IBM continues their fight against cancer. This week they announced they are investigating why certain cancers are resistant to certain treatments and what leads to re-occurrence. As Watson fights cancer, it is also trying to figure out how to get installed into every electronic device you own.
A mass of people greater than the size of the entire US population ditched Internet Explorer and Edge this year in favor of alternatives like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. While Microsoft ponders how to get those users back, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told the press why he and Bill Gates are no longer friends (hint: its because of mobile).
Acquisitions
- Oracle Set to Complete $9.3 Billion Deal to Buy NetSuite
The deal has been complicated by opposition from NetSuite’s largest institutional shareholder, T. Rowe Price Group Inc. The investment firm, which held 14.4 million NetSuite shares or 17.7% of the company’s outstanding stock as of Nov. 1, said in September that it wouldn’t tender its shares in support of the deal. It cited the conflict of interest created by the substantial NetSuite stockholdings by Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison and his family, saying the $109 a share price was too low.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/oracle-set-to-complete-9-3-billion-deal-to-buy-netsuite-1478324011
- How LinkedIn Drove a Wedge Between Microsoft and Salesforce
The two companies stayed close and by the spring of 2015 their conversations evolved into another deal: Microsoft would acquire Salesforce. In May 2015, CNBC reported that the talks had fallen apart because Salesforce was demanding around $70 billion, about $22 billion more than the company’s market value at the time.
Several people briefed on the talks said that account was accurate, though two of them said another factor was that Mr. Benioff thought Microsoft was not respectful enough of his accomplishments in building Salesforce. It was unclear whether Mr. Benioff would be happy in a subordinate role at Microsoft after building Salesforce from the ground up, and it was equally hard to imagine a successful Salesforce without him.
Also:
For the next several months, Microsoft and Salesforce privately made competing offers for LinkedIn, each sweetening their bids as the competition increased. Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and a board member, wooed Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder and chairman, according to the LinkedIn filing. Salesforce code-named its LinkedIn effort Project Burgundy.
- Why Google really spent $625 million on a company generating $92 million in revenue
It’s not like Google needed an API platform,” this person said. “But they did need revenue. They did need executive talent, they did need logos.”
Apigee has an experienced enterprise salesforce who have landed a long list of enterprise customers such as Allstate, AT&T, Burberry, First Data, Kaiser Permanente, Walgreens etc. All told, Apigee has more than 335 customers, it says.
More importantly, Apigee is a big AWS customer. Apigee’s cloud service is built on Amazon’s Web Service and a number of its customers also host their API apps on AWS as well. Once Google moves Apigee to Google’s cloud, it has a compelling inside sales track to convince 335 more enterprise customers to do the same.
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-google-spent-625-million-on-apigee-2016-11
Artificial Intelligence
- How AI (Artificial Intelligence) Creates A Better Customer Service Experience
Some may think that Watson would eventually be able to replace a call center rep. No doubt that Watson can deliver a better self-service solution. But, what if rather than replacing the employee, it supported the employee. This would allow for the company to keep the human touch with its customers, but also provide quick and accurate support. This, according to Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, is when AI, or artificial intelligence, takes on a new meaning. This is when AI becomes augmented intelligence.
- IBM’s Watson to use genomic data to defeat drug-resistant cancers
While a growing number of treatments can hold cancers in check for months or years, most cancers eventually recur, according to the Broad Institute researchers. This is in part because tumors acquire mutations that make them drug resistant.
That cancer drug resistance is a major cause of nearly 600,000 annual deaths in the U.S. alone, according to Eric Lander, the founding director of the Broad Institute. While scientists have discovered the cause of drug resistance in a small number of cancer cases, which has led to the development of new, successful treatments, most cases are not fully understood.
The new five-year, $50 million genome project will study thousands of drug resistant tumors and draw on Watson’s computational and machine learning methods to help researchers understand how cancers become resistant to therapies.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3140188/healthcare-it/ibms-watson-to-use-genomic-data-to-defeat-drug-resistant-cancers.html
Additional information on their partners:
IBM Watson Health partners with MIT, Harvard on 5-year cancer initiativeIBM Watson Health and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have launched a five-year $50 million research project to delve into cancer drug resistance.
Researchers will study thousands of drug-resistant tumors and draw on Watson’s computational and machine learning methods to understand how cancers become resistant to therapies.
http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/ibm-watson-health-partners-mit-harvard-5-year-cancer-initiative
- IBM’s Watson AI could soon be in devices from PCs to robots, thanks to Project Intu
“Intu is an architecture that enables Watson services in devices that perceive by vision, audition, olfaction, sonar, infrared energy, temperature, and vibration. Intu-enabled devices express themselves and interact with their environments, other devices, and people through speakers, actuators, gestures, scent emitters, lights, navigation, and more,” IBM explains on its GitHub page.
The project is in search of all manner of developers, whether they’re hacking together Raspberry Pi with various sensors to create robots, or businesses exploring bots for customer service.
