Category: Supplier Report

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Supplier Report: 7/20/2018

The Source: Joey Lombardi: This Dude Loves Mainframes

Amazon’s super-hyped Prime Day was successful, but the extra traffic shut down Amazon.com for a few hours. There are reports that data-center employees were scrambling to find unused servers and equipment to keep the site running.

Google is facing another massive fine ($5B) from the EU over their android operating system. Assuming the EU is successful after appeals, what are they going to do with all that money?

IBM is reporting improved financial performance and mainframe sales are at the center of this success.

Acquisitions

  • Ajit Pai Finds a Spine, Sends Sinclair-Tribune Deal to Merger Purgatory

    Current law prohibits any one company from reaching more than 39 percent of all U.S. TV households in a bid to protect competition and local reporting. Sinclair had petitioned the FCC to eliminate the ownership cap entirely, but the FCC lacks the authority to overturn federal law (that apparently wasn’t stopping the FCC from considering the move anyway).

    In case that failed, Sinclair had a backup plan. Consumer advocates highlighted how Sinclair had hoped to offload numerous stations to either shell companies, subsidiaries, or allies, letting it limbo under the ownership cap.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/594b73/ajit-pai-sinclair-tribune-deal

Cloud

  • Big Tech’s Growth Comes With a Big Bill

    Apple, for instance, is expected to boost its R&D spending by 17% to $14 billion for this calendar year, outpacing the 10% revenue growth analysts expect for the same period. The iPhone maker’s R&D bill has been steadily climbing over the last several years as it seeks out new hit products to offset its slowing smartphone and tablet businesses. But Apple still underspends Google-parent Alphabet as well as Microsoft and Amazon in both whole dollars and in percent of revenue, leading Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein to note last week that the company may still be “underinvesting in innovation.”

    Capital spending will also rise sharply—especially for companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google that have to keep building out network infrastructure to deliver their growing list of cloud-based services. Google’s capex bill alone is projected to surge more than 50% this year, while analysts expect increases of more than 30% for Microsoft and Amazon. And most projections for Amazon exclude the capital leases that the company also uses.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-techs-growth-comes-with-a-big-bill-1531819800?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • DuckDuckGo slams Google following EU antitrust decision

    The allegation came in a series of tweets from the DuckDuckGo Twitter account as a response to the fine. In them, the search engine claims that the company’s “anti-competitive search behavior isn’t limited to Android,” but it also exists in other products, like the Chrome browser as well. “Every time we update our Chrome browser extension, all of our users are faced with an official-looking dialogue asking them if they’d like to revert their search settings and disable the entire extension,” the tweet said.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/20/17595612/google-antitrust-eu-duckduckgo-chrome
    Update: Google owns Duck.com, but it’ll give rival DuckDuckGo a shoutout anyhow

    But after a new round of complaints this Friday, Google has relented. Google comms VP Rob Shilkin just quacked tweeted that a new landing page will give people an opportunity to click from Duck.com straight through to DuckDuckGo. Or to the Wikipedia page for ducks, because that’s only fair.

    https://www.cnet.com/news/google-owns-duck-com-but-itll-give-rival-duckduckgo-a-shoutout-anyhow/
    The Source: Joey Lombardi: Duck Duck No

  • Amazon’s EC2 gets faster processors, new high-memory instances

    Not only can you now run EC2 inside a Snowball Edge device, but the company also announced a bunch of new EC2 instance types in the cloud. Thanks to these new instance types, developers now have access to a new instance type (Z1d) with custom Xeon processors that can run at up to 4.0 GHz, as well as new memory-optimized instances (R5) that run at up to 3.1 GHz and that feature up to 50 percent more CPU power and 60 percent more memory than their predecessors. There also are some bare metal variants of these instances, as well as an R5d version that features local NVMe storage.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/amazons-ec2-gets-faster-processors-new-high-memory-instances/

Security

  • What Stays on Facebook and What Goes? The Social Network Cannot Answer

    In exchanges with reporters and lawmakers over the past week, its leaders — including Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive — have been comically tripped up by some of the most basic questions the site faces. Mr. Zuckerberg, in an interview with the journalist Kara Swisher that was published Wednesday, argued that Facebook would not ban Holocaust denialism on the site because “there are things that different people get wrong.” He later explained there were many other ways that Holocaust deniers could be penalized by Facebook — yet lucidity remained elusive.

    Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments fit a larger pattern. Presented with straightforward queries about real-world harm caused by misinformation on their service, Facebook’s executives express their pain, ask for patience, proclaim their unwavering commitment to political neutrality and insist they are as surprised as anyone that they are even in the position of having to come up with speech rules for billions of people.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/technology/facebook-misinformation.html
    Zuckerberg: I didn’t intend to defend Holocaust deniers

    Earlier today, Recode’s Kara Swisher released an extensive interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg covering the platform’s struggles during a long, scandal-ridden year. Nestled inside was an exchange where Swisher pressed the executive on why it allows some conspiracy theorists to be allowed to post on the platform, regardless of the truth of their statements — and he explicitly explained that these users, including Holocaust deniers, deserve a voice. This predictably kicked up a ruckus online, and Zuckerberg emailed a clarification to Recode reaffirming that he finds Holocaust deniers “deeply offensive” and didn’t intend to defend them. But he did state Facebook’s goal: Not to stop fake news, but prevent it from spreading.

