Tag: Microsoft

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Supplier Report: 5/17/2019

There is growing public pressure on Facebook to make some kind of change. Former employees and government officials want to break up the company calling it a monopoly, but are Facebook’s services essential?

Seeing this drama unfold, Google is quickly pivoting to privacy-based position. In recent weeks the company is allowing users to limit tracking and delete information Google has stored about usage.  Very smart move… but is it enough?

Meanwhile Oracle just can’t give up on Project Jedi.

Acquisitions

  • Apple buys companies at the same rate you buy groceries

    This weekend, CEO Tim Cook told CNBC that Apple purchases a new company every two to three weeks on average, and has bought between 20 and 25 companies in the last six months alone.

    That’s roughly as often as I bought groceries during some… oh, let’s just call them “fresh vegetable adjacent” periods of my life.

    You know how human beings never fail to be surprised when they get to the cash register and see how much of their paycheck is about to turn into food? I wonder if Apple ever feels that way. I’d guess not, considering how the company’s reportedly sitting on $225.4 billion dollars of cash on hand alone — enough to settle a historic array of lawsuits with Qualcomm 50 times over, if push came to shove.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18531570/apple-company-purchases-startups-tim-cook-buy-rate

  • Marvell to Acquire Aquantia, Eying Automotive Networking Market

    Marvell on Monday announced that it had reached an agreement to buy the networking specialist firm Aquantia for $452 million. The acquisition will allow Marvell to significantly augment their current networking capabilities, with the company intending to use Aquantia’s technology in future PC, enterprise, and especially in-vehicle applications.

    Under the terms of the deal, Marvell will pay Aquantia shareholders $13.25 per share in cash, bringing the total value of the deal to $452 million. The transaction has already been approved by board of directors of both companies, and subject to regulatory approval, is expected to close by the end of calendar year 2019.

    https://www.anandtech.com/show/14300/marvell-to-acquire-aquantia-eying-automotive-networking-market

Artificial Intelligence

  • The Morning After: All the important stuff from Google I/O

    An AI-powered assistant that responds to voice commands faster than you can type or swipe, even offline? That’s what Google promised at I/O, with demos showing off how its next-generation assistant could operate across and through several apps, using voice control almost exclusively to get the information users need when they need it. Plus, it learns what you like and can even make restaurant or menu suggestions based on those preferences. Expect to see these features roll out on Pixel phones first later this year.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/08/the-morning-after-google-io-highlights/

Cloud

  • Oracle Alleges AWS Recruited DoD Officials To Influence JEDI Cloud Award

    After Oracle first raised the issue, the DoD Inspector General, assisted by the FBI’s Public Corruption Squad, reopened a prior investigation and again concluded those potential improprieties didn’t impact the integrity of the process. A previous Government Accountability Office investigation also found no flaw warranting a change in how the military was selecting a cloud vendor.

    But Oracle argued Tuesday the military’s contracting officer was wrong to take Ubhi’s claims at face value during the investigation, noting he actively sought to return to AWS, where he previously worked, during his short stint at DoD, where for a time he worked as a JEDI project manager.

    https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/oracle-alleges-aws-recruited-dod-officials-to-influence-jedi-cloud-award

  • SAP embraces cloud customization – with interesting partners

    SAP is launching SAP Embrace, a new initiative to enable users of the SAP S/4 HANA ERP system to move it to the cloud, with platform, software, services and infrastructure customized to their specific industry needs. Interestingly, SAP is collaborating with cloud competitors Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud. SAP Embrace customers will be able to select one of those three cloud services providers as a hyperscaler, and also leverage SAP’s network of global strategic service partners.

    https://www.chainstoreage.com/technology/sap-embraces-cloud-customization-with-interesting-partners/

Security/Privacy

  • Google Says It Has Found Religion on Privacy

    Google plans to permit users to navigate its maps, watch videos on YouTube and search for information in “incognito mode,” limiting the amount of information shared with the company. It will also allow users to delete web and app activity history automatically after three months or 18 months.

    Google added incognito mode to its Chrome browser a decade ago.

    The company also said it would make it easier for users to find and delete information they have shared with the company, including location data in maps. For its Android operating system, Google said a new update would simplify how to limit the sharing of location data with app providers.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/technology/google-privacy-tools.html

Software/SaaS

  • Symantec CEO Abruptly Resigns Amid Financial Turmoil

    Symantec CEO Greg Clark abruptly resigned yesterday immediately before the embattled security company reported its fourth-quarter 2019 earnings, which included weak enterprise sales and disappointing forecasts for the first quarter and full 2020 fiscal year.

