Tag: Google

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Supplier Report: 10/8/2016

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Nobody wants to buy Twitter, but that isn’t stopping SalesForce, Google, and Microsoft with moving forward with their long term plans.

Internet of Things is trending this week as Microsoft is quietly shutting down their fitness band division, but will they buy FitBit (and what would they do with all of that data)? IBM is dropping $200M on a new IoT HQ in Germany.

There were also a few interesting team-ups this week: VMWare and Amazon on some potential VMWare options on AWS and IBM and AT&T deepening their relationship via cloud services.

Acquisitions

  • Plat.One acquisition marks start of $2B IoT investment plan for SAP

    SAP has bought IoT software developer Plat.One, marking the start of a plan to invest US$2 billion in the internet of things over the next five years.

    Some of those billions will be spent on the creation of IoT development labs around the world, SAP said Wednesday. It already has plans for such labs in Berlin, Johannesburg, Munich, Palo Alto, Shanghai and São Leopoldo in Brazil.

    The company is also rolling out a series of “jump-start” and “accelerator” IoT software packages for particular industries, to help them monitor and control equipment.

    http://www.pcworld.com/article/3124442/internet-of-things/platone-acquisition-marks-start-of-2b-iot-investment-plan-for-sap.html#tk.rss_all

  • Salesforce snaps up Krux for $700M on eve of Dreamforce

    On the eve of Dreamforce, his company’s annual developers shindig, Salesforce agreed on Monday to acquire Krux, a marketing-data start-up, for $700 million in stock and cash. Krux, which already has a partnership with Salesforce, is expected to bolster Salesforce’s ability to better identify and serve its cloud-software customers.

    http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/10/03/salesforce-snaps-up-krux-700m-eve-dreamforce/91490708/

  • Salesforce Investors Could Derail a Potential Deal for Twitter

    During a CNBC interview on Wednesday with Jim Cramer, Benioff neither confirmed nor denied Salesforce’s interest in Twitter, but didn’t exactly sound as if a deal is certain. “We have to look at everything, we’re going to pass on most things,” he said. Salesforce, which was down over 7% at one point, pared its losses a little following Benioff’s remarks.

    The fact that Twitter is already often used as a marketing and customer service vehicle by many companies — including, presumably, many Salesforce clients — probably isn’t lost on Benioff. Salesforce likely sees value in integrating Twitter with its Marketing Cloud (online marketing automation) and Service Cloud (customer service and enterprise collaboration) software. It also could leverage data on Twitter activity to give clients a better understanding of their customers, as well as engage with them more effectively.

    https://www.thestreet.com/story/13843028/1/salesforce-investors-could-derail-a-potential-deal-for-twitter.html
    Salesforce Should Leave This Bird in the Bush

    A Wall Street Journal report late Tuesday makes clear that Salesforce is still very interested. CEO Marc Benioff has reportedly been talking up Twitter behind closed doors—going so far as to describe the troubled microblogging service an “unpolished gem” at one gathering. Salesforce shares fell another 5% as a result. In all, the prospect of buying Twitter has erased nearly $5 billion in Salesforce’s market value.

    http://www.wsj.com/articles/salesforce-should-leave-this-bird-in-the-bush-1475696224

  • Should Microsoft Buy Fitbit?

    Fitbit isn’t for sale, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be bought. There wasn’t a “For Sale” sign hanging on Skype, Yammer, and more recently LinkedIn when Microsoft cracked open its huge pocketbook to snap up niche leaders. This makes Fitbit a logical target for a company with a history of multi-billion dollar purchases and a market leader that is attainable. Fitbit’s present enterprise value of $2.5 billion would be a light bite for Microsoft, even with a reasonable premium on top of that.

    http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/10/06/should-microsoft-buy-fitbit.aspx

  • Oracle Threatens to End NetSuite Deal

    On Friday, Oracle announced that it extended the expiration data of its tender offer for NetSuite to Nov. 4, having already extended the date to Oct. 6 last month “to facilitate the completion of outstanding antitrust reviews.” In September, Oracle received the final antitrust clearance needed, from the U.S. Department of Justice.

