Supplier Report: 11/24/2017
As everyone sleeps off the last traces of tryptophan, IT companies are also taking this time to pause and reflect… except for Uber who is in trouble AGAIN.
The ride share company announced a massive breach that happened last year (which they did not inform the public of until this week). The company also paid the hackers that breached their security $100K to delete the stolen data (and let’s take the hacker’s word that they complied with that gentlemen’s agreement) and not make any public statements.
Uber’s CSO has been terminated.
In other news, FCC chairman Ajit Pai seems poised to overturn net neutrality rules on December 14th which could greatly impact the way companies and consumers interact with each other on the internet.
Acquisitions
- AT&T Faces U.S. Antitrust Suit Over Time Warner Deal
The U.S. Justice Department is poised to sue to block AT&T’s $85.4 billion takeover of Time Warner, according to a person familiar with the matter, culminating more than a week of sparring over the deal and dealing a major blow to the carrier’s bid to create a media and telecommunications empire, Bloomberg News’ Sara Forden and David McLaughlin report.
The Justice Department said it plans to make a major antitrust announcement Monday afternoon, without specifying the topic. The person familiar with the matter said the news regards the government’s plan to sue to block the proposed AT&T merger with Time Warner.
- 5 Companies That Microsoft Could Put on Its Shopping List
Workday Inc. (WDAY) and ServiceNow Inc. (NOW) , as the largest SaaS pure-plays not named Salesforce, could catch its attention. Workday, worth $23 billion, is the top provider of cloud human capital management (HCM) and financials apps for enterprises, and it has also rolled out analytics tools and apps meant for universities.
ServiceNow, worth $22 billion, is the top provider of cloud-based IT service desk software and is also now a meaningful player in the IT operations management (ITOM) and IT business management (ITBM) software spaces. Buying the company would extend Microsoft’s reach within corporate IT departments and yield some synergies with the company’s System Center systems management software platform.
https://www.thestreet.com/story/14399919/1/companies-microsoft-could-buy.html
Artificial Intelligence
- AI Can Help Hunt Down Missile Sites in China
The deep learning algorithms proved capable of helping people with no prior imagery analysis experience find surface-to-air missile sites scattered across nearly 90,000 square kilometers of southeastern China. Such AI based on neural networks—layers of artificial neuron capable of filtering and learning from huge amounts of data—matched the overall 90 percent accuracy of expert human imagery analysts in locating the missile sites. Perhaps even more impressively, the deep learning software helped humans reduce the time needed to eyeball potential missile sites from 60 hours to just 42 minutes.
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-can-help-hunt-down-missile-sites-in-china/
Cloud
- Amazon’s cloud is about to announce a huge health-care deal with Cerner, sources say
As part of his keynote at re:Invent, AWS CEO Andy Jassy is planning to announce that Amazon is teaming up with Cerner, one of the world’s largest health technology companies, to help health-care providers better use their data to make health predictions about patient populations, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The sources, who asked not to be named because the discussions are still in the final stages, said the partnership is initially focused on Cerner’s so-called population health product — HealtheIntent — which enables hospitals to gather and analyze huge volumes of clinical data to improve patients’ health outcomes and lower treatment costs.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/22/aws-is-partnering-with-cerner-on-cloud-deal-for-healtheintent.html
- Google Cloud Platform cuts the price of GPUs by up to 36 percent
Google today announced that it’s cutting the price of using Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs through its Compute Engine by up to 36 percent. In U.S. regions, using the somewhat older K80 GPUs will now cost $0.45 per hour while using the newer and more powerful P100 machines will cost $1.46 per minute (all with per-second billing).
The company is also dropping the prices for preemptible local SSDs by almost 40 percent. “Preemptible local SSDs” refers to local SSDs attached to Google’s preemptible VMs. You can’t attach GPUs to preemptible instances, though, so this is a nice little bonus announcement — but it isn’t going to directly benefit GPU users.
- HPE and Rackspace bring pay-as-you-go service to OpenStack Private Cloud
“The launch of OpenStack Private Cloud with pay per use infrastructure delivered by Rackspace and HPE marks a pivotal moment in the private cloud market and in the industry at large,” said Antonio Neri, president of HPE. “This experience is the best of the cloud and on-premises worlds, and we fully expect this simple pay-per-use technology model to change the way enterprises make technology decisions.”
