Photo by Adi Constantin on Unsplash
There is a looming trade war with China that is getting closer to reality as companies are trying to determine if they can survive without the Chinese manufacturing supply chain. It is getting so serious that some companies (like Foxconn) are firing off press releases that they have capacity outside of China to meet their production goals.
And as China prepares to face off against Trump, the country continues to interfere with communication applications and protocols (like Telegram) impeding their own citizens ability to communicate due to fears of protests (and those efforts didn’t really matter).
Acquisitions/Investments
- Salesforce is buying data visualization company Tableau for $15.7B in all-stock deal
On the heels of Google buying analytics startup Looker last week for $2.6 billion, Salesforce today announced a huge piece of news in a bid to step up its own work in data visualization and (more generally) tools to help enterprises make sense of the sea of data that they use and amass: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7 billion in an all-stock deal.
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This is a huge jump on Tableau’s last market cap: it was valued at $10.79 billion at close of trading Friday, according to figures on Google Finance. (Also: trading has halted on its stock in light of this news.)
Artificial Intelligence
- Amazon CTO says AI tools like Lex are the next big thing after AWS and it’s not Amazon’s responsibility to make sure Rekognition is used accurately or ethically
For instance, Rekognition is being used by an anti-sex-trafficking non-profit organisation, Thorn, to scrape classified ad sites and search for matches against a database of missing teenagers.
But events like Re:Mars demonstrate that Amazon knows it has work to do in gaining the public’s trust in order to go ahead with its ambitions.
One non-Amazon guest on stage, the AI pioneer Andrew Ng, gave a pretty scathing review of the technology industry’s reputation – and food for thought for his hosts.
“Even as we lead the world through multiple waves of technological disruption, we’ve not always provided the best leadership. With the rise of the internet, we’ve created tremendous wealth, but we also contributed to wealth inequality. Let’s make sure that this time, with the rise of AI, we take everyone along with us.”
Cloud
- Amazon executives slam Oracle and Microsoft as the cloud wars heat up
Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy derided other providers of traditional on-premises database services at the company’s 10th annual public sector conference in Washington DC on Wednesday. AWS has battled Microsoft, Oracle and others for the Department of Defense cloud services contract, which is worth $10 billion and runs for 10 years.
“I think that most people are pretty frustrated with the older guard database solutions,” Jassy said. “They’re expensive, proprietary, high lock-in. They’re constantly auditing you, fining you unless you buy more from them. It’s just a model that people are sick of. And it’s why people are moving as quickly as possible to more open engines.”
https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/12/economy/aws-jedi-contract-amazon/index.html
Security/Privacy
- CFOs Grapple With How Much Cybersecurity Spending is Enough
Finding comfort on cybersecurity spending comes down to developing strong relationships with the chief information security officer and other information technology managers, said Steve Priest, the CFO of JetBlue Airways Corp. “You can’t do everything.” he said during an interview. “You have to trust the subject matter experts to do the job that they’re paid to do.”
Finance can help, though, by encouraging coordination between IT managers and the teams purchasing equipment, and by requiring purchases go through a competitive bidding process to ensure the company is getting the best deal, he said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/cfos-grapple-with-how-much-cybersecurity-spending-is-enough-11560378386
- Telegram faces DDoS attack in China… again
The company went on to describe a distributed denial of service attack as when “your servers get GADZILLIONS of garbage requests which stop them from processing legitimate requests. Imagine that an army of lemmings just jumped the queue at McDonald’s in front of you – and each is ordering a whopper,” according to Telegram. “The server is busy telling the whopper lemmings they came to the wrong place – but there are so many of them that the server can’t even see you to try and take your order.”
This isn’t the first time that someone has tried to take down Telegram at a time when China was experiencing significant unrest. Four years ago, a similar attack struck the company’s service, just as China was initiating a crackdown on human rights lawyers in the country.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/12/telegram-faces-ddos-attack-in-china-again/
Infrastructure/Hardware
- Apple’s U.S. iPhones Can All Be Made Outside of China If Needed
“Twenty-five percent of our production capacity is outside of China and we can help Apple respond to its needs in the U.S. market,” said Liu, adding that investments are now being made in India for Apple. “We have enough capacity to meet Apple’s demand.”
Apple has not given Hon Hai instructions to move production out of China, but it is capable of moving lines elsewhere according to customers’ needs, Liu added. The company will respond swiftly and rely on localized manufacturing in response to the trade war, just as it foresaw the need to build a base in the U.S. state of Wisconsin two years ago, he said.
The U.S. market accounts for one in every four iPhones sold worldwide, “so it represents a huge portion of Foxconn’s manufacturing business inside China,” Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston said.
- Broadcom to Take $2 Billion Hit From Huawei Ban
Broadcom’s gloomier guidance could spread across the semiconductor industry as other big players, including Qualcomm Inc. and Intel Corp. , begin to reconsider their outlooks in light of the Huawei ban and a broader anxiety about the geopolitical future, analysts say. Huawei is one of the U.S. chip industry’s most lucrative customers.
“Everybody probably has to cut just due to Huawei if nothing else,” said Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “Almost everybody has some exposure.”
Some smaller chip companies have already warned that the Huawei ban will ding their revenue. Qorvo Inc., which makes radio-frequency products, and Lumentum Holdings Inc., which makes optical networking products, both reduced their quarterly revenue guidance last month by about $50 million.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/broadcom-lowers-revenue-outlook-amid-trade-tensions-11560459528
Other
- IBM to inherit over 13,000 workers from Red Hat
IBM (IBM) is planning to cut around 1,700 jobs, according to a report from CNBC. The job cut comes as IBM prepares to add Red Hat (RHT) to its corporate family. IBM last year agreed to purchase Red Hat, an open-source software company, for $34 billion. Red Hat had more than 13,000 employees at the end of February this year. IBM itself has more than 340,000 employees worldwide. Therefore, IBM’s headcount is set to swell once the Red Hat deal closes. The deal is expected to close before the end of the year.
https://marketrealist.com/2019/06/ibm-cutting-jobs-as-red-hat-deal-closing-nears/