As budgets are settling down and getting approved for many of the companies I’m on the board of, I’m seeing a general trend of much less headcount growth in 2017 than in 2016. In some cases, companies got ahead of themselves. In others, they need to integrate all the people they’ve added. In some, they feel like they have a critical mass of people and want to march to get profitable on current headcount. And still others are profitable and have realized significant operating leverage in the past two quarters that they want to continue.
Google Co-Founder: Take Chances, Pursue Your Dreams and Silence the Voices
Brin encourages experimentation and innovation, just as one of his professors did when he wanted to leave Stanford to launch Google. But his career has taught him that the future is impossible to predict. He is cautious in his forecasts.
“The evolution of technology might be inherently chaotic,” he said. “We have a set of values and desires today that are probably pretty different than before the Industrial Revolution, and different still than before the Agrarian Revolution. And we might continue to evolve.”
In a tech-saturated world, customer feedback is everything
Executives and product teams shouldn’t wait until a product breaks to hear from their customers. My team, for example, recently executed a high-stakes redesign and overhaul of our central product. While we always strive to incorporate customer feedback and interaction into our day-to-day work, we worked with around 16,000 customers to receive feedback on different versions of our new product. Our entire process was oriented around continuous customer feedback — and it transformed the way we do business. We now collaborate with 11,000 customers who give us a constant look at how our product helps them solve the challenges they face in their day-to-day lives.
Why your “career path” won’t lead to your dream job
You may wonder, then, what’s the point of setting goals, working hard, and ending up somewhere you never intended to be? How can you make progress if you continually break course? How can you be successful if you can’t even follow a straight line?
Here’s the thing: The more activities you participate in, the more people you meet, the more opportunities you grab hold of, the more likely you are to find something amazing along the way—regardless of (or maybe especially if), your path is quite windy. In the words of the inimitable Oprah Winfrey, “Luck is preparation meeting opportunity.”
Heavy is the head that wears the crown. As Amazon’s AWS services continue to dominate the cloud sector, many analysts are reporting their lack of SaaS offerings as the chink in their armor.
Amazon is not alone in their weakness, poor sales is rumored to be forcing Oracle to eliminate jobs in the traditional software areas as they start to build up for their fight against AWS.
IBM’s good news regarding cloud growth is coming at a cost as the company announced a major reorganization in the cloud and power divisions.
Acquisitions
AppDynamics Acquired for $3.7 Billion
What AppDynamics gives Cisco is a tool for monitoring the performance of applications, regardless the application delivery platform. The idea is to find issues and deal with them before they become a big problem for end users. The worst case is a full outage, but there are countless other issues that can cause slow-downs and other headaches, as every user is keenly aware. As it monitors these applications, AppDynamics is gathering tons of data about the applications, the connections to other systems, the devices being used to connect to the application and so forth. All of this data is a natural byproduct of the monitoring process — and could have great value when combined with other network information.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise makes second acquisition in a week
Cloud Cruiser makes software that helps large companies visualize how and where their IT budget is being spent across different business units and different technology platforms. Its software can analyze changes in spending and ways specific business units might be able to save money.
The Flexible Capacity services offering allows customers to buy HPE private cloud infrastructure as a service based on the same monthly, fixed-fee, pay-as-you-go model that has fueled public cloud adoption. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
IBM Acquires Agile 3, Makers Of A Security Dashboard For Business Leaders
Agile 3, founded in 2009, offers a suite of products that help business leaders make decisions about security threats facing their companies through intuitive visualizations and analytics. The software design is heavily influenced by service-oriented architecture principles.
Agile 3’s founder, Raghu Varadan, had been IBM’s chief architect for its SOA Center of Excellence, and was responsible for implementing service-oriented architecture solutions for the IBM Global Business Services division’s largest customers.
