Tag: Amazon

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Supplier Report: 11/23/2018

Amazon executed a master maneuver via the split HQ2 announcement. The company is moving into 3 locations (NYC, Virginia, and Nashville) and gained invaluable access and data about cities across the east coast.

While some are unhappy about the news (including the places that won), the company set a precedent with local governments about how to frame a RFP to get maximum shareholder value. The question is… will there be backlash?

Meanwhile Facebook continues to fail in their attempts to regain the public’s and government’s trust.

Acquisitions

  • Microsoft acquires AI and bot development house XOXCO

    Microsoft is acquiring conversational AI and bot development software vendor XOXCO Inc. for an undisclosed amount. Microsoft announced its acquisition plans on November 14, the same day it is going public with a number of other AI product and service announcements.

    Among its products are Howdy.ai, which Microsoft describes as “the first commercially available bot for Slack that helps schedule meetings.” Howdy assists with the creation of custom bots, including bots for work chat, bots for customer support and bots for marketing. XOXCO also sells Botkit, a collection of development tools for those working on GitHub. Microsoft has partnered with XOXCO for a number of years.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-acquires-ai-and-bot-development-house-xoxco/

  • Oracle buys SD-WAN company Talari Networks

    Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    Talari’s main product is its Failsafe technology, which is an SD-WAN platform used to connect enterprise networks such as branch offices and data centers over large geographic distances. WAN connections traditionally required special proprietary hardware, but the SD-WAN movement does away with this by moving network control into the cloud using a software approach.

    https://siliconangle.com/2018/11/15/oracle-buys-sd-wan-company-talari-networks/

  • Analysts weighing in on $8B SAP-Qualtrics deal don’t see a game changer

    Tony Byrne, founder and principal analyst at Real Story Group, says he likes what Qualtrics brings to SAP, but he is not sure it’s quite as big a deal as McDermott suggests. “Qualtrics enables you to do more sophisticated forms of research which marketers certainly want, but the double benefit is that — unlike SurveyMonkey and others — Qualtrics has experience on the digital workplace side, which could complement some of SAP’s HR tooling.” But he adds that it’s not really the central CEM piece, and that his company’s research has found that SAP still has holes, particularly when it comes to marketing tools and technologies (MarTech).

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/12/analysts-weighing-in-on-8b-sap-qualtrics-deal-dont-see-a-game-changer/

  • Kofax to buy Nuance’s imaging division for $400M in cash

    The acquisition is a notable move for Kofax — itself acquired by Thoma Bravo last year in a $1.5 billion deal — as it continues to build up its business in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), the area of enterprise IT services that uses machine learning, computer vision and other AI-based tools to bring automation to repetitive or mundane back-office tasks that would have in the past been done by humans. (The idea is that this frees up the humans to make more sophisticated assessments in specific cases, or focus on entirely different tasks.)

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/12/kofax-to-buy-nuances-imaging-division-for-400m-in-cash/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Amazon Says It Has Over 10,000 Employees Working on Alexa, Echo

    Amazon announced its decision Tuesday on those two locations, after its yearlong review of possible cities to establish a second headquarters. Mr. Limp said Amazon picked them because of the availability of talent.

    “The tie went to where we could recruit and where people would want to live,” Mr. Limp said.

    Amazon said in September 2017 it had 5,000 employees working on Alexa and Echo. The company’s total workforce has grown 13% to more than 600,000 over the past year.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-says-it-has-over-10-000-employees-working-on-alexa-echo-1542138284

  • Did IBM overhype Watson Health’s AI promise?

    In July, the healthcare news publication Stat published a report claiming “internal IBM documents” showed the Watson supercomputer often spit out erroneous cancer treatment advice and that company medical specialists and customers identified “multiple examples of unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations,” even as IBM was promoting its AI technology.

