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Photo: Wilfred Iven
Supplier Report: 6/16/2017
Flush with cash, SoftBank is starting to execute on their 300 year plan. Softbank took Boston Dynamics off of Google’s hands… if you are going to have a multi-century strategy, it makes sense to buy a robotics company.
Dell’s financials are down $1.5b as they pay off the massive debt incurred to buy EMC. Slack is taking in $500M of funding as AWS and Microsoft contemplate buying the company. Verizon has finally closed their acquisition of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer is officially gone.
Acquisitions
- SoftBank to Buy Two Pioneers in Advanced Robots From Google Parent
SoftBank Group Corp. said it would buy Boston Dynamics from Alphabet Inc. The company builds robots that can perform feats such as pirouetting and climbing stairs, highlighting the Japanese company’s long-term investment horizon.
Price and other terms weren’t disclosed.
The deal comes more than a year after the Google parent dissolved its robotics group and started seeking buyers for Boston Dynamics, the unit at the centerpiece of the program. People close to Alphabet have said the company decided to sell Boston Dynamics when it resisted developing a commercial product within the next several years.
The deal also includes Schaft, a Japanese robotics maker that achieved fame by winning a challenge held by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 2013 for robots to perform rescue tasks.
- PokitDok Acquires Pharmacy and Software Assets of Oration PBC
PokitDok, an API platform to free, secure, and unify data has acquired the pharmacy and software assets of Oration PBC. The acquisition enables PokitDok to complete support for delivery of essential commercial pharmacy benefit data, via its APIs, so organizations, providers and consumers have tools to make better healthcare and treatment decisions. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
http://hitconsultant.net/2017/06/13/pokitdok-acquires-pharmacy-software-assets-oration-pbc/
Cloud
- IBM will put connected car data to better use
As cars get smarter, we’re going to have to deal with all of the information our daily drives create in a way we’ve never had to bother with before. Thankfully, IBM is offering to be the middleman that represents our vehicles in the confusing new world of automotive cloud telematics. The company has signed a deal with BMW that will see the BMW CarData platform connect to IBM’s Bluemix cloud. The idea is that IBM will host and analyze your information and then pass it to third parties — with your consent — when required.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/06/14/ibm-bmw-connected-car-data/
- Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant includes Alibaba, IBM
“The IBM Cloud experience is currently disjointed,” Gartner writes, noting that the company hasn’t updated its SoftLayer infrastructure since its purchase two years ago.
https://seekingalpha.com/news/3273838-gartners-iaas-magic-quadrant-includes-alibaba-ibm
Datacenter
- IBM and HPE’s Server Businesses Aren’t Just Pressured By the Cloud Anymore
It also wasn’t too surprising that sales of servers designed by cloud giants and supplied by ODMs grew strongly following a Q4 lull, as the likes of Amazon and Facebook continued spending heavily on capex. IDC estimated sales of such servers, which it refers to as ODM Direct, grew 41.8% to $1.2 billion (10.4% of industry revenue). It added one unnamed cloud firm single-handedly accounted for over 10% of the 2.21 million servers shipped during the quarter.
What was, surprising, though is that both firms reported Dell, the world’s second-biggest server vendor, saw meaningful sales growth in spite of the headwinds faced by peers. IDC estimated Dell’s server sales grew 4.7% to $2.37 billion, leading its market share to rise to 20.1% from 18.3% a year ago. By contrast, the firm had estimated Dell’s server sales were roughly flat in Q4. Gartner gave Dell a 19% Q1 share, up from 17.3%.
- Dell slumps to $1.5bn operating loss in first quarter in new structure
For its first quarter ending 5 May 2017, the Texas-based giant posted an operating loss of $1.5bn on revenues of $17.8bn. Dell is a private company, but still divulges its numbers, partly because it now owns VMware courtesy of its recent merger with EMC.
Dell’s Client Solutions Group saw revenue rise six per cent year on year to $9.1bn and operating income hit $374m.
Software/SaaS
- Larry Ellison’s Biggest Battle: Amazon, Microsoft And SAP Grabbing Oracle Database Customers
Microsoft recently surpassed Oracle—for the first time ever—as the world’s best on-premise Operational Database System as ranked by Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for both execution and vision, according to Microsoft EVP Scott Guthrie, speaking at an investor conference late last year. So if Microsoft can match or surpass Oracle’s database quality and performance on-premise with SQL 2016, that’s a huge reassurance for customers looking to expand as well into the cloud.
- Looks like HPE is getting in on the Blockchain game…
- Slack is reportedly raising another $500 million — and Amazon, Google, and Microsoft might try to buy it
Swisher also reports that the massive fundraising round from Slack, which currently has about $1 billion in revenue, has attracted interest in a potential acquisition from Amazon, Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft, though no formal offers have been made. Bloomberg originally reported Amazon’s interest in a Slack acquisition, with a potential bid of $9 billion or more.