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/18/zuckerberg-i-didn-t-intend-to-defend-holocaust-deniers/
    The Source: Joey Lombardi: Zuck has no answers

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Internal documents show how Amazon scrambled to fix Prime Day glitches

    The e-commerce giant also had to add servers manually to meet the traffic demand, indicating its auto-scaling feature may have failed to work properly leading up to the crash, according to external experts who reviewed the documents. “Currently out of capacity for scaling,” one of the updates said about the status of Amazon’s servers, roughly an hour after Prime Day’s launch. “Looking at scavenging hardware.”

    A breakdown in an internal system called Sable, which Amazon uses to provide computation and storage services to its retail and digital businesses, caused a series of glitches across other services that depend on it, including Prime, authentication and video playback, the documents show.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/19/amazon-internal-documents-what-caused-prime-day-crash-company-scramble.html

  • Mainframes the Unlikely Star of IBM’s Q2 Earnings

    It was systems hardware that really stood out though: the company’s IBM Z line of mainframes was up 100 percent year-on-year, “reflecting high adoption rate of [the] z14 and strong demand for new workloads”, IBM revealed in a slideshow.

    (The new IBM z14 single frame model mainframes can process 850 million encrypted transactions per day in the space of two floor tiles, and are a popular choice for data centers; it can deliver 100 percent encryption of application, cloud service and database data and allow open source machine learning to run on it.)

    https://www.cbronline.com/news/ibm-q2-mainframes

  • Amazon denies it will challenge Cisco with switch sales

    “Cisco and AWS have a longstanding customer and partner relationship, and during a recent call between Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins and AWS CEO Andy Jassy, Andy confirmed that AWS is not actively building a commercial network switch,” a Cisco Systems Inc. spokesman told MarketWatch on Wednesday.

    https://www.marketwatch.com/story/exclusive-amazon-denies-it-will-challenge-cisco-with-switch-sales-2018-07-18
    The Source: Joey Lombardi

  • Google builds its own subsea cable from the US to France

    As Google notes, owning the cable means it can lay it exactly where it needs it to be to connect its data centers — without having to take into account the needs of other consortium partners. Owning the cable also means that Google owns all the bandwidth for the lifetime of the cable (usually 15 to 25 years).

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/google-builds-its-own-subsea-cable-from-the-us-to-france/

Other

  • Google fined a record $5 billion by the EU for Android antitrust violations

    Google has been hit with a record-breaking €4.3 billion ($5 billion) fine by EU regulators for breaking antitrust laws. The European Commission says Google has abused its Android market dominance in three key areas. Google has been bundling its search engine and Chrome apps into the operating system. Google has also blocked phone makers from creating devices that run forked versions of Android, and it “made payments to certain large manufacturers and mobile network operators” to exclusively bundle the Google search app on handsets.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17580694/google-android-eu-fine-antitrust
    Again I ask – what would the EU do with this money? How does this fine help the people and companies Google impacted?

  • IBM Rides Newer Businesses to Higher Revenue, Profit

    The Armonk, N.Y., company’s profit rose 3.1% to $2.4 billion. Excluding special items, IBM had a profit of $3.08 a share. Analysts polled by FactSet were expecting an adjusted profit of $3.04 a share.

    IBM shares, down 6% over the past year, rose 2.8% to $148.50 in after-hours trading on Wednesday.

    Despite reporting higher revenue and profit in the latest quarter, IBM still faces challenges on several fronts. In its Cognitive Solutions segment, which includes services tied to the Watson supercomputer, sales fell 1% after adjusting for currency moves to $4.6 billion.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-rides-new-businesses-to-higher-revenue-profit-1531946666?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

Photo by Jj Mendez on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 7/13/2018

Amazon Networking: Joey Lombardi: The Source

Amazon is sending computer networking technology stocks into a dive with rumors they are getting into the router business.  Can the “eater of worlds” break into a market with low margins, demanding customers, and ever-present threat of hacks and security issues – and maintain customer satisfaction?

Amazon does control half of all online sales in the US… HALF. So they do know a thing or two about network traffic optimization.

IBM is finding that big data breaches cost corporations on average about $3.5M per event. Better make sure those routers are updated.

