SourceCast: Episode 60: Seeking an Oracle
SourceCast: Episode 59: Remote Possibilities
Supplier Report: 2/11/2017
It was an eclectic news week for IT suppliers. Microsoft cut their cloud prices for certain services and is also starting to protect customers against patent trolls, promising to assist small companies should a nonsense lawsuit occur.
Google found themselves in federal court being asked to provide the FBI access to emails. The company hoped to use Microsoft’s successful defense in a similar trail as grounds to drop the request, but it was denied. When Google isn’t in court, they are expanding the use of complex games to vet and teach their AI better ways to solve for problems.
Acquisitions
- The Case For IBM Buying Nvidia, Xilinx, And Mellanox
We know what you are thinking. This might be a good thing for IBM, but it might not be a good thing for Nvidia, Xilinx, and Mellanox, who are the key three hardware partners in the OpenPower consortium that IBM formed with the help of hyperscale datacenter operator Google back in August 2013. Fair enough. All three companies seem to be doing fine against their respective competition, and the OpenPower effort might be a tight enough coupling to get interesting and innovative systems to market. But, we might argue, this effort to build a flexible platform – for that is what the OpenPower consortium is ultimately about – could be significantly enhanced and accelerated by a tighter coupling of the core technologies created by all four of these companies. The fourth being, of course, the Power family of processors created by IBM, which would be married to Nvidia Tesla compute GPUs, Mellanox InfiniBand and Ethernet switching, and Xilinx UltraScale Virtex and Kintex FPGAs.
https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/02/07/case-ibm-buying-nvidia-xilinx-mellanox/
Artificial Intelligence
- DeepMind is using games to test AI aggression and cooperation
The findings are important as humanity releases multiple AI into the world. It’s likely some will clash and try to either co-operate or sabotage one another. What happens, for instance, if an AI is managing traffic flow across the city, while another is trying to reduce carbon emissions in the state? The rules of the “game” which govern their behavior then become vital. Setting parameters, and being mindful of other agents, will be crucial if we’re to balance the global economy, public health and climate change.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/09/google-deepmind-ai-cooperation-research/
- In major AI win, Libratus beats four top poker pros
Marking a major step forward for artificial intelligence (AI), Libratus, an AI developed by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), has resoundingly beaten four of the best heads-up no-limit Texas hold’em poker players in the world in a marathon, 20-day competition.
After 20 days and a collective 120,000 hands played, Libratus closed out the competition Monday leading the pros by a collective $1,766,250 in chips.
Cloud
- Senior Google Cloud Exec Departs After Reorg
Schachter joined the Internet search giant in 2012 from Salesforce.com, according to his LinkedIn profile. Initially he worked on Google for Work, formerly the overall brand for Google applications and devices. It is now part of the Google Cloud group. Schachter was promoted to head Google Cloud’s sales effort two years ago.
According to that story, there was a sales reorganization earlier this year in which Schachter got responsibility for North America sales while another executive took on Europe and the Middle East.
- Microsoft cuts cloud prices again
The Redmond., Wash., software group dropped prices by up to 61% on some of its products, though other offerings will not carry a discount.
- Microsoft Adds Patent Suit Protections For Cloud Customers
Microsoft, the second-biggest cloud infrastructure services vendor behind Amazon.com Inc., will help customers fight back by offering them one of its own patents to deter or defeat such suits. The software giant will also expand a program in which Microsoft provides funds or legal resources to fend off claims, known as indemnification.
http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/microsoft-adds-patent-suit-protections-cloud-customers
Datacenter
- Dell EMC gives channel partners a raise with newly combined program
In the new program channel partners will see rebate increases, Cook said. “There is no question rebates will be going up. If you look at the earnings opportunity for a Titanium partner who’s focused on storage they’ll get a base rebate of four per cent. Last year in the EMC plan alone it was two per cent. If you grow past the growth target…say $20 million…now they’ll make 10 per cent. Include some services and you get an additional one per cent. If it’s a new logo sale add another eight more points,” she said.
- 500 jobs to go in Leixlip as Hewlett Packard says it’s closing the plant within 12 months
Management at the facility addressed the 500 staff there this morning in relation to its future and said that the plant is to close before 2018 with all 500 jobs gone.