    http://www.wsj.com/articles/oracle-to-call-off-netsuite-deal-unless-shareholder-support-increases-1475849434

Artificial Intelligence

Cloud

Datacenter

  • The Job Cuts Begin: Dell Confirms Layoffs

    “Most cuts are overlap, none strategic and/or not part of the new Dell EMC program. To me very normal and a must once the two firms begin to integrate, gel, morph and then execute as a new technology powerhouse with a focused team that [has] the ‘right’ skill sets to address this new world,” Shepard wrote.

    http://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/300082351/the-job-cuts-begin-dell-confirms-layoffs.htm

  • Why Red Hat, Inc. Gained 11% in September

    The open-source software specialist saw second-quarter earnings rise 17% year over year, based on 17% stronger sales. Both of these figures were above Wall Street’s consensus estimates. Application development tools led the way with 33% higher sales, and Red Hat customers’ adoption of long-term support subscriptions is pacing ahead of the basic revenue growth.

    http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/10/07/why-red-hat-inc-gained-11-in-september.aspx

Software/SaaS

  • Oracle Will Keep Posting Growth in the SaaS Space

    As we discussed earlier in this series, Microsoft (MSFT) emerged as the leader of overall enterprise SaaS (software-as-a-service) space, and Salesforce (CRM) continues to rule the CRM (customer relationship management) space. It was the Oracle’s dominance in ERP (enterprise resource planning), the segment that grew the most in the SaaS space, that led it to register the highest growth in the SaaS space in 2Q16.

    http://marketrealist.com/2016/10/oracle-will-continue-post-growth-saas-space/

Other

  • IBM Brand Value Collapses 19%

    The failure of IBM’s turnaround continues to smother the business. IBM’s shares are off 17% in the past two years, against a 9% improvement in the S&P 500. IBM’s revenue in 2011 was $106.9 billion. In 2015, the figure fell to $81.7 billion.

    http://247wallst.com/technology-3/2016/10/05/ibm-brand-value-collapses-19/

  • SAS CEO Dr Jim Goodnight on the power of big data, literacy and philanthropy

    “We spend 25 per cent of our revenues on R and D every year, which is more than any other major software company,” says Goodnight, who was a statistics professor at the North Caroline State University when he started working on software for agriculture.

    http://www.cio.co.nz/article/607926/sas-ceo-dr-jim-goodnight-on-the-power-of-big-data-literacy-and-philanthropy/

  • Coupa up 87% in software IPO

    But they’re still not profitable. For the six months ending in July, Coupa lost $24.3 million, which compares to a loss of $25.1 million in the same period last year. Yet revenue is growing, up to $53.2 million from $31.6 million in the same time frames.

    CEO Rob Bernshteyn tells us they are more focused on their margins than profitability right now. “For every dollar we burned, we created well over a dollar in recurring revenue,” he told TechCrunch. He says he’s looking to “build this business for the long-term.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/06/coupa-up-87-in-software-ipo/?ncid=rss

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News You Can Use: 10/5/2016

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  • Here’s What It Takes For Your Company’s Culture To Survive An Acquisition

    Start small. Talk to your employees to identify their top concerns over an acquisition. Brainstorm some ways to keep the best aspects of both cultures intact, always looking for points of commonality. And over-communicate—every employee needs to understand what goes into an acquisition and what they should expect, and as those details change, team members need to know how and why.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/3063644/heres-what-it-takes-for-your-companys-culture-to-surive-an-acquisition?partner=rss

  • Why healthcare needs to care about Google’s acquisition of Apigee

    Healthcare has been relatively slow to adopt open API standards. Unlike social media and e-commerce, healthcare is mostly a closed ecosystem of proprietary software, notably electronic health record (EHR) systems that do not permit the free exchange of data. This has been the subject of much discussion and debate and has drawn the attention of the Office of the National Coordinator of Healthcare IT (ONC). The ONC has been pushing for more open standards to unlock the value of digitized medical records sitting in proprietary systems that can unleash innovation in healthcare and positively impact costs, quality and experience (the triple aim) in healthcare.

    http://www.cio.com/article/3120434/healthcare/why-healthcare-needs-to-care-about-googles-acquisition-of-apigee.html

  • How To Manage Technical Teams When You Don’t Share Their Credentials

    Whenever you lay out a plan that affects the work that technical team members will have to do, figure out what’s most important to you and do that first. You may find that the things others push back about aren’t especially critical to you, and that you can satisfy everyone’s interests without too much pain.

