Tag: Google

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Supplier Report: 3/13/2020


Photo by DDP on Unsplash

The Coronavirus continues to dominate the news feeds this week. Several companies are pulling out of or cancelling conferences and directing employees to stop traveling and work from home.

Articles from the New York Times and other respected news outlets are calling these preventative measures “unprecedented”. These actions beg the question, when will things go back to normal and how do firms plan around a global pandemic?

Acquisitions/Investments

  • BMC Software buys Compuware from Thoma Bravo

    By combining with Compuware, BMC said the companies will be better equipped to serve the enterprise technology stack. Together they plan to focus on mainframe operations, cybersecurity, application development, data, and storage as part of their enterprise DevOps strategies.

    “BMC continues to be focused on evolving and investing in our portfolio to address and even anticipate the needs of our customers, helping them to succeed today and into tomorrow,” said BMC chief executive Ayman Sayed. “It’s the ideal time to bring Compuware into our portfolio as the traditional mainframe AppDev market transitions to DevOps. We’re excited to welcome the Compuware team as we build best-of-breed modern mainframe solutions.”

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/bmc-software-buys-compuware-from-thoma-bravo/

  • Nvidia acquires data storage and management platform SwiftStack

    Nvidia today announced that it has acquired SwiftStack, a software-centric data storage and management platform that supports public cloud, on-premises and edge deployments.

    The company’s recent launches focused on improving its support for AI, high-performance computing and accelerated computing workloads, which is surely what Nvidia is most interested in here.

    The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition, but SwiftStack had previously raised about $23.6 million in Series A and B rounds led by Mayfield Fund and OpenView Venture Partners. Other investors include Storm Ventures and UMC Capital.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/05/nvidia-acquires-data-storage-and-management-platform-swiftstack/

  • HP Rejects Xerox’s Raised Takeover Offer

    Xerox this week launched an effort to acquire all HP shares outstanding, valuing HP at nearly $35 billion, or $24 a share in cash and stock. It had raised the offer from $22 a share. HP said the value of the offer’s equity component poses a risk to the company and would lead to uncertainties.

    The offer would leave Xerox “burdened with an irresponsible level of debt and which would subsequently require unrealistic, unachievable synergies that would jeopardize the entire company,” HP Chairman Chip Bergh said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/hp-rejects-xerox-takeover-offer-11583408223

Cloud

  • Judge says Amazon is ‘likely to succeed’ on key argument in Pentagon cloud lawsuit

    The document provides the first indication of how Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims might rule in a high-stakes bid protest over the Pentagon’s JEDI cloud computing contract, which was awarded to Microsoft in October following intervention from the White House and members of Congress.

    In a blow to Microsoft and the Defense Department, Campbell-Smith recently ordered the Pentagon to halt work on JEDI. In a lengthy opinion explaining her reasoning, she sided with Amazon’s contention that the Pentagon had made a mistake in how it evaluated prices for competing proposals from Amazon and Microsoft.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/06/judge-says-amazon-likely-succeed-key-argument-pentagon-cloud-lawsuit/

Security/Privacy

  • Halting $9.8 Billion in Theft Is Key to Crypto Growth, KPMG Says

    At least $9.8 billion in digital assets have been stolen by hackers since 2017 because of lax security or poorly written code, the accounting firm wrote in a report released Monday. Adoption of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether among institutional investors has led to competition for a place in portfolios, making safeguarding the tokens more important that ever, KPMG said.

    “Institutional investors especially will not risk owning crypto assets if their value cannot be safeguarded in the same way their cash, stocks and bonds are,” Sal Ternullo, co-leader of KPMG’s crypto-asset services and co-author of the report, said in a statement. Among the first companies to offer custody services for crypto are Fidelity Investments and units of the exchanges run by Intercontinental Exchange Inc., Coinbase Inc. and Gemini Trust Co.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-02/halting-9-8-billion-in-crypto-theft-key-to-growth-kpmg-says

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Honeywell says it will soon launch the world’s most powerful quantum computer

    Honeywell has long built the kind of complex control systems that power many of the world’s largest industrial sites. It’s that kind of experience that has now allowed it to build an advanced ion trap that is at the core of its efforts.

    This ion trap, the company claims in a paper that accompanies today’s announcement, has allowed the team to achieve decoherence times that are significantly longer than those of its competitors.

    **

    The result of this is a quantum computer that promises to achieve a quantum Volume of 64. Quantum Volume (QV), it’s worth mentioning, is a metric that takes into account both the number of qubits in a system as well as decoherence times. IBM and others have championed this metric as a way to, at least for now, compare the power of various quantum computers.

    So far, IBM’s own machines have achieved QV 32, which would make Honeywell’s machine significantly more powerful.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/honeywell-says-it-will-soon-launch-the-worlds-most-powerful-quantum-computer/

  • HPE Reports Sales That Miss Estimates on Weak Server Demand

    HPE Chief Executive Officer Antonio Neri has sought to fuel growth at the hardware company by moving to a subscription business model and investing in more sophisticated server technologies. The strategy may take years to pay off. In the meantime, HPE is exposed to China, the origin of the coronavirus, through its supply chain and its H3C server joint venture in the country. The company opted not to give a profit forecast for the current period due to uncertainty over the effects of the outbreak.

    HPE’s server sales decreased 16% to $3.01 billion in the period ended Jan. 31 because of macro uncertainty, supply chain disruption and a factory consolidation, Neri said in an interview. Businesses have reduced the pace of purchases for major information technology products amid slowing global economic growth.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-03/hpe-reports-sales-that-miss-estimates-on-declining-server-demand

CoronaVirus (Breaking it out into its own section)

  • eBay bans face mask and hand sanitizer listings to halt coronavirus price gouging

    eBay is escalating its fight against online price gouging during the coronavirus outbreak with a new outright ban on all sales of face masks, hand sanitizer, and disinfectant wipes. The new policy, outlined in a notice to sellers posted Friday, applies both to new listings and existing ones. eBay says it is in the process of removing current listings for these items as well as listings that mention the coronavirus, COVID-19 (the illness it causes), and other popular variations of the phrases like 2019nCoV.