Cloud
- Greening the cloud: How Amazon, Microsoft and Google are pursuing the goal of renewable power
AWS, along with its rivals, is trying to cut the pollution its data centers emit by building wind and solar farms. Most recently, the cloud leader announced plans to built a 189-megawatt (MW) wind farm in Hardin County, Ohio, that will generate 530,000 megawatt hours of power per year starting in December 2017. That’s enough to power about 50,000 homes U.S. homes for a year.
http://www.geekwire.com/2016/greening-cloud-amazon-microsoft-google-pursuing-goal-renewable-power/
- Hewlett Packard Emphasizes Importance, Potential of Blockchain, Decentralization
However, Dare notes that irrefutability and decentralization are two of the most important features of the Blockchain network as they enable participants in the network to send payments to each other without mediators. They could also allow banks and major financial institutions to conduct labor-saving operations.
Currently, a massive number of banks and financial establishments are gearing towards the development and implementation of the Blockchain technology. But, even multi-billion dollar institutions like Accenture have proposed the concept of editable Blockchain.
- Why IBM Is Betting Big on Blockchain
Another example is a project involving Visa and DocuSign that would allow car buyers to configure a lease and drive away with a new car immediately, without the time-consuming process of filling out mountains of paperwork. La’Zooz, a start-up in Israel, is using blockchain in a ride-sharing app that allows drivers and customers to connect directly, without the need for a middleman ride-sharing company.
Making supply chains more efficient is another area where blockchain could potentially shine. IBM estimates that blockchain could generate more than $100 billion of efficiencies annually if applied to global supply chains — a staggering number. Both Toyota and the U.S. Postal Service are currently looking into using blockchain for exactly that purpose.
http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/11/10/why-ibm-is-betting-big-on-blockchain.aspx
Datacenter/Desktop
- Ex-Microsoft CEO Ballmer says his push on smartphones strained relationship with Bill Gates
“There was a fundamental disagreement about how important it was to be in the hardware business,” Ballmer said. “I had pushed Surface. The board had been a little — little reluctant in supporting it. And then things came to a climax around what to do about the phone business.”
Microsoft entered the market in 2012 with the Surface RT, a tablet that sold poorly and required Microsoft to take a $900 million charge to write down the value of inventory. Now, the rejiggered Surface business is profitable and generated more than $4 billion in sales for the most recent year.
Software/SaaS
- 331 million people ditched Internet Explorer and Edge this year
Microsoft is trying to keep its users, no doubt, by trying to convince everyone that Edge is much better at battery management. It introduced features like Cortana support, pinned tabs and more, but none of those functions seem to be worth sticking around for. Chrome, a notorious system hog, wasn’t the main beneficiary this time, though. Instead, Computerworld said that Mozilla’s Firefox saw a user increase of about 2 percentage points, gathering a large chunk of the 2.7 percent of the user’s bailing from Microsoft’s ship. The pace doesn’t seem to be slowing, either, with a decline predicted to continue into the next several months according to Computerworld.
- Is IBM Cool Again?
Bots are one feature of Slack’s platform, and the first step of the partnership will see Watson used to power an improved version of Slackbot, Slack’s customer-service bot. Eventually, developers will be able to use various Watson services when building bots and other tools for the platform. Since Watson is a machine learning system, it has the capability to become more accurate and useful over time.
In terms of revenue, this partnership with Slack is likely to be a drop in the bucket for IBM. But it’s notable because it’s an example of a tech start-up choosing IBM for — well, anything. My guess is that IBM rarely comes up in the conversation at small tech companies like Slack. That was certainly true a few years ago, and it’s probably still true today. That Slack turned to IBM is a fairly significant development, and it could spur more deals and further expand Watson’s presence.
http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/11/06/is-ibm-cool-again.aspx
- Salesforce users: if you buy it, you integrate it
That’s the finding of a recent survey of 300 Salesforce users by Jitterbit, an integration vendor. While the vendor obviously has a horse in this race, the results underscore the urgency of application and data integration between Salesforce and on-premises systems. Yet, respondents are divided as to whom should take responsibility for the effort. Forty-four percent said that integration projects were the responsibility of the non-IT users adopting the solution. Another 43 percent said the IT department is expected to own the responsibility for integrating these solutions.
The result: integration chaos from the cloud. Integrating information from other business applications with Salesforce is crucial to gaining a 360-degree view of the customer, yet users often don’t have a clear integration strategy in place.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/salesforce-achilles-heel-integration/
Other
- CEO lured from Amazon AWS with millions in cash, stock options
Selipsky, who joined Tableau in September, got a $1 million signing bonus, $500,000 in base salary and up to $500,000 in annual performance bonuses. He was also granted $14 million in restricted class A stock with an option to purchase 75,000 shares.
- IBM moved jobs to India: Trump
“IBM laid off 500 workers in Minneapolis and moved their jobs to India and other countries. A Trump administration will stop the jobs from leaving America, and we will stop the jobs from leaving Minnesota,” Trump said in his speech yesterday in Minneapolis, as part of efforts to woo voters in Minnesota state which has been a Democrat stronghold.
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/ibm-moved-jobs-to-india-trump/1/804146.html
- Turbonomic Grabs Former HP COO Bill Veghte As New Top Exec
Former Hewlett-Packard executive Bill Veghte has joined Turbonomic, an application performance management developer and Hewlett Packard Enterprise strategic technology partner, as its full-time executive chairman.
Turbonomic, which until August was known as VMTurbo, Thursday unveiled the appointment along with the news that the privately held company has closed its 25th consecutive quarter of revenue growth.
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