    Stat cited several slide decks it had obtained from a presentation made by IBM Watson Health’s deputy chief health officer in 2016. The slides mostly blamed problems on the training of Watson by IBM engineers and staff at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC).

    https://www.computerworld.com/article/3321138/healthcare-it/did-ibm-put-too-much-stock-in-watson-health-too-soon.html

Cloud

  • Former Oracle exec Thomas Kurian to replace Diane Greene as head of Google Cloud

    The company had a disparate set of cloud services when she took over, and one of the first things Greene did was to put them all under a single Google Cloud umbrella. “We’ve built a strong business together — set up by integrating sales, marketing, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Google Apps/G Suite into what is now called Google Cloud,” she wrote in the blog post.

    As for Kurian, he stepped down as president of product development at Oracle at the end of September. He had announced a leave of absence earlier in the month before making the exit permanent. Like Greene before him, he brings a level of enterprise street cred, which the company needs as it continues to try to grow its cloud business.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/16/former-oracle-exec-thomas-kurian-to-replace-diane-greene-as-head-of-google-cloud/
    Google’s Cloud-Computing Boss, Diane Greene, to Step Down

    Google’s hiring of Mr. Kurian could suggest the company will consider making a bid for Red Hat Inc., the software-and-services company that International Business Machines agreed to acquire last month for $33 billion, Mr. Reback said. Red Hat would provide Google with the sales and support muscle, as well as credibility with corporate tech buyers, that it lacks, Mr. Reback said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-cloud-computing-boss-diane-greene-to-step-down-1542396164?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Oracle’s JEDI protest denied

    GAO denied Oracle’s protest and said that a single award strategy did not violate federal laws and procurement regulations — one of Oracle’s key arguments.

    “The Defense Department’s decision to pursue a single-award approach to obtain these cloud services is consistent with applicable statutes (and regulations) because the agency reasonably determined that a single-award approach is in the government’s best interests for various reasons, including national security concerns, as the statute allows,” GAO said in a statement announcing its ruling.

    https://washingtontechnology.com/blogs/editors-notebook/2018/11/oracle-lost-jedi-protest.aspx

Software/SaaS

  • Zuckerberg Defends Company in Friday Meeting With Employees

    Some Facebook employees indicated that they believe The Times and other news outlets are unfairly targeting the company because of its outsize influence — a sentiment shared in the session on Friday when employees asked executives what would happen to employees who leak information to the press.

    Mr. Zuckerberg made it clear that Facebook would not hesitate to fire employees who spoke to The New York Times or other publications. But after an employee asked whether the company should issue a report about how many leakers Facebook had found and fired, Mr. Zuckerberg played down the idea.

    Leaks, he said, are usually caused by “issues with morale.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/technology/facebook-mark-zuckerberg.html

  • Facebook Fallout Ruptures Democrats’ Longtime Alliance With Silicon Valley

    Facebook previously signaled that it was ready to work with Mr. Warner and others in Congress on new regulation. Yet at the same time, Facebook turned to a conservative opposition research firm that sought to undermine detractors by publicizing financial links to Mr. Soros, a harsh critic of both Facebook and Google.

    The revelations angered Democrats, who accused Facebook of tapping into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Mr. Soros — the very kind of propaganda the company has claimed to be battling. Facebook has denied that the effort was anti-Semitic.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/technology/facebook-democrats-congress.html

Other

  • Amazon, Google Poised for Race to Hire High-Tech Talent

    Amazon will bring more than 25,000 jobs to New York and another 25,000 to Northern Virginia, it announced Tuesday. Google, meanwhile, plans to double its workforce in New York City to more than 14,000 workers over the next ten years, its chief financial officer said Monday at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech D.Live conference.

    The competition for talent will be stiff, recruiters say. But the two companies each have some distinct requirements that set them apart from other employers—and from each other, according to an analysis that labor-analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies conducted for the Journal. For example, the companies favor different coding languages and technical approaches for software projects.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-google-chase-software-developersbut-not-the-same-ones-1542133719
    New York politicians push back on Amazon HQ2 plans

    “Amazon is a billion-dollar company,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “The idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/14/new-york-politicians-push-back-on-amazon-hq2-plans/

    What Is Amazon Getting From New York City and Virginia?