Software/SaaS
- Open source users: It’s time for extreme vetting
Open source won. It won because it’s used everywhere now. But now we have a supply chain problem we need to start thinking about and that is, where did you get it and how is it being taken care of, because software doesn’t age well. This is something that you have to take care of and you have to pay attention to. You can’t just pull software into your project and you’re done.
http://www.cio.com/article/3167527/linux/open-source-users-its-time-for-extreme-vetting.html
Other
- IBM’s Marissa Mayer moment: Staff ordered to work in one of 6 main offices – or face the axe
According to sources, the six “strategic” offices US marketing staff must work from are in: Austin, Texas; San Francisco, California; New York City, New York; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Atlanta, Georgia; and Raleigh, North Carolina. El Reg understands that employees will not get to choose a nearby office, but will instead be assigned a location based on where their team is predominantly situated. The first wave of workers were informed of the changes on Monday. The next wave will be instructed in early March, we’re told.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/08/ibm_no_more_telecommuting/
- Google told to hand over foreign emails in FBI search warrant ruling
The ruling is notable because it goes against an appeals court judgement last year — recently upheld — pertaining to Microsoft customer data held in servers outside the US. In that instance a federal court ruled the company did not have to hand over data stored on its servers in Ireland to the US government, declining to “disregard the presumption against extraterritoriality,” as the judge put it.
- Oracle settling with ex-worker over alleged fiddling of cloud accounts
In a joint submission Wednesday to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, lawyers for Oracle and the former employee Svetlana Blackburn asked for the vacation of a case management conference scheduled for Thursday, while submitting a notice of settlement to notify the court “that the lawsuit has been settled in principle, and to request thirty (30) days in which to file a dismissal.”
Photo: Oliver Cole
SourceCast: Episode 58: H-1Blues
Supplier Report: 1/28/2017
Heavy is the head that wears the crown. As Amazon’s AWS services continue to dominate the cloud sector, many analysts are reporting their lack of SaaS offerings as the chink in their armor.
Amazon is not alone in their weakness, poor sales is rumored to be forcing Oracle to eliminate jobs in the traditional software areas as they start to build up for their fight against AWS.
IBM’s good news regarding cloud growth is coming at a cost as the company announced a major reorganization in the cloud and power divisions.
Acquisitions
- AppDynamics Acquired for $3.7 Billion
What AppDynamics gives Cisco is a tool for monitoring the performance of applications, regardless the application delivery platform. The idea is to find issues and deal with them before they become a big problem for end users. The worst case is a full outage, but there are countless other issues that can cause slow-downs and other headaches, as every user is keenly aware. As it monitors these applications, AppDynamics is gathering tons of data about the applications, the connections to other systems, the devices being used to connect to the application and so forth. All of this data is a natural byproduct of the monitoring process — and could have great value when combined with other network information.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/25/cisco-appdynamics-3-7-billion-deal-all-about-the-data/?ncid=rss
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise makes second acquisition in a week
Cloud Cruiser makes software that helps large companies visualize how and where their IT budget is being spent across different business units and different technology platforms. Its software can analyze changes in spending and ways specific business units might be able to save money.
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/01/24/hewlett-packard-enterprise-makes-second.html
HPE Acquires Cloud Cruiser In Stepped Up Flexible Capacity Hybrid Cloud Pay-As-You-Go OffensiveThe Flexible Capacity services offering allows customers to buy HPE private cloud infrastructure as a service based on the same monthly, fixed-fee, pay-as-you-go model that has fueled public cloud adoption. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
- IBM Acquires Agile 3, Makers Of A Security Dashboard For Business Leaders
Agile 3, founded in 2009, offers a suite of products that help business leaders make decisions about security threats facing their companies through intuitive visualizations and analytics. The software design is heavily influenced by service-oriented architecture principles.
Agile 3’s founder, Raghu Varadan, had been IBM’s chief architect for its SOA Center of Excellence, and was responsible for implementing service-oriented architecture solutions for the IBM Global Business Services division’s largest customers.