Yahoo surprises no one by pushing back its Verizon acquisition close date
Yahoo has continued to work with Verizon on integration planning for the sale of its core business. In terms of timing, Yahoo had previously stated that it expected to close the transaction in Q1. However, given work required to meet closing conditions, the transaction is now expected to close in Q2 of 2017. The company is working expeditiously to close the transaction as soon as practicable in Q2.
IBM adds support for Google’s Tensorflow to its PowerAI machine learning framework
While TensorFlow has only been available for a little over a year, it has quickly become the most popular open source machine learning project on GitHub. IBM’s PowerAI already supported other frameworks and libraries like CAFFETheano, Torch, cuDNN, and NVIDIA DIGITS, but Tensorflow support was sorely missing from this lineup.
IBM clearly sees the combination of PowerAI with Nvidia’s NVLink interface and Pascal P100 GPU accelerators as a way to differentiate itself from the competition — and in this case, the competition it is gunning for is clearly Intel (though it’s worth noting that Intel and Google also recently teamed up to improve TensorFlow performance on its CPUs).
Apple joins Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft in AI initiative
The Partnership on AI was officially unveiled back in September 2016. At the time, Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft were the only founding members. Apple, Twitter, Intel and Baidu didn’t participate in the initiative.
But Apple was already enthusiastic about the project, so today’s news is more about formalizing the company’s involvement. Siri co-founder and CTO Tom Gruber is going to represent Apple. You can find the full board of trustees on the partnership’s website.
Will A.I. Allow Humans to Realize Our Full Potential?
Cloud
IBM’s SoftLayer is having a meltdown – and customers aren’t happy
“Since IBM came along there have been loads of outages, planned and otherwise,” our reader in the field told us.
“In the three years of service prior to this we had only one outage, in the six months after they took over we have had one outage that knocked out their AMS [Amsterdam] data center for four hours, [and] their entire global virtual server platform has had to be rebooted three times on separate occasions.”
Vice president and director of IBM research Arvind Krishna has been named senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud, which is a merger between the analytics business formerly run by Picciano, and the cloud division formerly run by LeBlanc. Krishna will report to John Kelly, senior vice president of Cognitive Solutions and IBM Research.
During the most recent quarter Amazon reported $3.231 billion in quarterly revenues while Microsoft’s annualized cloud revenues exceeded $13 billion. At first glance, it would appear that both these companies are running neck and neck when it comes to earnings from cloud, but Microsoft has a huge bonus package in the form of its SaaS product, Office 365, which is experiencing strong growth.
Though Azure is certainly growing at a healthy rate, it has a long way to go before it can compete at the same level as the IaaS offering from Amazon. Amazon has no such SaaS product lineup but still leads the race in terms of revenue thanks to its strength in IaaS. The company’s single-segment focus has helped Amazon add service after service and keep cutting prices, but still expand revenues – and margins along with it.
“Oracle should be congratulated for its enthusiasm and the proactive way it is pursuing the cloud market,” says Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT, adding that the company was late to the market. Oracle has taken a similar approach to Microsoft and IBM in offering services across all three layers of cloud: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. “They still have a massive install base of customers that want cloud services. The question is whether they will choose Oracle as their cloud vendor as opposed to vendors they may be currently working with, or choosing to go with a more established, more innovative vendor.” King adds Oracle’s cloud will appeal most to existing customers, but he questions how the company will be able to attract net new brands.
HP Inc announces moderate price hike across products
“HP is increasing the list price of its products in India. As a standard business practice, the company regularly reviews pricing and makes adjustments accordingly, based on a variety of factors including currency movement and commodities prices. Actual price increases will vary by product,” Rajiv Srivastava, Managing Director, HP Inc. India, told IANS.
Infinidat slims down in UK: Storage upstart has just handful of Brit staff
Infinidat has slimmed its UK office from 17 heads to just four since January 2016, and has not won a new customer in that time, we’re told.
We’ve heard that Infinidat has four UK customers: BrightSolid, Pulsant, BT and Barclays. BT, its biggest client worldwide followed by Barclays, is the most active, and is looked after by a director for enterprise sales. There are three technical and professional services people alongside him in the London office. Thirteen others have been let go.