    Incentives from New York state: $1.525 billion, including:

    • $1.2 billion in refundable tax credits from state’s Excelsior Program over 10 years, based on the creation of 25,000 jobs that pay an average of $150,000.
    • $325 million from Empire State Development based on how much space Amazon takes over the next decade.

    Incentives from New York City:

    • Amazon said it would apply for a New York City subsidy program that would provide it property-tax abatements for up to 25 years.
    • The company also is to seek incentives under a city program that could provide $3,000 in tax credits per eligible employee over 12 years, implying a $900 million benefit if all 25,000 workers are eligible. Amazon may also be eligible for other tax credits.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-is-amazon-getting-from-new-york-city-and-virginia-1542127124

Photo by Mael BALLAND on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 11/16/2018

Activism within technology companies remains a major topic due to headlines about Google and Amazon’s internal cultures.

Google workers remain unhappy with company’s response to repeated sexual harassment accusations from high level management.

Amazon employees remain frustrated with CEO Jeff Bezos’ willingness to support ICE with facial recognition software.

Silicon Valley is doing some collective soul searching because of these issues as well as the industry dependence on Saudi Arabian funding (via Softbank).

This is a good time to ask questions, but not a good time for clear answers.

Acquisitions

  • SAP to buy Qualtrics for $8 billion

    This would be the largest-ever purchase of a VC-backed enterprise software company, and the second-largest sale of any SaaS company (behind Oracle buying Netsuite for $9.3 billion).

    SAP CEO Bill McDermott said in a conference call that the Qualtrics IPO was already over-subscribed, and that he views this deal will mean for SAP what buying Instagram meant for Facebook — with SAP being able to merge its massive trove of operational data with Qualtrics’ collection of user experience data.

    https://www.axios.com/sap-to-buy-qualtrics-for-8-billion-1541977708-2936da4b-aeae-4ad2-9888-3dc384e08823.html

  • Microsoft buys two more video game studios

    In a broadcast from its Xbox Fanfest event this weekend, Microsoft announced the acquisition of two new video game studios: inXile Entertainment and Obsidian Entertainment.

    Both studios are headquartered in California, and both specialise in role-playing games. Both studios also have their roots in the 1990s “golden age” of computer RPGs, staffed by veteran developers from beloved 90s studio Black Isle. inXile is famous for nostalgic, strategic RPGs, such as Wasteland 2, which raised nearly $3m (£2.3m) on Kickstarter in 2012. Obsidian Entertainment is responsible for acclaimed modern RPGs Fallout: New Vegas, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Pillars of Eternity, and South Park: The Stick of Truth.

    https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/nov/10/microsoft-buys-two-new-video-game-studios

  • BlackBerry in talks to buy cybersecurity company Cylance

    BlackBerry Ltd is in talks to buy cybersecurity company Cylance Inc for as much as $1.5 billion, Business Insider reported on Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

    Irvine, California-based Cylance develops AI-based products to prevent cyberattacks on companies and recently considered filing for an IPO, according to the report. (read.bi/2SYzvM9) A deal could be announced as soon as next week, Business Insider reported citing sources, who cautioned the deal could still fall apart.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cylance-m-a-blackberry-idUSKCN1NE2GW
    That is a big purchase considering BlackBerry’s current cash flow

Artificial Intelligence

Cloud

  • Oath is dead. Long live Verizon Media Group/Oath

    Anyway, Oath is now going to be Verizon Media Group/Oath as part of a corporate restructuring undertaken by Verizon’s CEO, Vestberg. The company is going to operate under three different business units — a Consumer Group, led by Ronan Dunne, a current executive vice president of Verizon and president of Verizon Wireless; a Business Group, led by Tami Erwin, currently executive vice president of wireless operations — which will focus on government, small and medium businesses, large business customers, and operate the company’s telematics arm; and a Media Group / Oath, which will be led by Guru Gowrappan, currently Oath’s chief executive.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/05/i-come-to-bury-oath/