    “We will continue to monitor the evolving situation and quickly remove any listing that mentions COVID-19, coronavirus, 2019nCoV (except books) in the title or description,” the notice reads. “These listings may violate applicable US laws or regulations, eBay policies, and exhibit unfair pricing behavior for our buyers.”

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/6/21168211/ebay-coronavirus-sales-ban-face-masks-hand-sanitizer-price-gouging

  • SXSW cancels its 400K-person conference due to coronavirus

    SXSW has officially announced it will cancel its tech and music conference slated for March 13th to 22nd in Austin, Texas due to concerns around coronavirus, though it’s exploring rescheduling. “Based on the recommendation of our public health officer and our director of public health . . . I’ve gone ahead and declared a local disaster in the city and associated with that, have issued an order that effectively cancels SXSW,” said Austin Mayor Steve Adler at a press conference today.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/06/sxsw-cancelled/

  • SAP has cancelled all in-person events and says bookings on its Concur travel platform is down 20% due to coronavirus crisis

    SAP said the cancelled events include its Concur Fusion conference in Orlando which was supposed to take place next week and its SAP Ariba Live convention in Las Vegas scheduled later this month.

    SAP also will not participate in the upcoming SXSW gathering in Austin, Texas next week.

    SAP said its own data underscore “the impact of COVID-19,” the company said in a blog post: “We have seen travel transactions in our SAP Concur network down 20% year-over-year.”

    https://www.businessinsider.com/sap-cancelled-in-person-events-due-to-coronavirus-crisis-2020-3

  • As coronavirus pandemic spreads, demand for remote-work startups spikes

    Switching to a remote-work setup isn’t easy. Smartsheet’s Mark Mader told TechCrunch that the “challenge of remote work isn’t just about physical location,” continuing to say that it is “also about the need for people to feel connected and stay informed.” That means intelligent tooling, and smart workplaces norms and practices. (Mader also stressed low-code and no-code tooling as a possible way to empower remote workers).

    The remote-work boom was recently highlighted in Zoom’s earnings report. Its results bested expectations, and in its earnings call, the company said that it was seeing rising demand for its product in the wake of COVID-19, even if most of that rising usage was for its free service. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said that in light of the spread of the coronavirus, many companies had quickly come to understand the need for a tool like Zoom. The CEO added that he expects more companies to deploy remote work tooling like his video service in the future.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/06/as-coronavirus-pandemic-spreads-demand-for-remote-work-startups-spikes/

  • Google recommends Washington State employees work from home, citing coronavirus risk

    The software giant has not closed the offices outright, nor is it planning to make an official statement regarding the recommendation, but the news certainly points to broader trend of serious precautions around the novel coronavirus outbreak. The move follows a similar decision by Lyft, which sent home employees in its San Francisco office.

    Google maintains a number of different offices throughout the state. Washington has become a major concentration for the spread of the virus in the U.S. Seventy cases have been reported, resulting in 10 deaths. The majority have been in King County, which includes both Seattle and Kirkland — both homes to Google offices.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/05/google-recommends-washington-state-employees-work-from-home-citing-coronavirus-risk/

Other

  • Elizabeth Warren, big tech’s sworn foe, drops out of 2020 race

    Warren’s campaign raised early red flags for tech’s giants, which are now recalibrating for the threat from Sanders.

    Through the 2020 race, the elite upper echelons of tech — executives, venture capitalists and the like — sought a moderate alternative to the economic upheaval they feared would be bad for business, even as their own workers aligned with the contest’s most progressive candidates.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/05/big-techs-sworn-foe-drops-out-of-2020-race/

  • Amazon Warehouse Workers Are Abandoning Their Jobs in Droves

    Between 2011—the year the first fulfillment center opened in California— and 2017, the turnover rate in five counties with Amazon warehouses leaped from 38 percent to 100 percent, according to the report. In other words, more warehouse workers departed from their jobs each year in counties with an Amazon presence than the total number of warehouse jobs.

    “What emerges is a troubling picture of Amazon’s business model—one in which the company views its workers as disposable and designs its operations to foster high turnover,” the report’s authors wrote. “The particularly high rate [of turnover for Amazon] workers as compared to the rate for similar workers suggests that Amazon’s presence has had a unique impact.”

    By comparison, overall turnover rates for warehouse workers in California are 20 percent lower than they are in counties without Amazon warehouses, at 83 percent.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkexdb/amazon-warehouse-workers-are-abandoning-their-jobs-in-droves

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Supplier Report: 2/28/2020

Google had a lot of things happening in the news this week…

First their parent company Alphabet announced it is pruning its “other bets” (aka Moonshot” projects). These projects tend to focus on “greater good” goals like energy, internet availability for poor countries, or security. Alphabet has been moving these projects back under the Google umbrella, reducing funding, or looking to sell off companies.

Rumors continue that Alphabet companies are toxic and poorly managed. Like Nest, Jigsaw (a company focused on internet protection and security) has employees fleeing due to bad leadership and a lack of action when issues and complaints are raised.

Finally, the company is not making friends with the DOJ as the anti-trust case ramps up. Meanwhile, their rival Oracle (and Larry Ellison), continue to get very friendly with President Trump.

Google was a company that said “don’t be evil” and invested in technologies that could help billions of people across the planet. Now it is de-funding those projects, trying to find ways into China, harbors creepy out-of-touch executives, and is being called out for a “culture of fear” while their list of enemies grow…

What the hell happened?

