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings for the quarter were $1.45 a share.

    Wall Street was looking for Dell fiscal first quarter non-GAAP earnings of $1.21 a share on revenue of $22.24 billion. Earnings estimates had a wide range given that Dell is recently public.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/dell-technologies-fiscal-q1-mixed-as-storage-server-and-networking-sales-fall/

  • VMware Q1 tops expectations, revenue up 13% to $2.27 billion

    VMware delivered strong first quarter financial results Thursday that beat market expectations. The virtualization giant reported a net income of $505 million, or $1.21 per share. The income includes an unexpected gain of $132 million from VMware’s investment in Pivotal Software, the company said.

    Non-GAAP earnings were $1.32 per share on revenue of $2.27 billion, up 13% year over year. Wall Street was looking for earnings of $1.28 a share and revenue of $2.24 billion.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/vmware-q1-tops-expectations-revenue-up-13-to-2-27-billion/

Other

  • Experts are furious over the FCC’s rosy picture of broadband access

    To generate the report, the FCC relies on data from service providers. Using a form, the companies report on the census-derived “blocks” where they serve customers. Questions about the 2019 report started before it was even released: after an FCC press release put out in February trumpeted major gains in access, the nonprofit advocacy group Free Press noticed a major flaw in the figures. A small carrier, called BarrierFree, erroneously reported it served census blocks with nearly 62 million people, which would make it the fourth largest internet service provider in the country.

    The FCC rectified the error before the release of the final report, reducing the number of people it believed to have access by about 2 million, but the fact that the flaw was uncovered by Free Press raised questions about how closely the agency was monitoring the data it received. Starks’ statement questioned the figures. “It’s incredible to me that an error this large — approximately 62 million in overstated broadband connections — didn’t materially change the report,” he said.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18644726/fcc-broadband-report-high-speed-rural-statistics-reactions

  • Lenovo channels the spirit of IBM: Lays off 500 staff, savages Data Centre Group

    Lenovo is eliminating 500 staff worldwide, including some in its US headquarters at Research Triangle Park in Morrisville, North Carolina.

    The tech giant’s data centre group is reportedly among the hardest hit, with 200 people set to lose their jobs.
    **
    The measures certainly don’t align with the manufacturer’s financial performance: Lenovo reported record revenues for its fiscal 2019, growing to $51bn for the first time, up 12.5 per cent year on year. It turned a profit of $597m, as opposed to a loss of $189m it suffered in FY 2018.

    The Data Center Group was the Chinese biz’s fastest-growing business, with revenue going up 37.1 per cent year-on-year to $6.025bn – but the unit still made a pre-tax loss of $231m.

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/30/lenovo_lays_off_500/

  • Justice Department Prepares Antitrust Investigation of Google

    A Justice Department investigation would put Google—and potentially other tech giants—in an unwanted spotlight at a time when major internet companies already have seen their political fortunes turning, both in the U.S. and overseas.

    The shift has come with multibillion-dollar antitrust fines for Google from the European Union. Facebook Inc. has come under intense fire over Russian use of its platform to meddle in the 2016 election. Policy makers also are increasingly skeptical of internet companies’ privacy practices, as well as their potential to create other public harm.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-department-is-preparing-antitrust-investigation-of-google-11559348795

    Update: Amazon could face heightened antitrust scrutiny under a new agreement between U.S. regulators

    Amazon could face heightened antitrust scrutiny under a new agreement between U.S. regulators that puts it under closer watch by the Federal Trade Commission, three people familiar with the matter said.

    The move is the result of the FTC and the Department of Justice, the U.S. government’s leading antitrust enforcement agencies, quietly divvying up competition oversight of two of the country’s top tech companies, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the government’s work is confidential. The Justice Department is set to have more jurisdiction over Google, The Washington Post reported on Friday, paving the way for a potential investigation of the search-and-advertising giant.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/02/amazon-could-face-heightened-antitrust-scrutiny-under-new-agreement-between-us-regulators

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Supplier Report: 9/1/2017

Google’s main mission statement has been “don’t be evil”, but is that still the case?  Last month, I covered that Google has been caught funding pro-google studies (via universities and other research firms) and not disclosing that fact. This week Google had someone fired from a think tank they funded for supporting the EU’s stance that Google is a monopoly.

