Category: Supplier Report

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Supplier Report: 12/7/2018

FAANG companies continue to struggle with their employees’ perceptions of long-term business goals. Google once again is facing a public disagreement between employees over their plans for China – with some employees for and others against Project Dragonfly.

In the wake of Diane Greene’s departure at Google. insiders are saying that the company needs to start purchasing companies quickly (and that they already missed out on critical acquisitions that would better enable competition with AWS and Microsoft).

Acquisitions

  • United Tech to Break Itself Into Three Companies

    The company, which makes everything from Otis escalators to Pratt & Whitney jet engines, said Monday that it plans to spin off to shareholders its Otis division and Carrier building systems businesses. The Wall Street Journal had earlier reported on the plans to break apart.

    The separation is expected to be completed in 2020 and leave UTC as a pure-play aerospace company, following its acquisition of airplane-parts maker Rockwell Collins Inc. That $23 billion cash-and-stock deal closed Monday after lengthy antitrust reviews in the U.S. and China.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/united-technologies-to-separate-into-three-independent-companies-1543272920

  • Logitech isn’t buying Plantronics after all

    “Logitech approached Plantronics regarding a potential acquisition and, consistent with the Plantronics Board’s fiduciary duties, the Company entered into discussions with Logitech,” Plantronics’ own statement reads. “Those discussions have ended. Plantronics will not comment further on this matter.”

    A $2.2 billion deal would have been Logitech’s biggest acquisition to date by far, although it wouldn’t necessarily have reflected a particularly high valuation of Plantronics’ consumer business. Earlier this year Plantronics itself bought out video-conferencing solutions maker Polycom for $2 billion, which had to have been the main factor in Logitech’s willingness to pay so much.

    https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/11/25/18111967/logitech-plantronics-deal-acquisition-off

  • Billion-dollar deal: Google pays $1 billion for huge Mountain View business park

    Google’s Mountain View purchase means that in the two years since the search giant began to collect properties in downtown San Jose for a proposed transit village, the company has spent at least $2.83 billion in property acquisitions in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, downtown San Jose and north San Jose alone.

    Adding to the eye-popping numbers: Google’s spending activity in those four markets reaches $3 billion when including the company’s pending purchase in downtown San Jose of several government-owned parcels, along with the minimum value of a big set of surface parking lots that Google intends to buy from Trammell Crow, also downtown near its proposed transit village.

    https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/11/26/billion-dollar-deal-google-pays-1-billion-for-huge-mountain-view-business-park/

Cloud

  • Google Cloud Needs Acquisitions To Challenge Amazon, Analyst Says

    “It’s time to tap Alphabet’s piggy bank to boost GCP (Google Cloud Platform),” Baird analyst Colin Sebastian said in a report Monday. “As Google seeks to carve out greater share in the expanding enterprise cloud services market, we believe the company should embark on a more aggressive shopping spree.”

    The Google cloud unit should mull acquisitions of companies such as Workday(WDAY), ServiceNow (NOW), Atlassian (TEAM) and Salesforce.com (CRM), Sebastian said.

    https://www.investors.com/news/technology/google-cloud-acquisitions-enterprise-market/

  • It turns out some Google staff do believe in controversial plan to re-enter China

    Excerpt from a letter written by a Google employee:
    Dragonfly is well aligned with Google’s mission. China has the largest number of Internet users of all countries in the world, and yet, most of Google’s services are unavailable in China. This situation heavily contradicts our mission, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. While there are some prior success, Google should keep the effort in finding out how to bring more of our products and services, including Search, to the Chinese users.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/28/google-dragonfly-letter/
    Except…
    We are Google employees. Google must drop Dragonfly.

    Our opposition to Dragonfly is not about China: we object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be. The Chinese government certainly isn’t alone in its readiness to stifle freedom of expression, and to use surveillance to repress dissent. Dragonfly in China would establish a dangerous precedent at a volatile political moment, one that would make it harder for Google to deny other countries similar concessions.

    https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-employees-google-must-drop-dragonfly-4c8a30c5e5eb

  • IBM CEO Ginni Rometty Criticizes Big Internet Platforms for Mishandling Customers’ Data

    “The genesis of the trust crisis is the irresponsible handling of personal data by a few dominant consumer-facing platforms,” Ms. Rometty said Monday. The websites “have more power to shape public opinion than newspapers or the television ever had, yet they face very little regulation or liability.”

    “If there are specific companies that misbehave, steps need to be taken,” she said. “I would use a regulatory scalpel, not a sledgehammer” that affects the whole industry.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty-criticizes-rivals-for-mishandling-customers-data-1543257453

Security

  • Marriott reveals massive database breach affecting up to 500 million hotel guests

    Marriott is revealing a massive database breach today, affecting up to 500 million guests of its Starwood hotels the company first acquired in 2016. A security investigation has concluded that there was “unauthorized access” to a database holding hotel guest records. “Marriott learned during the investigation that there had been unauthorized access to the Starwood network since 2014,” says a statement from the company. The Starwood security breach affects a number of branded hotels owned by Marriott, including W Hotels, Sheraton, St. Regis, Westin, and more.