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Google parent Alphabet is pruning its ‘other bets’

    That list has been amended over the last four and a half years. Many Alphabet companies have simply rebranded — Life Sciences has become Verily, for instance, Google Ventures is now GV and Google X has dropped the word Google from its name. Of greater importance, however, are the “other bets” that Alphabet has created, killed and casually moved under Google management. Surprisingly, these decisions have accelerated over the last 12 months, highlighting Alphabet’s changing ambitions and just how difficult it is to turn a moonshot into a billion-dollar business.

    Take Makani. The team was developing kites with tiny turbines that could be tethered to a stable structure — a large boat or buoy, for instance — and leverage the wind to generate energy. Google invested an undisclosed amount in 2007 and then, through its X factory, acquired the company six years later. Makani worked in the secretive laboratory before partnering with Shell and ‘graduating’ to Alphabet company status in February 2019. Last August, the team completed its first off-shore demonstration in the North Sea, roughly 10 kilometers away from Norway. But that wasn’t enough for Alphabet management. Earlier this week, the company admitted that it was no longer confident in Makani’s moonshot.

    https://www.engadget.com/2020/02/20/alphabet-makani-chronicle-jigsaw-other-bets/

  • SoftBank spends $2.5 billion to get second Vision Fund off the ground: sources

    Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) account for the bulk of the first Vision Fund at $60 billion. They have yet to commit to the second fund.

    Son spoke to Mubadala executives last week to convince them that the turnaround the Vision Fund was implementing in its investment portfolio was working, said one of the people, who declined to be identified as the information was not public.

    SoftBank and PIF declined to comment. A Mubadala spokesman said his company was a long-term partner of SoftBank, with which it was in regular discussion.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-softbank-visionfund/softbank-spends-2-5-billion-to-get-second-vision-fund-off-the-ground-sources-idUSKBN20C0N3

Cloud

  • Google Plots Course to Overtake Cloud Rivals

    Within Google, the cloud business has been growing in importance. The cloud generated 5.5% of Alphabet sales last year, or $8.9 billion, up from $4.1 billion, or 3.7% of total sales, two years earlier. Alphabet only began separately reporting cloud sales in the last quarter, further highlighting the growth push.

    Mr. Kurian’s changes have led to tensions within Google’s cloud ranks, where engineers had largely worked unencumbered by deadlines, according to current and former employees. Engineers were often more focused on projects they deemed interesting, former employers said, rather than what customers were wanting. That meant such features as databases and identity management—which didn’t excite employees but were prized by corporate buyers—were neglected, former employers said.

    Under Mr. Kurian, said a former Google Cloud engineer, “we have to build stuff we can sell. People weren’t used to having that.” Mr. Kurian also upset some sales people when he shifted their compensation plans by lowering their base pay but offering more in bonuses for the deals they secured, former employees said. Google declined to comment.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-plots-course-to-overtake-cloud-rivals-11582383601

Security/Privacy

  • Google shifts authority over UK user data to the US in wake of Brexit

    Since 2019, shortly after Europe’s GDPR privacy rules were enacted, the official service provider and data controller for UK users had been Google’s Irish subsidiary. According to Reuters, the change in data controller could have implications for the extent of legal protection over Google’s UK user data. While Ireland is covered by the EU’s strict GDPR data protection regulations, the USA’s privacy protections are comparatively weaker. Reuters says the shift could make it easier for British authorities to obtain the data, in instances such as criminal investigations. The USA’s recent Cloud Act, it notes, could make this easier still.

    However, Reuters also says that the UK’s privacy rules will continue to apply when British authorities request user data, regardless of the fact that they’ll now be directed at Google’s US headquarters. For the foreseeable future, these rules are likely to be aligned with GDPR.

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/20/21145180/google-uk-user-data-processing-ireland-usa-authorities-data-protection-gdpr-cloud-act

  • Google’s Jigsaw Was Supposed to Save the Internet. Behind the Scenes, It Became a Toxic Mess

    Among Jigsaw’s products and research projects are Project Shield, a free service to stop distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks; Outline, a controversial VPN for people who live under censorious regimes that’s used by 50,000 people, according to a source with knowledge of the product; a tool to automatically moderate comments and a hate-speech-fighting AI that can spot “toxic” comments that’s used by The New York Times; and a program to steer people away from violent extremist content called the Redirect Method.

    These projects have gotten a lot of attention when they’ve launched, but none have been transformative for the internet. Experts say it’s unclear how much of a difference Jigsaw has made.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb98pb/google-jigsaw-became-toxic-mess

  • Hackers Were Inside Citrix for Five Months

    In March 2019, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alerted Citrix they had reason to believe cybercriminals had gained access to the company’s internal network. The FBI told Citrix the hackers likely got in using a technique called “password spraying,” a relatively crude but remarkably effective attack that attempts to access a large number of employee accounts (usernames/email addresses) using just a handful of common passwords.

    In a statement released at the time, Citrix said it appeared hackers “may have accessed and downloaded business documents,” and that it was still working to identify what precisely was accessed or stolen.

    But in a letter sent to affected individuals dated Feb. 10, 2020, Citrix disclosed additional details about the incident. According to the letter, the attackers “had intermittent access” to Citrix’s internal network between Oct. 13, 2018 and Mar. 8, 2019, and that there was no evidence that the cybercrooks still remain in the company’s systems.

    https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/02/hackers-were-inside-citrix-for-five-months/

Other

  • Jeff Bezos announced a $10 billion fund to fight climate change

    In a post on Monday morning Bezos announced that the Bezos Earth Fund will finance “scientists, activists, NGOs — any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world.”

    Bezos is already an investor in Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund whose mission is to finance the development of technologies that can mitigate climate change and reduce the use of fossil fuels and carbon emissions in industries, including energy generation, food production and manufacturing.