    But that means you need to distill whatever the ultimate goal is in your mind beforehand. Decide what’s absolutely crucial, and what’s negotiable will be come clearer. This way you can also give technical employees as much leeway as they need to figure out the “how,” which they’ll likely appreciate.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/3063554/lessons-learned/how-to-manage-technical-teams-when-you-dont-have-their-tech-credentials?partner=rss
    sn_spacedog

  • HPE Aruba Unveils Flexible Network Procurement Models Enabling Enterprises to Innovate at the Rapid Pace of Mobile and IoT

    To remove unpredictability in IT operations and spending, Aruba is taking a software-based approach with its Mobile First Platform, enabling IT organizations to quickly respond to new requirements as they emerge, minimize capital expenditures, and maintain a competitive edge. Customers benefit from customized options for obtaining and managing their networks with Aruba’s portfolio of programmable IT networking products for Wi-Fi, BLE, wired and wide area network (WAN) connectivity, and consulting, support and technology services from its key alliances.

    http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160912005258/en/HPE-Aruba-Unveils-Flexible-Network-Procurement-Models
    Worst.Headline.Ever

  • How to Strengthen Your Personal and Executive Presence

    Here’s an example: Martha is the CIO of a large financial services firm. After discussing her personal brand and talking to some of her colleagues, boss and staff, it became clear she was respected by the people she worked with. However, her current executive presence wasn’t sufficient for her mandate to transform the way technology was implemented and used within the business.

    In short, Martha’s current brand was seen as being “a manager who effectively problem solves and is known for hands-on implementation.” Not a bad brand, but insufficient for the task entrusted to her.

    How did Martha change her brand?

    One of the projects involved a series of town hall meetings designed to get her team excited about the IT transformation and buy in to supporting it. In alignment with her goal, Martha created a fun and inclusive agenda for the meeting and a highly visual presentation — the opposite of the usual boring, text-oriented presentation staff were used to.

    So… a “fun” meeting got the job done? No.
    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/278159
    sn_unacceptable

Photo: Finn Hackshaw

Posted on

Supplier Report: 10/1/2016

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As IBM’s plans to build the most versatile AI continues thanks to the purchase of Promontory Financial Group, their competitors are starting to get serious about AI too.

IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are so serious about their AI plans, they are agreeing to work together to create standards and transparency.  But as they buddy up, Microsoft is forming a huge team to center the company around machine learning.

Acquisitions

  • Now Disney might be interested in twitter…

    All of which adds up to a persuasive case that Disney and Twitter have … some things in common. Less clear is how that justifies Disney spending more than $20 billion on a company that produces infinite PR headaches and—at the moment—zero profit. It takes a lot of hand-waving to get from “They both live-stream sports!” to “Disney should own Twitter.” A Yahoo! Finance columnist took a stab at explaining the potential synergy last week.

    http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/09/26/why_no_one_should_buy_twitter_not_disney_and_not_salesforce.html

  • Oracle buys San Mateo Marriott

    The hotel was purchased through Hospitality Investment LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle. The previous owner was Atrium Plaza, a limited liability company owned by Tarsadia Investments of Newport Beach (Orange County).

    This is Oracle’s first hotel purchase. Larry Ellison, the company’s executive chairman, personally owns several hotels, including the Four Seasons Resort on the Hawaiian island of Lanai and the Epiphany Hotel in Palo Alto.

    http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/networth/article/Oracle-buys-San-Mateo-Marriott-9455940.php

  • IBM Announces Planned Acquisition of Promontory to Transform Regulatory Compliance with Watson

    ARMONK, N.Y. – 29 Sep 2016: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced plans to acquire Promontory Financial Group, a global market-leading risk management and regulatory compliance consulting firm.  Upon close, the capabilities of Promontory combined with IBM’s deep industry expertise and Watson’s cognitive capabilities will directly address the massive operational effort and manual cost of escalating regulation and risk management requirements.

