Amazon had an outage this week taking down popular sites like Slack and Atlassian. This outage happened as AWS is in talks with the Pentagon on another cloud contract (in which they are the front-runners). As AWS gets bigger, should companies look at other options so they don’t go down with the Titanic?
Apple found their supply chain had more human rights violations that originally reported via an internal audit conducted by an independent 3rd party. The company is in the process of rolling out a formal process to manage these types of ongoing violations.
IBM has over 400 active blockchain projects with customers at the moment. As IBM shifts to newer business models and services, some of their older customers like the Canadian government, are having major implementation issues on traditional services.
Acquisitions
- WeWork acquires SEO and marketing company Conductor
There’s a lot that make WeWork and Conductor a natural fit. Seth and his team built Conductor to provide the insights, education, and resources their customers need to succeed — in other words, Conductor helps their customers do what they love, and do it better. Conductor has made it easier for us to reach potential WeWork members who are looking for workspace. It’s also helped us get the word out about the services and amenities that we offer to companies of all sizes.
https://beta.techcrunch.com/2018/03/06/wework-acquires-conductor/
- WTF is CFIUS?
The U.S. is a technology leader, and it has a robust set of economic warfare tools to protect its competitive advantages. One of those tools is CFIUS, or the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. You might have heard it in the news recently because of its potential impact on Broadcom’s mega offer to buy Qualcomm, or because Congress is considering strengthening its provisions to potentially regulate startup investments from foreign firms.
CFIUS is becoming a lot more important these days due to a single country: China. There are few economic stories more fundamental than the continued rise of China as a world superpower. From humble experiments with capitalism in the early 1980s to the behemoth it is today, China’s economic growth has been nothing short of extraordinary. Underpinning that growth has been a deep appetite for technology and scientific research, first learned through overseas universities, and now through indigenous development.
As China’s wealth has grown, so has its desire to own the most distinguished technology companies in the world, and that’s where CFIUS comes in. The United States’s latest National Security Strategy labels China a “strategic competitor.” As tensions flare, CFIUS will be at the heart of the battle for who will ultimately own the technology industry.
- Google is selling off Zagat
Seven years after picking up Zagat for $151 million, Google is selling off the perennial restaurant recommendation service. The New York Times is reporting this morning that the technology giant is selling off the company to The Infatuation, a review site founded nine years back by former music execs.
The company had been rumored to be courting a buyer since early this year. As Reuters noted at the time, Zagat has increasingly become less of a focus for Google, as the company began growing its database of restaurant recommendations organically. Zagat, meanwhile, has lost much of the shine it had when Google purchased it nearly a decade ago.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/05/google-is-selling-off-zagat/?ncid=rss
Cloud
- AWS outage: Datacentre power cut knocks ‘hundreds’ of internet services offline
The cloud services giant confirmed that its US-East-1 region suffered two separate power loss incidents over the course of two hours in one of the site’s network peering facilities, each one lasting about 10 minutes.
As a result, organisations that rely on that region to host their applications and workloads “may have experienced internet connectivity issues”, said AWS in a statement on its services status page.
“Our network is designed to be fully redundant with multiple independent peering facilities in every region,” the statement continued. “Some customers experienced elevated latency and packet loss while the network rerouted affected traffic to these unaffected network peering facilities.
“Some packet loss was also observed as we restored traffic to the affected network peering facility.”
http://www.computerweekly.com/news/252436193/AWS-outage-Datacentre-power-cut-knocks-out-hundreds-of-internet-services
And this is why corporate customers should at least think about alternatives to AWS, 67% of all cloud is on AWS. When a hacker or a outage occurs, there are much bigger impacts. - Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery: How To Avoid the ‘Gotchas’
Sync-and-share solutions are a great opportunity to examine one of the key problems of cloud computing: Namely, that expectations rarely match reality. IT practitioners have a pretty good idea of how sync-and-share solutions work. As a result, it rarely occurs to us to sit users down and have the talk with them about the cloud not being magic. Unfortunately, many users encounter cloud-based solutions with erroneous preconceptions, and this “knowledge” leads to errors.
