Photo by Martino Pietropoli on Unsplash
The shadow of COVID19 continues to loom.
Amazon is warning stockholders that they plan to spend $4B in operational expenses protecting employees and combating the strain. Pandemic darling Zoom announced a new cloud contract with Oracle (which makes sense since Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have their own competing video conference platforms).
SoftBank’s financial woes continue and they cannot rely on a strong economy for a rebound. Their investments in WeWork continue to sour due to isolation orders globally and I don’t see things getting better for WeWork or SoftBank anytime soon… but relaxed Japanese banking systems could help.
Acquisitions/Investments
- Intel to buy smart urban transit startup Moovit for $1B to boost its autonomous car division
Sources tell TechCrunch that the startup — which had previously been backed by Intel Capital in a strategic investment — will become part of Intel’s Israeli automotive hub, which is anchored by Mobileye, the autonomous driving company that Intel acquired for $15.3 billion in 2017.
It’s not clear yet what Moovit would be doing in that hub, but as a rule, ingesting and actioning reliable, real-time traffic data and intelligent routing — the crux of what Moovit does — are some of the most challenging aspects of getting autonomous vehicle services up and running.
- SoftBank to write down WeWork by $6.6 billion, compounding portfolio misery
The tech conglomerate has poured more than $13.5 billion into WeWork, one of a string of troubled bets by CEO Masayoshi Son that have laid waste to SoftBank’s full-year earnings.
The group maintained its forecast of a record annual operating loss of 1.35 trillion yen announced earlier this month.
The darkening future for WeWork with customers in lockdown comes as deep-seated problems from SoftBank’s cash-fuelled push for rapid expansion are being compounded by the coronavirus outbeak.
SoftBank shares pared gains to close up 0.5% compared to a 2.1% rise in the benchmark index .N255. The group has launched a record 2.5 trillion yen buyback to support its share price. CEO Son uses his SoftBank shares as collateral for loans.
Cloud
- Oracle wins cloud computing deal with Zoom as video calls surge
The deal is a big win for Oracle, which wants to catch up with rivals such as Amazon.com (AMZN.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O) that have greater market share, and is selling a new generation of cloud technology after its first generation efforts failed to gain traction.
Zoom and Oracle did not disclose the size of the deal, but said traffic for “millions” of meeting participants is being handled by Oracle’s cloud service and about 7 million gigabytes of Zoom data per day is flowing through Oracle servers.
“It’s exciting to be able to come on to a platform and scale very rapidly,” Zoom’s Chief Technology Officer Brendan Ittelson told Reuters in an interview.
Zoom’s service ran on a mixture of its own data center gear and cloud computing services from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure, but it began working with Oracle about six weeks ago.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oracle-zoom-video-commn/oracle-wins-cloud-computing-deal-with-zoom-as-video-calls-surge-idUSKCN22A1R9
And now we understand why Larry was saying nice things about Zoom. He was working the deal. It is sad that everybody was expecting news like this because it is so out of character for Ellison to compliment other technology companies not in his pocket. - Microsoft signs Coca-Cola to 5-year cloud technology and business software deal
The companies describe the agreement as a strategic partnership. Microsoft says Coca-Cola’s call center managers will use artificial intelligence in Dynamics 365, for example, to determine which issues are most important for customers such as retailers and vendors in Coke’s supply chain.
In addition to using Microsoft Teams for smaller meetings and collaboration as many of its employees work from home, the company is using Microsoft 365 Live Events for large-scale video presentations, such as employee town halls.
The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant reports quarterly earnings on Wednesday afternoon, providing the first official glimpse of its financial performance since the global COVID-19 pandemic began. Analysts expect Microsoft to post revenue of $33.9 billion for the quarter, up from $30.6 billion a year ago, and earnings of 1.28 per share, up from 1.14 per share a year ago.
Software/SaaS
- Celonis pushes beyond process mining into automated workflow tooling
“We put all of this together — the intelligence, the action, the automation and we solve business goals for certain departments,” Rinke said.
For starters, that involves supply chain and finance, but there are plans for building even more applications this year and beyond. The way it works for starters, is it connects to the company’s transactions systems, whether that’s SAP or Oracle or something similar. This is where the Banyas acquisition really comes into play,
“You can basically put these applications on top of your transaction systems and tell them which business goals you have — like I want to preserve cash or I want to pay on time — and then we analyze the enterprise’s entire processes towards these business goals, and then drive everything, automate things towards these business goals intelligently,” he said.
- Can API vendors solve healthcare’s data woes?
While hospitals, urgent care facilities and health systems have stored patient records electronically for years thanks to laws passed under the Clinton administration, those records were difficult for patients themselves to access. The way the system has been historically structured has made it nearly impossible for an individual to access their entire medical history.
It’s a huge impediment to ensuring that patients receive the best care they possibly can, and until now it’s been a boulder that companies have long tried to roll uphill, only to have it roll over them.
Now, new regulations are requiring that the developers of electronic health records can’t obstruct interoperability and access by applications. Those new rules may unlock a wave of new digital services.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/28/can-api-vendors-solve-healthcares-data-woes/
Other
- Zoom admits it doesn’t have 300 million users, corrects misleading claims
The misleading blog was edited on April 24th, a day after the numbers made headlines worldwide. After The Verge reached out for comment from Zoom, the company added a note to the blog post admitting the error yesterday, and provided the following statement:
“We are humbled and proud to help over 300 million daily meeting participants stay connected during this pandemic. In a blog post on April 22, we unintentionally referred to these participants as “users” and “people.” When we realized this error, we adjusted the wording to “participants.” This was a genuine oversight on our part.”
Zoom’s growth has been impressive, but the company has not actually provided a daily active user count. Zoom usage has soared from 10 million daily meeting participants back in December to 300 million this month. Rivals like Microsoft Teams and Google Meet appear to be closing the gap, though. Microsoft said yesterday it now has 75 million daily active users of Teams, a jump from 70 percent in a month. Microsoft also recorded 200 million meeting participants in a single day this month.
- Amazon says it’ll spend $4 billion or more dealing with COVID-19
One of the more interesting bits from Bezos’ statement was that Amazon has a team of current employees that are working to build “incremental testing capacity.” So far, the team has built a lab to pilot tests for its frontline employees, and it pledges to share any progress the team makes to the greater effort against COVID-19.
Amazon’s Q1 2020 performance fell in line with its guidance from late last year, with $4 billion in operating income. Its net sales were at $75.5 billion, which outpaced the growth that it expected last quarter. AWS, its cloud computing services, saw a huge increase year over year, bringing in $10.2 billion this quarter, which is up from $7.7 billion in the same quarter in 2019.
Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, these numbers reveal that Amazon — at least so far — is rolling with the punches and keeping up with the unprecedented demand seen for orders around the globe.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/30/21243112/amazon-q1-2020-earnings-covid-19-coronavirus-jeff-bezos