Tag: Amazon

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Supplier Report: 7/6/2018

The Source Report: 7/6: Dell is going public: Joey Lombardi

Dell is going public again after Founder Michael Dell took the company private 5 years ago. Keeping VMWare was a major driver in this decision as is managing the debt incurred from acquiring EMC two years ago.

IBM has lined up ANOTHER large IT contract, this time with the Australian government which is surprising considering several public failures on joint efforts over the last few years.

Acquisitions

  • Dell will again become a publicly traded company in $22 billion buyout

    Dell is returning to the public market in a $22 billion stock buyout that will still leave CEO / founder Michael Dell and investment firm Silver Lake firmly in charge, as reported by The Financial Times. The company went private in 2013 following a $25 billion buyout by Dell and Silver Lake. Since then, Dell has seen success both in the enterprise market and with its consumer-focused PCs.

    By moving back to the public sphere, Dell and Silver Lake will retain control over VMWare — which Dell acquired back in 2015 when it purchased enterprise data company EMC to better appeal to business customers — and be placed in a better position to reduce its debts.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/2/17525450/dell-public-company-stock-buyout-market

  • AT&T Jacks Up TV Prices Post Merger After Claiming That Wouldn’t Happen

    AT&T last week informed its DirecTV Now streaming video customers they’ll be paying $5 more to use the service starting in August.

    “To continue delivering the best possible streaming experience for both new and existing customers, we’re bringing the cost of this service in line with the market—which starts at a $40 price point,” AT&T said in a statement to Cord Cutter News, which first reported the hike.

    The problem: AT&T repeatedly claimed that the company’s merger with Time Warner would lower rates, not raise them.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gy3xv4/atandt-jacks-up-tv-prices-post-merger-after-claiming-that-wouldnt-happen

Artificial Intelligence

  • Oracle recently offered an artificial intelligent expert as much as $6 million in total pay as Silicon Valley’s talent war heats up

    Oracle offered at least one candidate a $6 million package made up of salary and equity incentives to convince them to join the company, a source told Business Insider.

    That candidate had other job offers but went with Oracle because of the higher pay, the source said.

    https://nordic.businessinsider.com/oracle-artificial-intelligence-expert-pay-2018-7/

Cloud

  • Google Cloud’s COO has left after less than a year

    Before joining Google in late November 2017, Bryant spent more than 25 years at Intel, most recently leading its data center group. She took what was supposed to be a temporary leave from that role in May due to “family matters,” but ended up joining Google instead, under Cloud CEO Diane Greene.

    Bryant’s hire was a win for the search giant’s cloud business, which is widely seen as No. 3 in the public cloud market, behind Amazon and Microsoft. As the relative newcomer in the space, Google Cloud’s challenge has been to prove its capabilities to large businesses, though Greene has said that there are no more “deal blockers” in the way of new contracts.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/03/google-cloud-coo-diane-bryant-has-left-after-less-than-a-year.html

Security

  • Australian National University ‘hit by Chinese hackers’

    Networks at the Australian National University in Canberra, which is home to several defence-focused research units, were breached “months ago” by attackers whom authorities traced to China, said Channel Nine television and Fairfax Media websites, citing “multiple” unnamed security and intelligence sources.

    Also

    China has consistently and strongly denied being involved in any hacking attacks and its embassy in Australia, as well as the foreign ministry in Beijing, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The news comes as tension flares over new Australian laws that seek to curb foreign interference, measures the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has said were adopted to allay concerns over Chinese influence in politics and universities.

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jul/07/australian-national-university-hit-by-chinese-hackers

Software/SaaS

  • Micro Focus sells Suse for $2.5B

    Suse, one of the longest-running commercial Linux distributors and, these days, a major player in the open-source infrastructure and management space, has been through a few ownership changes in recent years. Micro Focus acquired Suse from The Attachmate Group back in 2014, which itself had acquired Novell, the then-owner of Suse, in 2010. Today, Micro Focus announced that Suse is changing owners yet again, as private equity firm and venture capital fund EQT is acquiring Suse.

    While the exact terms of the deal where not disclosed, EQT says the deal valued Suse at $2.535 billion.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/02/micro-focus-sells-suse-for-2-5b/

Datacenter/Hardware

  • IBM lands $740M contract to provide IT services to Australian government

    The main idea is to “prioritize the introduction of new technologies to citizen services,” Australia’s government said.