Apple is getting more daring… they announced a new application development deal with Accenture (where does that leave IBM?) and CEO Tim Cook has been taking some swipes at the US government regarding economic growth.

Observation: I want to point out a quirky trend in this week’s news: Almost all of the news feed items about Dell are about golf and all of the HPE news was about Meg Whitman not getting the Uber job (hundreds of articles for both).  Why aren’t these companies generating any other news and controlling their own narratives?

Artificial Intelligence

  • Shark-detecting drones to patrol Australian beaches

    Drones equipped with a shark detection system powered by artificial intelligence will start patrolling some Australian beaches from next month in a bid to improve safety.

    The battery-powered drones will provide a live-video feed to a drone operator who then uses the shark-spotting software to identify sharks in real time and with more accuracy than the human eye.

    Studies have shown that people have a 20-30 percent accuracy rate when interpreting data from aerial images to detect shark activity. Detection software can boost that rate to 90 percent, said Dr Nabin Sharma, a research associate at the University of Technology Sydney’s School of Software.

    http://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-sharkdrone-idUSKCN1B51KB

  • How Google and Microsoft Use AI to Turn Your Clicks Into Ad Dollars

    Google couldn’t make anyone available for interview before publication. Microsoft tells WIRED that it constantly tests new machine learning technologies in its advertising system. “Online advertising is perhaps by far the most lucrative application of AI [and] machine learning in the industry,” says John Cosley, director of marketing for Microsoft search advertising. Bing recently started using new deep learning algorithms to better understand the meaning of search queries and find relevant ads, he says.

    Research papers on using deep learning for ads may undersell both its true power and the challenge of tapping into it. Companies carefully scrub publications to avoid disclosing corporate secrets. And researchers tend to describe simplified versions of the problems faced by engineers who must target and serve ads at huge scale and speed, says Suju Rajan, head of research at computational advertising company Criteo. The company has released anonymized logs of millions of ad clicks that Google and others have used in papers on improving click predictions.

    https://www.wired.com/story/big-tech-can-use-ai-to-extract-many-more-ad-dollars-from-our-clicks/

Cloud

  • VMware is hedging its bets with its AWS partnership plus true private cloud

    “Fast forward to today. It’s growing at 10 to 12 percent a year; license is up 13 percent; it’s throwing off operating cash flow at $3 billion a year,” Vellante said. “Wall Street’s talking about VMware now being an undervalued stock.”

    Does this signal a shift in customer mindset? Do they want to bring the cloud operating model on-premises instead of migrating their businesses to cloud? VMware appears to think so.

    https://siliconangle.com/blog/2017/08/28/vmwares-hedging-bets-with-aws-partnership-plus-true-private-cloud-say-analysts-vmworld/

  • Amazon Has A Major Expense Storm Coming Its Way, Even If You Can’t Really See It

    …Effectively all of the servers used to run Amazon’s entire business, which have a three-year useful life, will never be counted as an expense when determining the reported operating cash flow number. The Capital Leases will never factor into their definition of free cash flow, since the original transaction is recorded under the Supplemental Cash Flow information and the payments on the Capital Leases are included in the Financing section of the Cash Flow Statement. The debt associated with purchasing the assets is never disclosed as a separate line item on the Balance Sheet, but rather buried in Other Liabilities and a footnote.

    https://seekingalpha.com/article/4102800-amazon-major-expense-storm-coming-way-even-really-see

  • Oracle to Hire 5K Executives for Cloud Operations in 2017

    Moreover, Oracle has introduced a number of cloud services like the retail merchandising solution , security solution over the last few quarters that have helped it to gain customers.