Acquisitions

  • Broadcom acquires CA Technologies for $18.9B in cash

    Broadcom, the massive semiconductor supplier you may remember from its failed attempt to acquire Qualcomm, today announced that it has reached a definitive agreement with CA Technologies, a major IT management software and solutions provider. The price of the acquisition is $18.9 billion in cash. CA’s shareholders will receive $44.50 per share, a 20 percent premium over the closing price of the company’s stock today.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/11/broadcom-acquires-ca-technologies-for-18-9b-in-cash/

  • The Department of Justice isn’t done fighting the AT&T-Time Warner merger

    “The Court’s decision could hardly have been more thorough, fact-based, and well-reasoned,” said AT&T General Counsel David McAtee in a statement. “While the losing party in litigation always has the right to appeal if it wishes, we are surprised that the DOJ has chosen to do so under these circumstances. We are ready to defend the Court’s decision at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/12/doj-appeals-att-time-warner/

  • AT&T acquires threat intelligence company AlienVault

    AT&T has announced plans to acquire cybersecurity company AlienVault. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    Founded in 2007, AlienVault offers a number of tools for detecting and responding to security threats through its Unified Security Management (USM) platform, while its Open Threat Exchange (OTX) platform serves as an online community where security professionals and researchers can share their latest findings and threat data.

    https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/10/att-acquires-threat-intelligence-company-alienvault/

  • Intel To Acquire eASIC: Lower Cost ASICs in FPGA Design Time

    Intel is also announcing that it will acquire a company called eASIC which develops FPGA-like design tools to roll out ‘structured ASICs’. These structured ASICs an intermediary between a full FPGA and a full ASIC that allow for a quick roll out time and cheaper production cost. Technically Intel has been using eASIC technology since at least 2015 in its custom Xeons, however today’s announcement means that the eASIC team will become part of Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group (PSG). The deal is expected to close within the next month.

    https://www.anandtech.com/show/13075/intel-acquires-easic-lower-cost-asics-in-fpga-design-time

Artificial Intelligence

  • Google Is Reportedly Looking to Take Over Call Centers With Its Duplex AI Assistant

    A report from The Information suggests Google may be making a play to find other applications for its human-sounding assistant and has already started experimenting with ways to use Duplex to do with away roles currently filled by humans—a move that could have ramifications for millions of people.

    Citing a person familiar with Google’s plans, The Information reported the company is already in conversation with at least one potential customer that would like to integrate Duplex into its operations. That firm, an unnamed large insurance company, is reportedly interested in using the voice assistant to handle simple, straightforward customer service calls.

    https://gizmodo.com/google-is-reportedly-looking-to-take-over-call-centers-1827379911

Cloud

  • Oracle Set to Merge Its Cloud Business

    Oracle (ORCL) is gradually converting its cloud service types—SaaS1, PaaS2, and IaaS3—into a single standard data center. These data warehouses are supported by a bare-metal infrastructure managed by a single unified operations team.

    The consolidation of these cloud services may help offer Oracle huge economies of scale by sharing data warehouse costs across the three categories, expanding margins. By bringing all three categories under one roof, the company can also improve efficiency.

    https://marketrealist.com/2018/07/oracle-set-to-merge-its-cloud-business
    Amazon is all about networking equipment

Security

  • ‘Mega’ Data Breaches Cost Companies a Staggering Fortune, IBM Study Finds

    According to the IBM study, while the average cost of a data breach globally hovers just under $4 million—a 6.4 percent increase over the past year—costs associated with so-called mega breaches (an Equifax or Target, for example) can reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The average cost of a breach involving 1 million records is estimated at around $40 million, while those involving 50 million records or more can skyrocket up to $350 million in damages.

    Of the 11 mega breaches examined by IBM, 10 were a result of criminal attacks.

    The average amount of time that passes before a major company notices a data breach is pretty atrocious. According to IBM, mega breaches typically go unnoticed for roughly a year.

    https://gizmodo.com/mega-data-breaches-cost-companies-a-staggering-fortune-1827510737

  • Microsoft urges lawmakers to regulate facial recognition technology

    The company, one of the key makers of software capable of recognizing individual faces, said it would take steps to make those systems less prone to bias; develop new public principles to govern the technology; and move more deliberately to sell its software and expertise in the area. While Microsoft said the technology industry bears responsibility for its products, it argued that government action is also needed.

    “The only effective way to manage the use of technology by a government is for the government proactively to manage this use itself,” Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, Brad Smith, said Friday in a blog post. “And if there are concerns about how a technology will be deployed more broadly across society, the only way to regulate this broad use is for the government to do so. This in fact is what we believe is needed today — a government initiative to regulate the proper use of facial recognition technology, informed first by a bipartisan and expert commission.”

    http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-facial-recognition-20180713-story.html

Software/SaaS

  • OpenText CEO opens up on organic growth ambitions

    But while M&A continues to be the leading growth driver for OpenText, opportunities for organic growth seem to be getting more attention at Canada’s largest software company, judging from announcements and discussions at the company’s Enterprise World 2018 event, being held this week in Toronto. And what does the company expect to be the three main sources of that growth? Cloud, AI and security.