    http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/50599.wss
    Watson Financial Services is born out of IBM’s purchase of Promontory Financial Group

    To make sense of this deal, you have to avoid relegating Promontory into the small box of financial services. Instead, it’s most practical to think of it as a big data company that also has a services business. While it’s true that it works with some of the largest banks in the world, it has slowly amassed a collection of regulatory and compliance data. Promontory also has a workforce that includes over 600 experts in the space.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/29/watson-financial-services-is-born-out-of-ibms-purchase-of-promontory-financial-group/?ncid=rss

  • Salesforce tries to block Microsoft’s LinkedIn acquisition

    Salesforce Chief Legal Officer Burke Norton will argue to the EU’s competition authority that Microsoft’s control of LinkedIn’s dataset following an acquisition would be anticompetitive. EU competition chief Margarethe Vestager said in January that her agency would be looking directly at whether a company’s use of data is bad for competition, and these complaints seem aimed squarely at those comments.

    http://www.pcworld.com/article/3126095/legal/salesforce-tries-to-block-microsofts-linkedin-acquisition.html

Artificial Intelligence

  • Microsoft’s Satya Nadella: ‘We’re not pursuing AI to beat humans at games’

    As Nadella explained, Microsoft isn’t “pursuing AI to beat humans at games,” a clear dig at Google’s AlphaGo computer which beat Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol.

    Instead, he said, the company is trying to democratize information and access to intelligence to “empower every person and every institution that people build with the tools of AI, so that they can go on to solve the most pressing problems of our society and economy.”

    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsofts-satya-nadella-were-not-pursuing-ai-to-beat-humans-at-games-221122184.html

  • IBM releases DataWorks to give enterprise data a home and a brain

    IBM’s new Project DataWorks is built with both Spark and IBM Watson at its core to prioritize speed and usability without sacrificing robust analytics. The best way to think about DataWorks is as a sort of Google Docs for data analytics. In practice, companies have huge data libraries that often end up in a variety of decentralized locations. IBM’s new product eats all this company data and puts it in one intuitively accessible place.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/27/ibm-releases-dataworks-to-give-enterprise-data-a-home-and-a-brain/?ncid=rss

  • Facebook, Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft created a partnership to make AI seem less terrifying

    The organization’s goals are objectively noble: to create standards for transparency, algorithmic accountability, fairness, and ethics, while teaching everyone from users to the US government how the technology works. Member companies say they’ll conduct and publish open research on these topics, and contribute financial support to further study. The frequency and content of these studies have not been solidified, and the organization isn’t launching with any initial studies or findings.

    http://qz.com/795034/facebook-google-amazon-ibm-and-microsoft-created-a-partnership-to-make-ai-seem-less-terrifying/

  • Microsoft creates artificial intelligence, research group

    Microsoft has created a 5,000-person engineering and research team focused on artificial intelligence, an effort to reposition the company to capitalize on the rapid growth of software aided by machine-learning algorithms.

    http://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/microsoft-creates-artificial-intelligence-research-group/

Cloud

Datacenter

  • NetApp’s CEO Sees More Growth in the Year Ahead

    And Kurian sees more growth in the year ahead, even though one of his biggest competitors, EMC, just completed a $65 billion merger with Dell. “The history of large mergers in the technology industry are ripe with lessons learned—they’re not easy to pull off,” he tells Fortune’s Susie Gharib. “We see this as a real opportunity to take share at least over the next couple of years.”

    http://fortune.com/video/2016/09/26/netapps-ceo-sees-more-growth/

Software/SaaS

Other

  • The EFF calls on HP to remove DRM from its printers

    In an open letter to HP Inc. President and CEO, Dion Weisler, activist Cory Doctorow calls on the company to take five steps immediately including apologizing to its customers and resorting the original functionality to its printers. HP seemingly knowingly activated the printer ink DRM under the guise of a security update, simultaneously removing features from its printers and violating the trust of its customers.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/27/the-eff-calls-on-hp-to-remove-drm-from-its-printers/?ncid=rss

  • Oracle cuts pay of top executives [somewhat bogus headline]

    Co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison received $41.5 million, a 35 percent decrease from last year. Co-Chief Executive Officers Safra Catz and Mark Hurd each received about $41 million, a 23 percent decline. The drop for the co-CEOs is accentuated by one-time stock awards valued at $9 million that they received when they were promoted at the end of 2014.