    One of the programs involves IBM setting up a research team in Melbourne that will be tasked with studying potential applications for AI, blockchain and quantum computing in government. Additional research units will be based in Canberra and on the Gold Coast, working on new cybersecurity tools for data protection. They’ll also be looking into how supercomputers can be used to enhance government services.

    This is important…

    IBM’s contract award comes despite a couple of recent calamities relating to past services it provided for Australia’s government. They include failing to provide basic protection against a distributed denial-of-service attack that led to an outage during Australia’s online census in 2016, and a botched payroll system IBM installed for Queensland’s Department of Health for which the client was later blamed.

    https://siliconangle.com/blog/2018/07/05/ibm-lands-740m-contract-provide-services/

Other

  • How Google and Facebook Are Monopolizing Ideas

    But as the companies come under growing pressure to police their platforms and weed out “fake news,” a growing range of content gets banned, labeled or deleted for often opaque or arbitrary reasons. ProPublica and Reveal, both nonprofit news publications, have had content dealing with hate groups and immigrant children, respectively, deleted or rejected by Instagram or Facebook. Video artists complain of viewership and ads being restricted because their content violated YouTube’s community standards.

    Unhappy users, advertisers and content providers wouldn’t have as much to complain about if Google (which bought YouTube in 2006) and Facebook (which acquired Instagram in 2012) had strong competitors to which they could switch.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-and-facebook-are-monopolizing-ideas-1530713153?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

Photo by Teddy Kelley on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 6/29/2018

The Source: Amazon buys PillPack - Joey Lombardi

Amazon’s desires to get into the healthcare industry made major progress this week with their announced acquisition of PillPack. It seems that the company will finally meet their goal of selling pharmaceuticals on their e-commerce engine.

IBM had a big sales announcement, but there were also reports of lack of strategic direction in their medical AI efforts.

The IT industry is still facing fallout over technological support of the DHS and ICE. As employees push back on their leaders, companies are scrambling to find a balance.

Acquisitions

  • Amazon Buys Online Pharmacy PillPack for $1 Billion

    Amazon.com Inc. is buying online pharmacy PillPack Inc. giving the e-commerce giant the ability to ship prescriptions around the country, and overnight, making it a direct threat to the more than $400 billion pharmacy business.

    Amazon is paying roughly $1 billion in cash for PillPack, which presorts medications and ships them to customers’ homes in 49 U.S. states, excluding Hawaii, according to people familiar with the matter. The online retailer beat out Walmart Inc., which also was in talks for the five-year-old startup, one of the people said. Walmart had no immediate comment.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-buy-online-pharmacy-pillpack-1530191443

  • Google admits it lost out to Microsoft buying GitHub

    Previous rumors suggest Google was also trying to acquire GitHub, alongside Microsoft’s bids. GitHub founder Chris Wanstrath reportedly chose Microsoft because of his relationship with CEO Satya Nadella. GitHub is a large code repository that has become very popular with developers and companies to host projects, documentation, and code. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and many other big tech companies use GitHub. There are 85 million repositories hosted on GitHub, and 28 million developers contribute to them.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/28/17512908/google-github-microsoft-acquisition-comments

Artificial Intelligence

  • Microsoft’s facial recognition can better identify people with darker skin tones

    Microsoft says its facial recognition tools are getting better at identifying people with darker skin tones than before, according to a company blog post today. The error rates have been reduced by as much as 20 times for men and women with darker skin and by nine times for all women.

    The company says it’s been training its AI tools with larger and more diverse datasets, which has led to the progress. “If we are training machine learning systems to mimic decisions made in a biased society, using data generated by that society, then those systems will necessarily reproduce its biases,” said Hanna Wallach, a Microsoft senior researcher, in the blog post.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/26/17507304/microsoft-facial-recognition-darker-skin-tones

  • Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

    IBM’s goal, the Phytel employees said, was to create a fancy new product that combined the capabilities of Phytel and Explorys. However, the offering managers didn’t have a clear idea of what that product would be. “They couldn’t decide on a roadmap,” says the second engineer. “We pivoted so many times.”