One common belief is that sync-and-share solutions adequately protect users against ransomware. They don’t. Modern ransomware makes numerous changes to files over time, ultimately running out the number of versions of files kept by the sync-and-share solution. There’s even a little game of cat-and-mouse going on with some of them where the sync-and-share vendor tries to add some level of ransomware detection based on access patterns, and the ransomware evolves new access patterns.
https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2018/03/06/cloud-dr-gotchas-to-avoid.aspx
- Microsoft to offer governments local version of Azure cloud service
The pairing of Azure Stack, Microsoft’s localized cloud product, and Azure Government, the government-tailored version of Microsoft’s cloud, comes as competition against Amazon.com Inc for major clients in the public sector ramps up.
The new offering, which will be made available in mid-2018, is designed to appeal to governments and agencies with needs for on-premise servers, such as in a military operation or in an embassy abroad, said Tom Keane, Microsoft Azure’s head of global infrastructure.
“Quite literally we’ve designed Azure Stack with the scenario of a submarine in mind,” Keane told Reuters.
- Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft jockey for Pentagon’s cloud business
Catz’s meeting with Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, which was confirmed by a department spokesman, came as technology companies are raising concerns that the Pentagon is leaning toward choosing Amazon.com Inc’s cloud division as a single provider for a multi-year contract to modernise its technology infrastructure.
Having already won two other government cloud contacts, Amazon Web Services is widely perceived as the front-runner for the Defense Department’s cloud award, while companies including Oracle, Microsoft Corp, and International Business Machines Corp fight for a piece of that business.
Oracle has a vested interest in how the contract is awarded because it has long-term contracts with multiple government agencies that use its flagship database to store information on their own systems. As the agencies look to switch to cloud computing and eye market leader Amazon, these moves threaten Oracle’s traditional revenue sources. Oracle has tried to protect its database business by offering cloud services of its own, but has come late to that market.
Software/SaaS
- IBM told investors that it has over 400 blockchain clients — including Walmart, Visa, and Nestlé
At least 400 IBM customers are now running blockchain-based projects, according to the briefing. Among those customers are 63 that work together with certain themes: 25 companies in global trade, 14 companies in food tracking, and 14 companies in global payments. Some of IBM’s most recognizable blockchain clients include Nestlé, Visa, Walmart, and HSBC.
While blockchains continue to be widely associated with startups and crypto-millionaires, IBM’s client list shows that large enterprises are truly embracing the technology.
IBM and Walmart actually launched a joint food safety blockchain project globally last year, which enables the grocery chain to figure out where specific produce originated in a matter of seconds.
http://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-blockchain-enterprise-customers-walmart-visa-nestl-2018-3
Datacenter/Hardware
- Amazon will stop selling Nest smart home devices, escalating its war with Google
The stakes are huge. Both Amazon and Google are building out a new voice-powered operating system that can control everything in your life — from your lights to your garage door to the music and video you stream. Amazon’s acquisition of Ring will give it a nice boost on the hardware side as it continues to build out Alexa’s AI. Ring was already one of Nest’s biggest competitors. Now it has the nearly-limitless funding needed from Amazon to go after its Google-backed rival.
The rivalry between Amazon and Google extends beyond the smart home, though.
http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-wont-sell-nest-products-from-google-2018-3
- Google’s new Bristlecone processor brings it one step closer to quantum supremacy
Today, Google said that it believes that Bristlecone, its latest quantum processor, will put it on a path to reach quantum supremacy in the future. The purpose of Bristlecone, Google says, it to provide its researchers with a testbed “for research into system error rates and scalability of our qubit technology, as well as applications in quantum simulation, optimization, and machine learning.”
One of the major issues that all quantum computers have to contend with is error rates. Quantum computers typically run at extremely low temperatures (we’re talking millikelvins here) and are shielded from the environment because today’s quantum bits are still highly unstable and any noise can lead to errors.
Because of this, the qubits in modern quantum processors (the quantum computing versions of traditional bits) aren’t really single qubits but often a combination of numerous bits to help account for potential errors. Another limited factor right now is that most of these systems can only preserve their state for under 100 microseconds.