    For a start, there was CEO Mark Barrenechea’s announcement in his Tuesday keynote of two new strands to the company’s cloud strategy: first, the release of the company’s new hybrid cloud platform OT2; and second, the news that its flagship EIM platform, OpenText Release 16, will now run on cloud infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft Azure, in addition to the existing options of on-premise or on the OpenText cloud as a managed service.

    https://diginomica.com/2018/07/12/opentext-ceo-opens-up-on-organic-growth-ambitions/

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Amazon Web Services Targets Cisco in Networking

    Networking company stocks fell off Friday following a report by The Information that Amazon Web Services is considering selling its own network switching devices.

    Cisco dropped 4 percent by the end of trading, representing a loss in stock value of roughly $8.5 billion. Juniper gave up more than 2 percent. Arista Networks dropped more than 4 percent, and F5 Networks dropped roughly a percent. Broadcom, which makes chips used in switching devices, was down more than 3 percent on the day following the report, extending a rough week for the stock.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/13/aws-network-devices-report-cisco-juniper-fall.html

Other

  • Amazon’s share of the US e-commerce market is now 49%, or 5% of all retail spend

    Amazon is set to clear $258.22 billion in US retail sales in 2018, according to eMarketer’s figures, which will work out to 49.1 percent of all online retail spend in the country, and 5 percent of all retail sales.

    Now, it is fast approaching a tipping point where more people will be spending money online with Amazon, than with all other retailers — combined. Amazon’s next-closest competitor, eBay, a very, very distant second at 6.6 percent, and Apple in third at 3.9 percent. Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer when counting physical stores, has yet to really hit the right note in e-commerce and comes in behind Apple with 3.7 percent of online sales in the US.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-commerce-market-is-now-49-or-5-of-all-retail-spend/

  • Xiaomi’s Weak I.P.O. Raises Doubts About China’s Tech Boom

    But many investors view Xiaomi as still largely a hardware maker, not an internet company. It has promised fatter margins from selling internet services to its smartphone users, but those services accounted for less than 9 percent of last year’s revenue.

    “Xiaomi has been billing itself as a Chinese internet company, but they really are not quite yet a pure internet company,” said Dan Wang, a technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics.

    “Investors haven’t really bought into that story,” Mr. Wang added.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/business/xiaomi-hong-kong-ipo.html

  • IBM earnings: Security is growing fast, but is it enough money to matter?

    Through the first quarter, IBM’s security business had generated $3.4 billion in revenue in the previous 12 months, for growth of 66% year over year, the company told MarketWatch. In the first quarter, security brought in $800 million with growth of 65% from the year-ago period, compared with SI’s 15% growth overall.

    That is just a fraction of IBM’s $19.07 billion in reported revenue, however, and may not be enough to truly move the needle as other segments grow much slower. Analysts expect technology services and cloud-platform revenue to rise 2.6%, to $8.63 billion and cognitive-solutions revenue to rise 4.4% to $4.76 billion from the year-ago quarter. Technology services and cloud-platform includes IBM Cloud, formerly known as Bluemix, while cognitive solutions includes IBM’s Watson AI.

    https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ibm-earnings-security-is-growing-fast-but-is-it-enough-money-to-matter-2018-07-13?ns=prod/accounts-mw

Photo by Andrew Sharples on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 7/6/2018

The Source Report: 7/6: Dell is going public: Joey Lombardi

Dell is going public again after Founder Michael Dell took the company private 5 years ago. Keeping VMWare was a major driver in this decision as is managing the debt incurred from acquiring EMC two years ago.

IBM has lined up ANOTHER large IT contract, this time with the Australian government which is surprising considering several public failures on joint efforts over the last few years.

Acquisitions

  • Dell will again become a publicly traded company in $22 billion buyout

    Dell is returning to the public market in a $22 billion stock buyout that will still leave CEO / founder Michael Dell and investment firm Silver Lake firmly in charge, as reported by The Financial Times. The company went private in 2013 following a $25 billion buyout by Dell and Silver Lake. Since then, Dell has seen success both in the enterprise market and with its consumer-focused PCs.

    By moving back to the public sphere, Dell and Silver Lake will retain control over VMWare — which Dell acquired back in 2015 when it purchased enterprise data company EMC to better appeal to business customers — and be placed in a better position to reduce its debts.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/2/17525450/dell-public-company-stock-buyout-market

  • AT&T Jacks Up TV Prices Post Merger After Claiming That Wouldn’t Happen

    AT&T last week informed its DirecTV Now streaming video customers they’ll be paying $5 more to use the service starting in August.

    “To continue delivering the best possible streaming experience for both new and existing customers, we’re bringing the cost of this service in line with the market—which starts at a $40 price point,” AT&T said in a statement to Cord Cutter News, which first reported the hike.

    The problem: AT&T repeatedly claimed that the company’s merger with Time Warner would lower rates, not raise them.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gy3xv4/atandt-jacks-up-tv-prices-post-merger-after-claiming-that-wouldnt-happen

Artificial Intelligence

  • Oracle recently offered an artificial intelligent expert as much as $6 million in total pay as Silicon Valley’s talent war heats up

    Oracle offered at least one candidate a $6 million package made up of salary and equity incentives to convince them to join the company, a source told Business Insider.