    Questions about the new fund are being referred to Amazon, which doesn’t have much to share. The money is from Bezos’ personal wealth and is separate from the foundation that he’d established, according to a spokesperson for the company.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/17/jeff-bezos-announced-a-10-billion-fund-to-fight-climate-change/

  • Texas AG accuses Google of delaying antitrust investigation and ‘pushing us towards a fight’

    In an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton pointed to Google’s attempts to prevent the state from using certain outside consultants as one delay tactic. And Paxton said he’s willing to take a more aggressive stance as a result.

    “They’re pushing us towards a fight,” Paxton told CNBC. “We don’t necessarily want one. But we won’t back off if they’re not going to cooperate.”

    Google has said it objected to three consultants because they worked for competitors, including Microsoft and News Corp, and that it wants to ensure any documents they review remain confidential.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/05/texas-ag-paxton-says-google-delaying-antitrust-investigation.html

  • As Google heads to the Supreme Court, Oracle takes aim at its industry allies

    Google has argued that calling its work copyright infringement would hurt software interoperability, saying that it copied elements of Java to support Java developers building apps for Android. Earlier this year, it garnered around two dozen briefs supporting its position.

    But Oracle claims that in reality, “Google appears to be virtually alone — at least among the technology community.” Glueck says Google’s most prominent backers had ulterior motives or “parochial agendas”; either they were working closely with Google, or they had their own designs on Java. Microsoft, for example, settled a Java-related lawsuit with some parallels to Google’s case. (That was, granted, nearly 20 years ago.) Oracle alleges that IBM simply wants easier access to Java after acquiring software company Red Hat. And Google is a prominent member of the CCIA.

    Glueck also argues that these briefs don’t support Google as wholeheartedly as they seem. It cites Microsoft’s brief, for example, as only addressing one of Google’s two arguments for why its borrowing is legal. (That argument involves establishing Google’s actions as fair use, though, which would still be enough to get it off the hook.)

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/19/21142366/google-supreme-court-oracle-java-copyright-microsoft-ibm

  • Dear Sophie: I need the latest details on the new H-1B registration process

    No, there is no limit to how many times a company can sponsor an individual. A lot of companies tend to do it three times because candidates can often work for you for three years with OPT and STEM OPT, but the law doesn’t set out an upper limit. Also, you can sponsor current F-1 students as well as people who have accepted your offers who are currently outside the United States.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/21/dear-sophie-i-need-the-latest-details-on-the-new-h-1b-registration-process/

Posted on

Supplier Report: 2/21/2020


Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash

It was a random week in tech: Larry Ellison is looking to make friends with President Trump (one of those the enemy of my enemy situations against Bezos perhaps?).

Xerox is still thirsty for HP Inc. and it looks like a hostile takeover is at least a possibility?

IBM is doubling down on communication platform Slack (thus shunning Microsoft) while Oracle and SAP are looking a little long in the tooth?

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Google closes $2.6B Looker acquisition

    While Kurian was happy to announce that Looker was officially part of the Google family, he made it clear in a blog post that the analytics arm would continue to support multiple cloud vendors beyond Google.

    “Google Cloud and Looker share a common philosophy around delivering open solutions and supporting customers wherever they are—be it on Google Cloud, in other public clouds, or on premises. As more organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy, Looker customers and partners can expect continued support of all cloud data management systems like Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Teradata,” Kurian wrote.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/13/google-closes-2-6b-looker-acquisition/

  • Xerox Raises Its Bid to Acquire HP

    Xerox Holdings Corp. XRX -1.13% raised its offer to buy HP Inc. HPQ +0.34% to $24 a share and said it would launch a public takeover bid early next month.

    In November, Xerox made an initial stock-and-cash offer of $22 a share for the maker of computers and printers. It said Monday that the latest offer isn’t tied to financing or due-diligence conditions.

    HP had rejected the initial bid as too low and questioned Xerox’s ability to finance a deal. In January, Xerox said it had secured up to $24 billion debt financing but HP again said the bid undervalued the company.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/xerox-raises-offer-for-hp-plans-to-launch-takeover-bid-in-early-march-11581342655

  • Infosys is acquiring Simplus for $250M to grow its Salesforce consulting arm

    The acquisition follows the purchase of Fluido, another Salesforce consulting shop, in 2018. The moves suggest that Infosys wants to build deeper expertise around Salesforce and make that a key piece of its consulting operations moving forward.

    Brent Leary, a CRM industry veteran, who is owner at CRM Essentials, says that Simplus is well-positioned in the Salesforce ecosystem to capture lucrative cloud integration services, and it should help expand Infosys’s Salesforce consulting arm. “By acquiring Simplus, it allows Infosys to grab more market share, while extending Salesforce capabilities to offer existing clients,” Leary told TechCrunch.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/11/infosys-is-acquiring-simplus-for-250m-to-grow-its-salesforce-consulting-arm/

Cloud

  • Google to restructure Cloud business, with some roles eliminated

    The restructuring is primarily meant to realign focus on international markets and affects fewer than 50 employees, according to a person close to the company. The company would not comment on how many employees are affected or which areas within the Cloud business would be affected, only saying it is working with internal “mobility teams” to find the employees new roles within the company.

    Kurian this week outlined the company’s strategy, which included targeting five industries: retail, health care, financial services, media and entertainment, and manufacturing.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/14/google-to-restructure-cloud-business-with-some-roles-eliminated.html

  • YouTube shines but Google ads continue to slow

    YouTube’s ad sales in the last three months of 2019 rose 31% year-on-year to $4.7bn (£3.62bn), Alphabet said. Overall Alphabet revenue increased by 17% year-on-year to $46bn – the slowest rate in more than two years.

    While YouTube is rapidly growing, Alphabet’s cloud business lags rivals.

    For years the business did not publish revenue figures for its various divisions, to the concern of investors and regulators. When Sundar Pichai took over as Alphabet chief executive last year the policy changed, although it is still not releasing profit figures for individual units.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51364853

  • Japan to hire Amazon to build government cloud

    The government aims to put systems currently operated by different ministries and agencies on the cloud in four to eight years. It is expected to officially choose industry leader Amazon Web Services this spring to build 20 core government wide systems to kick-start the process, due to its pricing and quality of services.