    The three executives were among the 20 highest-paid in the U.S. last year, according to the Bloomberg Pay Index, which values equity awards at the end of the fiscal year, continuing a trend of generous pay for Oracle’s bosses. More than half the company’s investors have voted against its pay practices in each of the last four years, making the company an outlier. About 1 percent of Standard & Poor’s 500 companies have lost in their most recent nonbinding votes, and the average support level is 93 percent.

    http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Oracle-cuts-pay-of-top-executives-9280119.php

  • Why Salesforce might be interested in Twitter

    “Salesforce’s competitors are snapping up [data sources] and will integrate them into their platforms to add additional perspective and intelligence,” Brent Leary, co-founder at CRM Essentials told TechCrunch. “If this deal with Twitter happens, it’s to add a constant flow of information into their AI platform, to marry it with their transactional and customer information,” he added. That combination could provide additional data fuel for Einstein.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/24/why-salesforce-might-be-interested-in-twitter/
    Why Google Needs Twitter More Than Salesforce — and What Facebook Has to Do With It

    But in other circumstances there is a different way to target customers and that’s using ads based on demographics, in Google’s case that’s called display ads. With demographics essentially you can reach users who you know have an interest in what you have to offer. When it comes to this type of advertising, Facebook (FB) is king. Facebook knows your age, sex, behaviors, what you like, it knows what you like to talk about and even what you’ve said. On top of all that, Facebook buys information about its users from third parties to know even more about them.

    https://www.thestreet.com/story/13750679/1/why-google-needs-twitter-more-than-salesforce-and-what-facebook-has-to-do-with-it.html

  • Meg Whitman and HP Five Years Later: Mission Accomplished?

    “We haven’t done anything stupid in the last four years,” she noted on a September 2015 analyst call, “and we don’t intend to do anything stupid in the future.” (These remarks came four years and one month after HP announced the Autonomy deal.) HP insiders still refer to August 18, 2011, the date that the Autonomy deal was announced, as a dark day in the company’s history.

    http://fortune.com/2016/09/27/whitman-hp-five-year/

  • Kustomer, founded by Salesforce alums, nabs $12.5M to repair customer care

    A new startup called Kustomer is getting ready to come out of stealth with an aim to fix all that by rebuilding the CRM from the point of view of the customer rep. Ambitiously, it is also trying to change the general business mindset in the process. By building a platform that is easy enough for everyone to use and holistic in the data it contains, Kustomer believes that anyone in a company, not just those relegated to the CRM silo, could act as a customer service rep.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/27/kustomer-customer-care/?ncid=rss

  • Lenovo undergoes another big layoff round, mostly impacting Motorola

    The company is at it again, and while the number is less than list time, it’s still fairly significant, primarily impacting its Motorola Mobility smartphone business. In a statement issued early today, the company is looking to downplay things a bit in contrast to its overall numbers, noting that the moves “[impact] less than two percent of its approximately 55,000 employees globally.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/26/lenovo-layoffs/?ncid=rss

Photo: Jason Blackeye

Posted on

Supplier Report: 9/24/2016

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This week is Oracle World which means Larry Ellison is talking epic piles of trash against his competitors (IBM and Amazon). While Larry drops his truth bombs from his throne of garbage, Microsoft, SalesForce, and IBM take further steps in advancing AI.

In between sound-bytes, Oracle did manage to pick up a security automation company named Palerra. Google and Amazon both purchased companies to help develop and improve chatbots and even Apple grabbed a machine learning company named Tuplejump.

Blockchain was hot news this week as IBM secured paying customers in Japan to deploy their version of blockchain technology. As companies look to leverage blockchain for their own use, many early adopters are calling foul due to Accenture’s attempts to introduce the ability to edit transaction tables.