Security

  • Jeff Bezos Fails to Explain Away Amazon’s Partnership with ICE

    So far, employees tell me, Amazon has not taken any action in response to its workers’ concerns. In fact, they said, a Thursday all-hands meeting was the first time executives addressed the controversy. Although the meeting wasn’t intended to focus on Rekognition, Bezos and co. fielded a pre-screened question that reportedly asked, “What is being done in response to the concerns voiced by both Amazon employees and civil-rights groups regarding Amazon selling facial-recognition technology to government and police organizations, including ICE?” Bezos passed the question to Andy Jassy, the Amazon Web Services C.E.O., who has defended the company’s decision, arguing that the terms of service for its products protects against misuse

    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/jeff-bezos-fails-to-explain-away-amazons-partnership-with-ice
    Bezos has stated in several interviews that he supports the government. To say that he hasn’t responded or made his position clear is inaccurate.

Datacenter/Hardware

  • AMD stock jumps as Amazon starts using Epyc chips in the cloud

    Amazon, the largest provider of cloud computing services, is now offering three of its most popular products based on AMD’s Epyc server chips, Matt Garman, vice president of computing at Amazon Web Services, said Tuesday at an AMD presentation in San Francisco. The AMD chips allow for a 10 percent saving in computing costs, Garman said.

    Separately, AMD said it has sent samples of a new chip design to customers. Those chips are being made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. with a technique called 7-nanometer production. That technology is equivalent to Intel’s announced 10-nanometer process, but will be in the market first, according to AMD’s Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster. Intel has announced issues with that 10-nanometer transition and said it won’t have server chips in the market until late next year.

    https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/amazon/amd-climbs-after-saying-amazon-will-use-its-cloud-server-chips

Other

  • Google Picks Geisinger CEO to Oversee Health-Care Initiatives

    Geisinger pioneered the use of electronic health records and other digital medical data. Its setup of integrating an insurer with a hospital system has been widely seen as a model, as more health-care companies try to blend various businesses under one roof. It has also been a leader in the broad use of genetic information to help manage and predict patients’ health conditions.

    Alphabet Inc.’s Google has launched various efforts in health care over the years with mixed success. Google Health, its first attempt to create an electronic health-records database, was launched in 2008 but was closed in 2011 after it failed to catch on with consumers and health-care providers.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-picks-geisinger-health-ceo-to-oversee-health-care-initiatives-1541712775

  • Google walkout organizers aren’t satisfied with CEO’s response

    In the Medium post today, the organizers commended Google’s process while also noting how Pichai’s response did not address many of the core demands. In the post, they write:

    However, the response ignored several of the core demands — like elevating the diversity officer and employee representation on the board — and troublingly erased those focused on racism, discrimination, and the structural inequity built into the modern day Jim Crow class system that separates ‘full time’ employees from contract workers. Contract workers make up more than half of Google’s workforce, and perform essential roles across the company, but receive few of the benefits associated with tech company employment. They are also largely people of color, immigrants, and people from working class backgrounds.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/08/google-walkout-organizers-response-sundar-pichai/

  • Tesla picks telco executive Robyn Denholm to replace Elon Musk as chairman

    “I believe in this company, I believe in its mission and I look forward to helping Elon and the Tesla team achieve sustainable profitability and drive long-term shareholder value,” Denholm said in a statement.

    “Robyn has extensive experience in both the tech and auto industries, and she has made significant contributions as a Tesla Board member over the past four years in helping us become a profitable company. I look forward to working even more closely with Robyn as we continue accelerating the advent of sustainable energy,” Musk added.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/08/robyn-denholm-tesla-chair/

  • In Silicon Valley, Saudi Money Keeps Flowing to Startups Amid Backlash

    Silicon Valley startups are continuing to negotiate deals with Saudi Arabia and take its capital through its partner SoftBank Group Corp, amid the controversy over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi that has clouded the kingdom’s role as a global technology investor.