    Cloud-based systems are expected to cost a third of the current set up to maintain. It would also free up manpower, helping to boost productivity.

    Noncore systems, such as those specific to the pension system or to a specific ministry, will be launched as they become ready and meet government standards. The government wants cloud service providers to have data centers in Japan due to security concerns, which means it cannot work with Chinese companies required to manage data at home.

    https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Japan-to-hire-Amazon-to-build-government-cloud

Software/SaaS

  • IBM picks Slack over Microsoft Teams for its 350,000 employees

    While this new rollout makes IBM Slack’s biggest customer to date, it has been the company’s biggest customer for years according to Slack. “IBM has been Slack’s largest customer for several years and has expanded its usage of Slack over that time,” reveals an SEC filing from Slack, which appears to downplay the news.

    In a statement to The Verge, Slack says IBM has more than 300,000 users and “has scaled its Slack deployment so it can offer it to every employee at IBM.” This is a significant increase from the 165,000 IBM users that Slack last reported in 2019 after the launch of its Enterprise Grid service. It’s not clear whether IBM is using the paid version of Slack for all of its employees or a mix of the free and paid options, though.

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/10/21132060/ibm-slack-chat-employee-rollout-microsoft-teams-competition

    I am not sure if it is about “trust”… I am sure it helps that IBM already has AI integrations with Slack and they have been using the product for a few years…

  • Oracle and SAP – going soft in their old age?

    Both, it seems, have woken up to the fact that firms like Salesforce, Workday, Coupa, Google and Amazon represent existential threats they are both hard put to push back against. In short, while neither are going away any time soon, both are long in the tooth and need to reinvent themselves if they are to stay relevant.

    Reinvention is never easy, especially when you’ve enjoyed a long period of success. After all, who wants to rock the proverbial boat when the cash register is singing along? But in these companies’ case, change is a-coming and not just in the product lines where both have been slow to understand the impact of technology shifts.

    https://diginomica.com/oracle-and-sap-going-soft-their-old-age

Other

  • Target’s Delivery App Workers Describe a Culture of Retaliation and Fear

    So it’s not enough to deliver the customer’s order from Target, now if you want to keep getting good ratings and more work you have to take out their trash and walk their dogs. Cool system! The article also details how Shipt workers worry about the company retaliating against them for posting negative comments or asking pointed questions on internal message boards and Facebook groups. One worker described being temporarily deactivated after criticizing the company’s new logo.

    And then there’s the issue of pay: Shipt workers told Motherboard that the company recently switched from a straightforward per-order pay structure to a confusing algorithm that considers… some factors… to determine how they’re paid. You will be shocked to hear that the new algorithm does not favor the workers; some report their pay has dropped by 50 percent since Shipt made the switch.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dygxzw/target-shipt-delivery-app-workers-retaliation

  • Larry Ellison Joins Peter Thiel In Trump’s Camp

    Increasingly, Ellison’s company is competing with the cloud computing wing of Amazon.com Inc., and he does it with zeal. Oracle funded an anti-Amazon group called the “Free and Fair Markets Initiative” to attack Amazon. Oracle also worked desperately to derail Amazon’s bid for JEDI, a lucrative Defense Department cloud contract, going for far as to sue the federal government for illegally favoring Amazon.

    Now, Ellison is making friends with his enemy’s enemy, who happens to be the President of the United States. On Wednesday, Ellison will host a fundraiser for President Donald Trump at his home in Rancho Mirage, California. Top contributors are expected to shell out $250,000 for a photo, a golf outing and a round-table discussion.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-14/larry-ellison-joins-peter-thiel-in-trump-s-camp

Posted on

Supplier Report: 1/31/2020


Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

Google is once again in the news for negative reasons. The company quietly rolled out changes to their search results that could mislead users to click on ads. After a media backlash, the search giant reversed course.

The drama between Xerox and HP continues as Xerox refuses to take no for an answer. HP is blaming Carl Icahn for the aggressive (and seemingly never-ending) acquisition attempts.

Finally, India has taken umbrage with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos due to Washington Post coverage of the Indian Government and for Amazon’s investment strategies in the country.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Xerox wants to replace HP board that rejected takeover bid

    Xerox and HP have been playing a highly public game of tit for tat in recent months. Xerox wants very much to combine with HP, and offered $34 billion, an offer HP summarily rejected at the end of last year. Xerox threatened to take it to shareholders.

    HP was none too pleased with this latest move by Xerox. “We believe these nominations are a self-serving tactic by Xerox to advance its proposal, that significantly undervalues HP and creates meaningful risk to the detriment of HP shareholders,” HP fired back in a statement today emailed to TechCrunch.

    It went on to blame Xerox shareholder Carl Icahn for the continued pressure. “We believe that Xerox’s proposal and nominations are being driven by Carl Icahn, and his large ownership position in Xerox means that his interests are not aligned with those of other HP shareholders. Due to Mr. Icahn’s ownership position, he would disproportionately benefit from an acquisition of HP by Xerox at a price that undervalues HP,” the company stated.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/xerox-wants-to-replace-hp-board-that-rejected-takeover-bid/

  • Hedge Funds Are Oddly Silent in Toshiba Buyout Drama

    Here’s a quick recap: As part of its Toshiba Next Plan, the company said in November that it planned to buy out shareholders in three subsidiaries for $1.8 billion, one of them being chip-equipment maker NuFlare Technology Inc. Tokyo-based Hoya Corp. put in a higher, unsolicited bid for NuFlare, seeking a minimum 66.7% stake. Toshiba Machine Co., which partly owns NuFlare, brushed off the hostile approach and went with the lower bid.

