Tag: IBM

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Supplier Report: 12/28/2018

Phone companies are taking over my report this week for a variety of reasons: T-mobile’s acquisition of Sprint is happening, AT&T is lying about 5G access (which is nothing new apparently), and Samsung is making chips for IBM.

And while these companies try to grow from their core businesses, Oracle is struggling with their big shift to cloud… but they have options.

Acquisitions

  • T-Mobile Takeover of Sprint Clears U.S. National Security Panel

    Neither Deutsche Telekom nor SoftBank is required to significantly change its own business or operations as a result of Cfius’s demands, according to the terms of the merger. Any potential changes are limited to T-Mobile, Sprint and their respective subsidiaries, deal documents show.

    Still, the global campaign by the other U.S. national security officials outside of Cfius was bearing some fruit. Deutsche Telekom on Friday said it was reviewing its procurement strategy for vendor equipment given “the global discussion about the security of network elements from Chinese manufacturers.” SoftBank last week made similar comments about its network in Japan.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/t-mobile-takeover-of-sprint-clears-u-s-national-security-panel-11545076651

Artificial Intelligence

  • This Health Startup Won Big Government Deals—But Inside, Doctors Flagged Problems

    To prove their point, the doctors had spent about a day carrying out an audit on their own initiative, according to one current and one former staff member, who asked not to be named for fear of legal repercussions. They found that around 10% to 15% of the chatbot’s 100 most frequently suggested outcomes, such as a chest infection, either missed warning signs of a more serious condition like cancer or sepsis or were just flat-out wrong, according to one insider. The clinicians had gone directly to Parsa that Friday in the hope of stalling the new release. They made their case, and after some negotiation he agreed to delay the rollout.

    But the doctors were still troubled. Interviews with current and former Babylon staff and outside doctors reveal broad concerns that the company has rushed to deploy software that has not been carefully vetted, then exaggerated its effectiveness.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/12/17/this-health-startup-won-big-government-dealsbut-inside-doctors-flagged-problems/#724a98c2eabb

Cloud

  • Oracle Revenue Flat as Push to Bolster Cloud Business Continues

    Oracle officials sought to reassure investors about the cloud business during a Monday conference call with analysts, highlighting strong software-as-a-service bookings in the latest period and Oracle’s competitive edge from its autonomous database.

    “We need more than just a great database,” said Larry Ellison, the company’s co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer. “We also need first-class infrastructure to run the database on, and we know finally have that.”

    Overall, Oracle reported second-quarter profit rose 5% to $2.33 billion, or 61 cents a share. Excluding stock-based compensation and other items, profit rose to 80 cents a share from 69 cents a share.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracle-revenue-flat-as-push-to-bolster-cloud-business-continues-11545084073

Security

  • China appears to have breached HPE and IBM, hacked into clients’ computers

    The attacks were part of a Chinese campaign known as Cloudhopper, which the United States and Britain on Thursday said infected technology service providers in order to steal secrets from their clients.

    While cybersecurity firms and government agencies have issued multiple warnings about the Cloudhopper threat since 2017, they have not disclosed the identity of technology companies whose networks were compromised.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/china-hacked-hpe-and-ibm-and-then-went-after-their-clients-reports-2018-12
    IBM says no evidence that ‘sensitive’ data was hacked by China

    “IBM has been aware of the reported attacks and already has taken extensive counter-measures worldwide as part of our continuous efforts to protect the company and our clients against constantly evolving threats,” Ed Barbini, vice-president for external relations and spokesman for New York-headquartered IBM, said in a text message.

    “We take responsible stewardship of client data very seriously, and have no evidence that sensitive IBM or client data has been compromised by this threat,” stated Mr Barbini.

    https://www.thenational.ae/business/technology/ibm-says-no-evidence-that-sensitive-data-was-hacked-by-china-1.804980

Software/SaaS

  • There’s ‘no way’ customers would migrate from Oracle to Amazon database software, Ellison says

    Amazon made its database technology available on the cloud long before Oracle did, Ellison said, but now Oracle is making its database technology readily available to customers in the cloud. The move lessens the chance customers will opt to move off Oracle technology. Such migrations are “just incredibly expensive and complicated and you’ve got to be willing to give up tons of reliability, tons of security, tons of performance to go ahead and do it,” Ellison said.

    https://www.ciodive.com/news/theres-no-way-customers-would-migrate-from-oracle-to-amazon-database-sof/544639/

  • Red Hat Flat as IBM’s $34B Purchase Nears

    Red Hat’s total revenues increased 13.2 percent year over year to $847 million for the third quarter of its fiscal 2019. That was lower than the 21.5 percent surge the company posted for the same quarter last year, and just shy of forecasts.