    The breach includes 327 million records of “some combination” of name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, Starwood Preferred Guest (“SPG”) account information, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/30/18119403/marriott-database-breach-starwood-hotels

  • Facebook might not sell user data, but internal documents suggest it certainly considered it

    Back in April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told congress unequivocally that, “We do not sell data.” But these documents suggest that it was something that the company internally considered doing between 2012 and 2014, while the company struggled to generate revenue after its IPO.

    In one case, an employee suggested shutting down data access unless companies spent “$250k a year to maintain access.” In another email, a Facebook employee talked about having a “strategic” talk with Amazon to avoid a “disappointing conversation” about it getting less data in the future. Concerns raised by the Royal Bank of Canada about restricted data access prompted a Facebook employee to ask in an email about how much the bank had agreed to spend on advertising. It’s unclear whether these emails were sent by one or multiple staff members.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/29/18117582/facebook-six4three-internal-documents-emails-selling-user-data

  • Google accused of GDPR privacy violations by seven countries

    The complaints, which each group has issued to their national data protection authorities in keeping with GDPR rules, come in the wake of the discovery that Google is able to track user’s location even when the “Location History” option is turned off. A second setting, “Web and App Activity,” which is enabled by default, must be turned off to fully prevent GPS tracking.

    The BEUC claims that Google uses “deceptive practices” to get users to enable both these options, and does not fully inform users of what doing so entails. As such, consent is not freely given.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27/18114111/google-location-tracking-gdpr-challenge-european-deceptive

Software/SaaS

  • Amazon will reportedly sell software that reads medical records

    The program scans medical files to pick out relevant information such as the medical condition and patient’s procedures and prescriptions. While other algorithms that try to do the same thing have been stymied by doctors’ abbreviations, Amazon claims to have trained its system to recognize the idiosyncrasies in how doctors take notes, sources told the WSJ. The company had already developed and sold this same software to other businesses, including ones focused on travel booking and customer service. For Amazon, this is another move into the health care market on the heels of the retailer buying the online pharmacy PillPack in June.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27/18115077/amazon-electronic-health-records-software-text-analysis-medical

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Microsoft wins $480M military contract to outfit soldiers with HoloLens AR tech

    The company just won a $480 million military contract with the U.S. government to bring AR headset tech into the weapon repertoires of American soldiers.

    The two-year contract may result in follow-on orders of more than 100,000 headsets according to documentation describing the bidding process. One of the contract’s tag lines for the AR tech seems to be its ability to enable “25 bloodless battles before the 1st battle,” suggesting that actual combat training is going to be an essential aspect of the AR headset capabilities.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/28/microsoft-wins-480m-military-contract-to-outfit-soldiers-with-hololens-ar-tech/

Other

  • US charges ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch with fraud over $11bn sale to HP

    Prosecutors have accused Lynch and former Autonomy vice president of finance Stephen Chamberlain of providing HP with false financial statements to make the company seem like a better deal to acquire than it actually was.

    Lynch faces up to 20 years in prison if he is successfully convicted on the 14 charges of conspiracy and fraud in a case filed by prosecutors in a federal court on Thursday. The DoJ is also asking that Lynch forfeit $815m if he’s convicted.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-charges-ex-autonomy-boss-mike-lynch-with-fraud-over-11bn-sale-to-hp/

  • Microsoft Is Worth as Much as Apple. How Did That Happen?

    But the more enduring and important answer is that Microsoft has become a case study of how a once-dominant company can build on its strengths and avoid being a prisoner of its past. It has fully embraced cloud computing, abandoned an errant foray into smartphones and returned to its roots as mainly a supplier of technology to business customers.

    That strategy was outlined by Satya Nadella shortly after he became chief executive in 2014. Since then, Microsoft’s stock price has nearly tripled.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/technology/microsoft-apple-worth-how.html

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Supplier Report: 11/30/2018

The haze of Thanksgiving and Black Friday is wearing off and several companies have found themselves with security issues.

Amazon, Venmo (Paypal) the United States Postal Service, and Microsoft have all been dealing with potential bugs and vulnerabilities (at various levels of severity).

Facebook continues to have exposure to social vulnerabilities – and things are getting tense: Sheryl Sandburg is rumored to be fearing for her job, but Mark Zuckerberg says she isn’t going anywhere (for now).

Artificial Intelligence

  • Lab-Grown Mini-Brains Spontaneously Produced ‘Human-Like’ Brain Waves for the First Time

    After the brain organoids had been growing in petri dishes for about six months, the researchers noticed that the electrical activity they were measuring was occuring at a higher rate than had ever been documented before in lab-grown organoids. Even more surprising, however, was that this electrical activity didn’t resemble the synchronized activity seen in mature human brains. Instead, the electrical patterns were chaotic, a hallmark of a developing brain.