    On Tuesday, a fund backed by activist investor Yoshiaki Murakami launched a tender offer for a 44% stake in Toshiba Machine, in an apparent effort to disrupt the consolidation. Toshiba Machine shares had surged as much as 19% Friday after the company said Murakami planned a bid. They fell Tuesday after the offer — a 12% premium to Thursday’s closing price — was lower than some investors expected.

    Yet shareholders at each of the companies — including the hedge funds that own Toshiba Corp. stock — seem to be the losers and no one is saying anything about it.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-21/hedge-funds-are-oddly-silent-in-toshiba-buyout-drama

Artificial Intelligence/Robotics

  • Google CEO Sundar Pichai calls for ‘sensible regulation’ of AI

    Of course, this call for “balance” leaves some questions about how tight of regulation Pichai is talking about. He doesn’t specifically rebuff the White House’s recent calls for a light touch. Nor does he suggest the EU’s more comprehensive proposals go too far.

    Instead he makes clear that having the international community come to an agreement on regulatory issues is key. Then seems to suggest that Alphabet’s own internal handling of AI could serve as a guideline. He claims that the rules and systems put in place by the company help it avoid bias, and prioritize the safety and privacy of people. Though, it is debatable how successful Alphabet has been on those fronts. He also says the company will not deploy AI “to support mass surveillance or violate human rights.” And while Google does not sell facial recognition software that could easily be abused (unlike some of its competitors), there is serious concern that Google and its ilk pose a broad threat to human rights.

    https://www.engadget.com/2020/01/20/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-regulation-editorial/

Cloud

  • Epic Systems, a major medical records vendor, is warning customers it will stop working with Google Cloud

    Privately held Epic is one of the largest electronic medical record companies in the U.S. It sells its products, which include a digital equivalent of the traditional doctor’s paper medical chart as well as billing tools, into the largest hospital systems in the U.S. Epic installations are major undertakings, and can end up costing billions of dollars overall. Once installed, they become a core part of a hospital’s information systems and are seldom dislodged.

    Epic’s decision is a blow to Google’s efforts to find new customer segments for its cloud products, as the company lags well behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in market share for cloud computing. The company is hoping to catch up by landing big-name customers such as Mayo Clinic, and by stressing its artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/17/epic-systems-warns-customers-it-will-stop-supporting-google-cloud.html

Security/Privacy

  • Hospitals Give Tech Giants Access to Detailed Medical Records

    The scope of data sharing in these and other recently reported agreements reveals a powerful new role that hospitals play—as brokers to technology companies racing into the $3 trillion health-care sector. Rapid digitization of health records and privacy laws enabling companies to swap patient data have positioned hospitals as a primary arbiter of how such sensitive data is shared.

    “Hospitals are massive containers of patient data,” said Lisa Bari, a consultant and former lead for health information technology for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Innovation Center.

    Hospitals can share patient data as long as they follow federal privacy laws, which contain limited consumer protections, she said. “The data belongs to whoever has it.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/hospitals-give-tech-giants-access-to-detailed-medical-records-11579516200

Software/SaaS

  • SAP’s new CEOs on the threat from Oracle: ‘We are winning market share’

    The German tech giant was the subject of criticism from some customers over a decision to end support for software running on third-party databases like Oracle. Late last year, Oracle’s technology chief Larry Ellison fired criticism of his own at the firm, claiming SAP’s customer base was “up for grabs.”

    In Oracle’s second-quarter earnings call, Ellison said one of SAP’s biggest customers would go live on Oracle’s enterprise resource planning platform (ERP) in 2020. ERP is a piece of software used by firms to manage their business and automate back office functions.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/24/sap-co-ceos-on-the-threat-from-oracle-we-are-winning-market-share.html

  • Many SAP customers ‘in a bind’ says DSAG 2020 investment report but there are reasons to be cheerful

    When it comes to SAP Cloud solutions in general, 14 percent of respondents plan “large and medium-sized” investments in SuccessFactors, 13 percent in SAP Analytics Cloud, and 11 percent in C/4HANA. Ariba, Integrated Business Planning, and Concur remain in the single digits. Only SAP Analytics Cloud shows an upward trend. After the number of companies willing to make “large and medium-sized” investments rose six percent to nine percent last year, this year it has again increased four percent to 13 percent. “SAP user companies continue to invest in SAP’s cloud solutions, to expand and grow their processes outside the core. This needs to be able to happen as a standardized, uniform process, without modifications. It’s our role as DSAG, in discussion with SAP, to ensure that out-of-the-box integration and harmonized data models continue. This will then facilitate the deployment of a rapid growth product like SAP Analytics Cloud,” explains Marco Lenck.

    https://diginomica.com/many-sap-customers-bind-says-dsag-2020-investment-report-there-are-reasons-be-cheerful

  • How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

    The new layout for search result is ugly at first glance — but then Google was always ugly until relatively recently. I very quickly learned to unconsciously take in the information from the top favicon and URL-esque info without it really distracting me.

    …Which is basically the problem. Google’s using that same design language to identify its ads instead of much more obvious, visually distinct methods. It’s consistent, I guess, but it also feels deceptive.

    Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is billions of people use Google?

    https://www.theverge.com/tech/2020/1/24/21079696/google-serp-design-change-altavisa-ads-trust
    Google’s latest user-hostile design change makes ads and search results look identical

    Now a user of Google’s search engine has — essentially — only a favicon between them and an unintended ad click. Squint or you’ll click it.

    This visual trickery may be fractionally less confusing in a small screen mobile environment — where Google debuted the change last year. But on a desktop screen these favicons are truly minuscule. And where to click to get actual information starts to feel like a total lottery.

    A lottery that’s being stacked in Google’s favor because confused users are likely to end up clicking more ad links than they otherwise would, meaning it cashes in at the expense of web users’ time and energy.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/squint-and-youll-click-it/

    Update: Google backtracks on search results design

    Google on Friday responded to criticism that recent changes to its search results have blurred the lines between ads and regular results, saying it will be experimenting with different designs.