    However, with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) still being one of the weaklings in the portfolio, the company is expected to spend more on it. This might affect gross margin in the near term. Nevertheless, the company anticipates SaaS gross margin to eventually rise to 80% in the long haul, thereby leading to an improvement in the bottom line.

    http://www.nasdaq.com/article/oracle-to-hire-5k-executives-for-cloud-operations-in-2017-cm839227

Datacenter

  • IBM talks about alphas instead of betas in storage
  • So… Cisco probably spent a good sum of money to make a commercial with Peter Dinklage (from Game of Thrones)

    In a blog post, Cisco CMO Karen Walker writes, “Peter Dinklage is the perfect messenger because of his global fame and ability to speak in a bold, intelligent, and captivating way. As he wanders through the streets of London, you hang on to each of his words as he describes just how simple–and monumental–the new network is.”

Software/SaaS

  • Apple takes another step into Microsoft’s core territory with Accenture deal

    For Apple, the partnership is part of a continued push to win over business clients and try to knock Microsoft from its long-held throne as the default operating system in the corporate world. To that end, Apple has established partnerships with IBM, Cisco, Deloitte and SAP aimed at moving more business applications over to iOS devices and making them easier to use in corporate settings.

    The engineering teams will focus on apps that are used by front-line workers and consumers, such as apps that run on iPads for the lobbies of retail banks, where a teller and a customer might both interact with the app.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/apple-takes-another-step-into-microsofts-core-territory-with-accenture-deal.html
    Wasn’t the IBM deal supposed to do the same thing? I wonder how Big Blue feels about a major competitor partnering with Apple to do the same thing they were supposed to do.

  • IBM, Food Giants Harness Blockchain Tech to Improve Supply Chain Traceability

    Together with its partners, IBM will identify and prioritize new areas where blockchain can benefit food ecosystems and inform new IBM solutions. This work will draw on multiple IBM pilots and production networks in related areas that successfully demonstrate ways in which blockchain can positively impact global food traceability.

    The tech giant says that parallel trials with Walmart in China and the US have demonstrated that blockchain can be used to track a product from the farm through every stage of the supply chain, right to the retail shelf, in seconds instead of days or weeks. The trials also demonstrated that stakeholders throughout the global food supply chain view food safety as a collaborative issue, rather than a competitive one and are willing to work together to improve the food system for everyone.

    http://www.sustainablebrands.com/news_and_views/startups/sustainable_brands/ibm_harnesses_blockchain_technology_improve_supply_chain_

Other

  • Tim Cook: Since the government isn’t doing it, Apple has a “moral responsibility to help grow the economy”

    “The reality is that government, for a long period of time, has for whatever set of reasons become less functional and isn’t working at the speed that it once was. And so it does fall, I think, not just on business but on all other areas of society to step up.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40460059/tim-cook-since-the-government-isnt-doing-it-apple-has-a-moral-responsibility-to-help-grow-the-economy

  • Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant

    “Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings,” Mr. Lynn said. “People are so afraid of Google now.”

    Google rejected any suggestion that it played a role in New America’s split with Open Markets. Riva Sciuto, a Google spokeswoman, pointed out that the company supports a wide range of think tanks and other nonprofits focused on information access and internet regulation. “We don’t agree with every group 100 percent of the time, and while we sometimes respectfully disagree, we respect each group’s independence, personnel decisions and policy perspectives.”

    New America’s executive vice president, Tyra Mariani, said it was “a mutual decision for Barry to spin out his Open Markets program,” and that the move was not in any way influenced by Google or Mr. Schmidt.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-google-new-america.html

  • Warren Buffett says the future belongs to new age Apple, not to doyen of past IBM

    Warren Buffett had previously voiced a preference to avoid investing in technology stocks, but began building a stake in Apple in 2016. CNBC had earlier reported that the Oracle of Omaha added nearly 76 million more shares in January. The iconic investor had said back then, “Apple strikes me as having quite a sticky product, and an enormously useful product to people that use it.”

    In comparison, Berkshire Hathaway sold off nearly 33% of its total holdings in IBM in the first and second quarters of 2017. At the end of 2016, Berkshire Hathaway had 81 million shares of IBM. In may this year, he told the channel, “I don’t value IBM the same way that I did six years ago when I started buying. I’ve revalued it somewhat downward.”

    http://www.financialexpress.com/market/warren-buffett-says-the-future-belongs-to-new-age-apple-not-to-doyen-of-past-ibm/834658/

Photo: Nicolas Picard