    When Muotri and his colleagues compared the organoids’ electrical activity to that seen in premature babies, they found that it was strikingly similar to the patterns seen in babies born 25-39 weeks after conception.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3meza/lab-grown-mini-brains-spontaneously-produced-human-like-brain-waves-for-the-first-time

Cloud

  • Google’s cloud business under Greene was plagued by internal clashes, missed acquisitions, insiders say

    Google’s lack of big deals has puzzled analysts given how aggressive the major software vendors have been at opening their wallets to win in the cloud. In two of the year’s biggest deals — IBM’s $34 billion purchase of Red Hat and Microsoft’s $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub — Google was involved in talks but ultimately came up short, according to people familiar with the matter.

    Greene wanted to buy GitHub but Pichai was less enthusiastic, unclear why Google would spend big money to get into the market for developer tools, said a person close to the business. Google’s bid for GitHub, whose cloud software lets programmers collaborate and share code, came in at just under $6 billion, and it declined to raise the price after being told of Microsoft’s offer, the person said.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/21/google-cloud-plagued-by-internal-clashes-in-its-effort-to-catch-amazon.html

Security

  • Venmo Caught Off Guard by Fraudsters

    In the first three months of 2018, the digital money-transfer service owned by PayPal Holdings Inc. PYPL -1.48% recorded an operating loss of about $40 million—nearly 40% larger than the loss for which the company had budgeted, according to internal documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

    Expenses related to fraudulent transactions were a big factor. The so-called transaction loss rate, which includes losses related to fraudulent charges, rose from about 0.25% of overall Venmo volume in January to 0.40% in March. The company had been shooting for a rate of roughly 0.24% in those periods, according to the documents.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/venmo-caught-off-guard-by-fraudsters-1543068120?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • USPS took a year to fix a vulnerability that exposed all 60 million users’ data

    The vulnerability included all 60 million user accounts on the website. It was caused by an authentication weakness in the site’s application programming interface (API) that allowed anyone to access a USPS database offered to businesses and advertisers to track user data and packages. The API should have verified whether an account had permissions to read user data but USPS didn’t have such controls in place.

    Users’ personal data including emails, phone numbers, mailing campaign data were all exposed to anyone who was logged into the site. Additionally, any user could request account changes for another user, so they could potentially change another account’s email address and phone number, although USPS does at least send a confirmation email to confirm the changes.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/22/18107945/usps-postal-service-data-vulnerability-security-patch-60-million-users

  • Amazon leaks users’ names and emails in ‘technical error’

    When contacted for comment, Amazon said that neither its website nor any of its systems had been breached and that it has “fixed the issue and informed customers who may have been impacted.” It did not reveal the number of accounts affected or which countries the users are located in. Twitter users across Europe and the United States have reported receiving the email, and forum posts suggest that the error affected consumer rather than business accounts on the platform.

    Characterizing this as a “technical error” means that the incident is unlikely to be related to reports of Amazon firing employees for sharing customer emails with third-party sellers, but the lack of information makes it difficult to establish exactly what happened. We have reached out to the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office, which Amazon would have needed to inform in the event of a breach, for comment.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/21/18106306/amazon-email-address-leak-technical-error-phishing

  • Hackers May Exploit Microsoft PowerPoint For Malware Attacks

    As explained, the malicious file involved in this attack method appears to have a blank page, but secretly connects to a malicious link. Ramilli analyzed the slide structure and noticed an external OLEobject. Upon further analysis, he found the target device already infected by the file downloaded on the system, that is, wraeop.sct. After this step, stage 3 of the attack begins that utilises an internal image to execute additional code leading to stage 4 – the payload execution.

    The researcher suspects the malware to be AzoRult after performing traffic analysis and considering the C&C admin.

    https://latesthackingnews.com/2018/11/18/hackers-may-exploit-microsoft-powerpoint-for-malware-attacks/

Software/SaaS

  • Red Hat to be ‘Switzerland’ within IBM

    According to Marco Bill-Peter, Red Hat senior vice president of customer experience and engagement, Red Hat will function as an independent, distinct unit within IBM’s Hybrid Cloud team and maintain its commitment to open source principles.

    https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/649888/red-hat-switzerland-within-ibm/
    Red Hat Says IBM Acquisition Won’t Change Its Culture — But Can It Change Theirs?

    “There is a commitment from them and a commitment from us as well: we stay true to open source. The other one is [Red Hat will] operate as an independent distinct unit and preserve our unique culture.”

