Supplier Report: 10/12/2018
The Pentagon’s $10B JEDI project has had cloud providers up in arms for months. They claim the RFP favors Amazon over everyone else due to scale and the government’s refusal to break up the hosting solution to multiple providers.
Google has dropped out of the bidding process stating the project doesn’t align to their values (or perhaps they realized they wouldn’t win and this is PR spin).
IBM is filing formal complaints days before the final proposal is due while Oracle has been filing complaints for months.
Meanwhile, Apple bought a few companies that allow them to further lock down their supply chain and control the technology that powers their devices.
Acquisitions
- Apple inks $600M deal to license IP, acquire assets and talent from Dialog to expand chipmaking in Europe
Apple is paying $300 million in cash to buy a portion of Dialog Semiconductor, a chipmaker based out of Europe that it has been working with since the first iPhone. On top of the $300 million portion of the deal, Apple is also committing a further $300 million to make purchases from the remaining part of Dialog’s business, making it a $600 million deal in total.
- Apple confirms it has acquired Spektral, a Danish computer vision startup, for augmented reality technology
Apple has purchased Spektral, a computer vision company based out of Denmark that has worked on segmentation technology, a more efficient way to “cut out” figures from their backgrounds in digital images and videos, reportedly for over $30 million.
This type of technology can be used, for example, to make quicker and more accurate/realistic cut-out images in augmented reality environments, but also for more standard applications like school photos. That was actually the first market the startup targeted, in 2015, although it appeared to shift strategy after that to build up IP and make deeper inroads into video. You can see a demo of how its technology works at the bottom of this post.
- SoftBank is considering taking a majority stake in WeWork
SoftBank may soon own up to 50 percent of WeWork, a well-funded provider of co-working spaces headquartered in New York, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.
SoftBank is reportedly weighing an investment between $15 billion and $20 billion, which would come from its $92 billion Vision Fund, a super-sized venture fund led by Japanese entrepreneur and investor Masayoshi Son.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/09/softbank-is-considering-taking-a-majority-stake-in-wework/
- LinkedIn acquires employee engagement platform Glint
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. For some context, Glint had raised nearly $80 million — including these rounds for $27 million and and $20 million in the last two years — was valued at around $220 million in its last round according to PitchBook. Investors included Bessemer Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Shasta Ventures and Meritech Capital Partners.
Artificial Intelligence
- Amazon Pulled the Plug on an AI Recruitment Tool That Was Biased Against Women
Reuters reported on Wednesday that five people close to the project told the outlet that in 2014 a team began building computer programs to automate and expedite the search for talent. Such systems use algorithms that “learn” which job candidates to look for after processing a large amount of historical data. By 2015, the team realized the AI wasn’t weighing candidates in a gender-neutral way.
“Everyone wanted this holy grail,” one of Reuters’ sources, all of whom requested to be anonymous, said in the report. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those.”
According to those engineers, the AI reduced job candidates to a star-review system, like it was reviewing a product on Amazon’s retail site. The computer models were trained on resumes submitted over a 10-year period, most of which came from men. It learned that a successful resume was a man’s resume.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evwkk4/amazon-ai-recruitment-hiring-tool-gender-bias
Cloud
- Google Drops Out of Pentagon’s $10 Billion Cloud Competition
Google’s announcement on Monday came just months after the company decided not to renew its contract with a Pentagon artificial intelligence program, after extensive protests from employees of the internet giant about working with the military. The company then released a set of principles designed to evaluate what kind of artificial intelligence projects it would pursue.
“We are not bidding on the JEDI contract because first, we couldn’t be assured that it would align with our AI Principles,” a Google spokesman said in a statement. “And second, we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications.”
- IBM protests $10B JEDI solicitation
It is no secret that DOD has steadfastly refused to budge from its strategy of awarding the contract to a single cloud service provider. This has been despite objections from many in industry and pressure from Congress to move toward a multiple award strategy.
IBM has been commenting and reviewing revisions to the final solicitation but now that the due date is upon us, the next logical step was to file its own protest.