The move is meant to respond to increased interest in public cloud services. The offering allows customers to pay only for what they use like a utility bill using HPE’s Flexible Capacity, making it easier to manage growth and bursts in workloads without paying for fixed capacity. The companies said providing the pay-as-you-go service will make private cloud 40% less expensive than the leading public cloud, an estimate based on Rackspace internal pricing analysis.
https://www.rcrwireless.com/20171120/pay-as-you-go-model-inspires-hpe-rackspace-private-cloud-tag27
Security
- Uber admits massive data breach
CEO Dara Khosrowshahi confirmed Tuesday that, in late 2016, hackers stole the data of 57 million of the company’s riders and drivers from around the world, including names, email addresses, phone numbers and driver’s license numbers. Khosrowshahi also confirmed that the $70 billion ridehailing giant has kept the cyberattack quiet for more than a year, in violation of laws that regulate such breaches.
As a result, Uber has fired chief security officer Joe Sullivan and one of his employees, according to Bloomberg. Sullivan was in charge of the company’s response when the attack took place. Former CEO Travis Kalanick reportedly learned about the hack roughly a month after it occurred.
The breach was reportedly discovered by a team hired by Uber to investigate Sullivan and the security department as a whole. The outside law firm in charge of the investigation found that two hackers broke into Uber’s Amazon Web Services account to gain access to rider and driver data, then asked Uber for money to keep the information private. Uber reportedly paid the hackers $100,000 to delete the data and conceal the incident.
https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/uber-admits-massive-data-breach
New York attorney general launches investigation of Uber’s $100,000 hack cover-upThe office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman confirmed to TechCrunch that it has opened an investigation into the incident.
The new investigation won’t be the first time that Uber has tangled with Schneiderman. Flaunting laws over the course of its aggressive pursuit of growth, Uber often ran into conflict with city and state legal authorities, and New York is no exception. The company reached a settlement with Schneiderman’s office in January 2016 over its abuse of private data in a rider-tracking system known as “God View” and its failure to disclose a previous data breach that took place in September 2014 in a timely manner.
Given the New York Attorney General’s interest in the latest Uber scandal, it follows that Uber will likely be in the hot seat in its home state of California, where under Civil Code 1798.82 businesses are required to disclose data breaches affecting more than 500 state residents to the Attorney General “in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay.”
https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/21/ny-ag-schneiderman-uber-hack-cover-up/?ncid=rss
Other
- Philip Hammond just declared war on tech firms like Amazon and Apple that avoid UK tax
Amazon, for example, uses a intricate arrangement that involves paying itself royalty fees for its own intellectual property. Those royalty fees are shielded from tax, and mean the company can wipe out its taxable income.
The Treasury source explained: “If you’re hosting your intellectual property in a country that doesn’t charge tax, and using that IP to make profit by interacting with UK customers, we will be taxing you at 20%.”
Since the UK’s tax authority can’t tax an overseas subsidiary, it will charge a “withholding tax”, meaning the money will be deducted at source.
Richard Murphy, a tax specialist who has previously written about the way tech firms avoid paying UK tax, described the announcement as “a good move.”
- Meg Whitman out as CEO of HPE early next year
Six years after taking the helm as head of HP, Meg Whitman will step down from her role as CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise in February 2018. Whitman’s spot will be filled by the company’s current President, Antonio Neri.
Neri has been with HP since 1995, starting as a customer service engineer at at call center, ultimately rising the ranks to Executive Vice President of HPE in 2015 and then to President in June of this year.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/21/meg-whitman-out-as-ceo-of-hpe-early-next-year/?ncid=rss
- What the End of Net Neutrality Means for You
On Tuesday, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced his plan to gut net neutrality and hand over control of the internet to service providers like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon (which also happens to be Pai’s former employer).
The new plan, titled the “Restoring Internet Freedom Order” promises to end government “micromanaging” of the internet in exchange for added transparency from service providers. However, it’s also ready been widely criticized for removing the consumer protections passed by the FCC in 2015.
The FCC is set to vote on the proposal on December 14, and it’s expected to pass thanks to a 3-to-2 party split favoring the Republicans.
https://lifehacker.com/what-the-end-of-net-neutrality-means-for-you-1820647171
FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see and useOne major beneficiary of the rule-change may be AT&T, which is embroiled in a landmark legal dispute with the Justice Department over an $85 billion purchase of the entertainment conglomerate Time Warner. Should AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner be allowed to close, a repeal of the FCC’s net neutrality rules could give the telecom giant greater power to flex its new content properties in different ways, according to some analysts.
The most immediate effect of the FCC’s plan “is that constraints limiting contractual arrangements [between Internet providers and other companies] … will be lifted for both AT&T and its competitors,” said Joshua Wright, a former Republican FTC commissioner.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/11/21/the-fcc-has-unveiled-its-plan-to-rollback-its-net-neutrality-rules/
Net Neutrality II: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (Very NSFW!)I probably posted this before in the “News You Can Use” section, but this is a good summary of the situation… beware of colorful language and singing goats.