    Significantly changing its culture could cause many of Red Hat’s 13,000 employees to leave, Bill-Peter said. It could also scare off long time partners like Amazon and Google from collaborating on “the next open hybrid cloud”. But Bill-Peter has little doubt IBM is committed to their independence.

    https://which-50.com/red-hat-says-ibm-acquisition-wont-change-its-culture-but-can-it-change-theirs/

Datacenter/Hardware

  • America’s nuclear arsenal relies on this brand-new supercomputer

    In an expansive white-tiled room in Livermore, California sits Sierra, the world’s second most powerful supercomputer. Sierra looks like an unassuming server farm, but is actually a massive connected hive of 190,000 processing cores. It was completed earlier this year, and has been on a shakedown cruise since then: researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ran astrophysics, climate, and precision medicine simulations on Sierra while ferreting out bad components and other technical hiccups.

    But early next year, Sierra’s real work will begin. The system will be “air gapped,” meaning that it will be disconnected from any external network to prevent unauthorized access. Once that happens, it can begin the calculations it was purpose-built to carry out: simulations of nuclear weapons launches and detonations.

    https://www.theverge.com/science/2018/11/20/18097534/nuclear-weapons-supercomputer-sierra-california-classified-stockpile-simulations

Other

  • With Facebook at ‘War,’ Zuckerberg Adopts More Aggressive Style

    Mr. Zuckerberg, who previously set annual goals such as to learn Mandarin and read 25 books, said this year he would focus on fixing Facebook. He believes this tougher management style is necessary to tackle challenges being raised both internally and externally, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

    Mr. Zuckerberg’s new posture could trouble those who feel his “move fast, break things” mantra from Facebook’s early days contributed to many of the company’s current problems. It also has led to confrontations with some of his top reports, including Ms. Sandberg, who has long had considerable autonomy over the Facebook teams that control communications and policy.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/with-facebook-at-war-zuckerberg-adopts-more-aggressive-style-1542577980
    Zuckerberg says stepping down at Facebook is ‘not the plan’

    Otherwise, he seemed unwilling to change his role or step down as leader of the company, and of COO Sandberg said “I hope we work together for decades more to come.” Separately, tonight TechCrunch reports that an internal memo showed outgoing policy head Eliot Schrager take responsibility for the company hiring Definers, a PR firm that spread negative publicity about competitors and pushed angles linking George Soros to critics. In the memo Schrage said Facebook did ask them to do work relating to Soros and that Definers reached out to members of the press showing that he funded some people who were critical of the company.

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/11/20/zuckerberg-says-stepping-down-at-facebook-is-not-the-plan/

Photo: Almos Bechtold

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Supplier Report: 11/23/2018

Amazon executed a master maneuver via the split HQ2 announcement. The company is moving into 3 locations (NYC, Virginia, and Nashville) and gained invaluable access and data about cities across the east coast.

While some are unhappy about the news (including the places that won), the company set a precedent with local governments about how to frame a RFP to get maximum shareholder value. The question is… will there be backlash?

Meanwhile Facebook continues to fail in their attempts to regain the public’s and government’s trust.

Acquisitions

  • Microsoft acquires AI and bot development house XOXCO

    Microsoft is acquiring conversational AI and bot development software vendor XOXCO Inc. for an undisclosed amount. Microsoft announced its acquisition plans on November 14, the same day it is going public with a number of other AI product and service announcements.

    Among its products are Howdy.ai, which Microsoft describes as “the first commercially available bot for Slack that helps schedule meetings.” Howdy assists with the creation of custom bots, including bots for work chat, bots for customer support and bots for marketing. XOXCO also sells Botkit, a collection of development tools for those working on GitHub. Microsoft has partnered with XOXCO for a number of years.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-acquires-ai-and-bot-development-house-xoxco/

  • Oracle buys SD-WAN company Talari Networks

    Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    Talari’s main product is its Failsafe technology, which is an SD-WAN platform used to connect enterprise networks such as branch offices and data centers over large geographic distances. WAN connections traditionally required special proprietary hardware, but the SD-WAN movement does away with this by moving network control into the cloud using a software approach.

    https://siliconangle.com/2018/11/15/oracle-buys-sd-wan-company-talari-networks/

  • Analysts weighing in on $8B SAP-Qualtrics deal don’t see a game changer

    Tony Byrne, founder and principal analyst at Real Story Group, says he likes what Qualtrics brings to SAP, but he is not sure it’s quite as big a deal as McDermott suggests. “Qualtrics enables you to do more sophisticated forms of research which marketers certainly want, but the double benefit is that — unlike SurveyMonkey and others — Qualtrics has experience on the digital workplace side, which could complement some of SAP’s HR tooling.” But he adds that it’s not really the central CEM piece, and that his company’s research has found that SAP still has holes, particularly when it comes to marketing tools and technologies (MarTech).

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/12/analysts-weighing-in-on-8b-sap-qualtrics-deal-dont-see-a-game-changer/

  • Kofax to buy Nuance’s imaging division for $400M in cash

    The acquisition is a notable move for Kofax — itself acquired by Thoma Bravo last year in a $1.5 billion deal — as it continues to build up its business in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), the area of enterprise IT services that uses machine learning, computer vision and other AI-based tools to bring automation to repetitive or mundane back-office tasks that would have in the past been done by humans. (The idea is that this frees up the humans to make more sophisticated assessments in specific cases, or focus on entirely different tasks.)

