Photo by Jose Rago on Unsplash
Oracle has been having an interesting year. Between trying to sue the Government over the JEDI cloud contract procurement process and losing one of their CEOs, it is not the most stellar time for the company.
Normally Oracle has less press than their peers but this week they kept showing up in articles. From a financial perspective, the company published mixed Q2 results. Sole CEO Safra Catz stated she expects much better performance next quarter (but how?).
Oracle also made headlines due to a former employee saying the company is cheating their customers by selling software that does not do what it claims to do. This does link up with stories about Oracle’s early days in the book Softwar.
Finally Oracle is moving their big annual conference “OpenWorld” from San Francisco to Las Vegas. This move is costing San Fran over $60M annual, but that city is too damn expensive.
Artificial Intelligence
- AI is making it easier to kill (you). Here’s How.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/technology/100000006082083/lethal-autonomous-weapons.html
Cloud
- Oracle Posts Mixed 2nd-Quarter Results
The database giant registered second-quarter earnings per share of 90 cents, up 12% year-over-year. Wall Street had projected earnings of 88 cents per share. Revenue during the same period stood at $9.61 billion. Revenue grew 1% year-over-year but did not live up to Wall Street’s expectation of $9.65 billion. Reflecting on the quarter’s performance, Oracle’s CEO Safra Catz commented:
“We had another strong quarter in our Fusion and NetSuite cloud applications businesses with Fusion ERP revenues growing 37% and NetSuite ERP revenues growing 29%. This consistent rapid growth in the now multibillion dollar ERP segment of our cloud applications business has enabled Oracle to deliver a double-digit EPS growth rate year-after-year. I fully expect we will do that again this year.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-posts-mixed-2nd-quarter-161331753.html
Security/Privacy
- New Orleans declares state of emergency following cyberattack
Officials are running many services on pen and paper until it’s deemed safe for computers to come back online, although the Orleans Parish Communication District (which handles both 311 and 991 lines) and courts weren’t affected. The city added that emergency services’ communications were still active, and that it could still obtain footage from public safety cameras if there was an incident.
It’s unclear when computers will go back online, when the state of emergency will be lifted, or who the culprits were. City-scale ransomware attacks like those using SamSam have frequently been the work of extortionists hoping only for a windfall profit, although there are concerns hostile countries might use malware to bankroll programs. Louisiana’s government faced its own ransomware attack in November and had to shut its Office of Motor Vehicles for days, although the state got back online without caving in to the attackers’ demands.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/12/14/new-orleans-cyberattack/
- Microsoft details the most clever phishing techniques it saw in 2019
Microsoft said that phishing attempts grew from under 0.2% in January 2018 to around 0.6% in October 2019, where 0.6% represented the percentage of phishing emails detected out of the total volume of emails the company analyzed.
While phishing attacks increased, the number of ransomware, crypto-mining, and other malware infections went down, the company said at the time.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-details-the-most-clever-phishing-techniques-it-saw-in-2019/
- FBI secretly demands a ton of consumer data from credit agencies. Now lawmakers want answers
The FBI regularly uses these legal powers — known as national security letters — to compel credit giants to turn over non-content information, such as records of purchases and locations, that the agency deems necessary in national security investigations. But these letters have no judicial oversight and are typically filed with a gag order, preventing the recipient from disclosing the demand to anyone else — including the target of the letter.
Only a few tech companies, including Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, have disclosed that they have ever received one or more national security letters. Since the law changed in 2015 in the wake of the Edward Snowden disclosures that revealed the scope of the U.S. government’s surveillance operations, recipients have been allowed to petition the FBI to be cut loose from the gag provisions and publish the letters with redactions.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/14/fbi-national-security-letter-credit-agencies/
Software/SaaS
- A former employee is suing Oracle, alleging the company sold customers phantom products and forced him out when he complained
A former Oracle product manager has sued the tech giant, claiming it sold phantom or broken products as part of a cloud service geared to universities.
Tayo Daramola said the company retaliated against him “reporting what was in fact a pattern of criminal acts,” the suit said.
He said he resisted participating in what he described as “misrepresentation and likely fraud,” and subsequently filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the suit said.
https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-manager-lawsuit-university-education-practices-2019-12
Other
- How consulting companies like McKinsey optimized American inequality
Broadly speaking, management consulting firms advise other organizations how to do their jobs better. They are hired, as CNBC’s Abigail Hess notes, “to assess and address problems, such as downsizing, acquisition or restructuring.”