    As a part of a mid-January redesign to desktop search results, the company made paid links look more like unpaid results. The word “Ad” in bold text appears next to the advertisements, which typically are listed first and are therefore more likely to be clicked on and generate ad revenue for Google.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/24/google-will-iterate-the-design-that-made-it-harder-to-tell-ads-from-search-results.html

Other

  • ‘Amazon Empire’ Documentary Shows How Jeff Bezos Took Over Everything

    Politicians, regulators, and commentators are not as clear-eyed about what to do with Amazon. Some want to break it up, others say that antitrust action won’t work, and others still talk of nationalizing the company. Or even worse, incorporating the company into a socialist system (gasp) by taking a close look at how Amazon’s central planning might help us design non-market solutions to problems that Amazon claims to solve today (i.e. matching people to their individual tastes at the highest possible quality for the lowest possible cost).

    Amazon is rapidly metastasizing into an invisible infrastructure that mediates our economy, politics, social relations, and culture. It is important we have a clear understanding of that and reject its rosy PR about simply wanting to provide goods to customers cheaply (and profitably).

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7kzbxg/amazon-empire-documentary-shows-how-jeff-bezos-took-over-everything

  • India Targets Jeff Bezos Over Amazon and Washington Post

    On the same day, Mr. Modi’s commerce minister, Piyush Goyal, dismissed Mr. Bezos’ announcement of a fresh $1 billion investment to help small businesses in the country. “It is not as if they are doing a favor to India,” Mr. Goyal told reporters. He then referred to the antitrust investigation of Amazon and its chief rival that Indian regulators opened the day before Mr. Bezos arrived.

    Although both men later tempered their remarks, the double-barreled assault on The Post and Amazon is reminiscent of President Trump, who has repeatedly attacked Mr. Bezos, The Post’s coverage of his administration, and Amazon — often all in the same tweet.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/technology/india-amazon-bezos-washington-post.html

  • IBM Sales Expected to Dip Despite Red Hat Purchase: What to Watch

    IBM is expected to report adjusted earnings per share of $4.69 for the quarter ended Dec. 31, down from $4.87 for the same period last year, according to analysts surveyed by FactSet. Adjusted net income should be around $4.19 billion, down from $4.42 billion in the year-prior quarter, the analysts expect.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-sales-expected-to-dip-despite-red-hat-purchase-what-to-watch-11579602600

  • Trend: Layoffs hit Q&A startup Quora

    “[W]e need to reduce our burn rate to a sustainable level from which we can focus on pursuing the mission and growing the business over the long term. We do not want to be dependent on outside capital, so self-reliance and careful management of our resources are crucial to our future,” D’Angelo wrote.

    Over the past several weeks, layoffs have been hitting startups, including several in SoftBank’s portfolio as well as Mozilla and, just today, genetic testing startup 23andMe.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/layoffs-hit-qa-startup-quora/

Posted on

Supplier Report: 1/24/2020


Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

Even though Google is under investigation for monopoly tactics, the company announced another acquisition. The search giant is set to purchase cloud sales company Pointy, which helps small companies sell their products online.

The company also announced a long-term strategy to kill browser cookies, with the aim to better protect end-user privacy (and likely unleash their own tracking-standard for advertisers).

Apple also announced an acquisition this week (AI startup Xnor.ai), but that news was overshadowed by the company’s refusal to unlock phones involved with the Pensacola shooting. Should tech companies intentionally open back doors for the government (even with the best of intentions) which could lead to much larger security issues?

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Google acquires Pointy, a startup to help brick-and-mortar retailers list products online, for $163M

    The search giant is acquiring Pointy, a startup out of Dublin, Ireland, which has built hardware and software technology to help physical retailers — specifically those that might not already have an extensive e-commerce storefront detailing in-store inventory — get their products discoverable online without any extra work.

    The companies are not disclosing the financial terms of the deal, but a source tells us it is €147 million ($163 million).

    A source notes that this was a “good outcome” because Pointy has a “one of a kind” product that didn’t really have any comparables in the market. Pointy had also managed to pick up quite a lot of traction as a small startup, working with around 10% of all physical retailers in the U.S. in certain categories (pets and toys were two of those, I was told).

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/14/google-is-buying-pointy-a-startup-that-helps-brick-and-mortar-retailers-list-products-online/

  • Equinix is acquiring bare metal cloud provider Packet

    Sara Baack, chief product officer at Equinix, says bringing the two companies together will provide a diverse set of bare metal options for customers moving forward. “Our combined strengths will further empower companies to be everywhere they need to be, to interconnect everyone and integrate everything that matters to their business,” she said in a statement.

    While the companies did not share the purchase price, they did hint that they would have more details on the transaction after it closes, which is expected in the first quarter this year.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/14/equinix-is-acquiring-bare-metal-cloud-provider-packet/

  • Apple acquires Xnor.ai, edge AI spin-out from Paul Allen’s AI2, for price in $200M range

    The three-year-old startup’s secret sauce has to do with AI on the edge — machine learning and image recognition tools that can be executed on low-power devices rather than relying on the cloud. “We’ve been able to scale AI out of the cloud to every device out there,” co-founder Ali Farhadi, who is the venture’s CXO (chief Xnor officer) as well as a UW professor, told GeekWire in 2018.

    Xnor.ai also developed a self-service platform that made it possible for software developers, even those who aren’t skilled in AI, to drop AI-centric code and data libraries into device-centric apps.