Other
- IBM’s Harriet Green named top 100 creative people for work with Watson
“I don’t much believe in artificial intelligence,” says Harriet Green, who is one of the executives helping to run IBM’s AI platform. “I believe in augmented intelligence. With Watson, we can augment capabilities that clients already have.”
“We have reached a tipping point with IoT innovation,” Green said.
“IBM Watson IoT has more than 6,000 clients and partners around the world, many who are eager to “co-innovate,” she added. IBM is investing $3 billion to prepare Watson for IoT.
This past February, Green helped IBM open its $200 million global headquarters in Munich, Germany. The center houses the Watson Internet of Things business. It is designed to drive collaboration and innovation with dozens of clients and partners in what IBM executives call “first-ever cognitive collaboratories.”
http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/ibms-harriet-green-named-top-100-creative-people-work-watson
- Uber just pissed off dozens of longtime employees; now they’re gunning for management
Earlier this week, at a staff meeting in San Francisco, Uber executives revealed to the company’s 12,000 employees that 20 of their colleagues had been fired and that 57 are still being probed over harassment, discrimination and inappropriate behavior, following a string of accusations that Uber had created a toxic workplace and allowed complaints to go unaddressed for years.
Yesterday, Uber fired senior executive Eric Alexander after it was leaked to Recode that Alexander had obtained the medical records of an Uber passenger in India who was raped in 2014 by her driver.
Recode also reported that Alexander had shared the woman’s file with Kalanick and his senior vice president, Emil Michael, and that the three men suspected the woman of working with Uber’s regional competitor in India, Ola, to hamper its chances of success there.
- Verizon Seals $4.5 Billion Yahoo Purchase as Mayer Heads Out
The companies officially closed the $4.5 billion agreement Tuesday, following Yahoo shareholder approval last week. Yahoo properties including Sports and Finance will become part of a new Verizon unit called Oath, which is home to brands like AOL, TechCrunch and the Huffington Post. Oath will be overseen by former AOL Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong, while Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, 42, is stepping down.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-13/verizon-seals-4-5-billion-yahoo-purchase-as-mayer-heads-out
Verizon Launches New Ad and Content Unit as Yahoo Deal ClosesDistribution will also be a factor: Soon, some of Oath’s content brands will be automatically available on the “decktop” of Verizon subscribers’ phones through its AppFlash app, for example. Verizon’s go90 mobile video app, will also become more integrated with Oath’s content properties. And entirely new mobile content brands are set to launch before the end of the year, created by Oath’s internal Factory unit.
Photo: Alex Knight
SourceCast: Episode 75: The HP Checkup
Supplier Report: 6/9/2017
This is starting to get repetitive… IBM had another rough week.
There are rumors that Facebook-owned Whatsapp is moving from their current IBM-hosted infrastructure to an in-house Facebook solution. Lululemon is also considering moving away from IBM cloud due to a recent outage.
As always, it wasn’t all bad news, IBM did score a 10-year outsourcing deal with Lloyds and they introduced a new transistor type for 5nm silicon chips (there was an insane amount of coverage on this).
Google is betting big on AI, and it might backfire due to their “lack of enterprise focus”. Meanwhile Verizon is finalizing their acquisition of Yahoo and is expected to reduce their workforce by 20%.
Acquisitions
Artificial Intelligence
- Why Google is betting big on AI
Google may not be the leader of cloud computing, but novel developments have spurred Sundar Pichai, the company’s CEO, to openly recognise this as an economic opportunity and possibly a challenge. The release of second generation cloud tensor processing units (TPU) is making cloud computing and machine learning faster and more efficient.
Google’s TPUs deliver an open source machine learning framework allowing massive scaling and dissemination of applications through the cloud. This innovation will expedite the process of intake, normalization, model training and deployment by essentially using machine learning to automate algorithms. In effect, this is automating deep learning by using machine learning. Google is calling this creation AutoML, and it is the breakthrough of the company’s AI research group, Google Brain.
http://www.cio.com/article/3198635/artificial-intelligence/why-google-is-betting-big-on-ai.html
- Why Google might lose the enterprise AI wars
Two major obstacles stand in Google’s way to cloud AI dominance: data gravity and lack of backwards compatibility. To illustrate the issue of data gravity, look no further than Amazon’s Snowball device. This chair-sized flash drive, capable of storing 80 TB of precious enterprise data, is physically shipped to a customer’s on-premise data centers to load petabytes of data and then shipped back to Amazon for upload to AWS servers. Ironically, manual transfer is significantly faster and cheaper for large data sets than any internet method. Enterprises with data-hungry AI applications will have an easier time running algorithms on-prem or on AWS and Azure, where their data already lives.
http://www.cio.com/article/3200184/it-industry/why-google-might-lose-the-enterprise-ai-wars.html
Cloud
- Lululemon CEO blames IBM for site outage, says it’s looking at other options
Some of Lululemon’s sales happen via its website, which is hosted on IBM’s public cloud. The site went down midday on May 22 and came back online about 20 hours later.