    Both Phytel engineers say the offering managers didn’t have technical backgrounds and sometimes came up with ideas for new products that were simply impossible. While the engineers tried to follow the shifting directions from above, Phytel didn’t deliver anything new to the market. “And we were burning through money,” the second engineer says.

    https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/robotics/artificial-intelligence/layoffs-at-watson-health-reveal-ibms-problem-with-ai

Cloud

  • Here’s how Amazon is able to poach so many execs from Microsoft

    In the three years between 2015 and 2017, at least 30 director or higher level executives went straight from Microsoft to Amazon. Google, the next most popular poaching ground for Amazon, lost just 5 executives to the e-commerce company during those three years. Apple and eBay both lost 2 executives to Amazon in that period, while Facebook, Walmart, and Netflix saw zero executives go to Amazon.

    Paysa’s data only includes people whose most recent jobs were at Microsoft and excludes the ones who may have worked elsewhere before joining Amazon. The company said it looked through at least 5 million resumes for this data, but may have missed the ones that did not update their resume profiles.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/25/amazon-favorite-poaching-ground-microsoft.html

Security

  • A new data breach may have exposed personal information of almost every American adult

    Earlier this month, security researcher Vinny Troia discovered that Exactis, a data broker based in Palm Coast, Florida, had exposed a database that contained close to 340 million individual records on a publicly accessible server. The haul comprises close to 2 terabytes of data that appears to include personal information on hundreds of millions of American adults, as well as millions of businesses. While the precise number of individuals included in the data isn’t clear—and the leak doesn’t seem to contain credit card information or Social Security numbers—it does go into minute detail for each individual listed, including phone numbers, home addresses, email addresses, and other highly personal characteristics for every name. The categories range from interests and habits to the number, age, and gender of the person’s children.

    https://www.wired.com/story/exactis-database-leak-340-million-records/

Software/SaaS

  • Salesforce Will Keep Ties to Border Agency After Protest

    “I’m opposed to separating children from their families at the border. It is immoral,” Benioff wrote Wednesday in a memo to Salesforce employees obtained by Bloomberg News. “I have personally financially supported legal groups helping families at the border. I also wrote to the White House to encourage them to end this horrible situation.”

    More than 650 Salesforce employees signed a letter to Benioff that called CBP’s actions “inhumane” and asked the San Francisco-based company to reconsider its contract providing tools to help with recruiting and communications. Some workers spoke Monday to Tony Prophet, the chief equality officer, about the letter, Bloomberg News reported. The staff’s effort is part of a growing wave of employee activism within the tech industry, as workers question how their products are used by U.S. law enforcement and the military.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-27/salesforce-s-benioff-keeps-ties-to-border-agency-after-protest

Datacenter/Hardware

  • IBM’s Competitive Advantage on Display in $320 Million Deal

    IBM announced a $320 million infrastructure outsourcing deal with KMD, one of Denmark’s leading suppliers of mission-critical software and IT services. IBM will provide KMD with IT infrastructure through 2024, and will assist KMD as it upgrades its infrastructure offerings for its clients. The scope of the agreement includes security, hybrid cloud, and machine learning, all growth areas for IBM.

    https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/06/28/ibms-competitive-advantage-on-display-in-320-milli.aspx

Other

  • Amazon Workers to Jeff Bezos: Stop Weaponizing Our Tech

    Gizmodo reports that Amazon employees are demanding that the company halt the sale of Rekognition, its facial-recognition technology, to law-enforcement agencies. “Along with much of the world we watched in horror recently as U.S. authorities tore children away from their parents,” reads an internal letter to Bezos, per Gizmodo. “In the face of this immoral U.S. policy, and the U.S.’s increasingly inhumane treatment of refugees and immigrants beyond this specific policy, we are deeply concerned that Amazon is implicated, providing infrastructure and services that enable ICE and D.H.S.”

    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/06/amazon-workers-to-jeff-bezos-stop-weaponizing-our-tech

Photo by Geran de Klerk on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 6/15/2018

The DOJ said it would not block AT&T’s $85B acquisition of Time Warner on Thursday, within hours the acquisition was deemed complete. AT&T wasn’t the only company making moves… Workday bought TWO companies and data analytics companies Slack and Tableau both announced acquisitions this week.

Amazon was in the press for poor labor conditions in their Alexa supply chain. Foxconn workers making the devices have been found to be mistreated and underpaid. Amazon’s own audit of the situation confirms the report.

Oracle shares dropped due to a JP Morgan CIO report documenting a decrease of purchasing interest of Oracle products and services from IT executives.

Acquisitions

  • AT&T Completes Acquisition of Time Warner Inc.