Acquisitions

  • Apple acquires another machine learning company: Tuplejump

    We’re hearing that Apple was particularly interested in “FiloDB”, an opensource project that Tuplejump was building to efficiently apply machine learning concepts and analytics to massive amounts of complex data right as it streamed in. According to its github page, FiloDB was primarily headed up by Evan Chan; Chan’s LinkedIn page says he’s been with Tuplejump since August of 2015.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/22/apple-acquires-another-machine-learning-company-tuplejump/?ncid=rss

  • Oracle buys Palerra to boost its security stack

    Palerra’s business currently focuses on providing security automation for enterprise apps, covering not just data in the apps but as that data “moves across services and it offers several layers of protection across infrastructure and software services,” as we wrote about them last year. Given how many apps today integrate and exchange data by way of APIs, that makes for a significant business.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/18/oracle-buys-palerra-to-boost-its-security-stack/?ncid=rss

  • Google’s new acquisition makes building chatbots easier

    Google took a shot at Facebook’s chatbot-building services on Monday with its acquisition of API.ai, a company that helps developers build and improve conversational interfaces for their services.

    API.ai has more than 60,000 developers using its platform to create conversational user interfaces for apps like Slack, Facebook Messenger and Kik. Its tools make it easier for programs to parse human language and translate it into action. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    http://www.cio.com/article/3121952/googles-new-acquisition-makes-building-chatbots-easier.html

  • Amazon wants a piece of the chatbot action too…

    It looks like Google, which yesterday acquired API.ai, a company that helps developers build conversational interfaces, isn’t the only major tech company hoovering up chat bot talent. TechCrunch understands that Angel.ai (formerly known as GoButler) has, at least partially, been acqui-hired by Amazon.

    The e-commerce giant confirmed that Angel.ai co-founder and CEO Navid Hadzaad has joined the company. “I can confirm that Navid started at Amazon, and that his first day was yesterday. We don’t have anything further to share at this time,” an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/20/angel-ai-a-company-that-builds-chat-bots-acqui-hired-by-amazon/?ncid=rss

  • Cisco and IBM Both Evaluate the Security Company Imperva

    An analyst note penned by Mitch Steves of RBC Capital Markets says a purchase by Cisco would align with its stated strategy to boost their security portfolio. He said that Cisco’s portfolio is “maximized in terms of attacks from the outside.” Imperva’s technology would be a “next step” in boosting its portfolio with hybrid cloud security, writes Steves.

    Imperva’s flagship product is its SecureSphere Data Security Suite, which can protect on-premises data as well as data in private, public, and hybrid clouds.

    https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/cisco-ibm-evaluate-security-company-imperva/2016/09/

  • Twitter shares spike on rumors of acquisition by Google, Microsoft, Salesforce or Verizon

    Twitter’s board of directors wants to sell, and a formal bid may come “shortly,” said CNBC, citing unnamed “people close to the situation.” But CNBC also said “no sale is imminent,” without accounting for the discrepancy.

    Negotiations are picking up steam and could be concluded by year-end, CNBC quoted one source as saying. The would-be buyers are said to be as interested in Twitter’s data as they are in its status as a media company.

    http://www.geekwire.com/2016/twitter-shares-spike-rumors-acquisition-google-microsoft-salesforce-verizon/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Microsoft Enlists AI, Cloud in Battle Against Cancer

    Microsoft is exploring multiple approaches, including a cloud-based tool called the Bio Model Analyzer, which creates a model of healthy cells and compares it against cells that grow cancerous, evaluating the interactions in the genes and proteins, offering researchers a window into how cancer spreads. The technology could help detect cancer earlier and may help doctors design effective treatments, cope with rare cancers and determine when and if a cancer will become resistant to a given treatment.

    Another cloud-based system called Literome trawls through millions of research papers, enabling oncologists to spend more time easing their patients’ suffering and less time combing through thick volumes of medical research. “To build Literome, [Microsoft researcher Hoifung] Poon and his colleagues used machine learning to develop natural language processing tools that require only a small amount of available knowledge to create a sophisticated model for finding those different descriptions of similar knowledge,” wrote Linn.

    http://www.eweek.com/enterprise-apps/microsoft-enlists-ai-cloud-in-battle-against-cancer.html
    sn_ai_arnold

  • Salesforce thinks AI will help it beat Microsoft and Oracle

    At next month’s Dreamforce, Salesforce’s mammoth annual customer conference that takes over downtown San Francisco, the company will introduce technology called Einstein, which it’s describing as the “world’s first comprehensive AI for CRM.”