    That candidate had other job offers but went with Oracle because of the higher pay, the source said.

    https://nordic.businessinsider.com/oracle-artificial-intelligence-expert-pay-2018-7/

Cloud

  • Google Cloud’s COO has left after less than a year

    Before joining Google in late November 2017, Bryant spent more than 25 years at Intel, most recently leading its data center group. She took what was supposed to be a temporary leave from that role in May due to “family matters,” but ended up joining Google instead, under Cloud CEO Diane Greene.

    Bryant’s hire was a win for the search giant’s cloud business, which is widely seen as No. 3 in the public cloud market, behind Amazon and Microsoft. As the relative newcomer in the space, Google Cloud’s challenge has been to prove its capabilities to large businesses, though Greene has said that there are no more “deal blockers” in the way of new contracts.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/03/google-cloud-coo-diane-bryant-has-left-after-less-than-a-year.html

Security

  • Australian National University ‘hit by Chinese hackers’

    Networks at the Australian National University in Canberra, which is home to several defence-focused research units, were breached “months ago” by attackers whom authorities traced to China, said Channel Nine television and Fairfax Media websites, citing “multiple” unnamed security and intelligence sources.

    Also

    China has consistently and strongly denied being involved in any hacking attacks and its embassy in Australia, as well as the foreign ministry in Beijing, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The news comes as tension flares over new Australian laws that seek to curb foreign interference, measures the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has said were adopted to allay concerns over Chinese influence in politics and universities.

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jul/07/australian-national-university-hit-by-chinese-hackers

Software/SaaS

  • Micro Focus sells Suse for $2.5B

    Suse, one of the longest-running commercial Linux distributors and, these days, a major player in the open-source infrastructure and management space, has been through a few ownership changes in recent years. Micro Focus acquired Suse from The Attachmate Group back in 2014, which itself had acquired Novell, the then-owner of Suse, in 2010. Today, Micro Focus announced that Suse is changing owners yet again, as private equity firm and venture capital fund EQT is acquiring Suse.

    While the exact terms of the deal where not disclosed, EQT says the deal valued Suse at $2.535 billion.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/02/micro-focus-sells-suse-for-2-5b/

Datacenter/Hardware

  • IBM lands $740M contract to provide IT services to Australian government

    The main idea is to “prioritize the introduction of new technologies to citizen services,” Australia’s government said.

    One of the programs involves IBM setting up a research team in Melbourne that will be tasked with studying potential applications for AI, blockchain and quantum computing in government. Additional research units will be based in Canberra and on the Gold Coast, working on new cybersecurity tools for data protection. They’ll also be looking into how supercomputers can be used to enhance government services.

    This is important…

    IBM’s contract award comes despite a couple of recent calamities relating to past services it provided for Australia’s government. They include failing to provide basic protection against a distributed denial-of-service attack that led to an outage during Australia’s online census in 2016, and a botched payroll system IBM installed for Queensland’s Department of Health for which the client was later blamed.

    https://siliconangle.com/blog/2018/07/05/ibm-lands-740m-contract-provide-services/

Other

  • How Google and Facebook Are Monopolizing Ideas

    But as the companies come under growing pressure to police their platforms and weed out “fake news,” a growing range of content gets banned, labeled or deleted for often opaque or arbitrary reasons. ProPublica and Reveal, both nonprofit news publications, have had content dealing with hate groups and immigrant children, respectively, deleted or rejected by Instagram or Facebook. Video artists complain of viewership and ads being restricted because their content violated YouTube’s community standards.

    Unhappy users, advertisers and content providers wouldn’t have as much to complain about if Google (which bought YouTube in 2006) and Facebook (which acquired Instagram in 2012) had strong competitors to which they could switch.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-and-facebook-are-monopolizing-ideas-1530713153?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

Photo by Teddy Kelley on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 6/29/2018

The Source: Amazon buys PillPack - Joey Lombardi

Amazon’s desires to get into the healthcare industry made major progress this week with their announced acquisition of PillPack. It seems that the company will finally meet their goal of selling pharmaceuticals on their e-commerce engine.

IBM had a big sales announcement, but there were also reports of lack of strategic direction in their medical AI efforts.

The IT industry is still facing fallout over technological support of the DHS and ICE. As employees push back on their leaders, companies are scrambling to find a balance.

Acquisitions

  • Amazon Buys Online Pharmacy PillPack for $1 Billion

    Amazon.com Inc. is buying online pharmacy PillPack Inc. giving the e-commerce giant the ability to ship prescriptions around the country, and overnight, making it a direct threat to the more than $400 billion pharmacy business.