    The company closed 100 deals during the quarter valued in excess of $1 million. Red Hat CFO Eric Shander added that, “Strong renewals of our largest deals also helped drive these results with all of our top 25 deals renewing at an upsell rate above 120 percent.”

    Red Hat CEO and President Jim Whitehurst said that the company added more than 100 new customers to both its OpenShift and Ansible platforms during the quarter. OpenShift is Red Hat’s Kubernetes-focused enterprise container product while Ansible is its DevOps automation platform.

    https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/red-hat-flat-as-ibms-34b-purchase-nears/2018/12/

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Samsung to Manufacture IBM’s 7nm Power CPUs

    IBM’s announcement noted that it has had a strong alliance in developing new process technologies with Samsung for the past 15 years. Back in 2015, IBM announced that its IBM Research Alliance, which includes Samsung, was able to produce the first 7nm EUV test chip. IBM will soon be able to take advantage of this node, too, although it doesn’t look like it will be among the first to use it.

    “This collaboration is an important milestone for Samsung’s foundry business as it signifies confidence in Samsung’s cutting-edge high performance EUV process technology,” Ryan Lee, Vice President of Foundry Marketing at Samsung Electronics, said in a statement.

    https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-ibm-7nm-power-cpu-hpc,38278.html

Other

  • AT&T will put a fake 5G logo on its 4G LTE phones

    According to FierceWireless, AT&T will display an icon reading “5G E” on newer phones that are connected to LTE in markets where the carrier has deployed a handful of speed boosting — but still definitively 4G — technologies. The “E,” displayed smaller than the rest of the logo, refers to “5G Evolution,” the carrier’s term for networks that aren’t quite 5G but are still faster than traditional LTE.

    If this sounds sadly familiar, it’s because AT&T pulled this exact same stunt during the transition to LTE. The company rolled out a speed-boosting 3G tech called HSPA+, then got all of its phone partners — even Apple! — to show a “4G” logo when on that kind of connection.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/21/18151764/att-5g-evolution-logo-rollout-fake-network

Photo by Humphrey Muleba on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 12/21/2018

Verizon is taking a $4.6B write down of their AOL and Yahoo acquisitions, discovering what most people said at the time of their Yahoo purchase – they made a bad decision.

The company also announce over 10,000 Verizon employees will be volunteering to leave their positions.

Oracle continues to struggle with their cloud position in the wake of Thomas Kurian leaving for Google. The company continues to protest and take legal action against the DoD over the way they conducted the JEDI RFP… because that’s how you endear yourself to someone you want to do business with later.

Acquisitions

  • Intel and TPG in talks to sell McAfee to Thoma Bravo for significantly more than $4.2 billion

    Private equity firm Thoma Bravo is in early discussions to acquire security software company McAfee from TPG and Intel for a significant premium over the company’s 2016 $4.2 billion valuation, according to people familiar with the matter.

    Talks may still fall apart and a deal announcement isn’t expected soon, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/14/intel-tpg-in-talks-to-sell-mcafee-to-thoma-bravo.html

  • SoftBank invests in parking startup ParkJockey pushing valuation to $1 billion

    Along with the SoftBank investment news, ParkJockey also announced that it was acquiring two of the largest parking operators in North America. The startup, with help from Abu Dhabi-based Mubadala Capital and debt financing from Owl Rock, said it had reached an agreement to acquire Imperial Parking Corporation, a North American-based parking management company often referred to as Impark. The agreement follows ParkJockey’s acquisition of parking management operator Citizens Parking Inc.