- Yahoo surprises no one by pushing back its Verizon acquisition close date
Yahoo has continued to work with Verizon on integration planning for the sale of its core business. In terms of timing, Yahoo had previously stated that it expected to close the transaction in Q1. However, given work required to meet closing conditions, the transaction is now expected to close in Q2 of 2017. The company is working expeditiously to close the transaction as soon as practicable in Q2.
Artificial Intelligence
- IBM adds support for Google’s Tensorflow to its PowerAI machine learning framework
While TensorFlow has only been available for a little over a year, it has quickly become the most popular open source machine learning project on GitHub. IBM’s PowerAI already supported other frameworks and libraries like CAFFETheano, Torch, cuDNN, and NVIDIA DIGITS, but Tensorflow support was sorely missing from this lineup.
IBM clearly sees the combination of PowerAI with Nvidia’s NVLink interface and Pascal P100 GPU accelerators as a way to differentiate itself from the competition — and in this case, the competition it is gunning for is clearly Intel (though it’s worth noting that Intel and Google also recently teamed up to improve TensorFlow performance on its CPUs).
- Apple joins Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft in AI initiative
The Partnership on AI was officially unveiled back in September 2016. At the time, Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft were the only founding members. Apple, Twitter, Intel and Baidu didn’t participate in the initiative.
But Apple was already enthusiastic about the project, so today’s news is more about formalizing the company’s involvement. Siri co-founder and CTO Tom Gruber is going to represent Apple. You can find the full board of trustees on the partnership’s website.
- Will A.I. Allow Humans to Realize Our Full Potential?
Cloud
- IBM’s SoftLayer is having a meltdown – and customers aren’t happy
“Since IBM came along there have been loads of outages, planned and otherwise,” our reader in the field told us.
“In the three years of service prior to this we had only one outage, in the six months after they took over we have had one outage that knocked out their AMS [Amsterdam] data center for four hours, [and] their entire global virtual server platform has had to be rebooted three times on separate occasions.”
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/ibm_softlayer_having_meltdown/
- IBM Shakes Up Cloud Division in Executive Reorg
Vice president and director of IBM research Arvind Krishna has been named senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud, which is a merger between the analytics business formerly run by Picciano, and the cloud division formerly run by LeBlanc. Krishna will report to John Kelly, senior vice president of Cognitive Solutions and IBM Research.
http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/ibm-shakes-up-cloud-division-in-executive-reorg
- How Long Can Amazon’s AWS Retain the IaaS Crown?
During the most recent quarter Amazon reported $3.231 billion in quarterly revenues while Microsoft’s annualized cloud revenues exceeded $13 billion. At first glance, it would appear that both these companies are running neck and neck when it comes to earnings from cloud, but Microsoft has a huge bonus package in the form of its SaaS product, Office 365, which is experiencing strong growth.
Though Azure is certainly growing at a healthy rate, it has a long way to go before it can compete at the same level as the IaaS offering from Amazon. Amazon has no such SaaS product lineup but still leads the race in terms of revenue thanks to its strength in IaaS. The company’s single-segment focus has helped Amazon add service after service and keep cutting prices, but still expand revenues – and margins along with it.
http://www.gurufocus.com/news/475709/how-long-can-amazons-aws-retain-the-iaas-crown
- Oracle outlines plans to take on Amazon in cloud
“Oracle should be congratulated for its enthusiasm and the proactive way it is pursuing the cloud market,” says Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT, adding that the company was late to the market. Oracle has taken a similar approach to Microsoft and IBM in offering services across all three layers of cloud: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. “They still have a massive install base of customers that want cloud services. The question is whether they will choose Oracle as their cloud vendor as opposed to vendors they may be currently working with, or choosing to go with a more established, more innovative vendor.” King adds Oracle’s cloud will appeal most to existing customers, but he questions how the company will be able to attract net new brands.
Datacenter
- HP Inc announces moderate price hike across products
“HP is increasing the list price of its products in India. As a standard business practice, the company regularly reviews pricing and makes adjustments accordingly, based on a variety of factors including currency movement and commodities prices. Actual price increases will vary by product,” Rajiv Srivastava, Managing Director, HP Inc. India, told IANS.