    Amazon is paying roughly $1 billion in cash for PillPack, which presorts medications and ships them to customers’ homes in 49 U.S. states, excluding Hawaii, according to people familiar with the matter. The online retailer beat out Walmart Inc., which also was in talks for the five-year-old startup, one of the people said. Walmart had no immediate comment.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-buy-online-pharmacy-pillpack-1530191443

  • Google admits it lost out to Microsoft buying GitHub

    Previous rumors suggest Google was also trying to acquire GitHub, alongside Microsoft’s bids. GitHub founder Chris Wanstrath reportedly chose Microsoft because of his relationship with CEO Satya Nadella. GitHub is a large code repository that has become very popular with developers and companies to host projects, documentation, and code. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and many other big tech companies use GitHub. There are 85 million repositories hosted on GitHub, and 28 million developers contribute to them.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/28/17512908/google-github-microsoft-acquisition-comments

Artificial Intelligence

  • Microsoft’s facial recognition can better identify people with darker skin tones

    Microsoft says its facial recognition tools are getting better at identifying people with darker skin tones than before, according to a company blog post today. The error rates have been reduced by as much as 20 times for men and women with darker skin and by nine times for all women.

    The company says it’s been training its AI tools with larger and more diverse datasets, which has led to the progress. “If we are training machine learning systems to mimic decisions made in a biased society, using data generated by that society, then those systems will necessarily reproduce its biases,” said Hanna Wallach, a Microsoft senior researcher, in the blog post.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/26/17507304/microsoft-facial-recognition-darker-skin-tones

  • Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

    IBM’s goal, the Phytel employees said, was to create a fancy new product that combined the capabilities of Phytel and Explorys. However, the offering managers didn’t have a clear idea of what that product would be. “They couldn’t decide on a roadmap,” says the second engineer. “We pivoted so many times.”

    Both Phytel engineers say the offering managers didn’t have technical backgrounds and sometimes came up with ideas for new products that were simply impossible. While the engineers tried to follow the shifting directions from above, Phytel didn’t deliver anything new to the market. “And we were burning through money,” the second engineer says.

    https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/robotics/artificial-intelligence/layoffs-at-watson-health-reveal-ibms-problem-with-ai

Cloud

  • Here’s how Amazon is able to poach so many execs from Microsoft

    In the three years between 2015 and 2017, at least 30 director or higher level executives went straight from Microsoft to Amazon. Google, the next most popular poaching ground for Amazon, lost just 5 executives to the e-commerce company during those three years. Apple and eBay both lost 2 executives to Amazon in that period, while Facebook, Walmart, and Netflix saw zero executives go to Amazon.

    Paysa’s data only includes people whose most recent jobs were at Microsoft and excludes the ones who may have worked elsewhere before joining Amazon. The company said it looked through at least 5 million resumes for this data, but may have missed the ones that did not update their resume profiles.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/25/amazon-favorite-poaching-ground-microsoft.html

Security

  • A new data breach may have exposed personal information of almost every American adult

    Earlier this month, security researcher Vinny Troia discovered that Exactis, a data broker based in Palm Coast, Florida, had exposed a database that contained close to 340 million individual records on a publicly accessible server. The haul comprises close to 2 terabytes of data that appears to include personal information on hundreds of millions of American adults, as well as millions of businesses. While the precise number of individuals included in the data isn’t clear—and the leak doesn’t seem to contain credit card information or Social Security numbers—it does go into minute detail for each individual listed, including phone numbers, home addresses, email addresses, and other highly personal characteristics for every name. The categories range from interests and habits to the number, age, and gender of the person’s children.

    https://www.wired.com/story/exactis-database-leak-340-million-records/

Software/SaaS

  • Salesforce Will Keep Ties to Border Agency After Protest

    “I’m opposed to separating children from their families at the border. It is immoral,” Benioff wrote Wednesday in a memo to Salesforce employees obtained by Bloomberg News. “I have personally financially supported legal groups helping families at the border. I also wrote to the White House to encourage them to end this horrible situation.”

    More than 650 Salesforce employees signed a letter to Benioff that called CBP’s actions “inhumane” and asked the San Francisco-based company to reconsider its contract providing tools to help with recruiting and communications. Some workers spoke Monday to Tony Prophet, the chief equality officer, about the letter, Bloomberg News reported. The staff’s effort is part of a growing wave of employee activism within the tech industry, as workers question how their products are used by U.S. law enforcement and the military.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-27/salesforce-s-benioff-keeps-ties-to-border-agency-after-protest

Datacenter/Hardware

  • IBM’s Competitive Advantage on Display in $320 Million Deal

    IBM announced a $320 million infrastructure outsourcing deal with KMD, one of Denmark’s leading suppliers of mission-critical software and IT services. IBM will provide KMD with IT infrastructure through 2024, and will assist KMD as it upgrades its infrastructure offerings for its clients. The scope of the agreement includes security, hybrid cloud, and machine learning, all growth areas for IBM.

    https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/06/28/ibms-competitive-advantage-on-display-in-320-milli.aspx

Other

  • Amazon Workers to Jeff Bezos: Stop Weaponizing Our Tech

    Gizmodo reports that Amazon employees are demanding that the company halt the sale of Rekognition, its facial-recognition technology, to law-enforcement agencies. “Along with much of the world we watched in horror recently as U.S. authorities tore children away from their parents,” reads an internal letter to Bezos, per Gizmodo. “In the face of this immoral U.S. policy, and the U.S.’s increasingly inhumane treatment of refugees and immigrants beyond this specific policy, we are deeply concerned that Amazon is implicated, providing infrastructure and services that enable ICE and D.H.S.”