Photo: João Victor Xavier
SourceCast: Episode 95: Tech company partnerships are confusing
Supplier Report: 11/3/2017
Masayoshi Son and John Legere are still playing this whole “will they or won’t they” merger game with TMobile and Sprint. Earlier this week it was off and now parties are coming back to the table.
Amazon also had some drama this week due to news breaking that a British public servant may have influenced the decision to purchase AWS services before taking a lucrative job with the company.
HPE is leaving their historic offices in Palo Alto and downsizing to an Aruba office in Santa Clara. HP, who once employed over 100,000 employees in the area, has reduced staff to approximately 45,000 globally due to restructuring and asset sell-offs.
Acquisitions
- Sprint owner SoftBank may be calling off T-Mobile merger
According to Nikkei, SoftBank and T-Mobile’s owner Deutsche Telekom had reached a broad agreement to integrate the two major US carriers, but couldn’t work out an ownership ratio that satisfied both companies.
Nikkei’s sources indicate that SoftBank board members decided to call the talks off on Monday, after a Friday meeting where executives determined “the company would not give up control.” SoftBank is reportedly expected to propose to Deutsche Telekom on Tuesday that they end negotiations.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/30/sprint-owner-softbank-may-be-calling-off-t-mobile-merger/
Update: T-Mobile, Sprint Working to Salvage MergerT-Mobile made a revised offer, which Sprint is considering, some of the people said. Terms of the new offer were unclear. The two sides could reach a deal within weeks, the people said, but the two companies could still fail to agree on deal terms.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/t-mobile-sprint-working-to-salvage-merger-1509658235
Artificial Intelligence
- IBM Watson digs deep on data to pave the way for enterprise AI apps
By 2018, nearly 75% of developers will build AI functionality into their apps, according to an IDC report. However, this requires wading through increasingly complex data that lives in different places, and must be continually and securely ingested, according to an IBM press release.
In response to this challenge, Watson will now include data cataloging and data refining, to improve data visibility and better enforce data security policies so that users can more easily share information across public and private cloud environments.
In addition to the Watson news, IBM also announced plans to extend its Unified Governance Platform with new capabilities, to help companies prepare for increasing governance and regulatory requirements, such as GDPR. They include the ability to have a single view of the Unified Governance Catalog for both structured and unstructured information. It also modified the look of its Datastage Designer with a cognitive design that can recognize and suggest usage patterns, to speed the development of data integration flows.
Cloud
- IBM kills Bluemix, a year after killing SoftLayer
On Tuesday this week the company changed it again, announcing that “Bluemix is now IBM Cloud”.
The company’s rationale is that “we are merging the Bluemix brand with IBM Cloud brand since they’ve grown to be synonymous.”
Everything IBM does in the cloud comes under the new brand: Watson, PaaS, SaaS – the works.
There’s not much more to the change than branding: the company promises all the stuff currently labelled “Bluemix” will keep running.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/02/ibm_renames_bluemix_ibm_cloud/
- Protecting our Google Docs and Drive Users
On Tuesday, October 31, we mistakenly blocked access to some of our users’ files, including Google Docs. This was due to a short-lived bug that incorrectly flagged some files as violating our terms of service (TOS). The blocking raised questions in the community and we would like to address those questions here.
Tuesday’s bug caused the Google Docs and Drive services to misinterpret the response from these protection systems and erroneously mark some files as TOS violations, thus causing access denials for users of those files. As soon as our teams identified the problem, we removed the bug and worked to restore access to all affected files.
https://www.blog.google/products/docs/protecting-our-google-docs-and-drive-users/
- Microsoft, Oracle, IBM look to lure cloud services customers with new pay structure
Traditionally, companies would ink large software deals based on factors such as the number of a customer’s devices – and not actual subsequent use of the products.The cloud business is a crucial growth area for the traditional enterprise technology pioneers, battling against rivals Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google. The public cloud services global market is likely to increase more than 18 percent to $260.2 billion this year and almost double to $411 billion in 2020, according to Gartner Inc Microsoft, for example, said last week it had generated $20.4 billion in commercial cloud revenue on an annualized basis.
Tying usage to sales incentives should help keep customers on board when it’s time to agree to a new contract, said Stephen White, an analyst with Gartner. “The behaviors of the salespeople need to be more in tune with what a customer actually is going to need and use,” White said. “It certainly makes the renewal discussion easier.”Oracle and IBM declined to comment. Previously, Microsoft had been bundling cloud services, such as Azure for storing and running data and cloud applications, with many of its multiyear deals. Althoff said the shift in pay incentives is a significant change.