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/12/kofax-to-buy-nuances-imaging-division-for-400m-in-cash/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Amazon Says It Has Over 10,000 Employees Working on Alexa, Echo

    Amazon announced its decision Tuesday on those two locations, after its yearlong review of possible cities to establish a second headquarters. Mr. Limp said Amazon picked them because of the availability of talent.

    “The tie went to where we could recruit and where people would want to live,” Mr. Limp said.

    Amazon said in September 2017 it had 5,000 employees working on Alexa and Echo. The company’s total workforce has grown 13% to more than 600,000 over the past year.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-says-it-has-over-10-000-employees-working-on-alexa-echo-1542138284

  • Did IBM overhype Watson Health’s AI promise?

    In July, the healthcare news publication Stat published a report claiming “internal IBM documents” showed the Watson supercomputer often spit out erroneous cancer treatment advice and that company medical specialists and customers identified “multiple examples of unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations,” even as IBM was promoting its AI technology.

    Stat cited several slide decks it had obtained from a presentation made by IBM Watson Health’s deputy chief health officer in 2016. The slides mostly blamed problems on the training of Watson by IBM engineers and staff at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC).

    https://www.computerworld.com/article/3321138/healthcare-it/did-ibm-put-too-much-stock-in-watson-health-too-soon.html

Cloud

  • Former Oracle exec Thomas Kurian to replace Diane Greene as head of Google Cloud

    The company had a disparate set of cloud services when she took over, and one of the first things Greene did was to put them all under a single Google Cloud umbrella. “We’ve built a strong business together — set up by integrating sales, marketing, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Google Apps/G Suite into what is now called Google Cloud,” she wrote in the blog post.

    As for Kurian, he stepped down as president of product development at Oracle at the end of September. He had announced a leave of absence earlier in the month before making the exit permanent. Like Greene before him, he brings a level of enterprise street cred, which the company needs as it continues to try to grow its cloud business.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/16/former-oracle-exec-thomas-kurian-to-replace-diane-greene-as-head-of-google-cloud/
    Google’s Cloud-Computing Boss, Diane Greene, to Step Down

    Google’s hiring of Mr. Kurian could suggest the company will consider making a bid for Red Hat Inc., the software-and-services company that International Business Machines agreed to acquire last month for $33 billion, Mr. Reback said. Red Hat would provide Google with the sales and support muscle, as well as credibility with corporate tech buyers, that it lacks, Mr. Reback said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-cloud-computing-boss-diane-greene-to-step-down-1542396164?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Oracle’s JEDI protest denied

    GAO denied Oracle’s protest and said that a single award strategy did not violate federal laws and procurement regulations — one of Oracle’s key arguments.

    “The Defense Department’s decision to pursue a single-award approach to obtain these cloud services is consistent with applicable statutes (and regulations) because the agency reasonably determined that a single-award approach is in the government’s best interests for various reasons, including national security concerns, as the statute allows,” GAO said in a statement announcing its ruling.

    https://washingtontechnology.com/blogs/editors-notebook/2018/11/oracle-lost-jedi-protest.aspx

Software/SaaS

  • Zuckerberg Defends Company in Friday Meeting With Employees

    Some Facebook employees indicated that they believe The Times and other news outlets are unfairly targeting the company because of its outsize influence — a sentiment shared in the session on Friday when employees asked executives what would happen to employees who leak information to the press.

    Mr. Zuckerberg made it clear that Facebook would not hesitate to fire employees who spoke to The New York Times or other publications. But after an employee asked whether the company should issue a report about how many leakers Facebook had found and fired, Mr. Zuckerberg played down the idea.

    Leaks, he said, are usually caused by “issues with morale.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/technology/facebook-mark-zuckerberg.html

  • Facebook Fallout Ruptures Democrats’ Longtime Alliance With Silicon Valley

    Facebook previously signaled that it was ready to work with Mr. Warner and others in Congress on new regulation. Yet at the same time, Facebook turned to a conservative opposition research firm that sought to undermine detractors by publicizing financial links to Mr. Soros, a harsh critic of both Facebook and Google.

    The revelations angered Democrats, who accused Facebook of tapping into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Mr. Soros — the very kind of propaganda the company has claimed to be battling. Facebook has denied that the effort was anti-Semitic.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/technology/facebook-democrats-congress.html

Other

  • Amazon, Google Poised for Race to Hire High-Tech Talent

    Amazon will bring more than 25,000 jobs to New York and another 25,000 to Northern Virginia, it announced Tuesday. Google, meanwhile, plans to double its workforce in New York City to more than 14,000 workers over the next ten years, its chief financial officer said Monday at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech D.Live conference.