    Under the terms of the merger, Time Warner Inc. shareholders received 1.4 shares of AT&T common stock, in addition to $53.75 in cash, per share of Time Warner Inc. As a result, AT&T issued 1,185M shares of common stock and paid $42.5B in cash. Including net debt from Time Warner, we now have $180.4B in net debt.

    https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180614006343/en/ATT-Completes-Acquisition-Time-Warner

  • Workday acquires Rallyteam to fuel machine learning efforts

    In this case, Workday appears to be acquiring the talent. It wants to take the Rallyteam team and incorporate it into the company’s engineering unit to beef up its machine learning efforts, while taking advantage of the expertise it has built up over the years connecting employees with interesting internal projects.

    “With Rallyteam, we gain incredible team members who created a talent mobility platform that uses machine learning to help companies better understand and optimize their workforces by matching a worker’s interests, skills and connections with relevant jobs, projects, tasks and people,” Workday’s Cristina Goldt wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/08/workday-acquires-rallyteam-to-fuel-machine-learning-efforts/

  • Workday acquires financial modelling startup Adaptive Insights for $1.55B

    Workday, the cloud-based platform that offers HR and other back-office apps for businesses, is making an acquisition to expand its portfolio of services: It’s buying Adaptive Insights, a provider of cloud-based business planning and financial modelling tools, for $1.55 billion. The acquisition is notable because Adaptive Insights had filed for an IPO as recently as May 17.

    Workday says that the $1.55 billion price tag includes “the assumption of approximately $150 million in unvested equity issued to Adaptive Insights employees” related to that IPO. This deal is expected to close in Q3 of this year.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/11/workday-acquires-financial-modelling-startup-adaptive-insights-for-1-55b/

  • Tableau gets AI shot in the arm with Empirical Systems acquisition

    The startup was born just two years ago from research on automated statistics at the MIT Probabilistic Computing Project. According to the company website, “Empirical is an analytics engine that automatically models structured, tabular data (such as spreadsheets, tables, or csv files) and allows those models to be queried to uncover statistical insights in data.”

    The product was still in private Beta when Tableau bought the company. It is delivered currently as an engine embedded inside other applications. That sounds like something that could slip in nicely into the Tableau analytics platform. What’s more, it will be bringing the engineering team on board for some AI knowledge, while taking advantage of this underlying advanced technology.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/13/tableau-gets-ai-shot-in-the-arm-with-empirical-systems-acquisition/

  • Splunk to Acquire Software Problem-Solver VictorOps for $120 Million

    Big data-cruncher Splunk is acquiring VictorOps, a Boulder, Colo.-based startup whose tools help software developers collaborate and resolve engineering issues, for $120 million mostly in cash with some stock equity. The deal is expected to close before August.

    VictorOps’ tech brings together software engineers so they can overcome technical issues as they arise. The system generates notifications, pulls relevant parties into chat groups, presents pertinent documents, and keeps detailed records as teams work through coding problems.

    http://fortune.com/2018/06/11/splunk-acquire-software-startup-victorops/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Accenture wants to beat unfair AI with a professional toolkit

    “We’re seeing increasing focus on algorithmic bias, fairness. Just this past week we’ve had Singapore announce an AI ethics board. Korea announce an AI ethics board. In the US we already have industry creating different groups — such as The Partnership on AI. Google just released their ethical guidelines… So I think industry leaders, as well as non-tech companies, are looking for guidance. They are looking for standards and protocols and something to adhere to because they want to know that they are safe in creating products.

    “It’s not an easy task to think about these things. Not every organization or company has the resources to. So how might we better enable that to happen? Through good legislation, through enabling trust, communication. And also through developing these kinds of tools to help the process along.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/09/accenture-wants-to-beat-unfair-ai-with-a-professional-toolkit/

Cloud

  • Oracle shares drop after JP Morgan downgrades on lost business to Amazon and Microsoft

    Oracle’s “specific metrics in our large-scale CIO survey have arced over into negative territory, which makes us uncomfortable because the results of our CIO surveys over the years have been highly predictive,” analyst Mark Murphy said in a note to clients Thursday. “Oracle spending intentions have only looked lukewarm in our CIO survey work in the recent past, but the data takes a dive in the current survey. … In our discussions, CIOs have clarified that they are migrating Oracle databases to Microsoft SQL Server, Amazon databases and PostgreSQL.”