    Two startups— View Inc., which makes light-adjustable glass, and Zume Inc., which uses robots to make pizza—disclosed investments over the past week totaling a combined $1.5 billion from SoftBank’s Saudi-backed Vision Fund.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-silicon-valley-saudi-money-keeps-flowing-to-startups-amid-backlash-1541586601

Photo by Alen Rojnić on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 10/26/2018

Amazon’s stock took a hit this week due to analysts’ lowered expectations about Q4 spending despite record profits. Will that retail downturn leak into corporate spending?

Oracle is having a moment thanks to their annual “Oracle World” conference. The company announced the acquisition of an AI company and maintained their tradition of s**t talking about their competitors in the press.

Acquisitions

  • Oracle acquires DataFox, a developer of ‘predictive intelligence as a service’ across millions of company records

    Oracle today announced that it has made another acquisition, this time to enhance both the kind of data that it can provide to its business customers, and its artificial intelligence capabilities: it is buying DataFox, a startup that has amassed a huge company database — currently covering 2.8 million public and private businesses, adding 1.2 million each year — and uses AI to analyse that to make larger business predictions.

    Terms of the deal do not appear to have been disclosed but we are trying to find out. DataFox — which launched in 2014 as a contender in the TC Battlefield at Disrupt — had raised just under $19 million and was last valued at $33 million back in January 2017, according to PitchBook. Investors in the company included Slack, GV, Howard Linzon, and strategic investor Goldman Sachs among others.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/22/oracle-acquires-datafox-a-developer-of-predictive-intelligence-as-a-service-and-a-trove-of-company-information/

  • Facebook on Hunt for Big Cybersecurity Acquisition

    In its current acquisition efforts, the company is most likely to look at software that it could wrap into its own systems, including things like analytics or tools to flag unauthorized access, people familiar with its thinking said. Companies in these categories include Demisto, JASK and Swimlane, each of which are privately held and would likely cost somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It could also look for technology that could help users keep their accounts more secure or add privacy features, the people said. Some companies in this category include ZeroFOX and SafeGuard Cyber, both of which help assess accounts for risk of attack or prevent attacks. ZeroFOX has raised more than $80 million to date and SafeGuard Cyber $14.9 million.

    https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facebook-on-hunt-for-big-cybersecurity-acquisition

Artificial Intelligence

  • China’s Baidu challenges Google with A.I. that translates languages in real-time

    Baidu is China’s largest search engine and for that reason has often been compared to Google. Its latest product comes over a year after Google unveiled the Pixel Buds, a set of wireless headphones that it claims can do live translation.

    Huang said Baidu is looking to integrate the AI interpreter into its Wi-Fi translator, a product it unveiled earlier this year which is both a portable internet hub and translator. The company will also use this technology to translate speeches at its annual Baidu World Conference on November 1 in Beijing, China.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/24/baidu-challenges-google-with-ai-that-translates-languages-in-real-time.html

Cloud

  • Oracle’s Larry Ellison keeps poking AWS because he has no choice

    This was about showmanship. It was about chest beating and it’s about going after the market leader because frankly, the man has little choice. By now, it’s well documented that Oracle was late to the cloud. Larry Ellison was never a fan and he made it clear over the years, but today as the world shifts to a cloud model, his company has had to move with it.

    To make matters worse, Oracle’s late start puts it well behind market leader AWS. Hence, Ellison shouting from the rooftops how much better his company’s solutions are and how insecure the competitors are. Synergy Research, which follows the cloud market closely, has pegged Amazon’s cloud market share at around 35 percent. It has Oracle in the single digits in the most recent data from last summer (and the market hasn’t shifted dramatically since it came out with this data).