    On the company’s second-quarter conference call in August, Benioff called it “AI for everyone.”

    Salesforce executives on Thursday gave a group of reporters an early look at Einstein in preparation for the unveiling. The general idea, as the name implies, is that sales tools are getting a whole lot smarter.

    http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/19/salesforce-thinks-ai-will-help-it-beat-microsoft-and-oracle.html
    More:

    Powered by advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery, Einstein’s breakthrough innovations allow models to be automatically customized for every single customer. These models learn, self-tune and get smarter with every interaction and additional piece of data. Einstein will automatically discover relevant insights, predict future behavior, proactively recommend best next actions and even automate tasks. Now every Salesforce user will be able to leverage AI capabilities to deliver more personalized and predictive customer experiences.

    https://mspoweruser.com/salesforce-announces-einstein-ai-platform-take-microsoft-others/

  • Microsoft surpasses IBM Watson, achieves lowest error rate for speech recognition

    WER, in case you are unaware of it, is a commonly used metric of the performance of voice based systems, including speech recognition or machine translation. Until now, the IBM Watson had the lowest WER of 6.9, although IBM had at a recent interspeech conference claimed achieving 6.6 percent error rate. However, Microsoft’s new systems are even better.

    https://thetechportal.com/2016/09/18/microsoft-surpasses-ibm-watson-voice/

  • IBM Watson is just ‘an advertisement’ for AI while Amazon Aurora is ‘not very good’ – Oracle’s Mark Hurd was on fire today

    Nothing we haven’t heard before, perhaps, but then things got really weird, as someone brought up AI. Hurd said artificial intelligence is “nothing more than pattern matching” and called IBM Watson an “advertisement”.

    “I look through a bunch of videos and say ‘Those two images are the same, or those two pieces of text are the same, or those two numbers are the same’. The real trick to this isn’t where you see it with advertisements like Watson, but the ability to get it into my day-to-day work,” said Hurd, alluding to yesterday’s keynote, when Ellison used a chatbot to order some business cards and make a crack about no longer being CEO, as the bot spotted his “change of title”.

    http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2471270/ibm-watson-is-just-an-advertisement-for-ai-while-amazon-aurora-is-not-very-good-oracles-mark-hurd-was-on-fire-today

Cloud

Datacenter

  • Falling flash prices are a boon to enterprise storage buyers

    That was the big trend in the second quarter of this year, according to IDC. Enterprise storage systems factory revenue was US$8.8 billion, flat compared with last year’s second quarter, but the total capacity that vendors shipped increased 12.9 percent.

    Much of the credit goes to the falling price of a gigabit of flash storage, IDC analyst Liz Conner said. It’s amplified by the growing popularity of flash, which enterprises are adopting for both speed and space-saving. Technology advancements help: Where enterprises last year were ordering SSDs (solid-state drives) with up to 3TB, now they can buy in bulk with units as big as 15TB.

    http://www.cio.com/article/3121328/falling-flash-prices-are-a-boon-to-enterprise-storage-buyers.html

  • EMC: King of storage needs to shore up defenses

    EMC (18.1 per cent) lost -5.5 per cent points of revenue share in the year, HPE (17.6 per cent) gained 8.8 per cent, Dell (11.5 per cent) a relative monster increase of 13.8 per cent, IBM (6.8 per cent) lost -15.6 per cent (recently-appointed storage boss Ed Walsh has a mountain to climb) with NetApp (6.7 per cent) losing -3.2 per cent. The market amounted to $8.83 BN, with ‘Others’ taking 30.3 per cent of that and ODM direct 9 per cent.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/19/weakness_appears_in_emcs_storage_dominance/

  • As Dell and HPE revamp, Lenovo sets sights on enterprise cloud servers

    Lenovo wants a bigger chunk of that market and is working toward offering custom-built converged servers targeted at specific tasks. The company is also looking for a larger opportunity with custom hardware for large-scale customers.

    http://www.cio.com/article/3120742/as-dell-and-hpe-revamp-lenovo-sets-sights-on-enterprise-cloud-servers.html
    I called this out on SourceCast Episode 38

  • IBM focuses on a hybrid-cloud future with latest hardware and software

    In support of its emphasis on the hybrid approach, IBM cited its own recent survey of 1,000 respondents, who said 45 percent of workloads will remain on the premises despite cloud growth.