    The investment puts the ParkJockey valuation to more than $1 billion, reported Miami Herald.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/10/softbank-invests-in-parking-startup-parkjockey-pushing-valuation-to-1-billion/

  • GE Announces New Industrial IoT Software Business

    In establishing GE Digital as a separate, wholly owned subsidiary, GE CEO Larry Culp is giving GE Digital perhaps its best chance of survival. He’s also creating an opportunity for GE shareholders to leverage any success down the road. But can GE Digital be successful as a standalone company?

    The opportunity before a new GE Digital is to capitalize on the reputation of Predix as a solid platform for industrial IoT. Unencumbered by having to supply IT services to the various GE industrial divisions, the new GE Digital should be more nimble and responsive to market opportunities.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/forrester/2018/12/14/ge-announces-new-industrial-iot-software-business/#fc03cc94b1ce

  • Trello acquires Butler to add power of automation

    What Butler brings to Trello  is the power of automation, stringing together a bunch of commands to make something complex happen automatically. As Trello’s Michael Pryor pointed out in a blog post announcing the acquisition, we are used to tools like IFTTT, Zapier and Apple Shortcuts, and this will bring a similar type of functionality directly into Trello.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/10/trello-acquires-butler-to-add-power-of-automation/

Artificial Intelligence

  • The Deadly Recklessness of the Self-Driving Car Industry

    The newest and most glaring example of just how reckless corporations in the autonomous vehicle space can be involves the now-infamous fatal crash in Tempe, Arizona, where one of Uber’s cars struck and killed a 49-year-old pedestrian. The Information obtained an email reportedly sent by Robbie Miller, a former manager in the testing-operations group, to seven Uber executives, including the head of the company’s autonomous vehicle unit, warning that the software powering the taxis was faulty and that the backup drivers weren’t adequately trained.

    “The cars are routinely in accidents resulting in damage,” Miller wrote. “This is usually the result of poor behavior of the operator or the AV technology. A car was damaged nearly every other day in February. We shouldn’t be hitting things every 15,000 miles. Repeated infractions for poor driving rarely results in termination. Several of the drivers appear to not have been properly vetted or trained.”

    https://gizmodo.com/the-deadly-recklessness-of-the-self-driving-car-industr-1831027948

Cloud

  • Oracle earnings: Chronic cloud concerns create crisis of confidence

    In a quarterly survey of 36 Oracle partners, J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Murphy found most results to be “underwhelming.”

    “In the aftermath of former President Thomas Kurian’s departure to Google, metrics are listless and dull for Pace of Business, Revenue Expectation, and Oracle’s Momentum / Technology Vision,” Murphy wrote. “‘Failure to innovate’ is being mentioned.”

    “Amazon, Microsoft MSFT SAP SAP and Google are most frequently mentioned as becoming more competitive with Oracle,” the J.P. Morgan analyst said. “Partners view Oracle as being ‘way back in the cloud arms race’ and ‘not sure they can catch up at this point.’”

    https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/1FF18130-FD69-11E8-95C1-5E5DFA743B98

  • Amazon Intervenes in Oracle’s JEDI Lawsuit

    In addition to the alleged conflicts of interest, Oracle’s lawsuit takes issue with the Pentagon’s decision to award the contract to a single company, similar to arguments it made in a bid protest the Government Accountability Office denied in November.

    In its motion to intervene, AWS called Oracle’s allegations “meritless” and contended it has “direct and substantial economic interests at stake” in the lawsuit; the granted motion gives AWS the legal right to defend its proprietary, financial and reputational interests that could arise in the case.

    https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2018/12/amazon-intervenes-oracles-jedi-lawsuit/153559/

  • Verizon Admits Defeat With $4.6 Billion AOL-Yahoo Writedown

    The wireless carrier slashed the value of its AOL and Yahoo acquisitions by $4.6 billion, an acknowledgment that tough competition for digital advertising is leading to shortfalls in revenue and profit.