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/24/oracles-larry-ellison-keeps-poking-aws-because-he-has-no-choice/

  • Microsoft crushes quarterly earnings as cloud revenues rise

    Azure revenue grew 93 percent during the company’s fiscal third quarter and 89 percent during its fourth quarter ended in June. Microsoft does not break out specific revenue dollar figures for Azure.

    Microsoft’s commercial cloud business — which combines Azure with subscription cloud-software services Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 — also grew at a slightly slower rate than during the previous quarter, but still increased 47 percent to $8.5 billion.

    https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/microsoft-crushes-quarterly-earnings-as-cloud-revenues-rise/

Security

  • Yahoo to pay $50M, other costs for massive security breach

    Yahoo has agreed to pay $50 million in damages and provide two years of free credit-monitoring services to 200 million people whose email addresses and other personal information were stolen as part of the biggest security breach in history.

    The restitution hinges on federal court approval of a settlement filed late Monday in a 2-year-old lawsuit seeking to hold Yahoo accountable for digital burglaries that occurred in 2013 and 2014, but weren’t disclosed until 2016.

    https://www.apnews.com/2af6d21f80aa4e9483fa32e26f03417c

  • Japan and China Are Getting Along Better, but Not When It Comes to Tech

    Yet Japanese government and business leaders express views in line with Vice President Mike Pence’s recent depiction of China as a nation that seeks technological dominance “by any means necessary” including “forced technology transfer [and] intellectual property theft.”

    China is “making unacceptable demands and seeking to exclude foreign businesses,” said a top Japanese official.

    One response, the official said, would be to block Chinese tech companies from global markets.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-rivalry-shadows-japan-china-summit-1540306548?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

Software/SaaS

  • Linus Torvalds is Back With Linux

    Almost exactly a month after Torvalds’ self-imposed exile, he is back at the helm of the project he started nearly three decades ago. In a note sent to the Linux Kernel mailing list on Monday, Greg Kroah-Hartman, a lead Linux developer, said that he is “handing the kernel tree back” to Torvalds.

    “These past few months has [sic] been a tough one for our community, as it is our community that is fighting from within itself, with prodding from others outside of it,” Kroah-Hartman wrote. “So here is my plea to everyone out there. Let’s take a day or two off, rest, relax with friends by sharing a meal, recharge, and then get back to work.”

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3km9qb/linus-torvalds-is-back-with-linux

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Investigating Implausible Bloomberg Supermicro Stories

    In this article, we have shown why the technical details of the Bloomberg alleged hack are inaccurate and/or implausible. These technical details were offered to Bloomberg through anonymous sources, so we have no way of doing further fact-checking. We showed why, even if a chip can be produced and placed it would not work as Bloomberg reports. CEOs such as Tim Cook of Apple and Charles Liang of Supermicro and all of the named companies have said that the reporting was untrue or inaccurate. The three security experts named in the two Bloomberg pieces have expressed reservations about what and how Bloomberg has presented the story.

    Bloomberg is standing by their piece, citing 17 sources and over 100 interviews. It seems 9 sources between Apple and Supermicro have contradicting evidence offered by CEOs with a duty to make truthful statements about their companies. There are 2 cited security experts who have reservations, as does the lynchpin expert in the follow-up piece but we do not know if they are included in the tally.

    https://www.servethehome.com/investigating-implausible-bloomberg-supermicro-stories/

Other

  • SoftBank Chief Is Said to Have Canceled Appearance at Saudi Conference

    Word of Mr. Son’s decision not to attend came on Tuesday, the first day of the conference. A representative for SoftBank, the Japanese internet, energy and financial conglomerate, did not immediately respond to a request for comment

    However, Saleh Romeih, an executive with Softbank’s Vision Fund, the biggest technology fund on record, spoke on a panel at the conference on Tuesday, a spokesman for the fund said. The Saudi government is providing $45 billion of the Vision Fund’s nearly $100 billion.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/business/saudi-investment-softbank.html

  • Amazon shares fall as record profits are offset by conservative holiday forecasts

    Amazon is still raking in the cash, but its slower than expected customer growth in its web services offerings and a weaker than expected sales outlook for the holiday season shook investor confidence and caused the stock to slide around 5 percent in after-hours trading.