IBM’s protest filing is not publicly available but Sam Gordy, IBM’s general manager for federal, laid out his argument in a blog posting as well as in an interview with Washington Technology.
https://washingtontechnology.com/blogs/editors-notebook/2018/10/ibm-jedi-protest.aspx
Security
- The breach that killed Google+ wasn’t a breach at all
The vulnerability itself seems to have been relatively small in scope. The heart of the problem was a specific developer API that could be used to see non-public information. But crucially, there’s no evidence that it actually was used to see private data, and given the thin user base, it’s not clear how much non-public data there really was to see. The API was theoretically accessible to anyone who asked, but only 432 people actually applied for access (again, it’s Google+), so it’s plausible that none of them ever thought of using it this way.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/9/17957312/google-plus-vulnerability-privacy-breach-law
Software/SaaS
- Microsoft Just Did Something Big With 60,000 Patents
The technology giant said Wednesday it would contribute more than 60,000 of its patents to the Open Invention Network. This is noteworthy because the group’s member companies cross-license their patents to each other to prevent future lawsuits in which companies may allege that another firm’s technology infringes on their own patents.
http://fortune.com/2018/10/10/microsoft-patents-open-source/
Other
- Google Appeals $5 Billion EU Fine in Android Case
Google’s appeal is the latest volley in a series of actions that European regulators and legislators are directing at big tech companies—many led by EU antitrust commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who has emerged as one of the most avid global regulators for big tech firms. Google is already appealing her 2017 decision that fined Google €2.43 billion for allegedly abusing the power of its search engine to favor its own service to show product ads on behalf of online retailers.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-appeals-5-billion-eu-fine-in-android-case-1539109713
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Supplier Report: 9/28/2018
Facebook was hacked (again), exposing 50 million users to potential data breaches. Instagram and WhatsApp accounts could also be affected.
As Intel experiences chip shortages, their plan is to focus on getting the high end chips at the door.
Ohh… Elon Musk is getting sued.
Acquisitions
- Slack buys Astro and shuts down its email app
It may seem curious for Slack, the giant chat app with the goal of killing email, to buy an email app — but the pairing makes a good deal of sense. Astro’s focus was on business users, and it built out some smart integrations inside of Slack. With the two teams combined, Slack can use Astro’s experience to build a native solution for dealing with emails right inside the chat app.
There is some bad news, though: Slack is shutting down Astro’s email app. The app will stop functioning on October 10th. That’s unfortunate, given that good third-party email clients have become increasingly hard to come by, and Astro had some features that really made it stand out.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/24/17897658/slack-astro-acquisition-email-app-shut-down-integration
- With Sirius behind it, can Pandora now stage a comeback?
Sirius XM is all about selling subscriptions to listen to Howard Stern and stations based on genres like 70s, 80s and 90s, and for those who want on-demand music, “now Sirius can cross sell a Spotify clone,” he says. “It’s a winning combination.”
Pandora’s biggest issue has been its double-edged sword. It is under contract to the record labels in paying higher copyright fees than on-demand outlets, and thus, the more listeners it gets, the more money it has to pay out. Pachter says Pandora has lost over $100 million in 2017 and 2016 due to sky high royalty rates.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/09/25/sirius-xm-pandora-comeback/1416707002/
- DXC Boosts Cloud-First Approach With System Partners Buyout
System Partners, a provider of customer-centric services like advisory, strategy designing, tailored managed services and the like, boasts more than 100 Salesforce certified consultants in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra.
Management at DXC Technology believes that the buyout is a strategic move to support and cater to existing customers more efficiently, and strengthen its position in the cloud market
https://www.nasdaq.com/article/dxc-boosts-cloud-first-approach-with-system-partners-buyout-cm1029023
Artificial Intelligence
- Tech Giants Launch New AI Tools as Worries Mount About Explainability
About 60% of 5,000 executives polled in a recent study by IBM’s Institute of Business Value said they were concerned about being able to explain how AI is using data and making decisions in order to meet regulatory and compliance standards. That’s up from 29% in 2016.
Cloud
- Rising Cloud Bills May Get a Breather
It is a big food chain that’s gotten much bigger quickly. Total capital spending by the four aforementioned companies has jumped by an average of 45% on a year-over-year basis for the past six quarters. The four spent a total of $34.7 billion in the first six months of this year—up 59% from the same period last year. But analysts for Morgan Stanley expect that pace to decelerate to growth of 45% for the second half and warned in a note this week that it could slow further to “low double digits” next year.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/rising-cloud-bills-may-get-a-breather-1538128800
- Microsoft, IBM sign up to cheaper cloud alliance
GeekWire is reporting that Cloudflare has brought in Microsoft, IBM, Digital Ocean, Automattic and Backblaze under a single banner called the Bandwidth Alliance.