“I talked to Ginni [Rometty, IBM’s CEO]; our team was up 36 hours straight,” Potdevin told CNBC. “We’re not satisfied with what happened. We’re looking at our options.”
Other public clouds include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Alphabet’s Google Cloud Platform. Lululemon could also opt to set up its own data center infrastructure and reduce its dependency on third-party cloud-computing resources. IBM’s other cloud customers include Citi, the U.S. Interior Department, Macy’s and Whirlpool.
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/02/lululemon-ceo-blames-ibm-for-site-outage.html
- Facebook is planning to move WhatsApp off IBM’s public cloud, source says
The WhatsApp move, which could begin later this year, would result in IBM losing a high profile customer for its public cloud. A source claims that WhatsApp has been one of IBM’s top five public cloud customers in terms of revenue, and was at one point spending $2 million a month with IBM. (IBM says WhatsApp is not currently one of its top five public cloud customers.)
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/07/facebook-planning-to-move-whatsapp-off-ibms-public-cloud.html
- Microsoft restructures cloud, data, AI organizations
As part of a reorganization announced internally within the company on June 7th, Microsoft has chosen to restructure its cloud, data, and AI organizations. The changes reportedly take effect immediately and were reportedly announced by Scott Guthrie, and Harry Shum (via ZDNet.)
Part of the changes include a new Cloud AI Platform organization, led by Corporate Vice President Joseph Sirosh. This division will be responsible for Azure Search, Azure Machine Learning, the Microsoft Bot Framework, R Server and the Algorithms and Data Science Solution team. Since Joseph Sirosh previously handled the Data Platform group at Microsoft, it now will be led by Corporate Vice President of Azure, Jason Zander, and be part of a new Azure + Data Platform Group.
https://www.onmsft.com/news/microsoft-restructures-cloud-data-ai-organizations
Datacenter/Hardware
- IBM creates a new transistor type for 5nm silicon chips
This new process created by IBM will make it possible for engineers to put as many as 30 billion transistors on to a chip the size of a single human fingernail, using a new process called gate-all-around (GAA) transistors, which uses horizontal layers of stacked silicon to enable a fourth “gate” on transistors on the chip.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/05/ibm-creates-a-new-transistor-type-for-5nm-silicon-chips/?ncid=rss
Other
- Lloyds finally inks mega 10-year cloudy outsourcing deal with IBM
Those talks concluded today, with Lloyds announcing to staff it has “signed one of the largest cloud transformation deals” within the financial sector. The shift to IBM’s private cloud will take three years.
“Most colleagues working in Infrastructure Technology Services supporting these systems and delivering change will transition to IBM, with a number retained in Lloyds Banking Group to manage the relationship, service and governance of IBM,” said the memo.
As a result, around 500 staff will transfer to IBM on 1 September 2017. Some 1,000 contractors who currently support Lloyds Banking Group will also move to support IBM.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/06/lloyds_confirms_ibm_cloudy_outsourcing/
- Amazon Wins the Race to $1,000
Soaring gains among tech and internet stocks have concerned some investors, particularly those who remember the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. But others expect these stocks to continue to advance. Thomas Lee, a U.S. portfolio strategist at Fundstrat Global Advisors, on Friday forecast that Facebook, Amazon, Netflix Inc. and Alphabet—a group collectively known by the acronym FANG—could climb another 20% to 40% by the end of the year. These companies, he said, represent a dense concentration of earnings and sales growth that is hard to find elsewhere in the market.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-wins-the-race-to-1-000-1496440170
- As the merger is completed, layoffs of up to 1,000 jobs at the combined AOL and Yahoo are expected
According to sources, layoffs are expected to take place across AOL and Yahoo that could number up to 1,000 jobs. That is less than 20 percent of the combined company, according to sources.
This action is not unexpected, given that both companies have a lot of redundancies, including in human resources, finance, marketing and general administration.
- IBM Community College Partnerships Support Next-Gen IT Training
The technology company will collaborate with the participating institutions on curriculum design for next-generation IT skills; offer community college students opportunities for internships and apprenticeships; and hire students for IBM careers. The partnership will include schools in or near Columbia, MO, Rocket Center, WV, Dubuque, IA, Boulder, CO, Poughkeepsie, NY, Raleigh, NC, Austin, TX, Dallas and Houston — areas which the company notes have traditionally been underserved by high-tech employers.
Photo: Dawid Zawiła