    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/06/amazon-workers-to-jeff-bezos-stop-weaponizing-our-tech

Photo by Geran de Klerk on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 6/15/2018

The DOJ said it would not block AT&T’s $85B acquisition of Time Warner on Thursday, within hours the acquisition was deemed complete. AT&T wasn’t the only company making moves… Workday bought TWO companies and data analytics companies Slack and Tableau both announced acquisitions this week.

Amazon was in the press for poor labor conditions in their Alexa supply chain. Foxconn workers making the devices have been found to be mistreated and underpaid. Amazon’s own audit of the situation confirms the report.

Oracle shares dropped due to a JP Morgan CIO report documenting a decrease of purchasing interest of Oracle products and services from IT executives.

Acquisitions

  • AT&T Completes Acquisition of Time Warner Inc.

    Under the terms of the merger, Time Warner Inc. shareholders received 1.4 shares of AT&T common stock, in addition to $53.75 in cash, per share of Time Warner Inc. As a result, AT&T issued 1,185M shares of common stock and paid $42.5B in cash. Including net debt from Time Warner, we now have $180.4B in net debt.

    https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180614006343/en/ATT-Completes-Acquisition-Time-Warner

  • Workday acquires Rallyteam to fuel machine learning efforts

    In this case, Workday appears to be acquiring the talent. It wants to take the Rallyteam team and incorporate it into the company’s engineering unit to beef up its machine learning efforts, while taking advantage of the expertise it has built up over the years connecting employees with interesting internal projects.

    “With Rallyteam, we gain incredible team members who created a talent mobility platform that uses machine learning to help companies better understand and optimize their workforces by matching a worker’s interests, skills and connections with relevant jobs, projects, tasks and people,” Workday’s Cristina Goldt wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/08/workday-acquires-rallyteam-to-fuel-machine-learning-efforts/

  • Workday acquires financial modelling startup Adaptive Insights for $1.55B

    Workday, the cloud-based platform that offers HR and other back-office apps for businesses, is making an acquisition to expand its portfolio of services: It’s buying Adaptive Insights, a provider of cloud-based business planning and financial modelling tools, for $1.55 billion. The acquisition is notable because Adaptive Insights had filed for an IPO as recently as May 17.

    Workday says that the $1.55 billion price tag includes “the assumption of approximately $150 million in unvested equity issued to Adaptive Insights employees” related to that IPO. This deal is expected to close in Q3 of this year.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/11/workday-acquires-financial-modelling-startup-adaptive-insights-for-1-55b/

  • Tableau gets AI shot in the arm with Empirical Systems acquisition

    The startup was born just two years ago from research on automated statistics at the MIT Probabilistic Computing Project. According to the company website, “Empirical is an analytics engine that automatically models structured, tabular data (such as spreadsheets, tables, or csv files) and allows those models to be queried to uncover statistical insights in data.”

    The product was still in private Beta when Tableau bought the company. It is delivered currently as an engine embedded inside other applications. That sounds like something that could slip in nicely into the Tableau analytics platform. What’s more, it will be bringing the engineering team on board for some AI knowledge, while taking advantage of this underlying advanced technology.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/13/tableau-gets-ai-shot-in-the-arm-with-empirical-systems-acquisition/

  • Splunk to Acquire Software Problem-Solver VictorOps for $120 Million

    Big data-cruncher Splunk is acquiring VictorOps, a Boulder, Colo.-based startup whose tools help software developers collaborate and resolve engineering issues, for $120 million mostly in cash with some stock equity. The deal is expected to close before August.

    VictorOps’ tech brings together software engineers so they can overcome technical issues as they arise. The system generates notifications, pulls relevant parties into chat groups, presents pertinent documents, and keeps detailed records as teams work through coding problems.

    http://fortune.com/2018/06/11/splunk-acquire-software-startup-victorops/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Accenture wants to beat unfair AI with a professional toolkit

    “We’re seeing increasing focus on algorithmic bias, fairness. Just this past week we’ve had Singapore announce an AI ethics board. Korea announce an AI ethics board. In the US we already have industry creating different groups — such as The Partnership on AI. Google just released their ethical guidelines… So I think industry leaders, as well as non-tech companies, are looking for guidance. They are looking for standards and protocols and something to adhere to because they want to know that they are safe in creating products.