- Infinidat slims down in UK: Storage upstart has just handful of Brit staff
Infinidat has slimmed its UK office from 17 heads to just four since January 2016, and has not won a new customer in that time, we’re told.
We’ve heard that Infinidat has four UK customers: BrightSolid, Pulsant, BT and Barclays. BT, its biggest client worldwide followed by Barclays, is the most active, and is looked after by a director for enterprise sales. There are three technical and professional services people alongside him in the London office. Thirteen others have been let go.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/infinidat_slims_down_in_uk/
Software/SaaS
- Why Salesforce is the new BlackBerry
Earlier last year, Salesforce announced that it beat Q1 earnings following a 20 percent pricing increase. Its thousands of embedded (read: captive) users have had no choice but to pay up. Soon, however, a new generation of automated CRMs will emerge as a viable alternative, bringing intelligence and ease-of-use to a category of “dumb” CRM databases. They’ll offer products that are easily configured, always up-to-date, and entirely automated – delivering a delightful user experience in a tech landscape known for the opposite.
Like BlackBerry, the disruption will happen much faster than Salesforce expects.
http://thenextweb.com/opinion/2017/01/20/salesforce-new-blackberry/
- OpenText completes $1.62-billion Dell acquisition
The deal includes the Documentum enterprise content management platform and Dell’s enterprise content management division.
With the acquisition, 5,000 customers, 2,000 employees and more than 300 partners join OpenText, the company said.
http://www.cambridgetimes.ca/news-story/7080349-opentext-completes-1-62-billion-dell-acquisition/
- Oracle Is ‘Toast,’ Layoffs In Sparc Business
According to a report by Mercury News as part of statutory obligation, Oracle has intimated the Employment Development Department that it would lay off 450 employees in its Santa Clara systems division. According to the report, those affected include hardware and software developers along with managers, technicians and administrative assistants.
Also:
With the layoff reports, the analyst feels the reason for optimism on Oracle has proven to be completely wrong. The analyst also pointed to the industry’s belief that more layoffs in California, Colorado and Massachusetts are on the cards, with the guesstimate at 1,500
Other
- Follow-up: US alleges systemic employment discrimination at Oracle
The U.S. government says Oracle routinely and systemically pays white men more than women and minorities and that it favors Asian candidates over others in product development and technical roles.
The investigation was triggered by a regular compliance review by the government. As a federal contractor, Oracle is prohibited from engaging in discrimination based on race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.
- Avaya says bankruptcy is a step toward software and services
Networking and collaboration vendor Avaya declared bankruptcy last Thursday, calling the move part of its transition from a hardware to a software and services company.
It plans to keep operating during the bankruptcy thanks to its cash from operations and US$725 million in financing that still needs approval by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. Avaya said its foreign affiliates aren’t included in the filing and won’t be affected.
- Microsoft reportedly plans to lay off about 700 workers next week
“The upcoming cuts won’t be specific to any single group, but will be spread across the company’s worldwide offices and business units, including sales, marketing, human resources, engineering, finance and more,” Business Insider said it was told by its source. “The goals of these rotating smaller layoffs is not to reduce costs but to update skills in various units.”
http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2017/01/20/microsoft-layoffs-january-2017.html
- Cisco debuts its own smart whiteboard priced to compete with the Google Jamboard
The Spark Board works with fingers or a stylus and saves automatically. The system is priced to compete with Google’s Jamboard (which puts it significantly below Microsoft’s $8,999 Surface Hub) at $4,990 for the 55-inch version due out at the end of the month. A 70-inch version is due out before year’s end, priced at $9,990.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/24/cisco-spark-board/?ncid=rss
- Verizon fourth quarter earnings fall short of analyst expectations
Verizon this morning reported adjusted fourth quarter earnings of 86 cents per share, on revenue of $32.3 billion.
On the earnings side, that falls short of what Wall Street analysts had expected — EPS of 89 cents per share and $32.1 billion in revenue. That also marks a 5.6 percent revenue decline from the fourth quarter of 2015.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/24/verizon-q4-earnings/?ncid=rss
Photo: Annette Beetge