    The move will erase almost half the value of the division it had been calling Oath, which houses AOL, Yahoo and other businesses like the Huffington Post.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-11/verizon-writes-down-4-6-billion-of-value-of-aol-yahoo-business

Security

  • Chinese Hackers Breach U.S. Navy Contractors

    The data allegedly stolen from Navy contractors and subcontractors often is highly sensitive, classified information about advanced military technology, according to U.S. officials and security researchers. The victims have included large contractors as well as small ones, some of which are seen as lacking the resources to invest in securing their networks.

    One major breach of a Navy contractor, reported in June, involved the theft of secret plans to build a supersonic anti-ship missile planned for use by American submarines, according to officials. The hackers targeted an unidentified company under contract with the Navy’s Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-navy-is-struggling-to-fend-off-chinese-hackers-officials-say-11544783401

  • Equifax breach was ‘entirely preventable’ had it used basic security measures, says House report

    The report confirmed most of what was already known, but added new color and insights that were previously unreported. The credit agency failed to patch a disclosed vulnerability in Apache Struts, a common open source web server, which Homeland Security had issued a warning about some months before. The unpatched Apache Struts server was powering its five-decades-old(!) web-facing system that allowed consumers to check their credit rating from the company’s website. The attackers used the vulnerability to pop a web shell on the server weeks later, and managed to retain access for more than two months, the House panel found, and were able to pivot through the company’s various systems by obtaining an unencrypted file of passwords on one server, letting the hackers access more than 48 databases containing unencrypted consumer credit data.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/10/equifax-breach-preventable-house-oversight-report/

    The people at Equifax want you to forget about this, we have to keep reminding ourselves that this was not acceptable and ensure other companies with this data are held to higher standards.

Software/SaaS

  • IBM Hopes To Strengthen ‘Do Not Call’ Registries With Blockchain

    The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India is hoping that by using blockchain to keep tabs on the system, it will make it easier to figure out who is abusing the system and how. The proposed platform would record who made a “Do Not Call” request, the telephone numbers accused of violating the request, and mobile telephone portability data. By having this information on a shared ledger, it will theoretically be easier to identify fraud quickly.

    https://www.ethnews.com/ibm-hopes-to-strengthen-do-not-call-registries-with-blockchain

Other

  • Verizon announces 10,400 employees will voluntarily leave the company

    Verizon today announced 10,400 employees are taking buyouts to leave the company. That’s about 7 percent of the company’s worldwide workforce. This is part of an effort to trim the telecom giant’s workforce ahead of its push toward 5G.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/10/verizon-announces-10400-employees-will-voluntarily-leave-the-company/

  • Why Apple Chose Austin, Seattle and Culver City for Its New Jobs Push

    Each location where it announced expansion plans Thursday reflects a different facet of Apple’s evolving model. Culver City gives Apple a Hollywood homebase as it pushes into video programming. Seattle is a machine-learning hub where it can develop algorithms that personalize streaming-music playlists and improve Siri. San Diego and Austin offer semiconductor engineers who can advance the customized-chip efforts that help Apple wring more money out of its iPhones, iPads and Macs.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-new-job-push-reflects-shifting-strategy-and-changing-identity-11544792403

  • Why the Amazon Invasion in New York and Virginia Will Be Slow

    Before workers can move in, Amazon needs to remodel temporary offices it is leasing in Long Island City and Crystal City, which will take several months. Amazon already has plenty of office space in both metro areas, so it won’t need to rush construction, these people said. It could take roughly two years before Amazon is able to break ground on its new New York campus, and potentially a little sooner for Northern Virginia, due to various needed site approvals and other preconstruction

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-amazon-invasion-in-new-york-and-virginia-will-be-slow-11544697000

  • Huawei CFO freed on bail ahead of extradition

    A British Columbia Supreme Court justice has granted Meng bail after her attorney and family made a case for her conditional release. She’s paying $10 million CAD ($7 million of it in cash) and must stay in the province, report to a supervisor, agree to around-the-clock surveillance, pay for security, live in a Vancouver area house owned by her husband (Liu Xiaozong) and remain home between 11PM and 6AM.

    Liu also promised both $1 million in cash as well as the $14 million value of two Vancouver homes.