    The company appointed Richard Hill, current Symantec director and former chairman and CEO of Novellus Systems, as interim president and CEO, effective immediately, and said it will begin a search to find a permanent CEO.

    https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/symantec-ceo-abruptly-resigns-amid-financial-turmoil/2019/05/

  • IBM sells $28.6b of bonds to help fund Red Hat buy

    The Red Hat purchase will push the combined company’s borrowings above $US60 billion with debt that’s more than three times a key measure of earnings, said Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Robert Schiffman and Mike Campellone. Though IBM won’t buy back shares in the next two years, it still risks a potential downgrade to the BBB range, the tier of corporate debt that’s just above junk, they wrote.

    IBM took out a $US20 billion bridge loan to fund the Red Hat deal and will use some of its cash pile, the company said in October when the transaction was announced. S&P Global Ratings and Fitch Ratings cut IBM one level to A at the time, the sixth-highest investment-grade rating, while it remains on review for downgrade at Moody’s Investors Service.

    https://www.afr.com/markets/debt-markets/ibm-sells-28-6b-of-bonds-to-help-fund-red-hat-buy-20190509-p51li8

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Microsoft open-sources its quantum computing development tools

    This move, the company says, is meant to make “quantum computing and algorithm development easier and more transparent for developers.” In addition, it will make it easier for academic institutions to use these tools, and developers, of course, will be able to contribute their own code and ideas.

    Unsurprisingly, the code will live on Microsoft’s GitHub page. Previously, the team had already open-sourced a number of tools and examples, as well as a library of quantum chemistry samples, but this is the first time the team is open-sourcing core parts of the platform.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/06/microsoft-open-sources-its-quantum-computing-development-tools/

  • Apple’s would-be sapphire glass supplier charged with fraud

    Apple loaned $578 million to a company called GT Advanced Technologies, which was supposed to build highly scratch-resistant screen covers from synthetic sapphire crystals. Instead, it produced flawed “boules” of sapphire that couldn’t be cut into displays and went bankrupt months after it started. Now, the SEC has announced that it’s charging the company and its ex-CEO with fraud for allegedly withholding key information from stockholders.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/06/apple-sapphire-glass-supplier-charged-with-fraud/

Other

  • Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes, calls for Facebook to be broken up

    The tl;dr of Hughes’ argument against Facebook/Zuckerberg being allowed to continue its/his reign of the internet knits together different strands of the techlash zeitgeist, linking Zuckerberg’s absolute influence over Facebook, and therefore over the unprecedented billions of people he can reach and behaviourally reprogram via content-sorting algorithms, to the crushing of innovation and startup competition; the crushing of consumer attention, choice and privacy, all hostage to relentless growth targets and an eyeball-demanding ad business model; the crushing control of speech that Zuckerberg — as Facebook’s absolute monarch — personally commands, with Hughes worrying it’s a power too potent for any one human to wield.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/09/facebook-co-founder-chris-hughes-calls-for-facebook-to-be-broken-up/

    Facebook is not a monopoly, and breaking it up would defy logic and set a bad precedent

    Hughes and others have cited historical precedents such as the government’s breakup of Standard Oil and AT&T as a justification for stricter antitrust regulation against tech giants. But these companies not only had clear monopolies with pricing power that hurt consumers, they also offered products that were vital to the economy.

    Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are only three of many ways people can communicate digitally, and while many people spend hours every week using them, they are replaceable and inessential — and, in fact, getting away from Facebook and Instagram might make people happier. Even Hughes acknowledges, when he finds himself scrolling through Instagram at idle hours, “The choice is mine, but it doesn’t feel like a choice.”

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/09/facebook-should-not-be-broken-up-commentary.html

  • Elon Musk is going to trial for calling a cave diver a pedophile on Twitter

    Defamation law doesn’t apply to opinions or derogatory hyperbole, and Judge Wilson concluded that Musk’s case would be stronger if he’d simply tweeted an insult. But Musk “did not call [Unsworth] a ‘pedo guy’ and leave it there,” writes Wilson. “Rather, he made follow-up statements indicating that he believed his statements to be true.” That included the emails to BuzzFeed, where Musk “purported to convey actual facts and even suggested that the BuzzFeed reporter call people in Thailand to confirm his narrative.”

    The decision doesn’t mean Musk is guilty, but it means Unsworth’s case is strong enough to deserve a trial. A pre-trial conference will take place on October 7th. This won’t be the first time Musk has gone to court for some bad tweets. He recently settled a separate lawsuit with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which accused him of making misleading financial statements on Twitter.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/10/18564625/elon-musk-vernon-unsworth-pedo-guy-tweets-defamation-lawsuit-trial-date-set

Photo by Jason Dent on Unsplash

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Suppler Report: 5/10/2019

Apple and Microsoft are starting the push for the cloud… services. Apple is expected to derive 30% of their profits from services this year and much more in the future.  For Microsoft, it isn’t enough to host, they want to be a platform for productivity, IOT, and blockchain.