Earlier last year, Salesforce announced that it beat Q1 earnings following a 20 percent pricing increase. Its thousands of embedded (read: captive) users have had no choice but to pay up. Soon, however, a new generation of automated CRMs will emerge as a viable alternative, bringing intelligence and ease-of-use to a category of “dumb” CRM databases. They’ll offer products that are easily configured, always up-to-date, and entirely automated – delivering a delightful user experience in a tech landscape known for the opposite.
Like BlackBerry, the disruption will happen much faster than Salesforce expects.
According to a report by Mercury News as part of statutory obligation, Oracle has intimated the Employment Development Department that it would lay off 450 employees in its Santa Clara systems division. According to the report, those affected include hardware and software developers along with managers, technicians and administrative assistants.
Also:
With the layoff reports, the analyst feels the reason for optimism on Oracle has proven to be completely wrong. The analyst also pointed to the industry’s belief that more layoffs in California, Colorado and Massachusetts are on the cards, with the guesstimate at 1,500
Follow-up: US alleges systemic employment discrimination at Oracle
The U.S. government says Oracle routinely and systemically pays white men more than women and minorities and that it favors Asian candidates over others in product development and technical roles.
The investigation was triggered by a regular compliance review by the government. As a federal contractor, Oracle is prohibited from engaging in discrimination based on race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.
Avaya says bankruptcy is a step toward software and services
Networking and collaboration vendor Avaya declared bankruptcy last Thursday, calling the move part of its transition from a hardware to a software and services company.
It plans to keep operating during the bankruptcy thanks to its cash from operations and US$725 million in financing that still needs approval by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. Avaya said its foreign affiliates aren’t included in the filing and won’t be affected.
Microsoft reportedly plans to lay off about 700 workers next week
“The upcoming cuts won’t be specific to any single group, but will be spread across the company’s worldwide offices and business units, including sales, marketing, human resources, engineering, finance and more,” Business Insider said it was told by its source. “The goals of these rotating smaller layoffs is not to reduce costs but to update skills in various units.”
Cisco debuts its own smart whiteboard priced to compete with the Google Jamboard
The Spark Board works with fingers or a stylus and saves automatically. The system is priced to compete with Google’s Jamboard (which puts it significantly below Microsoft’s $8,999 Surface Hub) at $4,990 for the 55-inch version due out at the end of the month. A 70-inch version is due out before year’s end, priced at $9,990.
Verizon fourth quarter earnings fall short of analyst expectations
Verizon this morning reported adjusted fourth quarter earnings of 86 cents per share, on revenue of $32.3 billion.
On the earnings side, that falls short of what Wall Street analysts had expected — EPS of 89 cents per share and $32.1 billion in revenue. That also marks a 5.6 percent revenue decline from the fourth quarter of 2015.
Why You Should Recognize Luck’s Role in Your Success or Failure
Recognizing luck also helps with empathy. When you over-credit hard work and throw the role of luck out the window, it’s easy to assume everyone else should be able to accomplish the same things you can. When you recognize the role of luck, however, you keep your ego in check, which makes it easier to look at things more objectively and with less judgment.
Would You Want the “Right to Disconnect” from Work?
…“All the studies show there is far more work-related stress today than there used to be, and that the stress is constant,” MP Benoit Hamon told the BBC. “Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down.”
Too often, people burn themselves out by agreeing to take on more tasks than they can handle. However, overloading yourself with work can reduce the quality of what you produce. If you’re too busy, you may also miss deadlines. In those cases, the person you’re working for likely would have preferred that you had just said “no” from the start.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/287746 Photo: The Business Backer Coming out of college almost 20 years ago, I entered a work force that told me to “NEVER SAY NO”. Early in my career that was a major source of burnout. However, in the last 5 years, saying yes gave me opportunities and access to projects that were good for both experience and my career politically.