    The competition for talent will be stiff, recruiters say. But the two companies each have some distinct requirements that set them apart from other employers—and from each other, according to an analysis that labor-analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies conducted for the Journal. For example, the companies favor different coding languages and technical approaches for software projects.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-google-chase-software-developersbut-not-the-same-ones-1542133719
    New York politicians push back on Amazon HQ2 plans

    “Amazon is a billion-dollar company,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “The idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/14/new-york-politicians-push-back-on-amazon-hq2-plans/

    What Is Amazon Getting From New York City and Virginia?

    Incentives from New York state: $1.525 billion, including:

    • $1.2 billion in refundable tax credits from state’s Excelsior Program over 10 years, based on the creation of 25,000 jobs that pay an average of $150,000.
    • $325 million from Empire State Development based on how much space Amazon takes over the next decade.

    Incentives from New York City:

    • Amazon said it would apply for a New York City subsidy program that would provide it property-tax abatements for up to 25 years.
    • The company also is to seek incentives under a city program that could provide $3,000 in tax credits per eligible employee over 12 years, implying a $900 million benefit if all 25,000 workers are eligible. Amazon may also be eligible for other tax credits.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-is-amazon-getting-from-new-york-city-and-virginia-1542127124

Photo by Mael BALLAND on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 11/16/2018

Activism within technology companies remains a major topic due to headlines about Google and Amazon’s internal cultures.

Google workers remain unhappy with company’s response to repeated sexual harassment accusations from high level management.

Amazon employees remain frustrated with CEO Jeff Bezos’ willingness to support ICE with facial recognition software.

Silicon Valley is doing some collective soul searching because of these issues as well as the industry dependence on Saudi Arabian funding (via Softbank).

This is a good time to ask questions, but not a good time for clear answers.

Acquisitions

  • SAP to buy Qualtrics for $8 billion

    This would be the largest-ever purchase of a VC-backed enterprise software company, and the second-largest sale of any SaaS company (behind Oracle buying Netsuite for $9.3 billion).

    SAP CEO Bill McDermott said in a conference call that the Qualtrics IPO was already over-subscribed, and that he views this deal will mean for SAP what buying Instagram meant for Facebook — with SAP being able to merge its massive trove of operational data with Qualtrics’ collection of user experience data.

    https://www.axios.com/sap-to-buy-qualtrics-for-8-billion-1541977708-2936da4b-aeae-4ad2-9888-3dc384e08823.html

  • Microsoft buys two more video game studios

    In a broadcast from its Xbox Fanfest event this weekend, Microsoft announced the acquisition of two new video game studios: inXile Entertainment and Obsidian Entertainment.

    Both studios are headquartered in California, and both specialise in role-playing games. Both studios also have their roots in the 1990s “golden age” of computer RPGs, staffed by veteran developers from beloved 90s studio Black Isle. inXile is famous for nostalgic, strategic RPGs, such as Wasteland 2, which raised nearly $3m (£2.3m) on Kickstarter in 2012. Obsidian Entertainment is responsible for acclaimed modern RPGs Fallout: New Vegas, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Pillars of Eternity, and South Park: The Stick of Truth.

    https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/nov/10/microsoft-buys-two-new-video-game-studios

  • BlackBerry in talks to buy cybersecurity company Cylance

    BlackBerry Ltd is in talks to buy cybersecurity company Cylance Inc for as much as $1.5 billion, Business Insider reported on Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

    Irvine, California-based Cylance develops AI-based products to prevent cyberattacks on companies and recently considered filing for an IPO, according to the report. (read.bi/2SYzvM9) A deal could be announced as soon as next week, Business Insider reported citing sources, who cautioned the deal could still fall apart.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cylance-m-a-blackberry-idUSKCN1NE2GW
    That is a big purchase considering BlackBerry’s current cash flow

Artificial Intelligence

Cloud

  • Oath is dead. Long live Verizon Media Group/Oath

    Anyway, Oath is now going to be Verizon Media Group/Oath as part of a corporate restructuring undertaken by Verizon’s CEO, Vestberg. The company is going to operate under three different business units — a Consumer Group, led by Ronan Dunne, a current executive vice president of Verizon and president of Verizon Wireless; a Business Group, led by Tami Erwin, currently executive vice president of wireless operations — which will focus on government, small and medium businesses, large business customers, and operate the company’s telematics arm; and a Media Group / Oath, which will be led by Guru Gowrappan, currently Oath’s chief executive.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/05/i-come-to-bury-oath/

Security

  • Jeff Bezos Fails to Explain Away Amazon’s Partnership with ICE

    So far, employees tell me, Amazon has not taken any action in response to its workers’ concerns. In fact, they said, a Thursday all-hands meeting was the first time executives addressed the controversy. Although the meeting wasn’t intended to focus on Rekognition, Bezos and co. fielded a pre-screened question that reportedly asked, “What is being done in response to the concerns voiced by both Amazon employees and civil-rights groups regarding Amazon selling facial-recognition technology to government and police organizations, including ICE?” Bezos passed the question to Andy Jassy, the Amazon Web Services C.E.O., who has defended the company’s decision, arguing that the terms of service for its products protects against misuse

    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/jeff-bezos-fails-to-explain-away-amazons-partnership-with-ice
    Bezos has stated in several interviews that he supports the government. To say that he hasn’t responded or made his position clear is inaccurate.