And as those companies succeed, others like Verzion and Oracle are struggling with their cloud services and acquisitions. Verizon is now looking to sell off Yahoo assets like Tumblr after users have fled from the platform. Oracle is expecting weaker companies to consolidate.

Acquisitions

Artificial Intelligence

  • IBM’s decision to halt sales of Watson AI: strategic move or admission of failure?

    At present, IBM says it will no longer develop or market the drug discovery application but will continue to support existing users of the software. It may be that the technology is simply not yet mature enough for deployment in certain capacities such as drug discovery, diagnosis and treatment recommendations despite indications of some success by other AI companies.

    However, given that AI employs machine learning, with further input of data from a variety of sources, the abilities and accuracy of the AI will most likely increase. With the pressure to commercialize a driving factor for many companies, there may not be enough time set aside for the numerous iterations and human participation necessary for developing and fine-tuning the technology.

    https://www.verdict.co.uk/ibm-watson-ai-healthcare/

Cloud

  • Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz: Car hire biz demands $32m+ for ‘defective’ cyber-revamp

    As Hertz endured the delays, it found itself immersed in a nightmare: a product and design that apparently didn’t do half of what was specified and still wasn’t finished. “By that point, Hertz no longer had any confidence that Accenture was capable of completing the project, and Hertz terminated Accenture,” the car rental company complained in a lawsuit [PDF] lodged against Accenture in New York this month.

    Hertz is suing for the $32m it paid Accenture in fees to get to that aborted stage, and it wants more millions to cover the cost of fixing the mess. “Accenture never delivered a functional website or mobile app,” Hertz claimed.

    Accenture told El Reg on Tuesday this week it believes Hertz’s lawsuit is “without merit.”

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture_lawsuit/

  • Verizon Looks to Unload Tumblr Blogging Site

    It is unclear how much Verizon might get for Tumblr, a free service with more than 400 million blogs. Yahoo paid about $1.1 billion for the New York-based site in 2013, when it was among a number of fast-growing startups such as online scrapbook Pinterest and news aggregation and commenting site Reddit.

    But Tumblr struggled to generate meaningful revenue for Yahoo and was eclipsed by other social media, such as Medium, Facebook and Instagram, which Facebook bought in 2012. Yahoo wrote down Tumblr’s value by $230 million in 2016.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/verizon-looks-to-unload-tumblr-blogging-site-11556823135

  • Microsoft’s Satya Nadella uses a subtle fear tactic to win cloud business away from Amazon

    Nadella was reminding Read that unlike giant cloud provider Amazon, Microsoft isn’t competing with WPP. It isn’t a retailer competing with WPP’s customer’s either. And although it does have Bing and does sell ads, it also has an ad sales partnership with WPP.

    Nadella’s sales pitch is simple, and one used not just with ad agency giant WPP but with retailers, an industry Amazon has really clobbered: Do you trust a technology partner to store their data, handle their transactions, know the most intimate details of their business, if that tech partner is also a competitor?

    https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-subtle-fear-tactic-win-cloud-business-amazon-2019-5

  • Oracle CEO Mark Hurd says that consolidation is coming as ‘underfunded’ cloud software companies get bought up: ‘Many of the companies will go away’

    “Hurd’s analysis is correct,” Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, told Business Insider.

    “Smaller SaaS companies are underfunded and will have trouble competing with the big players in this market. If they have unique technology they could become M&A targets. It is expensive to market and serve the SaaS markets and being under-capitalized will hurt their chances to compete for the same businesses big SaaS companies go after today.”

    Ray Wang, president of Constellation Research, agreed, saying: “We are still in a market of consolidation.”

    https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-ceo-mark-hurd-cloud-software-consolidation-2019-5

Security/Privacy

  • Zero-day attackers deliver a double dose of ransomware—no clicking required

    Attackers have been actively exploiting a critical zero-day vulnerability in the widely used Oracle WebLogic server to install ransomware, with no clicking or other interaction necessary on the part of end users, researchers from Cisco Talos said on Tuesday.

    The vulnerability and working exploit code first became public two weeks ago on the Chinese National Vulnerability Database, according to researchers from the security educational group SANS ISC, who warned that the vulnerability was under active attack. The vulnerability is easy to exploit and gives attackers the ability to execute code of their choice on cloud servers. Because of their power, bandwidth, and use in high-security cloud environments, these servers are considered high-value targets. The disclosure prompted Oracle to release an emergency patch on Friday.

    https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/zeroday-attackers-deliver-a-double-dose-of-ransomware-no-clicking-required/

  • Large GDPR Fines Are Imminent, EU Privacy Regulators Say

    Helen Dixon, Ireland’s data-protection commissioner, said at an event here that her office has received about 6,000 complaints since GDPR went into effect. Most have been minor, such as individuals having problems deleting their accounts with certain firms. But her office is now investigating 18 cases involving large data breaches, systemic privacy issues and other serious violations at technology firms, she said.