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/11/huawei-cfo-freed-on-bail/

    Inside Huawei’s Secret HQ, China Is Shaping the Future

    In the past two years, the largest internet companies formed semiconductor units to improve their cloud offerings and AI applications, such as image recognition and voice assistance. Huawei’s chip design unit, HiSilicon, has been around since 2004. It started working on customized chips to handle complex algorithms on hardware before the cloud companies did. Research firm Alliance Bernstein estimates that HiSilicon is on pace for $7.6 billion in sales this year, more than doubling its size since 2015.

    “Huawei was way ahead of the curve,” said Richard, the analyst.

    Yet in terms of sales and operations, Huawei’s cloud business is meager next to its larger rivals. The company spent about $13 billion on research and development in 2017, up more than 17 percent from the previous year. Its rivals in the cloud market have cut similarly sized checks. “Huawei has concluded that if it does not offer future solutions via the cloud, where its customers are migrating, someone else will,” said Siow Meng Soh, a research manager for GlobalData Plc.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-12/huawei-furthers-china-s-grand-tech-ambitions-amid-meng-detention

Photo by Lubo Minar on Unsplash

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Supplier Report: 12/14/2018

IBM is selling off Lotus Notes to Indian firm HCL to free up cash for their acquisition of Red Hat… which leads to the question… who is still using Lotus Notes?

Oracle is still fired up about the Government’s project JEDI and continues to make noise in the courts.  

Meanwhile, an early 5G demo was lackluster and Chinese phonemaker Huawei is imploding.  

Acquisitions

  • IBM selling Lotus Notes/Domino business to HCL for $1.8B

    This announcement marks the end of the line for IBM involvement. With the development of the platform out of its control, and in need of cash after spending $34 billion for Red Hat, perhaps IBM simply decided it no longer made sense to keep any part of this in-house.

    As for HCL,  it sees an opportunity to continue to build the Notes/Domino business, and it’s seizing it with this purchase. “The large-scale deployments of these products provide us with a great opportunity to reach and serve thousands of global enterprises across a wide range of industries and markets,” C Vijayakumar, president and CEO at HCL Technologies, said in a statement announcing the deal.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/07/ibm-selling-lotus-notes-domino-business-to-hcl-for-1-8b/
  • Apple acquired Platoon, a platform for musicians to create and distribute work

    Spotify has made some significant moves to bypass record labels and work directly with artists, and there are signs that Apple could be eyeing up a similar approach to get a bigger share of original content.

    According to a report in Music Business Worldwide and also confirmed by us with sources close to the deal, Apple has acquired Platoon, a startup out of London that works primarily with musicians — but also other creators like writers — to produce (it has its own studios), distribute and sell their work, using analytics to source talent, and figure out the best way to target and market that content: the modern-day tech equivalent of A&R services.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/07/apple-platoon/

Cloud

  • Oracle Takes JEDI Case to Courts

    The software giant, which saw its bid protest against JEDI denied by the Government Accountability Office in November, filed a lawsuit Thursday in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
    Details of the complaint are currently under seal, but Oracle’s previous bid protests centered around the Pentagon’s decision to award JEDI—worth up to $10 billion over a decade—to a single cloud service provider rather than multiple companies.

    https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/12/oracle-takes-jedi-case-court/153380/

Security

  • Marriott’s breach response is so bad, security experts are filling in the gaps — at their own expense

    One problem: the email sender’s domain didn’t look like it came from Marriott at all.

    Marriott sent its notification email from “email-marriott.com,” which is registered to a third party firm, CSC, on behalf of the hotel chain giant. But there was little else to suggest the email was at all legitimate — the domain doesn’t load or have an identifying HTTPS certificate. In fact, there’s no easy way to check that the domain is real, except a buried note on Marriott’s data breach notification site that confirms the domain as legitimate.

    But what makes matters worse is that the email is easily spoofable.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/03/marriott-data-breach-response-risk-phishing/

  • Google personalizes search results even when you’re logged out, new study claims

    For the study, DuckDuckGo compiled 87 result sets (76 on desktop and 11 on mobile), and it conducted the searches consecutively and simultaneously starting at 9PM ET on June 24th, 2018. It did one private, logged-out test and then a logged-in test immediately after, so as not to influence the private test with prior results. What DuckDuckGo found was that using private browsing and logging out of Google had almost no effect on the variation in search results: users saw a roughly equitable amount of variation across all three searches and when searching privately and while logged in.