The Purpose of a Supply Chain Manager: The End Customer Experience
The journey to understand that focus tells you what your business model really depends on. Too many companies don’t understand what customers really value and as a consequence spend a lot to develop low-value innovation, such as car manufacturers loading their cars with more features that customers don’t use – a phenomenon known as marketing myopia.
Bonus: Americans at Work: Philadelphia’s Municipal Offices
While photographing in these spaces what stuck out most visually was the physical evidence of decades past, not only in the space’s aesthetics and architecture but in the office equipment itself. An employee can find themselves sitting at mid century desk working on a 21st century computer while referencing a ledger book from 1887. Philadelphia City Hall is like a time capsule no one is quite ready to put the lid on. Over time, as Philadelphia grew, more municipal offices have been built to accommodate the needs of the city. One of these offices—Philadelphia’s Municipal Services Building—is a more modern office building, something office workers of today would be more familiar with.
2017 is finally in full swing… I uncovered 7 acquisitions this week by major IT suppliers. It seems like a great time to be in the AI game, everybody wants to buy a tiny cognitive firm…
As AI profit grows, IBM is experiencing decline in their traditional sweet spots like storage. Blue’s cloud profits are also increasing, but Amazon is growing exponentially faster than competitors like Google and Microsoft.
IBM and Microsoft both got victories by having certain platforms reach new levels of government certification and clearance. Take the wins where you can get them!
Acquisitions
HP Enterprise just bought a $1 billion startup for $650 million
At the time of SimpliVity’s last fundraising, in March 2015, the company had declared that it was valued at “more than $1 billion.” All in all, SimpliVity had raised $276 million from investors like Kleiner Perkins, Accel, and Waypoint Capital.
By buying SimpliVity, HP Enterprise takes the startup’s capabilities and adds it to their own — crucial as the company moves to compete with the combined Dell EMC juggernaut, following the close of their mega-merger. Dell EMC, for its part, has been investing heavily in the market, and resells Nutanix hardware to its customers.
Kurtz spoke with CFO Duston Williams and also chief marking officer Howard Ting, along with a group of investors, and came away with the impression that the company is taking steps that could offset some of its reliance on privately held Dell, which sells Nutanix equipment and has made up 10% of sales.
Microsoft acquires Simplygon to boost 3D innovation
This is part of Microsoft’s “3D for everyone” strategy that will be the focus in the upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update. According to Tsunoda, Simplygon, a company with reputable expertise in 3D, could help Microsoft simplify the process of capturing creating, and sharing 3D information. Microsoft’s new online creator community, Remix3D.com, and the new Paint 3D application codenamed “Beihai” will be complemented by Simplygon technology.
Among the most important new features implemented into the Windows 10 Creators Update is a wide range of 3D capabilities that cater to creative types, according to Digital Trends. In the next version of Windows 10, in fact, 3D will take a central role, with the ability to scan objects and import them into the new Paint 3D app as 3D objects. It will also be possible to share these objects to the new Remix 3D community sharing site and interact with them using Windows Holographic and HoloLens.
Quip, the productivity platform that Salesforce acquired last year, announced its Friday that the firm Unity&Variety will be joining its team.
The small Unity&Variety design team — which includes Joey Flynn, Drew Hamlin and Andy Chung — will help Quip “build the next generation of productivity tools,” Quip announced via Twitter. They’ll work on adding creative and visual elements to Quip, according to Salesforce. Has produced at least one public app, the game Pinchworm.
Salesforce (CRM) continued its buyout spree in December 2016 with its acquisition of Twin Prime, a startup focused on ML (machine learning) that facilitates enhanced performance of mobile apps. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
Microsoft just bought an AI startup that can outperform Facebook and Google (Thanks JD!)
The Verge covered Maluuba in the summer of 2016, when the startup shared the results of an AI system that could read and comprehend text with near human capability, outperforming similar systems shown off by Google and Facebook. Along with acquiring the company, Microsoft has also established closer ties with Yoshua Bengio, a pioneer in the field of deep learning who served as an advisor to Maluuba, and will now become and advisor to Microsoft’s AI division.