    IBM also announced new or strengthened relationships with partners Canonical, Hortonworks, Mirantis, NGINX and Red Hat. In particular, IBM and Red Hat together said they plan to deliver offerings built on open-source products including Red Hat’s enterprise Linux, its virtualization and its enterprise Linux High Availability.

    Research firm Gartner last month put IBM in the lower-left corner of its most recent Infrastructure-as-a-Service magic quadrant, well behind market-leader Amazon Web Services and behind Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

    http://www.geekwire.com/2016/ibm-focuses-hybrid-cloud-future-latest-hardware-software/

Software/SaaS/IaaS

  • Microsoft is shutting down Skype’s HQ in London as part of large-scale terminations

    Surprisingly, the Financial Times also reported an insider working in the Skype HQ stating that the move was not a surprise. Many in the office anticipated the same and had been leaving the company since the past few years. The layoffs so far have been attributed to the Microsoft’s struggling smartphones business.

    http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/microsoft-is-shutting-down-skypes-hq-in-london-as-part-of-large-scale-terminations-335844.html

  • Cisco and Salesforce join forces for sales, service and IoT solutions

    The two companies will tie up on both Salesforce and Cisco products to offer enhanced capabilities in Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, Salesforce IoT Cloud and Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Enterprise.

    Helping organisations collaborate better, Cisco and Salesforce’s first announcement will see Cisco Spark and WebEx integrated into Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud via the Salesforce Lightning Framework. It will help colleagues communicate better via chat, video, and voice without leaving Salesforce.

    http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/sales-crm/6327/cisco-and-salesforce-join-forces-for-sales-service-and-iot-solutions

Other

  • Employees, not outsiders, are responsible for most cyber threats, IBM says

    Sixty percent of all attacks in 2015 were made by insiders – employees, contractors, consultants and third-party vendors – with malicious intent or inadvertent actors. Inadvertent actors are initiated or instigated by trustworthy people within an organization.

    Two-thirds of these attacks were fueled by malicious intent and the rest were the result of inadvertent actions.

    http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/employees-not-outsiders-are-responsible-most-cyber-threats-ibm-says
    sn_officespace

  • Silicon Valley layoffs beat any dot.com bust records

    An additional 62,917 jobs were lost in June 2016 from Silicon Valley alone. And then there were veiled threats from Apple, Google, Amazon and more that use Ireland as a tax haven.

    Tech recruitment company Challenger commented, “Companies that do not adapt to changing trends will be left behind. Nobody knows this better than technology firms, where the very nature of the business means constantly evolving and shifting resources. We are seeing this play out with Cisco, just as it has played out with Intel, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and several other tech giants in recent months.”

    http://www.itwire.com/recruitment/74825-silicon-valley-layoffs-beat-any-dot-com-bust-records.html

  • HP printers block third party print cartridges

    HP printers are no longer recognising unofficial and cheaper printer ink cartridges after a firmware update, according to third party Dutch printer ink vendor 123inkt.

    HP admits that as a result of the update, settings had been changed so HP printers would only communicate with cartridges with HP chips.

    http://www.channelbiz.co.uk/2016/09/19/hp-printers-block-third-party-print-cartridges/
    Translation: HPI doesn’t make any money on the printers so they are doing everything they can to make you buy their ink.

  • Oracle Receives Favorable Ruling, Awarded $100 Million

    The United States District Court for the District of Nevada not only granted Oracle’s motion for a permanent injunction but also ordered Rimini and its CEO to pay more than $100 million in punitive charges.

    The favorable ruling is quite a breather after Oracle’s recent litigation setbacks against Alphabet Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise

    http://www.nasdaq.com/article/oracle-receives-favorable-ruling-awarded-100-million-cm683847

Photo: Peter Lobozzo