    Some key elements to the variation included changes in news sources and the placement of sometimes identical links in different positions, which has a drastic impact on the likelihood that they get clicked. The study also found variations in how news articles and videos were laid out among standard text links, and as many as 22 different domains showing up in the first page of results for “vaccinations,” with a standard search result page typically containing 10 organic links.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18124718/google-search-results-personalized-unique-duckduckgo-filter-bubble

Software/SaaS

  • Google is shutting down Allo

    Google has officially announced that it’s shutting down Allo, ending the run of yet another failed Google chat app experiment. The news isn’t entirely unsurprising, given that Google had already paused investment in Allo back in April. Back then, the head of the communications group at Google, Anil Sabharwal, noted that “[Allo] as a whole has not achieved the level of traction we’d hoped for.”

    Allo will “continue to work through March 2019,” Google says, and users will be able to export their conversation history until then.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/5/18127540/google-kills-allo-end-date

  • Mozilla’s CEO isn’t happy with Microsoft’s switch to Chromium

    The note sees Beard condemning Microsoft’s move –though he admits it “may well make sense” from a business standpoint — while urging Chrome users to try Mozilla’s Firefox instead. “Will Microsoft’s decision make it harder for Firefox to prosper? It could,” states Beard, adding: “making Google more powerful is risky on many fronts.”

    Recalling Microsoft’s monopoly on browsers in the early 2000s before Firefox’s arrival, Beard claims history could be about to repeat itself. Only this time, Google is at the reins. According to the Mozilla chief: “If one product like Chromium has enough market share, then it becomes easier for web developers and businesses to decide not to worry if their services and sites work with anything other than Chromium.”

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/07/mozilla-ceo-microsoft-chromium/

Datacenter/Hardware

  • The first ‘real world’ 5G test was a dud

    A handful of 5G devices are here on the beautiful island of Maui. But journalists aren’t being allowed to try 5G in any meaningful way. They can’t touch working versions of the Samsung phone, or the AT&T hotspot, or the Verizon hotspot, or run an actual speed test on Motorola’s 5G modded phone. There are demos, like a VR headset plugged into a computer connected to Wi-Fi that’s also technically 5G, but we can’t peer behind the curtain to verify that 5G is actually working.

    Why the cloak and dagger? It’s because the networks aren’t anywhere near as fast as 5G is supposed to be. They’re slower than the Comcast internet connection I have at home.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18125854/verizon-att-5g-speed-test-slow-maui-qualcomm-snapdragon-summit

Other

  • Canadian Authorities Arrest CFO of Huawei Technologies at U.S. Request

    A spokesman for Canada’s justice department said Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Vancouver on Dec. 1 and is sought for extradition by the U.S. A bail hearing has been tentatively scheduled for Friday, according to the spokesman. Ms. Meng, the daughter of Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, also serves as the company’s deputy chairwoman.

    The arrest comes at a critical juncture in U.S.-Chinese relations. President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping last weekend agreed to a temporary truce in a trade spat to negotiate a settlement. The U.S. has raised other concerns with China, ranging from spying to intellectual-property theft to Beijing’s military posture in the South China Sea. China has said its actions are appropriate.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/canadian-authorities-arrest-cfo-of-huawei-technologies-at-u-s-request-1544048781?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

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Supplier Report: 12/7/2018

FAANG companies continue to struggle with their employees’ perceptions of long-term business goals. Google once again is facing a public disagreement between employees over their plans for China – with some employees for and others against Project Dragonfly.

In the wake of Diane Greene’s departure at Google. insiders are saying that the company needs to start purchasing companies quickly (and that they already missed out on critical acquisitions that would better enable competition with AWS and Microsoft).

Acquisitions

  • United Tech to Break Itself Into Three Companies

    The company, which makes everything from Otis escalators to Pratt & Whitney jet engines, said Monday that it plans to spin off to shareholders its Otis division and Carrier building systems businesses. The Wall Street Journal had earlier reported on the plans to break apart.