Google acquires Fabric developer platform and team from Twitter
Google is taking over Twitter’s mobile app developer platform Fabric, as well as its Crashlytics crash reporting system, Answers mobile app analytics, Digits SMS login system and FastLane development automation system. Twitter launched Fabric as a modular SDK in 2014 to allow developers to pick and choose different tools to improve their apps, and it now serves apps reaching 2.5 billion users built by 580,000 developers.
Oracle Snaps Up Apiary, a Little API Company with Big Customers
Oracle says it is buying Apiary, a company that specializes in managing and monitoring application programming interfaces, or APIs, which offer standard ways to connect software applications. Both software giants and large Fortune 500 companies are scrambling to add expertise in building, monitoring, and documenting these crucial pieces of technology.
IBM’s Ginni Rometty Entirely Correct Here – AI Will Create Different Jobs, Not No Jobs
“It is a partnership between man and machine, if you want to put it that way,” Rometty said in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“Think more about activities changing with the technologies. When you do your job, there will be things that take you a lot of time to research and do,” she said. “Yes, they’ll be done faster. Then you have the time to do what I think we all humans do best.”
Moving from Data to Insights: The Future is Cognitive (IBM Webinar)
Microsoft CEO Nadella: ‘Steer AI away from replacing people’
Nadella says he’s warned Microsoft and its rivals to steer clear of “parlor tricks” that show AI’s power without preserving workers’ dignity.
“The fundamental need of every person is to be able to use their time more effectively, not to say, ‘Let us replace you’,” Nadella told Bloomberg at this week’s DLD conference in Munich.
Sears Uses IBM Watson to Bring Artificial Intelligence to Tire Shopping
Sears Auto Center announced the pilot launch of its Digital Tire Journey, a web app that uses IBM Watson Natural Language Classifier service to help customers find the best tires that fit their needs. Hoffman Estates-based Sears says that beyond a vehicle’s make and model, customers need tires that are built for their everyday routines, and its new AI-powered site is designed to make the shopping experience more efficient.
Oracle and Google Refine Their Cloud Pitches to Take On Amazon
Companies with consumer DNA are not used to providing in-person or telephone support simply because the economics won’t support that expense. That’s why Amazon had to re-boot to approach these sorts of businesses by, for example, cultivating relationships with big systems integrators like Cap Gemini and Accenture that have worked with big businesses for decades.
Now Google must do the same. When it comes to big customers, Driscoll said: “Sometimes you need to take a client to dinner and talk to them—especially when they’re spending a few million dollars a year with you.”
Microsoft cloud gets Pentagon’s top security rating
The Pentagon has given the highest security rating for unclassified data to Microsoft’s federal cloud offerings, Azure Government and a Defense Department-specific iteration of Office 365. The Microsoft services were granted Level 5 provisional authority to operate certification.
According to Microsoft, the rating makes it the first and only cloud provider that can offer a complete DOD cloud solution that is approved at that security level for controlled unclassified information (CUI).
IBM Analytics: A Unique Positioning within the Cloud Computing Industry
IBM’s strength lies in its relationships with the largest companies in the world, most of whom are already its clients. IBM also knows that the bulk of these companies will prefer the hybrid cloud model so they retain a greater measure of control over their data; in addition, there are those who will not move out of their private clouds.
In order to leverage that strength, IBM Analytics has decided to take the deployment-agnostic route for its analytics business. That way, they don’t rub their existing clients the wrong way, but are also there to support those clients who are seriously looking at public cloud as an option.
The first wave of cloud growth came from basic software applications moving to the cloud. The second, and larger wave will come from things like AI-based applications, the globally connected Internet of Things, cloud gaming, virtual reality and other forward technologies.