Scheduled to be announced today, during Cloudflare’s eighth birthday party, the group’s goal is to make sure Cloudflare’s customers using their services pay either significantly cheaper prices, or pay nothing at all, for the traffic that passes through locations where their networks are connected to Cloudflare’s services.
https://www.itproportal.com/news/microsoft-google-sign-up-to-cheaper-cloud-alliance/
Security
- France records big jump in privacy complaints since GDPR
France’s CNIL agency said today that it’s received 3,767 complaints since May 25, when GDPR came into force, up from 2,294 complaints over the same period last year — which it notes was already a record year.
CNIL says this represents a 64% increase in complaints, which it suggests shows that EU citizens have “seized the GDPR strongly” — attributing public engagement on the issue to media attention on the new regulation and on data protection stories such as the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/25/france-records-big-jump-in-privacy-complaints-since-gdpr/
- Facebook Is Breached by Hackers, Putting 50 Million Users’ Data at Risk
Three software flaws in Facebook’s systems allowed hackers to break into user accounts, including those of the top executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, according to two people familiar with the investigation but not allowed to discuss it publicly. Once in, the attackers could have gained access to apps like Spotify, Instagram and hundreds of others that give users a way to log into their systems through Facebook.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-data-breach.html
Infrastructure/Hardware
- Intel acknowledges supply issues, will prioritize premium chips
In the short term, Intel plans to prioritize the premium market, including Xeon and Core processors, so it “can serve the high-performance segments of the market.” Beyond that, the company plans to invest $15 billion in capital expenditures this year, including $1 billion going toward the manufacture of 14nm silicon in the U.S., Ireland and Israel.
These issues have left the broader PC industry in a rough spot. On the face of it, a shortage due to increased demand seems like a good problem to have, but ultimately a lack of processors could create a major issue if the market continues to grow, perhaps ultimately reversing some of that success.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/28/intel-acknowledges-supply-issues-will-prioritize-premium-chips/
- Verizon hits 1.45Gbps 4G LTE speeds in New York
The milestone saw it aggregate six channels of spectrum (both licensed and shared — a first in the US). According to Verizon VP of Technology Planning and Development, Bill Stone, the company is laying a “foundation” for its “evolution into 5G.”
The trial involved aggregating four carriers of licence-assisted access (LTE-LAA) spectrum with licensed PCS and AWS spectrum, according to ZDNet. It also relied on 256 quadrature amplitude moderation (256 QAM) and 4×4 multiple-input multiple-output (4×4 MIMO) technologies — the latter antenna tech is available in 1,100 locations nationwide. Meanwhile, it’s facing fierce 5G competition from rivals AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/28/verizon-peak-4g-lte-speed-new-york/
Other
- SEC charges Tesla CEO Elon Musk with fraud
The SEC complaint alleges that Musk issued “false and misleading” statements and failed to properly notify regulators of material company events. The SEC held a press conference Thursday evening regarding the complaint.
Among other remedies, the SEC is seeking to bar Musk from serving as an officer or director of a publicly traded company if found guilty.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/27/tesla-falls-4percent-on-report-elon-musk-sued-by-sec.html
Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash
Supplier Report: 9/14/2018
Microsoft acquired Lobe, a company to help advance their AI strategy and make it accessible to the masses. Making AI easier is critical as there are reports that companies need to start investing in AI now to just keep up with competition in the next 5-10 years.
Companies also need to invest in software developers as CNBC reports that developers are more valuable to corporations than money…
Acquisitions
- Microsoft acquires Lobe, a drag-and-drop AI tool
Microsoft today announced that is has acquired Lobe, a startup that lets you build machine learning models with the help of a simple drag-and-drop interface. Microsoft plans to use Lobe, which only launched into beta earlier this year, to build upon its own efforts to make building AI models easier, though, for the time being, Lobe will operate as before.
“As part of Microsoft, Lobe will be able to leverage world-class AI research, global infrastructure, and decades of experience building developer tools,” the team writes. “We plan to continue developing Lobe as a standalone service, supporting open source standards and multiple platforms.”