    The separation is expected to be completed in 2020 and leave UTC as a pure-play aerospace company, following its acquisition of airplane-parts maker Rockwell Collins Inc. That $23 billion cash-and-stock deal closed Monday after lengthy antitrust reviews in the U.S. and China.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/united-technologies-to-separate-into-three-independent-companies-1543272920

  • Logitech isn’t buying Plantronics after all

    “Logitech approached Plantronics regarding a potential acquisition and, consistent with the Plantronics Board’s fiduciary duties, the Company entered into discussions with Logitech,” Plantronics’ own statement reads. “Those discussions have ended. Plantronics will not comment further on this matter.”

    A $2.2 billion deal would have been Logitech’s biggest acquisition to date by far, although it wouldn’t necessarily have reflected a particularly high valuation of Plantronics’ consumer business. Earlier this year Plantronics itself bought out video-conferencing solutions maker Polycom for $2 billion, which had to have been the main factor in Logitech’s willingness to pay so much.

    https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/11/25/18111967/logitech-plantronics-deal-acquisition-off

  • Billion-dollar deal: Google pays $1 billion for huge Mountain View business park

    Google’s Mountain View purchase means that in the two years since the search giant began to collect properties in downtown San Jose for a proposed transit village, the company has spent at least $2.83 billion in property acquisitions in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, downtown San Jose and north San Jose alone.

    Adding to the eye-popping numbers: Google’s spending activity in those four markets reaches $3 billion when including the company’s pending purchase in downtown San Jose of several government-owned parcels, along with the minimum value of a big set of surface parking lots that Google intends to buy from Trammell Crow, also downtown near its proposed transit village.

    https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/11/26/billion-dollar-deal-google-pays-1-billion-for-huge-mountain-view-business-park/

Cloud

  • Google Cloud Needs Acquisitions To Challenge Amazon, Analyst Says

    “It’s time to tap Alphabet’s piggy bank to boost GCP (Google Cloud Platform),” Baird analyst Colin Sebastian said in a report Monday. “As Google seeks to carve out greater share in the expanding enterprise cloud services market, we believe the company should embark on a more aggressive shopping spree.”

    The Google cloud unit should mull acquisitions of companies such as Workday(WDAY), ServiceNow (NOW), Atlassian (TEAM) and Salesforce.com (CRM), Sebastian said.

    https://www.investors.com/news/technology/google-cloud-acquisitions-enterprise-market/

  • It turns out some Google staff do believe in controversial plan to re-enter China

    Excerpt from a letter written by a Google employee:
    Dragonfly is well aligned with Google’s mission. China has the largest number of Internet users of all countries in the world, and yet, most of Google’s services are unavailable in China. This situation heavily contradicts our mission, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. While there are some prior success, Google should keep the effort in finding out how to bring more of our products and services, including Search, to the Chinese users.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/28/google-dragonfly-letter/
    Except…
    We are Google employees. Google must drop Dragonfly.

    Our opposition to Dragonfly is not about China: we object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be. The Chinese government certainly isn’t alone in its readiness to stifle freedom of expression, and to use surveillance to repress dissent. Dragonfly in China would establish a dangerous precedent at a volatile political moment, one that would make it harder for Google to deny other countries similar concessions.

    https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-employees-google-must-drop-dragonfly-4c8a30c5e5eb

  • IBM CEO Ginni Rometty Criticizes Big Internet Platforms for Mishandling Customers’ Data

    “The genesis of the trust crisis is the irresponsible handling of personal data by a few dominant consumer-facing platforms,” Ms. Rometty said Monday. The websites “have more power to shape public opinion than newspapers or the television ever had, yet they face very little regulation or liability.”

    “If there are specific companies that misbehave, steps need to be taken,” she said. “I would use a regulatory scalpel, not a sledgehammer” that affects the whole industry.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty-criticizes-rivals-for-mishandling-customers-data-1543257453

Security

  • Marriott reveals massive database breach affecting up to 500 million hotel guests

    Marriott is revealing a massive database breach today, affecting up to 500 million guests of its Starwood hotels the company first acquired in 2016. A security investigation has concluded that there was “unauthorized access” to a database holding hotel guest records. “Marriott learned during the investigation that there had been unauthorized access to the Starwood network since 2014,” says a statement from the company. The Starwood security breach affects a number of branded hotels owned by Marriott, including W Hotels, Sheraton, St. Regis, Westin, and more.

    The breach includes 327 million records of “some combination” of name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, Starwood Preferred Guest (“SPG”) account information, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/30/18119403/marriott-database-breach-starwood-hotels

  • Facebook might not sell user data, but internal documents suggest it certainly considered it

    Back in April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told congress unequivocally that, “We do not sell data.” But these documents suggest that it was something that the company internally considered doing between 2012 and 2014, while the company struggled to generate revenue after its IPO.

    In one case, an employee suggested shutting down data access unless companies spent “$250k a year to maintain access.” In another email, a Facebook employee talked about having a “strategic” talk with Amazon to avoid a “disappointing conversation” about it getting less data in the future. Concerns raised by the Royal Bank of Canada about restricted data access prompted a Facebook employee to ask in an email about how much the bank had agreed to spend on advertising. It’s unclear whether these emails were sent by one or multiple staff members.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/29/18117582/facebook-six4three-internal-documents-emails-selling-user-data

  • Google accused of GDPR privacy violations by seven countries

    The complaints, which each group has issued to their national data protection authorities in keeping with GDPR rules, come in the wake of the discovery that Google is able to track user’s location even when the “Location History” option is turned off. A second setting, “Web and App Activity,” which is enabled by default, must be turned off to fully prevent GPS tracking.

    The BEUC claims that Google uses “deceptive practices” to get users to enable both these options, and does not fully inform users of what doing so entails. As such, consent is not freely given.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27/18114111/google-location-tracking-gdpr-challenge-european-deceptive

Software/SaaS

  • Amazon will reportedly sell software that reads medical records

    The program scans medical files to pick out relevant information such as the medical condition and patient’s procedures and prescriptions. While other algorithms that try to do the same thing have been stymied by doctors’ abbreviations, Amazon claims to have trained its system to recognize the idiosyncrasies in how doctors take notes, sources told the WSJ. The company had already developed and sold this same software to other businesses, including ones focused on travel booking and customer service. For Amazon, this is another move into the health care market on the heels of the retailer buying the online pharmacy PillPack in June.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27/18115077/amazon-electronic-health-records-software-text-analysis-medical

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Microsoft wins $480M military contract to outfit soldiers with HoloLens AR tech

    The company just won a $480 million military contract with the U.S. government to bring AR headset tech into the weapon repertoires of American soldiers.

    The two-year contract may result in follow-on orders of more than 100,000 headsets according to documentation describing the bidding process. One of the contract’s tag lines for the AR tech seems to be its ability to enable “25 bloodless battles before the 1st battle,” suggesting that actual combat training is going to be an essential aspect of the AR headset capabilities.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/28/microsoft-wins-480m-military-contract-to-outfit-soldiers-with-hololens-ar-tech/

Other

  • US charges ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch with fraud over $11bn sale to HP

    Prosecutors have accused Lynch and former Autonomy vice president of finance Stephen Chamberlain of providing HP with false financial statements to make the company seem like a better deal to acquire than it actually was.

    Lynch faces up to 20 years in prison if he is successfully convicted on the 14 charges of conspiracy and fraud in a case filed by prosecutors in a federal court on Thursday. The DoJ is also asking that Lynch forfeit $815m if he’s convicted.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-charges-ex-autonomy-boss-mike-lynch-with-fraud-over-11bn-sale-to-hp/

  • Microsoft Is Worth as Much as Apple. How Did That Happen?

    But the more enduring and important answer is that Microsoft has become a case study of how a once-dominant company can build on its strengths and avoid being a prisoner of its past. It has fully embraced cloud computing, abandoned an errant foray into smartphones and returned to its roots as mainly a supplier of technology to business customers.

    That strategy was outlined by Satya Nadella shortly after he became chief executive in 2014. Since then, Microsoft’s stock price has nearly tripled.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/technology/microsoft-apple-worth-how.html

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