Other
- Apple finds more serious supplier problems as its audits expand
Apple said in the report that the proportion of “low performers,” or suppliers scoring less than 59 points on its 100-point scale, fell to 1 percent in 2017 from 3 percent in 2016 and 14 percent in 2014. “High performers” with scores of more than 90 rose to a record high of 59 percent from 47 percent the year before.
Apple found 44 “core violations” of its labor rules in 2017, double the previous year. Those included three instances of employees forced to pay excessive fees for a job, a practice Apple banned in 2015.
In one case, over 700 foreign contract workers recruited from the Philippines were charged a total of $1 million to work for a supplier. Apple said it forced the supplier to repay the money.
- Why Amazon Is Immune To Almost Any Boycott
Amazon, however, is in a different position–one that’s great for Jeff Bezos and annoying for activists. “For all its problems,” says King, “[Amazon] has a pretty robust reputation.” He goes on, “a boycott against Amazon doesn’t really change in people’s minds what kind of company Amazon is.” Which is to say, Bezos’s behemoth website has remained a relative constant for all these years, strategically staying out of the public eye while amassing hundreds of millions of loyal users. People know what the company is, what it has been doing, and the services its offers.
What’s more, the boycotts levied against the retail giant aren’t about some deep-seated collusion with the forces of evil, but rather passive business dealings. The activist organization Sleeping Giants, for instance, has been lobbying for Amazon to stop advertising on Breitbart. Though the group has had success with other campaigns–it got over a thousand advertisers to pull advertising from both Breitbart and the Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor–Amazon has yet to change its ways. Though it may ruffle some people’s feathers that the company advertises on a far-right website or allows a gun rights organization to distribute its TV content, that doesn’t reveal an internal clash of values. Amazon is just doing business–the same business it’s been doing for years. And since people are very unlikely to stop using Amazon, the company probably sees no reason to acquiesce.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40538592/how-amazon-is-immune-to-almost-any-boycott
- Canada’s IBM Payroll Plans Go Bust — Costing $1 Billion
“They should have known better,” Daviau told the publication, adding that IBM holds some of the blame because it also went forward with the payroll system’s launch.
“IBM got into a contract with the government that was very beneficial to IBM, which meant that the contract — despite non-delivery — could continue to be extended and IBM could continue to come back to the pot for money,” she said.
In a statement, IBM said it is “fulfilling its obligations on the Phoenix contract, and the software is functioning as intended.” It added that it “continues to work in partnership with the government’s efforts to resolve the project’s issues and remains committed to the project’s overall success.”
https://www.pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments/2018/ibm-canada-payroll/
- More ‘boomerang’ employees return to Microsoft as corporate culture shifts
Microsoft has always had “boomerang” employees, as have other tech companies in the highly competitive industry. During the few years before Nadella stepped into the role, about 12 percent of the company’s new hires in the U.S. each year had previous job stints at the company. But that number ticked up to 16 percent, or 621 boomerangs, between July 2014 and July 2015, starting a few months after Nadella took over as CEO.
For the recent Microsoft boomerangs, returning to Redmond feels like stepping into a company that has changed — albeit one where that still occurs slowly.
- Marriott Employee Roy Jones Hit ‘Like.’ Then China Got Mad
Craig Smith, head of Asia-Pacific for Marriott, said in a separate statement, “We made a few mistakes in China earlier this year that suggested some associates did not understand or take seriously enough the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China. Those incidents were mistakes and in no way representative of our views as a company.”
“Not only can’t you speak freely inside of China, but you can’t even speak freely outside of China—and that’s really bad,” said Xiao Qiang, a Chinese internet expert at the University of California at Berkeley.
Marriott was within its legal rights to fire Mr. Jones, legal experts say. But some say the severity of the penalty—termination, rather than a reprimand or suspension—highlights the increasingly unforgiving environment for those who offend Chinese sensibilities.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/marriott-employee-roy-jones-hit-like-then-china-got-mad-1520094910
Photo: Kirstyn Paynter