    Ms. Dixon said she plans to bring her first draft decisions for enforcement actions to the European Data Protection Board this summer. Other data protection authorities can raise objections.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/large-gdpr-fines-are-imminent-eu-privacy-regulators-say-11556829079

Software/SaaS

  • Microsoft launches a fully managed blockchain service

    We’re not talking cryptocurrencies here, though. This is an enterprise service that is meant to help businesses build applications on top of blockchain technology. It is integrated with Azure Active Directory and offers tools for adding new members, setting permissions and monitoring network health and activity.

    The first support ledger is J.P. Morgan’s Quorum. “Because it’s built on the popular Ethereum protocol, which has the world’s largest blockchain developer community, Quorum is a natural choice,” Azure CTO Mark Russinovich writes in today’s announcement. “It integrates with a rich set of open-source tools while also supporting confidential transactions—something our enterprise customers require.” To launch this integration, Microsoft partnered closely with J.P. Morgan.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/02/microsoft-launches-a-fully-managed-blockchain-service/

  • Services really are becoming a bigger part of Apple’s business

    This shift is already playing out in the company’s financials. While product sales dipped a bit year-over-year — down from $51.3 billion in the quarter that ran from January to March 2018 to $46.6 billion in the same quarter of 2019 — revenue from the services business climbed from $9.9 billion to $11.5 billion.

    In this fiscal Q2 quarter of 2018, Apple’s total revenue came in at roughly $61.1 billion; in the same quarter of 2019, it dipped to $58 billion. This works out to services accounting for 16.1% of Apple’s revenue in fiscal Q2 2018, but nearly 20% in fiscal Q2 2019. Apple CFO Luca Maestri says services now account for “one-third” of the company’s gross profits.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/30/services-really-are-becoming-a-bigger-part-of-apples-business/

Other

  • Foxconn Chairman Meets With Trump as Wisconsin Plant Plans Fall Behind

    The Foxconn project is one of the biggest U.S. public-incentive deals ever offered to a foreign company, a more than $4 billion package of state and local tax breaks and infrastructure investment.

    President Trump has been involved with the Wisconsin project since its inception, and said he was the one who advised Mr. Gou to build in rural southeastern Wisconsin. At last year’s groundbreaking, President Trump touted the plant as a pillar of his plan to bring advanced-manufacturing jobs to the industrial Midwest and described Chairman Gou as “one of the most successful businessmen in the world, very few people even close.”

    But President Trump didn’t mention Foxconn in a Saturday night rally in Green Bay, a rare omission for a project he has described as “the eighth wonder of the world.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/foxconn-chairman-heads-to-wisconsin-plant-site-after-meeting-with-president-trump-11556810035

  • Alphabet Falls $1 Billion Short of Revenue Forecasts, Blaming Strong Dollar

    The law of large numbers is simple: As a company gets bigger, it becomes difficult to find new ways to make money and maintain rapid growth. The issue has dogged other big tech companies like Apple in recent years.

    Alphabet explained the revenue shortfall with a very big-company answer. It said the strong United States dollar dented revenue by $1.2 billion. Google executives rattled off a long list of currencies weakening against the dollar, including the euro, the British pound, Brazilian real and Indian rupee. The company said it expected foreign currency to be an issue again in the current quarter.

    Shares of Alphabet fell more than 7 percent in early trading on (last) Tuesday.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/technology/alphabet-quarterly-results-2019.html

  • Eric Schmidt to Leave Alphabet Board

    Mr. Schmidt, 64 years old, was appointed CEO in 2001, when Google was still privately traded and just three years old. Already a Silicon Valley veteran, he was brought in to provide managerial heft to the less experienced founders of the company, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The interview process included a trip by the three men to the free-spirited Burning Man festival in Nevada.

    Board member Diane Greene, who was replaced as chief executive of the cloud division in January, also will leave the board, the company announced. Cloud has been a sore spot for Google, despite a big hiring push and the attention of some of the company’s top executives.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/eric-schmidt-to-leave-alphabet-board-11556659629

Photo by Mitchell Orr on Unsplash

Posted on

Supplier Report: 4/26/2019

Google continues to make moves in the cloud with new hires and policy changes that should make their services more attractive under the leadership of Thomas Kurian but news continues to leak about failing AI ethics boards and past behavior with open source competitors that makes me wonder if Google is actually evil (sometimes). But there is good news… Google’s streaming beef with Amazon seems to be squashed…for now.

Meanwhile, T-Mobile is facing an uphill battle with the DOJ on their Sprint merger plans and Wisconsin might actually push back against Foxconn.


Acquisitions

  • T-Mobile-Sprint Deal Runs Into Resistance From DOJ Antitrust Staff

    The nation’s third- and fourth-biggest carriers by subscribers are facing challenges on several fronts, but their most immediate hurdle comes from the Justice Department’s antitrust division, which is considering whether the deal would present an unacceptable threat to competition.