Datacenter
- Microsoft Turns up the Heat on Oracle, Amazon, and IBM Databases
While transitioning database platforms is still a significant task to undertake and the cost can still be high even if the tool is free, Microsoft knows that as companies look to move away from on-premises to cloud services, that’s a natural time to consider migrating. By offering this tool now, as more companies work to plan out the future (or lack of future) for their own local metal, the offer may entice some to leave their old db tech behind.
Microsoft has become much more aggressive in this space in the past few years as the company looks to position its technology, both software and hardware (Azure) ahead of legacy competitors like Oracle and IBM. The reason for this is that they are trying to catch up to the next generation of service providers, like Amazon, and by using their own tools and tech as a leverage, it’s fostering the growth of Azure.
https://www.petri.com/microsoft-turns-heat-oracle-amazon-ibm-databases
- HPE to move HQ from Palo Alto to Santa Clara as it consolidates Silicon Valley footprint
After two years of massive restructuring and staff reductions, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is selling its headquarters on land it has owned in Palo Alto, California since 1957, the company announced on Thursday.
The headquarters will move to nearby Santa Clara, at a new 23,000 square-foot office complex originally built to house Aruba, a company acquired by HPE in 2015. Some of the staff will also move to existing offices in San Jose and Milpitas.
HPE wouldn’t disclose how many people work in Silicon Valley, but the company has around 45,000 employees globally.
http://www.businessinsider.com/hpe-selling-palo-alto-headquarters-move-santa-clara-2017-11
Make sure you update those purchase orders!
Other
- The continuous flow of execs between AWS, Microsoft, IBM and government
According to a report in the Times today, the Home Office’s former chief digital officer, Norman Driskell, took a job with Amazon Web Services (AWS) without gaining the necessary approvals first – a trend that has been highlighted by the National Audit Office in recent months as a concern.
Driskell oversaw multimillion pound contracts with AWS during his time at the Home Office and has also set up one of Europe’s largest AWS user groups in his spare time, before taking up the job as a public sector lead with the cloud hosting giant.
https://diginomica.com/2017/10/30/continuing-flow-execs-aws-microsoft-ibm-government/
A senior civil servant with a £130,000 salary reportedly breached transparency rules when he quit and joined AmazonThe Home Office reportedly paid the US firm £1.2 million in the 18 months prior to Driskell’s departure, which happened in November 2016. In February 2017, just three months later, the Home Office awarded AWS a two-year contract worth £4.8 million, according to The Times.
Under the new contract, the Home Office will reportedly move immigration data from a remote provider to an “in-house AWS solution.”
- IBM Elects Two New Members to Its Board of Directors
Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer, said: “Joe Swedish and Rick Waddell are distinguished leaders in their fields, and we are delighted to add their insights and leadership to the IBM board. Mr. Swedish brings experience as a transformational leader in health care in both the payer and provider space, and Mr. Waddell’s experience enhances the strong financial services expertise on the board. Their perspectives on contemporary business issues and their experience running data-intensive enterprises will be an asset to IBM and to our shareholders.”
- SoftBank, Facebook, and Amazon commit to 8,700-mile transpacific subsea cable system
Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank is joining forces with Facebook, Amazon, and a number of other technology companies to build a new 14,000 km (8,700 mile) transpacific subsea cable connecting Asia with North America.
The Jupiter cable system will have two landing points in Japan — at Shima in the Mie prefecture and at Maruyama in the Chiba prefecture — as well as one at Daet in the Philippines and one near Los Angeles in the U.S.
- Amazon’s HQ2 could go to Washington D.C., where it has over 500 job openings, says analyst
While it remains unclear what city Amazon will pick, analysts at Baird Equity Research believe Washington D.C. has one major edge over others: current number of job openings.
As of last Friday, Washington D.C. had 531 corporate jobs available, the most after Seattle and the San Francisco-Bay Area. If you exclude West Coast cities, and use current job openings density as an important measure for Amazon’s HQ2 criteria, Washington D.C. would be a front-runner to win the bid, Baird Equity Research wrote in a note Monday.
“We view this as relevant to the HQ2 search, as Amazon might prioritize locations based on already having a sizable non-fulfillment workforce,” the note said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/30/amazon-hq2-washington-dc-possible-given-job-openings.html
- Just Think: What Amazon Could Do to the Pharmacy Business
Noticing that an Amazon customer seems to be taking an awful lot of medication to lose weight, the company might pitch fitness machines or online yoga classes. But it could also provide entertainment suggestions—free with that Prime account—that would go nicely with the state of your health. If Amazon can tell from all that Xanax you’re ordering that you seem to be having a hard time, it might recommend video offerings like “Love, Actually” or “8 Hours: Ocean Lights & Whale Songs.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/just-think-what-amazon-could-do-to-the-pharmacy-business-1509639035
Photo: Joey Kyber