And to support that kind of environment, IaaS must necessarily continue to grow at the current pace, or faster. The more we move into cloud the more cloud we need – to move into! SaaS proliferation supported by IaaS expansion is the engine for cloud growth – this year and for the next several years.
According to the Army, the project required Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Impact Level 5 (IL-5) Provisional Authorization to manage controlled, unclassified information. IBM is the only company to be authorized by DISA at IL-5 to run Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions on government premises. IBM announced the accreditation in February which included a condition limiting the initial number of tenants in the cloud; according to today’s announcement, that condition was removed in September.
50TB hand made storage array (10 gb/s write speeds )
IBM is letting storage hardware revenues slip gently off into the night
IBM’s results announcement material said that storage HW revenues were down 10 per cent on the year. Our calculation is that they are thus $718.2m, compared to $768m a year ago. In the fourth 2010 quarter Big Blue’s storage hardware revenues were $1.2bn; six years later they are $718m, a 40.2 per cent drop.
Oracle’s Strategy to Hit $10 Billion in SaaS Revenues
For a lot of enterprises, a single-vendor solution for SaaS products is preferable, and that’s how Oracle wants to position itself. Microsoft is taking baby steps towards that same goal as well as it uses its strength in one SaaS area (Office 365) to strengthen another (Dynamics 365.) Both companies know that the head-on approach to taking on a segment leader like Salesforce is not the best solution.
The Board is now pleased to announce that Chris Hsu, currently Chief Operating Officer of HPE and Executive Vice President of HPE Software, will become CEO of the Enlarged Group following completion of the transaction. This appoinment will further strengthen the Board and Executive management of the Enlarged Group. As part of its succession plan the Board was fortunate to have multiple internal candidates that were well qualified for the role.
Oracle latest tech firm sued by Department of Labor
The legal complaint asks the court to order the cancellation of all of Oracle’s federal contracts unless it prohibits discriminatory hiring practices and makes up for lost compensation and employment benefits to those affected.
“The complaint is politically motivated, based on false allegations, and wholly without merit,” Deborah Hellinger, a spokeswoman for Oracle, said in a statement provided to CNNMoney. “Oracle values diversity and inclusion, and is a responsible equal opportunity and affirmative action employer.”
Adobe and Salesforce among best US workplaces in the technology sector
The rankings are based on employee feedback about how frequently they experience behaviors that create a great workplace, taking into consideration factors such as the quality of the employee benefits programme, support for a work-life balance, transparency of communication, degree of collaboration, and the opportunity for professional development. The rankings also take into account whether these experiences are consistent regardless of gender, race, ethnicity and job role.
Salesforce Is Opening an Innovation Hub Near Amazon and Microsoft
Salesforce announced plans for this expansion in October 2015, and still plans to double its local workforce in the new neighborhood to nearly 500 people. The new Bellevue Salesforce Engineering and Innovation Hub will even include “dedicated mindfulness areas.”
Effective this week, Daniel Springer is taking the reigns and former CEO Keith Krach is moving to a chairman role.
With a reported valuation of more than $3 billion, 14-year-old DocuSign is said to be scaling, with speculation that it’s nearing its long-awaited IPO. Though he couldn’t comment on timing, Springer happens to have experience with IPOs — he brought Responsys public in 2011 and later helped it get acquired by Oracle.
To revamp growth, the company has invested over $30 billion in five key growth areas: Analytics, Cloud, Mobile, Security and Social. These areas offer incredible potential that is beginning to be captured. From today’s earnings’ release, we can see that year over year, Analytics grew 9% to $19.5 billion, Cloud 35% to $13.7 billion, Mobile 35% to $4.1 billion and Security 14% to $2 billion (Social, though, fell by 10% to $1 billion). Revenues generated by these areas have grown to $32.8 billion and now represent 41% of the company’s total revenues. Such growth is impressive considering that, in 2010, strategic imperatives represented only 13% of total revenues. Growth is slowing down because the segments are becoming larger, but these growth rates are still more appropriate for a tech start-up rather than for a giant like IBM.