    In a meeting earlier this month, Justice Department staff members laid out their concerns with the all-stock deal and questioned the companies’ arguments that the combination would produce important efficiencies for the merged firm, the people said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/t-mobile-sprint-deal-runs-into-resistance-from-doj-antitrust-staff-11555446461

  • Salesforce is buying MapAnything, a startup that raised over $84 million

    The companies did not reveal the selling price, and Salesforce didn’t have anything to add beyond a brief press release announcing the deal.

    “The addition of MapAnything to Salesforce will help the world’s leading brands accurately plan: how many people they need, where to put them, how to make them as productive as possible, how to track what’s being done in real time and what they can learn to improve going forward,” Salesforce wrote in the statement announcing the deal.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/17/salesforce-is-buying-mapanything-a-startup-that-raised-over-84-million/

  • Why it just might make sense that Salesforce.com is buying Salesforce.org

    Salesforce has always made a lot of hay about being a responsible capitalist. It’s something it highlights at events and really extends with the 1-1-1 model it created, which gives one percent of profit, time and resources (product) to education and nonprofits. Its employees are given time off and are encouraged to work in the community. Salesforce.org has been the driver behind this, but something drove the company to bring Salesforce.org into the fold.

    While it’s easy to be cynical about the possible motivations, it could be a simple business reason, says Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research. As he pointed out, it didn’t make a lot of sense from a business perspective to be running two separate entities with separate executive teams, bookkeeping systems and sales teams. What’s more, he said there was some confusion over lack of alignment and messaging between the Salesforce.com education sales team and what was happening at Salesforce.org. Finally, he says because Salesforce.org couldn’t issue Salesforce.com stock options, it might not have been attracting the best talent.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/16/why-it-just-might-make-sense-that-salesforce-com-is-buying-salesforce-org/

  • Microsoft acquires Express Logic for its real-time internet of things operating system

    Microsoft today announced that it’s acquired Express Logic, a 23-year-old San Diego, California-based developer of real-time operating systems (RTOS) for internet of things (IoT) and edge devices powered by microcontroller units (MCUs), for an undisclosed amount.

    “With this acquisition, we will unlock access to billions of new connected endpoints, grow the number of devices that can seamlessly connect to Azure and enable new intelligent capabilities,” wrote Microsoft’s director of IoT Sam George in a blog post. “Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS joins Microsoft’s growing support for IoT devices and is complementary with Azure Sphere, our premier security offering in the microcontroller space.”

    https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/18/microsoft-acquires-express-logic-for-its-real-time-internet-of-things-operating-system/

  • CloudBees acquires Electric Cloud to build out its software delivery management platform

    CloudBees, the enterprise continuous integration and delivery service (and the biggest contributor to the Jenkins open-source automation server), today announced that it has acquired Electric Cloud, a continuous delivery and automation platform that first launched all the way back in 2002.

    The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition, but CloudBees has raised a total of $113.2 million while Electric Cloud raised $64.6 million from the likes of Rembrandt Venture Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, RRE Ventures and Next47.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/18/cloudbees-acquires-electric-cloud-to-build-out-its-software-delivery-management-platform/

Artificial Intelligence

  • The most overlooked path to commercialize AI is for companies to do it themselves

    Scaling these teams is expensive and operationally intensive. Going full stack opens up opportunities for companies to integrate labeling workflows into other jobs. Employees traditionally tasked with performing a consumer or enterprise service can take on the extra task at reduced expense. And if their role is assisted by a machine, they will gradually become more productive over time as their assistive models get more accurate with more labeled data.

    A second and inherently related benefit of going full stack is that these startups are able to generate — and own — powerful virtuous data feedback loops. Owning data flows creates more impressive moats than merely locking down static data sets. Deep Sentinel has a natural moat in the consumer security space, for example, as it not only has accurate classifiers, but accurate classifiers that continue to improve with real-world data generated in an environment it can control.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/15/the-most-overlooked-path-to-commercialize-ai-is-for-companies-to-do-it-themselves/

  • What HIPAA Compliance Means for Amazon

    Amazon is currently working with six business partners — Livongo, Express Scripts, Cigna Health Today, Swedish Health Connect, Atrium Health and ERAS, a program of Boston Children’s Hospital — to help customers make appointments, access medical instruction, track a prescription and other services. It’s a big step for one of the world’s most powerful companies, giving it a stronghold in the $3.5 trillion health care industry.

    Amazon had been working for some time to develop software that would meet federal HIPAA regulations, and it even created a health team within its Alexa division a year ago to work on the project, according to Business Insider. Meeting HIPAA standards is important, but the professors questioned whether it is enough.

    “I’m not sure that Amazon’s checking off the regulatory box on HIPAA compliance begins to answer the privacy concerns that we ought to have,” Rosoff said.

    https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/alexa-hipaa-compliant/

Cloud

  • Google Cloud brings on 27-year SAP veteran as it doubles down on enterprise adoption

    Unsurprisingly, Kurian is also looking to put his stamp on the executive team, too, and today announced that former SAP executive Robert Enslin is joining Google Cloud as its new president of Global Customer Operations.

    Enslin’s hire is another clear signal that Kurian is focused on enterprise customers. Enslin, after all, is a veteran of the enterprise business, with 27 years at SAP, where he served on the company’s executive board until he announced his resignation from the company earlier this month. After leading various parts of SAP, including as president of its cloud product portfolio, president of SAP North America and CEO of SAP Japan, Enslin announced that he had “a few more aspirations to fulfill.” Those aspirations, we now know, include helping Google Cloud expand its lineup of enterprise customers.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/17/google-cloud-brings-on-27-year-sap-veteran-as-it-doubles-down-on-enterprise-adoption/

Security

  • Facebook admits harvesting 1.5 million people’s email contacts without consent

    Facebook has admitted to accessing and storing the email contacts of as many as 1.5 million of its users without their consent. Business Insider reports that between May 2016 and last month, the social media platform asked some of its new users to verify their email address by providing the password to their email account. After doing so, the users’ contacts would be automatically imported, without any option for the user to opt out.

    Responding to the report, a Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider that email contacts were “unintentionally uploaded” as part of the process. They said that these contacts had never been shared with anyone, and that the company is now deleting the contacts that were uploaded. Facebook also claims to have fixed the “underlying issue” that led to the problem.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/18/18485089/facebook-email-password-contacts-upload-1-5-million-security-cybersecurity

Software/SaaS

  • Former Mozilla exec: Google has sabotaged Firefox for years

    “Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We’ll fix it soon. We want the same things. We’re on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?”

    “I’m all for ‘don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence’ but I don’t believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done,” Nightingale said.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/

  • IBM’s Shares Slide as Growth Challenges Remain

    Goldman Sachs analysts said they were encouraged by IBM’s results, but added that investors remain skeptical of the company’s ability to sustain improvements. Cloud revenue accounted for one-quarter of IBM’s total revenue over the past 12 months, up from 22% a year earlier, an IBM representative said.

    Shares in IBM fell 4.2% to $139.11 on Wednesday. The stock is down 14% over the past year.

    IBM’s year-over-year revenue had fallen in virtually every quarter since Ms. Rometty took over until the last quarter of 2017. The company also posted revenue growth in the first half of last year, but that turnaround proved short-lived: Revenue declined again in the last two quarters of 2018.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibms-shares-tumble-as-challenges-remain-in-hunt-for-growth-11555526709

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Apple and Qualcomm settle dispute, paving way for 5G iPhone

    The two U.S. companies have been negotiating details of the settlement for weeks, sources told the Nikkei Asian Review. They have agreed to drop all litigation worldwide and struck a six-year licensing agreement, that will ensure the launch of the first 5G iPhone in 2020. The settlement included an undisclosed payment to Qualcomm by Apple, which several weeks ago asked its suppliers to begin testing the chipmaker’s 5G modems, sources said.

    Intel followed up news of the settlement by announcing its exit from 5G chips and raising questions over the future potential of the next generation technology, which the smartphone industry is hoping will help to revive a market suffering its third consecutive year of decline.

    https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/5G-networks/Apple-and-Qualcomm-settle-dispute-paving-way-for-5G-iPhone

  • Intel to Exit 5G Smartphone Modem Business, Focus 5G Efforts on

    Network Infrastructure and Other Data-Centric Opportunities
    The company will continue to meet current customer commitments for its existing 4G smartphone modem product line, but does not expect to launch 5G modem products in the smartphone space, including those originally planned for launches in 2020.

    “We are very excited about the opportunity in 5G and the ‘cloudification’ of the network, but in the smartphone modem business it has become apparent that there is no clear path to profitability and positive returns,” said Intel CEO Bob Swan. “5G continues to be a strategic priority across Intel, and our team has developed a valuable portfolio of wireless products and intellectual property. We are assessing our options to realize the value we have created, including the opportunities in a wide variety of data-centric platforms and devices in a 5G world.”

    https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-modem-statement/#gs.6hoz8p

  • Microsoft’s green plan: Our data centers will run on 60% renewable energy by 2020

    With the 60 percent milestone in sight, the company is now targeting over 70 percent renewable energy for its data centers by 2023.

    Microsoft is aiming to cut its carbon emissions by 75 percent by 2030 and as part of that effort has raised its internal carbon ‘tax’ to $15 per metric ton on all carbon emissions, which is nearly double the current rate for carbon emissions, according to Microsoft president Brad Smith.