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/13/microsoft-acquires-lobe-a-drag-and-drop-ai-tool/
- Intel acquires NetSpeed Systems to boost its system-on-a-chip business
The company has acquired NetSpeed Systems, a startup that makes system-on-chip (SoC) design tools and interconnect fabric intellectual property (IP). The company will be joining Intel’s Silicon Engineering Group, and its co-founder and CEO, Sundari Mitra, herself an Intel vet, will be coming on as a VP at Intel where she will continue to lead her team.
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but for some context, during NetSpeed’s last fundraise in 2016 (a $10 million Series C) it had a post-money valuation of $60 million, according to data from PitchBook.
Artificial Intelligence
- The devilishly quiet age of AI
The era’s winners will be those who are not fooled by the absence of visible change from AI over the next 5-7 years. By the time the fruits of AI investment become clear — after 2025 — it will be extremely difficult to compete with the leading players, says Jacques Bughin and Jeongmin Seong, two co-authors of the report.
AI adoption will add $13 trillion a year to global production, the report said, and an average of 1.2% to global GDP growth per year.
- Google Cloud’s new AI chief is on a task force for AI military uses and believes we could monitor ‘pretty much the whole world’ with drones
Google’s decision to hire Moore was greeted with displeasure by at least one former Googler who objected to Project Maven.
“It’s worrisome to note after the widespread internal dissent against Maven that Google would hire Andrew Moore,” said one former Google employee. “Googlers want less alignment with the military-industrial complex, not more. This hire is like a punch in the face to the over 4,000 Googlers who signed the Cancel Maven letter.”
A Google spokesman declined to comment.
Cloud
- Oracle’s Kurian Is Said to Be at Odds With Ellison on Cloud
The growing strife between Kurian, president of product development, and Executive Chairman Ellison culminated in Kurian’s announcement on Sept. 5 that he’s taking a break, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing a private matter. Kurian wants Oracle to make more of its software available to run on public clouds from chief rivals Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. as a way to diversify from its own struggling infrastructure, a view opposed by Ellison, one of the people said.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/oracle/oracles-kurian-said-be-odds-ellison-cloud
Security
- A year later, Equifax lost your data but faced little fallout
“There was a failure of the company, but also of lawmakers,” said Mark Warner, a Democratic senator, in a call with TechCrunch. Warner, who serves Virginia, was one of the first lawmakers to file new legislation after the breach. Alongside his Democratic colleague, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the two senators said their bill, if passed, would hold credit agencies accountable for data breaches.
“The message sent to the market is ‘if you can endure some media blowback, you can get through this without serious long-term ramifications’, and that’s totally unacceptable,” he said.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/08/equifax-one-year-later-unscathed/
Software/SaaS
- Software developers are now more valuable to companies than money: Survey
And yet, despite being many corporations’ most precious resource, developer talents are all too often squandered. Collectively, companies today lose upward of $300 billion a year paying down “technical debt,” as developers pour time into maintaining legacy systems or dealing with the ramifications of bad software.
This is especially worrisome, given the outsized impact developers have on companies’ chances of success. Software developers don’t have a monopoly on good ideas, but their skill set makes them a uniquely deep source of innovation, productivity and new economic connections. When deployed correctly, developers can be economic multipliers — coefficients that dramatically ratchet up the output of the teams and companies of which they’re a part.
- What you need to know ahead of the EU copyright vote
European lawmakers want to extend digital copyright to also cover the ledes of news stories which aggregators such as Google News typically ingest and display — because, again, the likes of Alphabet is profiting off of bits of others’ professional work without paying them to do so. And, on the flip side, media firms have seen their profits hammered by the Internet serving up free content.
The reforms would seek to compensate publishers for their investment in journalism by letting them charge for use of these text snippets — instead of only being ‘paid’ in traffic (i.e. by becoming yet more eyeball fodder in Alphabet’s aggregators).
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/08/what-you-need-to-know-ahead-of-the-eu-copyright-vote/
- Burger King selects SAP solutions to support growth
The chain will use Cloud-based procurement applications and a business network from SAP Ariba and SAP S/4HANA from SAP to expand its presence and increase revenue.These solutions will assist the restaurant chain to create a digital process to fuel savings, efficiencies and business growth.