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/14/oracle-shares-drop-after-jp-morgan-downgrades-on-lost-business-to-amazon-and-microsoft.html

Software/SaaS

  • Microsoft will ‘lose developers for a generation’ if it stuffs up GitHub, says future CEO

    “We are buying GitHub because we like GitHub; our plan is to continue to invest in the GitHub roadmap, and make GitHub better at being GitHub,” Friedman wrote.

    That means no ads in public repos, because Friedman said Sourceforge became “a swamp of banner ads and pop ups and delayed downloads to expose users to more ads”. He added that “GitHub’s clean interface and developer-centric approach can be seen in part as a reaction against Sourceforge” and suggested GitHub’s ascendency shows a no-ads approach has proven the correct approach.

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/08/nat_friedman_github_ceo_elect_ama_session/

  • Yahoo Messenger is shutting down on July 17, redirects users to group messaging app Squirrel

    “There currently isn’t a replacement product available for Yahoo Messenger,” the company writes. “We’re constantly experimenting with new services and apps, one of which is an invite-only group messaging app called Yahoo Squirrel (currently in beta).” Squirrel is a group messaging app Yahoo started testing last month. You can request access to the beta here.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/08/yahoo-messenger-is-shutting-down-on-july-17-redirects-users-to-group-messaging-app-squirrel/

Datacenter/Hardware

  • IBM and the DoE launch the world’s fastest supercomputer

    Summit, which has been in the works for a few years now, features 4,608 compute servers with two 22-core IBM Power9 chips and six Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs each. In total, the system also features over 10 petabytes of memory. Given the presence of the Nvidia GPUs, it’s no surprise that the system is meant to be used for machine learning and deep learning applications, as well as the usual high performance computing workloads for research in energy and advanced materials that you would expect to happen at Oak Ridge.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/08/ibms-new-summit-supercomputer-for-the-doe-delivers-200-petaflops/

  • Qualcomm Is Cutting Up to Half of Jobs in Data-Center Unit

    The company will eliminate 241 positions at its design center in Raleigh, North Carolina, and 43 in California, according to notices filed with those states. The total number of cuts, including those not covered by such notices, will represent a third to half of the server-chip unit’s employees, according to a person familiar with the process. The reduction comes on top of the previously announced elimination of about 1,500 workers across the company.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-14/qualcomm-is-said-to-cut-up-to-half-of-jobs-in-data-center-unit

Other

  • Verizon CEO to Retire, Succeeded by a Newcomer

    Verizon Communications Inc. VZ 0.35% named Hans Vestberg as its next chief executive, choosing a relative newcomer to run the wireless giant at a time when its industry is being reshaped by megadeals.

    Mr. Vestberg, who joined the company about a year ago and is its chief technology officer, will succeed longtime CEO Lowell McAdam on Aug. 1. Mr. McAdam will remain executive chairman until the end of the year and then become nonexecutive chairman.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/verizon-ceo-to-retire-replaced-by-a-newcomer-1528455600?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • After report on ‘appalling’ conditions, Foxconn will investigate plant that makes Amazon devices

    Though regular workers were better compensated in terms of wages and benefits, China Labor Watch says both groups were subjected to long hours and low wages, with workers putting in more than 100 overtime hours during peak season, even though the legal limit is 36 hours, and some working consecutively for 14 days. Workers on average earned wages between 2000 to 3000 RMB ($312.12 to $468.19), significantly less than Hengyang’s monthly average wage of 4,647 RMB ($725.22), but often had their overtime hours as punishment for taking leave or having unexcused absences.

    The report also claimed that the factory had poor fire safety in its dormitories, lack of sufficiently protective equipment, verbally abusive managers and the “absence of a functioning labor union.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/10/after-report-on-appalling-conditions-foxconn-will-investigate-plant-that-makes-amazon-devices/
    Workers not paid legally by Amazon contractor in China

    Amazon disclosed that its own auditors visited the Foxconn factory in March and found that it had hired an illegally high number of agency workers and was not paying them properly for working overtime.

    Agency staff – known as dispatch workers in China – do not get sick pay or holiday pay and can be laid off without wages during lulls in production. China changed its labour laws in 2014 to limit their use to 10% of any workforce in an attempt to stop companies exploiting them to cut costs.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/09/amazon-contractor-foxconn-pay-workers-illegally

Photo by Michael Prewett on Unsplash