    Microsoft has had a carbon tax in place since 2012 that puts the burden on business divisions financially to cut their own carbon emissions.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-green-plan-our-data-centers-will-run-on-60-renewable-energy-by-2020/

Other

  • Gov. Tony Evers wants to renegotiate Foxconn deal, says company won’t employ 13,000

    “Clearly the deal that was struck is no longer in play and so we will be working with individuals at Foxconn and of course with (the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.) to figure out how a new set of parameters should be negotiated,” Evers told reporters in his Capitol office.

    He said it was premature to say what specific changes he would be seeking. Under existing deals, the state and local governments could provide the company up to $4 billion to establish a massive facility in Racine County and create up to 13,000 Wisconsin jobs.

    https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2019/04/17/tony-evers-says-foxconn-wont-employ-13-000-wants-new-deal/3498897002/

  • Google and Amazon end their ridiculous streaming video spat

    This should mark the end of a long, contentious relationship between Amazon and Google. For a while, Amazon declined to sell Google’s Chromecast devices, products that compete directly with Amazon’s own Fire TV products. Amazon also didn’t include support for Google Cast in the Prime Video app, which made it essentially impossible to get Prime Video on bigger screens if you used Google products. Google responded by pulling support for the YouTube apps on Fire TV as well as the Echo Show

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/18/google-amazon-youtube-firetv-prime-video-chromecast/

  • The EU has officially passed its controversial copyright law

    A total of 19 European Council members, including France and Germany, voted in favor of the new Copyright Directive. Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Finland and Sweden voted against adopting the directive, whereas Belgium, Estonia and Slovenia abstained — but their opposition ultimately didn’t matter. EU countries now have 24 months to apply the directive to their national legislations.

    Under the new rules, the likes of YouTube, Facebook and Instagram will be required to obtain licenses for copyrighted works from rights holders in order to host their content. They’ll also be forced to police copyrighted material through the use of tools such as filters. Critics, including Google, fear a surge in takedown requests could turn the web into a ghost town. Internet campaigners, meanwhile, have warned that the resulting censorship could quell unique forms of online expression, from GIFs to memes.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/15/eu-officially-passed-copyright-law/

Photo by Chris Sabor on Unsplash

Posted on

Supplier Report: 4/19/2019

IBM and Oracle have been eliminated from the Pentagon’s “Project JEDI” RFP, after almost a year of complaints and public accusations that the bidding event was rigged in Amazon’s favor.

Meanwhile Google, who bowed out of Project JEDI bidding early, made several cloud-based announcements this week to differentiate themselves from AWS and Microsoft. Thomas Kurian is wasting no time.

Foxconn is getting blasted in the press this week due to their (lack of) plans at their Wisconsin manufacturing plant. There are reports that rented office buildings are almost completely empty and the overall strategy for the new plant make absolutely no sense.

Acquisitions

  • Accenture announces intent to buy French cloud consulting firm

    Accenture says that Cirruseo’s strength and deep experience in Google’s cloud-based artificial intelligence solutions should help as Accenture expands its own AI practice. Google TensorFlow and other intelligence solutions are a popular approach to AI and machine learning, and the purchase should help give Accenture a leg up in this area, especially in the French market.

    “The addition of Cirruseo would be a significant step forward in our growth strategy in France, bringing a strong team of Google Cloud specialists to Accenture,” Olivier Girard, Accenture’s geographic unit managing director for France and Benelux said in a statement.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/09/accenture-announces-intent-to-buy-french-cloud-consulting-firm/

Artificial Intelligence

  • A Google Brain Program Is Learning How to Program

    In a new paper, Google Brain researchers propose using neural networks to model human source code editing. Effectively this means treating code editing as a sequence and having a machine learn how to “write code” like in a natural language model — by analysing a short paragraph of editing, the model can extract intent and leverage that to generate subsequent edits.

    To understand the intent behind developers’ source code editing actions, the main challenge was how to learn from earlier editing sequences in order to predict upcoming edits. Researchers explain the AI models needed to understand “the relationship of the change to the state” rather than “the content of the edits” or “the result of the edit.”

    https://medium.com/syncedreview/a-google-brain-program-is-learning-how-to-program-27533d5056e3
    (Thanks JD!)

Cloud

  • Google’s hybrid cloud platform is coming to AWS and Azure

    So with Anthos, Google will offer a single managed service that will let you manage and deploy workloads across clouds, all without having to worry about the different environments and APIs. That’s a big deal and one that clearly delineates Google’s approach from its competitors’. This is Google, after all, managing your applications for you on AWS and Azure.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/09/googles-anthos-hybrid-cloud-platform-is-coming-to-aws-and-azure/

  • What’s Been Lacking at Google’s Cloud? Enough Humans

    Google Cloud had prioritized developing technology over sales and support, said Gene Reznik, strategy chief at the consulting firm Accenture PLC, which helps clients deploy tech from major cloud services including Google’s.