Leveraging both solutions, the company will gain insights from the data stored in its supply chains and use them to grow further.
https://www.verdictfoodservice.com/news/burger-king-sap-solutions-growth/
Datacenter/Hardware
- Apple raised the price of its best phone by $330, and no one cares
Two years ago, a brand-new flagship Apple smartphone started at $650. Now, the a compromised version of Apple’s vision will set you back $750. Even though the Xr will likely be more than enough iPhone for most customers, the iPhone X proved that there are loads of people out there willing to pay $999 and up for a truly premium device.
And this year, those with lots of money have even more opportunity to spend: the iPhone Xs Max starts at $1,099 and goes up to an insane $1,449 with 512GB of storage. In 2016, the top-of-the-line iPhone 7 Plus with 256GB of storage cost $929. Not only has Apple raised the cost of a flagship device, it expanded the pricing window for its highest-end phones by more than $500.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/13/apple-iphone-xs-xr-price-increases/
Other
- Trump renews call for Apple to make its products in the US
But while moving its manufacturing operations to the US would allow it to skip the tariffs, Apple’s products likely wouldn’t be any cheaper. China is an attractive to tech manufacturing because its workforce is cheaper and the plants that produce individual components are in close proximity to one another. Moving that manufacturing infrastructure would be costly. On Twitter, Trade lawyer Scott Lincicome pointed out that an iPhone would be more expensive to manufacture here in the US, citing a Marketplace report from 2014 that suggested that the component cost of an iPhone in China was around $190 per phone. In the US, that price jumps up to around $600, pushing the device — at the time — to a predicted price of $2000, far more than what would be seen under the tariffs.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/8/17835158/trump-twitter-apple-manufacturing-tariffs
- Tough Days for China’s Tech Giants
For Tencent, which makes over 90% of its revenue in China, more government scrutiny has become a reality. Beijing has been holding up approvals for new games and sales of in-game items like virtual weapons—Tencent makes around half its annual revenue from the latter. The freeze caused the company’s first year-over-year profit decline since the last quarter in 2005.
This doesn’t seem like a hiccup. Beijing last week said it will continue limiting videogame releases and set restrictions on young people’s playing time, while state media has been repeatedly lambasting game companies for creating social problems. Nasdaq-listed Baidu, too, has been reprimanded for hosting content that threatens China’s “social order.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tough-days-for-chinas-tech-giants-1536312601?ns=prod/accounts-wsj
- Tim Armstrong to depart as CEO of Verizon’s Oath
Verizon’s head of media and advertising Tim Armstrong will leave at the end of the year, the company announced Wednesday. CNBC reported Armstrong was in talks to leave as of Sept. 7.
Armstrong came to Verizon in 2015 as part of the acquisition of AOL, where he was CEO. The company later bought Yahoo and combined the two divisions into a digital advertising unit called Oath but those efforts have yet to produce significant growth. Verizon has decided to integrate Oath more fully with the rest of the company’s operations, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report, despite recent discussions about spinning off Oath into a separate business.
Oath president and COO K. Guru Gowrappan will “assume all management responsibilities” as chief executive effective Oct. 1, the company said in a release.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/12/tim-armstrong-out-at-verizons-oath.html
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
Supplier Report: 8/24/2018
This week the news is very beverage focused: IBM wants robots to get you coffee and Pepsi bought Israeli company SodaStream.
Microsoft is under investigation for software fraud in Turkey while Amazon quietly gobbles up all of our energy (at a discounted rate).
Finally, Tesla is staying public because I am sure that was keeping everyone up at night.
Acquisitions
- Pepsi buys SodaStream for a future beyond cola
The deal will also help SodaStream expand its global reach. It currently distributes in 80,000 stores across 45 countries, with the bulk of its custom coming from Western Europe which is seeing an increasing backlash against single-use plastic. The company estimates their machines help consumers save up to 1,000 bottles and cans a year, no doubt a driver behind the extremely successful quarter it reported recently. Revenue climbed 31 percent to $171.5 million for the quarter to June 30, while net income jumped 82 percent. Of course Pepsi is going to want a piece of that.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/20/pepsi-buys-sodastream-for-a-future-beyond-cola/
It isn’t a tech deal, but it is Israeli-based (and I did a podcast about this topic).
Artificial Intelligence
- AI Can Manipulate Video to Make Everybody Dance Now
In a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server this week, researchers at the University of California Berkeley demonstrate how they designed AI that, given video of an expert dancer and an amateur, can transfer the moves from one to the other and create convincing video of the amateur pulling off some seriously impressive rug-cutting. But that’s not all.