The key to management consulting firms’ function is in the word management. Management consultants work for a company’s executives, not its employees, and the hiring of one is often a sign that layoffs are imminent. Wendell Potter, a former vice president at a health insurer, says “it was clear that when [a management consulting firm] was brought in there would be layoffs. In my own department, there were times when I had to lay people off because off because of McKinsey’s work.”
As Duff McDonald, author of “The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business,” once put it: “McKinsey might be the single greatest legitimizer of mass layoffs in history.”
- Oracle Won’t Return to Dual-CEO Structure
Oracle Corp. ORCL -3.47% said it won’t replace its late co-CEO, Mark Hurd, leaving Safra Catz as the sole top executive leading the software giant after years of operating with an unusual, two-chief structure.
In the company’s first earnings report since Mr. Hurd’s death in October, Oracle founder and Chairman Larry Ellison said it is working to strengthen its management team, to develop a group of executives who are “potential CEOs when both Safra and I retire, which is not anytime soon.” But he described the two-CEO setup as unusual and not something Oracle is looking to repeat.
Ms. Catz now leads Oracle as sole CEO. Mr. Ellison, who ceded the CEO post to Mr. Hurd and Ms. Catz in 2014, remains active as chairman and chief technology officer.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracle-reports-higher-profit-11576186408
- Salesforce promotes Bret Taylor to president and COO
Salesforce announced today that it has named Bret Taylor as president and chief operating officer of the company. Prior to today’s promotion, Taylor held the position of president and chief product officer.
In his new position, Taylor will be responsible for a number of activities, including leading Salesforce’s global product vision, engineering, security, marketing and communications. That’s a big job, and as such he will report directly to chairman Marc Benioff.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/12/salesforce-promotes-bret-taylor-to-president-and-coo/
- SoftBank’s China strategy wobbles as key bets disappoint
In fairness to SoftBank, many China IPOs have stumbled, hurt by a sharp slowdown in economic growth and trade tensions with the United States.
But investors and some bankers looking at China-related deals say SoftBank’s involvement, once a sign of promising prospects, was now viewed as a red flag that a company was likely overvalued.
“SoftBank has become a signal that the market has peaked,” said one person involved in the OneConnect IPO.
- The Money Men Who Enabled Adam Neumann and the WeWork Debacle
Little of WeWork’s trajectory would have been possible were it not for the collection of veteran executives and financiers from the upper echelons of Wall Street and Silicon Valley who enabled Mr. Neumann, a charismatic 40-year-old with little prior business experience.
Mr. Neumann mesmerized them with his pitch, which offered a vision for the property-leasing company as a tech startup with limitless potential to transform how people work and live.
Investors poured capital onto Mr. Neumann’s business bonfire and ceded control, rarely pushing back with any force despite mounting problems and year after year of missed projections.
Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank Group Corp., who helped inflate WeWork’s valuation to $47 billion, pushed an already wild-spending Mr. Neumann to act bigger and crazier. JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO James Dimon and other bankers, instead of injecting a dose of reality, spent years championing Mr. Neumann and the company as they battled for the coveted IPO assignment.
- For Tech Jobs, the Rich Cities Are Getting Richer
Researchers from the Brookings Institution and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech-industry-backed think tank, arrived at their conclusion by looking at a fairly narrow slice of jobs—13 industries that involve the highest rate of research and development spending and STEM degrees per worker. That includes much of the software industry, as well as jobs in areas like pharmaceuticals and aerospace. The researchers found that, between 2005 and 2017, five metro areas—San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego, and Boston— not only added lots of jobs, they were also becoming more dominant in those industries overall.
https://www.wired.com/story/tech-jobs-rich-cities-getting-richer/
- Oracle will move its annual OpenWorld conference to Las Vegas because San Francisco is too expensive
According to an email that the San Francisco Travel Association (SFTA) sent to its members on Monday, Oracle has signed a three-year agreement to bring its flagship event to the Caesars Forum in Las Vegas.
“Oracle stated that their attendee feedback was that San Francisco hotel rates are too high,” the email, which was viewed by CNBC, said. “Poor street conditions was another reason why they made this difficult decision.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/10/oracle-moving-openworld-from-san-francisco-to-las-vegas-caesars-forum.html
Oracle is right to move the conference away from San Fran (although I do not like Las Vegas). San Francisco needs to change.