    “It’s not an easy task to think about these things. Not every organization or company has the resources to. So how might we better enable that to happen? Through good legislation, through enabling trust, communication. And also through developing these kinds of tools to help the process along.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/09/accenture-wants-to-beat-unfair-ai-with-a-professional-toolkit/

Cloud

  • Oracle shares drop after JP Morgan downgrades on lost business to Amazon and Microsoft

    Oracle’s “specific metrics in our large-scale CIO survey have arced over into negative territory, which makes us uncomfortable because the results of our CIO surveys over the years have been highly predictive,” analyst Mark Murphy said in a note to clients Thursday. “Oracle spending intentions have only looked lukewarm in our CIO survey work in the recent past, but the data takes a dive in the current survey. … In our discussions, CIOs have clarified that they are migrating Oracle databases to Microsoft SQL Server, Amazon databases and PostgreSQL.”

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/14/oracle-shares-drop-after-jp-morgan-downgrades-on-lost-business-to-amazon-and-microsoft.html

Software/SaaS

  • Microsoft will ‘lose developers for a generation’ if it stuffs up GitHub, says future CEO

    “We are buying GitHub because we like GitHub; our plan is to continue to invest in the GitHub roadmap, and make GitHub better at being GitHub,” Friedman wrote.

    That means no ads in public repos, because Friedman said Sourceforge became “a swamp of banner ads and pop ups and delayed downloads to expose users to more ads”. He added that “GitHub’s clean interface and developer-centric approach can be seen in part as a reaction against Sourceforge” and suggested GitHub’s ascendency shows a no-ads approach has proven the correct approach.

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/08/nat_friedman_github_ceo_elect_ama_session/

  • Yahoo Messenger is shutting down on July 17, redirects users to group messaging app Squirrel

    “There currently isn’t a replacement product available for Yahoo Messenger,” the company writes. “We’re constantly experimenting with new services and apps, one of which is an invite-only group messaging app called Yahoo Squirrel (currently in beta).” Squirrel is a group messaging app Yahoo started testing last month. You can request access to the beta here.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/08/yahoo-messenger-is-shutting-down-on-july-17-redirects-users-to-group-messaging-app-squirrel/

Datacenter/Hardware

  • IBM and the DoE launch the world’s fastest supercomputer

    Summit, which has been in the works for a few years now, features 4,608 compute servers with two 22-core IBM Power9 chips and six Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs each. In total, the system also features over 10 petabytes of memory. Given the presence of the Nvidia GPUs, it’s no surprise that the system is meant to be used for machine learning and deep learning applications, as well as the usual high performance computing workloads for research in energy and advanced materials that you would expect to happen at Oak Ridge.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/08/ibms-new-summit-supercomputer-for-the-doe-delivers-200-petaflops/

  • Qualcomm Is Cutting Up to Half of Jobs in Data-Center Unit

    The company will eliminate 241 positions at its design center in Raleigh, North Carolina, and 43 in California, according to notices filed with those states. The total number of cuts, including those not covered by such notices, will represent a third to half of the server-chip unit’s employees, according to a person familiar with the process. The reduction comes on top of the previously announced elimination of about 1,500 workers across the company.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-14/qualcomm-is-said-to-cut-up-to-half-of-jobs-in-data-center-unit

Other

  • Verizon CEO to Retire, Succeeded by a Newcomer

    Verizon Communications Inc. VZ 0.35% named Hans Vestberg as its next chief executive, choosing a relative newcomer to run the wireless giant at a time when its industry is being reshaped by megadeals.

    Mr. Vestberg, who joined the company about a year ago and is its chief technology officer, will succeed longtime CEO Lowell McAdam on Aug. 1. Mr. McAdam will remain executive chairman until the end of the year and then become nonexecutive chairman.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/verizon-ceo-to-retire-replaced-by-a-newcomer-1528455600?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • After report on ‘appalling’ conditions, Foxconn will investigate plant that makes Amazon devices

    Though regular workers were better compensated in terms of wages and benefits, China Labor Watch says both groups were subjected to long hours and low wages, with workers putting in more than 100 overtime hours during peak season, even though the legal limit is 36 hours, and some working consecutively for 14 days. Workers on average earned wages between 2000 to 3000 RMB ($312.12 to $468.19), significantly less than Hengyang’s monthly average wage of 4,647 RMB ($725.22), but often had their overtime hours as punishment for taking leave or having unexcused absences.

    The report also claimed that the factory had poor fire safety in its dormitories, lack of sufficiently protective equipment, verbally abusive managers and the “absence of a functioning labor union.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/10/after-report-on-appalling-conditions-foxconn-will-investigate-plant-that-makes-amazon-devices/
    Workers not paid legally by Amazon contractor in China

    Amazon disclosed that its own auditors visited the Foxconn factory in March and found that it had hired an illegally high number of agency workers and was not paying them properly for working overtime.

    Agency staff – known as dispatch workers in China – do not get sick pay or holiday pay and can be laid off without wages during lulls in production. China changed its labour laws in 2014 to limit their use to 10% of any workforce in an attempt to stop companies exploiting them to cut costs.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/09/amazon-contractor-foxconn-pay-workers-illegally

Photo by Michael Prewett on Unsplash