“With our framework,” the researchers wrote, “we create a variety of videos, enabling untrained amateurs to spin and twirl like ballerinas, perform martial arts kicks or dance as vibrantly as pop stars.”
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43pebw/ai-can-manipulate-video-to-make-anybody-dance
- IBM has invented coffee drones – and they predict when you need a cup
IBM has secured a patent for a coffee drone that not only flies around public spaces to deliver cups of brew but also predicts which people need caffeine pick-me-ups.
According to paperwork filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the device could be used in an office, cafe or event setting, where a preordered cup of joe would be delivered to the drinker or where a thirsty individual would flag it down. Facial- or voice-recognition software, an electronic ID tag or Bluetooth from a person’s smartphone ensures the coffee gets to the right person.
Cloud
- Amazon is one of the largest consumers of electricity but is offloading costs onto others
Supporting the power requirements of astoundingly large data centers is no small feat. AWS is now responsible for nearly two percent of all electrical power consumption in the United States. Under secretive agreements between Amazon and energy providers, the true costs of running such massive data centers are well hidden from the public.
In Ohio, Amazon opened three data centers in 2016 that are all operating with secret electric rates. Only five representatives on a public utility commission, a private development agency known as JobsOhio, and Amazon know how much is being paid for a public service. Amazon claims that its discounted rates are a trade secret and therefore must be redacted in any requests for public records.
Security
- T-Mobile says hackers stole customer data in data breach
The cell giant, currently merging with Sprint, said in a statement that hackers customer stole names, billing zip codes, phone numbers, email addresses, account numbers, and account type — such as if an account was prepaid or postpaid — in what the company described as an “unauthorized capture of data.”
No customer financial or billing data was compromised, the company said.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/24/t-mobile-says-hackers-stole-customer-data-in-data-breach/
- Who needs democracy when you have data?
“No government has a more ambitious and far-reaching plan to harness the power of data to change the way it governs than the Chinese government,” says Martin Chorzempa of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC. Even some foreign observers, watching from afar, may be tempted to wonder if such data-driven governance offers a viable alternative to the increasingly dysfunctionallooking electoral model. But over-relying on the wisdom of technology and data carries its own risks.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611815/who-needs-democracy-when-you-have-data/
Software/SaaS
- Oracle’s Bad Boy Image
Oracle exercises its contractual right to audit the use of its software at customer locations. When an audit turns up a violation or potential violation of the license agreement, the sides work out a solution that often involves additional license purchases. No one likes this.
The process makes Oracle look bad in the eyes of the public, who think of licensing as supporting one or a few software deployments. However, although the audits are randomized, they often involve customers with hundreds, or even thousands, of licenses spread across far flung empires.
Datacenter/Hardware
- Big Spenders Pinch Chip Equipment Makers
The culprit? Semiconductor equipment companies live on the capital spending of chip makers. That spending has been cyclical historically, and has seen a big upswing over the past couple years thanks to booming demand for components like memory chips. But nothing lasts forever, and two of the world’s largest chip makers—Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing —seem to be trimming their outlays again.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-spenders-pinch-chip-equipment-makers-1534600801
Other
- Microsoft Hit With U.S. Bribery Probe Over Deals in Hungary
The investigation follows a series of similar probes into Microsoft business partners that surfaced in 2013 in five other countries. Microsoft made a push earlier this decade to expand in emerging markets, as well as smaller, middle-income countries like Hungary. In some cases, those bets have turned into legal and reputational challenges.
The U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are probing how Microsoft sold software such as Word and Excel to middleman firms in Hungary that then sold those products to government agencies there in 2013 and 2014, according to these people.
- Tesla will remain public, Elon Musk says
Musk’s go-private plan didn’t just cause consternation among his shareholders — it also interested the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to The New York Times. “is ramping up an investigation about whether he misled investors and violated federal securities laws,” The Times reported earlier today. Previous reporting in The Wall Street Journal suggested that the SEC was already investigating Tesla for possibly misleading investors about its Model 3 production. Tesla faces at least three investor lawsuits that accuse Musk’s August 7 tweet of being market manipulation.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/24/17780714/elon-musk-tesla-staying-public
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash