The Source

Amazon is all over the news this week as they are introducing more AI/machine learning tools, more industry specific platforms, and more flexible GPU pricing.

Last week there were rumors that IBM was having issues with their cloud hosting financials, but they bounced back this week by securing American Airlines as a Bluemix customer and also bringing more focus on their blockchain solutions.

HPE is… just confusing me with every public action and comment they make.

Acquisitions

• SUSE Acquires HPE OpenStack Cloud Technology and Talent
  

  Linux vendor SUSE is acquiring OpenStack cloud and Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology and staff from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in a deal announced on November 30. Financial terms of the acquisition are not being publicly disclosed and the deal is set to close in the first quarter of 2017.

  http://www.eweek.com/cloud/suse-acquires-hpe-openstack-cloud-technology-and-talent.html

• IBM closes acquisition of financial consulting firm Promontory (old news)
  

  The firm’s statement continues, “The acquisition complements IBM’s Industry Platforms business, formed to develop open vertical platforms – the first comprehensive ‘as a service’ offerings designed from the ground up for individual industries. These platforms will integrate IBM Cloud, Watson and capabilities from across digital ecosystems of specialized providers, and serve multiple clients in an industry – delivering dramatically reduced costs for outcomes spanning speed, quality, audit-ability, security and transparency.”

  http://www.consultancy.uk/news/12849/ibm-closes-acquisition-of-financial-consulting-firm-promontory

• Twitter buys startup Yes, Inc. and scores a new VP of product in the process
  

  The new VP of Product, Keith Coleman, steps into the role as part of Twitter’s purchase of seven-person mobile app startup Yes, Inc., where he served as CEO. Prior to that gig, the exec worked as a product manager for another little startup called Google.

  https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/01/twitter-vp/?ncid=rss

• Fitbit is buying troubled smartwatch maker Pebble for around $40 million
  

  A source close to the company told TechCrunch that watch maker Citizen was interested in purchasing Pebble for $740 million in 2015. This deal failed and before the launch of the Pebble 2 Intel made an offer for $70 million. The CEO, Eric Migicovsky refused both offers. Our source said that Fitbit is now paying between $34 and $40 million for the company and is “barely covering their debts.”

  https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/fitbit-pebble/?ncid=rss
  I am putting this news item on the report as now there is one less IoT/wearable company that could be making health related devices
  Related News:
  Smartwatches wear out their welcome with Motorola

  Android Wear has had a rough year. What started with a promising announcement of Android Wear 2.0 at Google I/O has ended with a delayed launch, an utter lack of new models and now, a disillusioned manufacturer. In an interview with the Verge, Shakil Barkat, Motorola’s head of global product development, said in no uncertain terms that the company has soured on smartwatches and doesn’t “see enough pull in the market” to release a new model anytime soon.

  http://www.greenbot.com/article/3146360/android/smartwatches-wear-out-their-welcome-with-motorola.html

• Can CSC spin-merger help HPE strike the infrastructure-services balance?
  

  “With ES moving out, it gives us the opportunity to partner far more with the likes of [professional services company] Accenture,” he said.

  Also:
  HPE VP Alistair Winner says this:

  When asked if HPE is still primarily a product and hardware company, Alastair answered resolutely, “No.”

  He said where once customers just wanted to buy gear from them and move on, “now customers are saying, ‘Actually, I don’t want to buy gear anymore. Help me consume it, whether that’s on premise or on the cloud.’”

  This is a total copout BS statement and Alistair needs to be called out on that.

  http://siliconangle.com/blog/2016/11/29/can-csc-spin-merger-help-hpe-strike-infrastructure-services-balance-hpediscover/

Artificial Intelligence

• AWS comes out swinging with A.I. services
  

  The three services being rolled out are Amazon Rekognition for image recognition; Amazon Polly for text-to-speech services; and Amazon Lex, the technology inside its smart device Alexa, offering speech recognition services.

  http://www.computerworld.com/article/3146089/artificial-intelligence/aws-comes-out-swinging-with-ai-services.html

• Should Microsoft be your AI and machine learning platform?
  

  The cloud-based machine-learning marketplace is increasingly crowded, with competing services from the likes of Google, IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Mike Gualtieri, VP at analyst house Forrester, said that while Microsoft offered simpler tools for firms building their own machine-learning models, the quality of the firm’s on-demand, pre-trained speech, vision and language recognition services would likely be less effective than Google’s because of the search giant’s access to huge amounts of training data.

  http://www.zdnet.com/article/should-microsoft-be-your-ai-and-machine-learning-platform/

• Pfizer to use IBM Watson to devise immunotherapies for cancer
  

  “With the incredible volume of data and literature available in this complex field, we believe that tapping into advanced technologies can help our scientific experts more rapidly identify novel combinations of immune-modulating agents,” said Mikael Dolsten, Pfizer’s president of worldwide research and development. “We are hopeful that by leveraging Watson’s cognitive capabilities in our drug discovery efforts, we will be able to bring promising new immuno-oncology therapeutics to patients more quickly.”

  http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20161201/NEWS/161209996

Cloud

• How Amazon Web Services is luring banks to the cloud
  

  Jassy said the trend started at last year’s re:Invent, where Capital One Financial Chief Information Officer Rob Alexander talked publicly about recreating the consumer banking experience in the cloud. On Tuesday, Amazon said that over the next five years, Capital One will migrate “many core business and customer applications to AWS.”

  Intuit, whose tax and payroll software exposes it to strict regulations, has moved completely to Amazon’s cloud. And the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, is headed in that direction.

  http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/30/how-amazon-web-services-is-luring-banks-to-the-cloud.html

• How to compare cloud costs between Amazon, Microsoft and Google
  

  One advantage of IaaS is that customers can spin resources up and down as needed. But the most expensive way to buy cloud-based virtual machines is to pay for them on-demand. If customers plan and commit to a long-term contract, they will save money.

  In AWS, the primary way to do this is by using Reserved Instances (RIs). “You get the discount in exchange for making a one-year or three-year commitment with the longer commitment giving a higher discount,” RightScale engineers explain. “If you also pay for some or all of that committed usage upfront, the discount gets larger.” RightScale says discounts of RIs compared to on-demand VMs range from 24% to 75%.

  http://www.networkworld.com/article/3145470/cloud-computing/how-to-compare-cloud-costs-between-amazon-microsoft-and-google.html

• American Airlines selects IBM as its Cloud provider
  

  As part of the partnership, American Airlines will move select enterprise applications to IBM’s Cloud. The airline will be able to leverage the global footprint of IBM Cloud, which consists of more than 50 data centers spanning 17 countries, as well as a wide range of application development capabilities through IBM Bluemix. In addition the company will have access to IBM advanced analytics capabilities and technologies, all of which will enable the company to advance its enterprise into a cognitive infrastructure that offers greater resiliency and better customer experiences.

  https://www.traveldailynews.com/post/american-airlines-selects-ibm-as-its-cloud-provider

• Amazon Web Services is rolling out a way to use to use just the GPU power you need
  

  That means companies can tap into just a sliver of GPU power, or a larger amount, on demand as they need it and pay for that amount. GPUs can run a ton of tasks in parallel and have a lot of advantages in certain compute situations, like rendering games. But some lightweight processes don’t necessary require a full GPU cluster, which running for a company — especially a smaller one — might become prohibitively expensive very quickly. The new product, introduced at AWS Re:Invent, is called Elastic GPU for EC2.

  https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/30/amazon-web-services-is-rolling-out-a-way-to-use-to-use-just-the-gpu-power-you-need

• Docker for AWS: Who’s it really for?
  

  The biggest clue as to who Docker for AWS is aimed at: its use of CloudFormation as its interface to AWS. Cloud Formation was created to allow AWS services to be stood up as a single unit, without the user needing intimate knowledge of how to configure each piece. Configuring services like Elastic Load Balancing or CloudWatch isn’t a trivial process, and most AWS components have a learning curve associated with them.

  Docker for AWS reduces the overall learning curve for those who want to use Docker—and Docker Swarm—on AWS. But users can also manually configure a setup later on if the need arises.

  http://www.infoworld.com/article/3145696/application-development/docker-for-aws-whos-it-really-for.html

Datacenter

• Here’s More Bad News for Tech Hardware Makers
  

  Spending by small and medium businesses (SMBs) on laptops, PCs, peripherals, and other hardware will show a just a 1.1% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next four years compared to 6.6% growth in software spending, and 3.8% growth in IT services spending, according to IDC.

  http://fortune.com/2016/11/28/tech-hardware/
  
  Note: This article is a bit of a mess. Cloud is not called out specifically but is probably included in business services, which includes outsourcing.

• Hewlett Packard Enterprise Demonstrates World’s First Memory-Driven Computing Architecture
  

  “We have achieved a major milestone with The Machine research project — one of the largest and most complex research projects in our company’s history,” said Antonio Neri, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise Group at HPE. “With this prototype, we have demonstrated the potential of Memory-Driven Computing and also opened the door to immediate innovation. Our customers and the industry as a whole can expect to benefit from these advancements as we continue our pursuit of game-changing technologies.”

  https://www.hpe.com/us/en/newsroom/news-archive/press-release/2016/11/1287610-hewlett-packard-enterprise-demonstrates-worlds-first-memory-driven-computing-architecture.html

Software/SaaS

• IBM is continuing its blockchain push
  

  Putting blockchain to use for real-world transactions is likely not that far off. If working groups’ tests are successful, firms could be using it to transact real value as early as the end of this year and we could see widespread industry application within the next few years.

  http://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-is-continuing-its-blockchain-push-2016-12
  

Other

• Why Have IBM’s Global Business Services Failed to Grow?
  

  The government remained tight-lipped about the specifics of what was discussed, but did say that among the topics of discussion was the IT skills gap and the Digital Single Market – an initiative to ensure people and businesses across the continent can access digital services seamlessly and are subject to the same rules and regulations.

  http://marketrealist.com/2016/11/ibms-global-business-services-failed-grow-2/

Photo: vedanti