    Those two threads of innovation are woven into the startup’s motto: “AI Everywhere, for Everyone.”

    https://www.geekwire.com/2020/exclusive-apple-acquires-xnor-ai-edge-ai-spin-paul-allens-ai2-price-200m-range/

Cloud

  • Google Cloud gets a premium support plan with 15-minute response times

    Google stresses that the team that will answer a company’s calls will consist of “content-aware experts” that know your application stack and architecture. As with similar premium plans from other vendors, enterprises will have a Technical Account manager who works through these issues with them. Companies with global operations can opt to have (and pay for) technical account managers available during business hours in multiple regions.

    The idea here, however, is also to give GCP users more proactive support, which will soon include a site reliability engineering engagement, for example, that is meant to help customers “design a wrapper of supportability around the Google Cloud customer projects that have the highest sensitivity to downtime.” The Support team will also work with customers to get them ready for special events like Black Friday or other peak events in their industry. Over time, the company plans to add more features and additional support plans.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/google-cloud-gets-a-premium-support-plan-with-15-minute-response-times/

Security/Privacy

  • Apple Said It Is Helping In The Pensacola Shooting Investigation, But It Won’t Unlock The Shooter’s iPhones

    “We reject the characterization that Apple has not provided substantive assistance in the Pensacola investigation. Our responses to their many requests since the attack have been timely, thorough and are ongoing,” the company said in a statement. “We responded to each request promptly, often within hours, sharing information with FBI offices in Jacksonville, Pensacola and New York. The queries resulted in many gigabytes of information that we turned over to investigators. In every instance, we responded with all of the information that we had.”

    But Apple said nothing about actually unlocking the gunman’s two iPhones. Instead, it reiterated its stance on privacy.

    “We have always maintained there is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys,” the company explained. “Backdoors can also be exploited by those who threaten our national security and the data security of our customers. … We feel strongly encryption is vital to protecting our country and our users’ data.

    https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/scottlucas/william-barr-apple-request-unlock-iphones

  • Google Says Chrome Will End Support for Third-Party Cookies That Track You. Here’s Why That’s Not All Good News

    So, let’s look at the good news and the bad news. If you’re a user, there’s mostly good news, because ending third-party cookies is generally good for privacy. The caveat here is that it’s not yet entirely clear how Google plans to have it both ways. Meaning, it’s not clear how Google thinks it can provide a privacy-protected browsing experience that also provides targeted ads.

    There’s also the fact that some less ethical advertisers will no doubt resort to other types of more nefarious tracking, like browser and device fingerprinting. Those technologies create a profile of you based on information sent by your browser about your device, the operating system, your location, and other unique identifiers. Safari has introduced protection against that, and it will be interesting if Google takes a similar approach with Chrome.

    https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/google-says-chrome-will-end-support-for-third-party-cookies-that-track-you-thats-not-all-good-news.html

Software/SaaS

  • Mozilla lays off 70 as it waits for new products to generate revenue

    In an internal memo, Mozilla chairwoman and interim CEO Mitchell Baker specifically mentions the slow rollout of the organization’s new revenue-generating products as the reason for why it needed to take this action. The overall number may still be higher, though, as Mozilla is still looking into how this decision will affect workers in the U.K. and France. In 2018, Mozilla Corporation (as opposed to the much smaller Mozilla Foundation) said it had about 1,000 employees worldwide.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-waits-for-subscription-products-to-generate-revenue/?guccounter=1

  • Daily Crunch: Goodbye Hipmunk

    Founded by Adam J. Goldstein and Reddit co-founder Steve “spez” Huffman, Hipmunk was one of the first well-made “metasearch” travel sites. It scrounged up flights (and hotels/car rentals/etc.) from across myriad services like Expedia, Priceline, etc., presenting all the times and prices in one big, skimmable interface.

    Now the Hipmunk team says the website and app are both shutting down. Oh, and we’ve confirmed that Goldstein and Huffman tried to buy the company back from SAP Concur, but that doesn’t seem to have panned out.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/daily-crunch-goodbye-hipmunk/

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Report: Intel CPU Supply Issues Will Likely Persist Through 2020

    Intel has previously admitted to being stuck between a rock and a hard place and their CEO, Bob Swan, gave a very candid explanation for the situation they are in right now. It does, however, mean that AMD *will* be eating away more market share from Intel as OEMs and AIBs have to switch to AMD parts to maintain their volume as Intel’s foundries are running at peak capacity and cannot keep up with demand. Every chip order that Intel is not able to meet means market share gained by AMD.

    It also doesn’t help that Intel’s chips ship at a premium (and it makes no sense to kill that premium right now when demand exceeds supply) and OEMs/AIBs have to pass that cost down to consumers who may prefer to go with AMD alternatives anyways. If there is one thing we know for sure it is that 2020 is going to be a make or break year for Intel and things won’t start looking up for the company till late 2021.

    https://wccftech.com/report-intel-cpu-supply-issues-will-likely-persist-through-2020/

Other

  • Silicon Valley Abandons the Culture That Made It the Envy of the World

    Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, said much the same last year. “Chinese companies are growing faster, they have higher valuations, and they have more users than their non-Chinese counterparts,” he said. “It’s very important to understand that there is a global competition around technology innovation, and China is a significant player and likely to remain so.”

    This is a full reversal of the language that tech promoters used to sell Silicon Valley–style innovation and competitiveness for decades. Saxenian has noticed the change in how the Valley describes itself, or at least in how the dominant firms do. “Advocacy of the small, innovative firm and entrepreneurial ecosystem is giving way to more and more justifications for bigness (scale economics, competitive advantage, etc.),” Saxenian wrote to me in an email. “The big is beautiful line is coming especially from the large companies (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple) that are threatened by antitrust and need to justify their scale.”

    This sort of talk prompts one obvious, knee-jerk response: It’s simply hypocrisy. When Google and Facebook were start-ups, their executives said start-ups were good. Now that Google and Facebook are huge, their executives say huge companies are good. It’s cynical, if not unexpected.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/why-silicon-valley-and-big-tech-dont-innovate-anymore/604969/