Datacenter/Hardware

  • AMD stock jumps as Amazon starts using Epyc chips in the cloud

    Amazon, the largest provider of cloud computing services, is now offering three of its most popular products based on AMD’s Epyc server chips, Matt Garman, vice president of computing at Amazon Web Services, said Tuesday at an AMD presentation in San Francisco. The AMD chips allow for a 10 percent saving in computing costs, Garman said.

    Separately, AMD said it has sent samples of a new chip design to customers. Those chips are being made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. with a technique called 7-nanometer production. That technology is equivalent to Intel’s announced 10-nanometer process, but will be in the market first, according to AMD’s Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster. Intel has announced issues with that 10-nanometer transition and said it won’t have server chips in the market until late next year.

    https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/amazon/amd-climbs-after-saying-amazon-will-use-its-cloud-server-chips

Other

  • Google Picks Geisinger CEO to Oversee Health-Care Initiatives

    Geisinger pioneered the use of electronic health records and other digital medical data. Its setup of integrating an insurer with a hospital system has been widely seen as a model, as more health-care companies try to blend various businesses under one roof. It has also been a leader in the broad use of genetic information to help manage and predict patients’ health conditions.

    Alphabet Inc.’s Google has launched various efforts in health care over the years with mixed success. Google Health, its first attempt to create an electronic health-records database, was launched in 2008 but was closed in 2011 after it failed to catch on with consumers and health-care providers.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-picks-geisinger-health-ceo-to-oversee-health-care-initiatives-1541712775

  • Google walkout organizers aren’t satisfied with CEO’s response

    In the Medium post today, the organizers commended Google’s process while also noting how Pichai’s response did not address many of the core demands. In the post, they write:

    However, the response ignored several of the core demands — like elevating the diversity officer and employee representation on the board — and troublingly erased those focused on racism, discrimination, and the structural inequity built into the modern day Jim Crow class system that separates ‘full time’ employees from contract workers. Contract workers make up more than half of Google’s workforce, and perform essential roles across the company, but receive few of the benefits associated with tech company employment. They are also largely people of color, immigrants, and people from working class backgrounds.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/08/google-walkout-organizers-response-sundar-pichai/

  • Tesla picks telco executive Robyn Denholm to replace Elon Musk as chairman

    “I believe in this company, I believe in its mission and I look forward to helping Elon and the Tesla team achieve sustainable profitability and drive long-term shareholder value,” Denholm said in a statement.

    “Robyn has extensive experience in both the tech and auto industries, and she has made significant contributions as a Tesla Board member over the past four years in helping us become a profitable company. I look forward to working even more closely with Robyn as we continue accelerating the advent of sustainable energy,” Musk added.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/08/robyn-denholm-tesla-chair/

  • In Silicon Valley, Saudi Money Keeps Flowing to Startups Amid Backlash

    Silicon Valley startups are continuing to negotiate deals with Saudi Arabia and take its capital through its partner SoftBank Group Corp, amid the controversy over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi that has clouded the kingdom’s role as a global technology investor.

    Two startups— View Inc., which makes light-adjustable glass, and Zume Inc., which uses robots to make pizza—disclosed investments over the past week totaling a combined $1.5 billion from SoftBank’s Saudi-backed Vision Fund.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-silicon-valley-saudi-money-keeps-flowing-to-startups-amid-backlash-1541586601

Photo by Alen Rojnić on Unsplash

Posted on

Supplier Report: 11/2/2018

Companies are trying to find a way to make money in a world where customers are shrinking and costs continue to rise.

IBM’s purchase of Red Hat shows the company has to focus less on their AI goals and get back to software and services.

As people hold on to their phones and computers longer, Apple is raising prices to ensure the cash flow increases. The laws of supply and demand ring true as phone prices rise, demand has dropped. Is this a chicken and egg situation?  Only time will tell.

Acquisitions

  • IBM to Acquire Red Hat for About $33 Billion

    IBM plans to pay $190 a share for Red Hat in what IBM said would be its largest acquisition ever. IBM plans to use cash and debt to make the acquisition. At the end of the third quarter, it held $14.7 billion in cash.

    IBM is paying an unusually large premium in the deal, at 63% above Red Hat’s closing stock price of $116.68 on Friday. IBM said that the deal, including debt, is worth $34 billion. Using Red Hat’s most recently disclosed number for shares outstanding, the equity value of the deal is just under that.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-in-advanced-talks-to-buy-red-hat-1540751279?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

Cloud

  • Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy Pays Off

    The cloud-computing business, called Azure, grew 76%–still healthy but the slowest pace of growth since Microsoft began regularly disclosing the percentage gains about three years ago. Microsoft doesn’t disclose revenue figures for the business, but Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analyst Brad Reback estimated Azure revenue totaled $2.69 billion for the quarter.

    Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud segment, which includes Azure and server products, grew 24% to $8.57 billion, about $300 million above analysts’ expectations. “This absolutely shows Microsoft’s hybrid-cloud strength,” Mr. Reback said.

    Overall, revenue rose 19% to $29.08 billion.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsofts-profit-revenue-rise-even-as-cloud-business-growth-slows-1540413172

Security

  • Private messages from 81,000 hacked Facebook accounts for sale

    The perpetrators told the BBC Russian Service that they had details from a total of 120 million accounts, which they were attempting to sell, although there are reasons to be skeptical about that figure.

    Facebook said its security had not been compromised.

    And the data had probably been obtained through malicious browser extensions.

    Facebook added it had taken steps to prevent further accounts being affected.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46065796

  • Sen. Ron Wyden Introduces Bill That Would Send CEOs to Jail for Violating Consumer Privacy

    Wyden’s bill proposes that companies whose revenue exceeds $1 billion per year—or warehouse data on more than 50 million consumers or consumer devices—submit “annual data protection reports” to the government detailing all steps taken to protect the security and privacy of consumers’ personal information.

    The proposed legislation would also levy penalties up to 20 years in prison and $5 million in fines for executives who knowingly mislead the FTC in these reports. The FTC’s authority over such matters is currently limited—one of the reasons telecom giants have been eager to move oversight of their industry from the Federal Communications Commission to the FTC.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8xjwjz/sen-ron-wyden-introduces-bill-that-would-send-ceos-to-jail-for-violating-consumer-privacy

Software/SaaS

  • IBM is betting the farm on Red Hat, and it better not mess up

    As Jon Shieber pointed out yesterday, it was a tacit acknowledgement that company was not going to get the results it was hoping for with emerging technologies like Watson artificial intelligence. It needed something that translated more directly into sales.

    Red Hat can be that enterprise sales engine. It already is a company on a $3 billion revenue run rate, and it has a goal of hitting $5 billion. While that’s somewhat small potatoes for a company like IBM that generates $19 billion a quarter, it represents a crucial addition.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/29/ibm-is-betting-the-farm-on-red-hat-and-it-better-not-mess-up/

  • Box takes on OpenText, Microsoft as enterprise content hub

    “The next five years in content management will be completely different from the last 20,” said Jeetu Patel, chief product officer at Box. Gone are the days of self-contained repositories that simply store, produce and archive business documents. The key to success entails knowing where your content resides, how to best access it and weaving the content into high-value experiences that solve business problems. The enterprise content hub is where that all begins, and Box is positioning itself to become that focus.

    https://searchcontentmanagement.techtarget.com/feature/Box-takes-on-OpenText-Microsoft-as-enterprise-content-hub

  • Linus Torvalds is back at Linux while GNU’s Stallman unveils a “kindness” policy

    Torvalds’s apparent speedy return and Stallman’s not-explicitly-pro-diversity not-quite-a-code-of-conduct seem to show the open source and free software movements are intent on taking their own approaches to diversity and gender relations. There’s no doubt this side of computing, which has historically been male and white and somewhat insular, is feeling the impact of external critiques. But so far, the projects have made relatively bland moves toward change that may not be enough to satisfy their critics or make would-be contributors who’ve felt excluded see themselves as welcome.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90254836/linus-torvalds-is-back-at-linux-while-gnus-stallman-unveils-a-kindness-policy

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Apple Raises Prices, and Profits Keep Booming

    Apple said Thursday that it sold about as many iPhones in the latest quarter as it did a year earlier but that iPhone revenue rose 29 percent. That was because customers paid nearly 29 percent more for the devices. (The average selling price is now $793.)

    The price increase helped propel Apple’s profits 32 percent higher, to $14.13 billion.

    But after those figures were reported, Luca Maestri, Apple’s chief financial officer, said in a conference call that the company would no longer disclose how many iPhones, iPads or Mac computers it sold. As a result, journalists and analysts will no longer be able to track how Apple’s swelling prices are improving its profits.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/technology/apple-quarterly-results.html

Other

  • Google Walkout: Employees Stage Protest Over Handling of Sexual Harassment

    But employees’ discontent continued to simmer. Many said Google had treated female workers inequitably over time. Others were outraged that Google had paid Andy Rubin, the creator of the Android mobile software, a $90 million exit package even after the company concluded that a harassment claim against him was credible.

    That led some Google employees to call for a walkout. The organizers also produced a list of demands for changing how Google handles sexual harassment, including ending its use of private arbitration in such cases. They also asked for the publication of a transparency report on instances of sexual harassment, further disclosures of salaries and compensation, an employee representative on the company board, and a chief diversity officer who could speak directly to the board.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/technology/google-walkout-sexual-harassment.html

Photo by Taylor Grote on Unsplash