    Profits for the company continued to soar, reaching $2.9 billion, or $5.75 per share, up from $2.5 billion in the second quarter, and handily beating analysts’ estimates of $3.14 per share. Those earnings were offset by slower revenue growth at $56.6 billion versus the $57.1 billion analysts had expected.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/25/amazon-shares-fall-as-record-profits-are-offset-by-conservative-holiday-forecasts/

  • Silicon Valley’s dirty secret: Using a shadow workforce of contract employees to drive profits

    It’s not only in Silicon Valley. The trend is on the rise as public companies look for ways to trim HR costs or hire in-demand skills in a tight labor market. The U.S. jobless rate dropped to 3.7 percent in September, the lowest since 1969, down from 3.9 percent in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    Some 57.3 million Americans, or 36 percent of the workforce, are now freelancing, according to a 2017 report by Upwork. In San Mateo and Santa Clara counties alone, there are an estimated 39,000 workers who are contracted to tech companies, according to one estimate by University of California Santa Cruz researchers.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/22/silicon-valley-using-contract-employees-to-drive-profits.html

Posted on

Supplier Report: 10/19/2018

The Pentagon’s “Project Jedi” continues to make headlines this week as Microsoft employees published a letter asking the company to not bid on the work.

Jeff Bezos was interviewed the week and pondered why technology companies would decline an opportunity to work with the military as the “United States has a right to be defended”.

IBM was down 6% this week as cloud and analytics sales were flat. They did score a $240M AI contract with Lenovo, so it isn’t all bad?

Acquisitions

Artificial Intelligence

  • IBM Snags $240 Million AI Deal

    Lenovo is now looking to make its commercial PC business more efficient, and it’s turning to IBM’s artificial intelligence technology for help. IBM announced a multiyear deal with Lenovo on Thursday that aims to use AI to reduce customer service and field service costs. The $240 million pact, covering North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, is a win for IBM’s technology support services business.

    https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/10/18/ibm-snags-240-million-ai-deal.aspx

Cloud

  • Jeff Bezos Says Tech Companies Should Work With the Pentagon

    The Amazon founder seemed baffled by the wave of employee dissent that has torn through tech companies over the ethical implications of government contracts. Last week, for example, Google said it would not bid for a Pentagon cloud computing contract called Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative, or JEDI. Google earlier said it would not renew its contract on Project Maven.

    “It doesn’t make any sense to me,” Bezos said of tech companies pulling back from government work. “One of the jobs of the senior leadership team is to make the right decision, even when it’s unpopular.”

    https://www.wired.com/story/amazons-jeff-bezos-says-tech-companies-should-work-with-the-pentagon/

  • Microsoft workers urge company to pass on JEDI

    “Many Microsoft employees don’t believe that what we build should be used for waging war,” the group said in an open letter published Oct. 12 on Medium. The post came as the company itself signaled in a blog post that it was likely to bid on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, a 10-year, single-source deal designed to provide cloud and advanced computing capabilities to the warfighter in the field.

    The Microsoft employee group is also seeking a set of “AI principles” modeled on the tenets of artificial intelligence put out by Google under pressure from its employees. Google has committed to not developing weaponized AI, as well as AI applications that conduct surveillance outside of “internationally accepted norms” and whose purpose “contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

    https://fcw.com/articles/2018/10/15/jedi-microsoft-dont-bid.aspx

Security

  • Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla come together to end TLS 1.0

    The impact of removing the old protocols shouldn’t be too substantial. All four companies cite usage figures for the old versions; Firefox sees the most TLS 1.0 and 1.1 usage (1.4 percent of all secure connections) while the other three vendors claim a figure below 1.0 percent. The current recommendation is that sites switch to TLS 1.2 (which happens to be the minimum required for HTTP 2.0) and offer only a limited, modern set of encryption algorithms and authentication schemes. TLS 1.3 was recently finalized, but it currently has little widespread adoption.

