Phone companies are taking over my report this week for a variety of reasons: T-mobile’s acquisition of Sprint is happening, AT&T is lying about 5G access (which is nothing new apparently), and Samsung is making chips for IBM.
And while these companies try to grow from their core businesses, Oracle is struggling with their big shift to cloud… but they have options.
Acquisitions
- T-Mobile Takeover of Sprint Clears U.S. National Security Panel
Neither Deutsche Telekom nor SoftBank is required to significantly change its own business or operations as a result of Cfius’s demands, according to the terms of the merger. Any potential changes are limited to T-Mobile, Sprint and their respective subsidiaries, deal documents show.
Still, the global campaign by the other U.S. national security officials outside of Cfius was bearing some fruit. Deutsche Telekom on Friday said it was reviewing its procurement strategy for vendor equipment given “the global discussion about the security of network elements from Chinese manufacturers.” SoftBank last week made similar comments about its network in Japan.
Artificial Intelligence
- This Health Startup Won Big Government Deals—But Inside, Doctors Flagged Problems
To prove their point, the doctors had spent about a day carrying out an audit on their own initiative, according to one current and one former staff member, who asked not to be named for fear of legal repercussions. They found that around 10% to 15% of the chatbot’s 100 most frequently suggested outcomes, such as a chest infection, either missed warning signs of a more serious condition like cancer or sepsis or were just flat-out wrong, according to one insider. The clinicians had gone directly to Parsa that Friday in the hope of stalling the new release. They made their case, and after some negotiation he agreed to delay the rollout.
But the doctors were still troubled. Interviews with current and former Babylon staff and outside doctors reveal broad concerns that the company has rushed to deploy software that has not been carefully vetted, then exaggerated its effectiveness.
Cloud
- Oracle Revenue Flat as Push to Bolster Cloud Business Continues
Oracle officials sought to reassure investors about the cloud business during a Monday conference call with analysts, highlighting strong software-as-a-service bookings in the latest period and Oracle’s competitive edge from its autonomous database.
“We need more than just a great database,” said Larry Ellison, the company’s co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer. “We also need first-class infrastructure to run the database on, and we know finally have that.”
Overall, Oracle reported second-quarter profit rose 5% to $2.33 billion, or 61 cents a share. Excluding stock-based compensation and other items, profit rose to 80 cents a share from 69 cents a share.
Security
- China appears to have breached HPE and IBM, hacked into clients’ computers
The attacks were part of a Chinese campaign known as Cloudhopper, which the United States and Britain on Thursday said infected technology service providers in order to steal secrets from their clients.
While cybersecurity firms and government agencies have issued multiple warnings about the Cloudhopper threat since 2017, they have not disclosed the identity of technology companies whose networks were compromised.
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-hacked-hpe-and-ibm-and-then-went-after-their-clients-reports-2018-12
IBM says no evidence that ‘sensitive’ data was hacked by China“IBM has been aware of the reported attacks and already has taken extensive counter-measures worldwide as part of our continuous efforts to protect the company and our clients against constantly evolving threats,” Ed Barbini, vice-president for external relations and spokesman for New York-headquartered IBM, said in a text message.
“We take responsible stewardship of client data very seriously, and have no evidence that sensitive IBM or client data has been compromised by this threat,” stated Mr Barbini.
Software/SaaS
- There’s ‘no way’ customers would migrate from Oracle to Amazon database software, Ellison says
Amazon made its database technology available on the cloud long before Oracle did, Ellison said, but now Oracle is making its database technology readily available to customers in the cloud. The move lessens the chance customers will opt to move off Oracle technology. Such migrations are “just incredibly expensive and complicated and you’ve got to be willing to give up tons of reliability, tons of security, tons of performance to go ahead and do it,” Ellison said.
- Red Hat Flat as IBM’s $34B Purchase Nears
Red Hat’s total revenues increased 13.2 percent year over year to $847 million for the third quarter of its fiscal 2019. That was lower than the 21.5 percent surge the company posted for the same quarter last year, and just shy of forecasts.
The company closed 100 deals during the quarter valued in excess of $1 million. Red Hat CFO Eric Shander added that, “Strong renewals of our largest deals also helped drive these results with all of our top 25 deals renewing at an upsell rate above 120 percent.”
Red Hat CEO and President Jim Whitehurst said that the company added more than 100 new customers to both its OpenShift and Ansible platforms during the quarter. OpenShift is Red Hat’s Kubernetes-focused enterprise container product while Ansible is its DevOps automation platform.
https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/red-hat-flat-as-ibms-34b-purchase-nears/2018/12/
Datacenter/Hardware
- Samsung to Manufacture IBM’s 7nm Power CPUs
IBM’s announcement noted that it has had a strong alliance in developing new process technologies with Samsung for the past 15 years. Back in 2015, IBM announced that its IBM Research Alliance, which includes Samsung, was able to produce the first 7nm EUV test chip. IBM will soon be able to take advantage of this node, too, although it doesn’t look like it will be among the first to use it.
“This collaboration is an important milestone for Samsung’s foundry business as it signifies confidence in Samsung’s cutting-edge high performance EUV process technology,” Ryan Lee, Vice President of Foundry Marketing at Samsung Electronics, said in a statement.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-ibm-7nm-power-cpu-hpc,38278.html
Other
- AT&T will put a fake 5G logo on its 4G LTE phones
According to FierceWireless, AT&T will display an icon reading “5G E” on newer phones that are connected to LTE in markets where the carrier has deployed a handful of speed boosting — but still definitively 4G — technologies. The “E,” displayed smaller than the rest of the logo, refers to “5G Evolution,” the carrier’s term for networks that aren’t quite 5G but are still faster than traditional LTE.
If this sounds sadly familiar, it’s because AT&T pulled this exact same stunt during the transition to LTE. The company rolled out a speed-boosting 3G tech called HSPA+, then got all of its phone partners — even Apple! — to show a “4G” logo when on that kind of connection.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/21/18151764/att-5g-evolution-logo-rollout-fake-network
Photo by Humphrey Muleba on Unsplash