    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/browser-vendors-unite-to-end-support-for-20-year-old-tls-1-0/

  • Apple ‘Deeply Apologetic’ Over Account Hacks in China

    The Cupertino, Calif.-based company didn’t specify how many users were hit or how much money was stolen, nor did it offer details about how the hackers acquired the users’ Apple IDs and passwords. To help prevent unauthorized access to their accounts, Apple said, people should enable two-factor authentication.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-deeply-apologetic-over-account-hacks-in-china-1539690961?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

Software/SaaS

  • Why IBM’s Brief Growth Streak Just Stalled

    There had been some faint lights at the end of the tunnel here over the past couple of quarters, when they’ve been able to grow their quarterly revenues. That flipped this quarter. Their strategic imperatives, which is really their cloud business, their data analytics business, saw some stumbling blocks. Their growth slowed there. They saw a drop in new signings in that business. That stung a little bit. It’s been a very tough go for IBM. Their best business this quarter, and really a lot this year, is their legacy mainframe business. That will tend to tail off next year.

    https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/10/19/why-ibms-brief-growth-streak-just-stalled.aspx

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Inside the heart of an IBM Cloud Data Center

    Uh… Cool?
  • Dell says its gaming business is worth $3 billion

    According to Frank Azor (who helms the Alienware, Gaming, and XPS divisions at Dell), that number puts Dell’s gaming business at three times the size of its competitors, though Azor apparently didn’t specify which competitors he was referring to. Also unknown is how that number breaks down between the flagship Alienware line and Dell’s more recent, cheaper G Series gaming hardware. It’d be interesting to see how the company’s newer and more budget-friendly options contribute to the overall total.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/18/17994618/dell-gaming-worth-3-billion-alienware

Other

  • Google’s CEO Defends Potential Return to China

    In his most extensive public remarks on the topic, Sundar Pichai said entering China in some ways aligns with the company’s mission to provide information to the world’s population, since one-fifth of those people reside in China. Even complying with China’s censors, he said, Google would be able to deliver search results to more than 99% of queries and in some cases deliver more helpful results than users currently get from local search engines.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-ceo-defends-potential-return-to-china-1539661027

  • Google could finally face serious competition for Android

    Until now, Google has locked phone and tablet makers into its ecosystem. If they wanted to include Google’s apps and services at all, they effectively had to include those apps and services on every consumer Android device that they made (with the exception of inside China, where Google doesn’t operate). That’s meant, for instance, that Samsung likely couldn’t release a variant of the Galaxy S9 that only includes the Galaxy Apps store and the Samsung browser and doesn’t include Chrome, Google Play, or Google search.

    Google said it is incorrect to say the original terms banned Android partners from making any phones or tablets without its apps. The terms only prevented them from selling non-certified versions of Android, the company says; devices that were “compatible” with its apps could still be shipped, even if its apps weren’t included. But it’s unclear whether there are any certified consumer Android devices that do not include Google’s apps.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/18/17989052/google-android-fork-competition-europe-antitrust-commission-lawsuit

  • Netflix criticizes EU over ‘content quota’

    The EU, writes Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in the report, is “currently rewriting its audio visual rules” that will demand streaming services like Netflix “devote a minimum of 30 percent of their catalog to European works.” Netflix’s report acknowledged that catering to a specific audience encouraged more regional original programming for international audiences, but suggested that enforcing quotas on a streaming service could have unwanted negative effects.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/16/17986086/netflix-third-earnings-report-european-union-content-quote-international

Photo by Tobias Cornille on Unsplash