    “There is a lot of hand-holding required” with big corporate customers, Mr. Reznik said. But Google often had product engineers rather than account managers handle customer calls. “It really wasn’t their day job,” he said, adding that Mr. Kurian brings a corporate credibility to Google’s “consumer-centric culture.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-been-lacking-at-googles-cloud-enough-humans-11554724802

  • Amazon and Microsoft Are 2 Finalists for $10 Billion Pentagon Contract

    The Pentagon said Wednesday that Amazon and Microsoft were the final candidates for a hotly contested $10 billion contract to bring modern cloud computing to the Defense Department.

    IBM and Oracle had also bid for the project, known as the joint enterprise defense infrastructure, or JEDI. But the Defense Department concluded that they did not meet the minimum requirements for the program.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/technology/amazon-microsoft-jedi-pentagon.html

  • Why IBM Is Leaving The Marketing Cloud Business

    Rather than scrabbling over marketshare in the marketing cloud space, where Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle have been dropping billions, IBM is focusing on core technologies and infrastructure, AI, blockchain, global services, consulting and creating a cloud environment to compete with Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

    “That’s the big game IBM is hunting,” Stanhope said.

    But even back when IBM seemed like it was ramping up its focus on marketing technology, there wasn’t necessarily buy in from the big wigs at the top. IBM also lost one of its marketing product cheerleaders when David Kenny, who led efforts at IBM Watson, left to take on the CEO role at Nielsen in November 2018.

    https://adexchanger.com/platforms/why-ibm-is-leaving-the-marketing-cloud-business/

Security

  • Amazon’s Alexa isn’t just AI — thousands of humans are listening

    What the company doesn’t tell you explicitly, as highlighted by an in-depth investigation from Bloomberg published this evening, is that one of the only, and often the best, ways Alexa improves over time is by having human beings listen to recordings of your voice requests. Of course, this is all buried in product and service terms few consumers will ever read, and Amazon has often downplayed the privacy implications of having cameras and microphones in millions of homes around the globe. But concerns about how AI is trained as it becomes an ever more pervasive force in our daily lives will only continue to raise alarms, especially as most of how this technology works remains beyond closed doors and improves using methods Amazon is loathe to ever disclose.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/10/18305378/amazon-alexa-ai-voice-assistant-annotation-listen-private-recordings

  • Nearly 70 percent of hotel websites leak personal data, Symantec study finds

    The main issue involved booking confirmation emails, according to Symantec principal threat researcher Candid Wueest. Many of the messages include an active link that directs to a separate website where guests can access their reservation having to log in again. The booking code and the guest email are often in the URL itself, which in and of itself isn’t a big deal.

    But, like many businesses, hotels share your personal data with third parties, meaning that your booking code and email are visible to them as well. The attacker would only need access to your booking code and email in order to find your address, full name, cell phone number, passport number and other highly sensitive information. Symantec also found that a smaller number of hotels didn’t encrypt the links sent in confirmation emails, giving attackers another window of opportunity.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/10/nearly-70-percent-of-hotel-websites-leak-personal-data-symantec/

  • Hackers publish personal data on thousands of US police officers and federal agents

    TechCrunch spoke to one of the hackers, who didn’t identify his or her name, through an encrypted chat late Friday.

    “We hacked more than 1,000 sites,” said the hacker. “Now we are structuring all the data, and soon they will be sold. I think something else will publish from the list of hacked government sites.” We asked if the hacker was worried that the files they put up for download would put federal agents and law enforcement at risk. “Probably, yes,” the hacker said.

    The hacker claimed to have “over a million data” [sic] on employees across several U.S. federal agencies and public service organizations.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/12/police-data-hack/

Software/SaaS

  • Google’s new AI tools scan documents, take phone calls, and search for products

    Google today launched Document Understanding AI in beta, a serverless platform that automatically classifies, extracts, and structures data within contained within scanned physical and digital documents. It integrates with existing products from Iron Mountain, ​Box​, DocuSign, ​Egnyte​, ​Taulia​, UiPath, ​Accenture, and others, and Google says that customers who’ve tapped it for custom document classification have seen up to 96% accuracy.

    “Most companies have billions of documents — and moving that information into digital or cloud-native solutions where it can be easily accessed and analyzed can involve many hours of manual entry,” Besik said. “Document Understanding AI can help automate document processing workflows. This means you can … start making data-driven business decisions faster and more accurately.”

    https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/10/googles-new-ai-tools-scan-documents-take-phone-calls-and-search-for-products/

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Microsoft says its data shows FCC reports massively overstate broadband adoption

    Part of the issue is that internet providers essentially just report their own coverage via a form, and the FCC reports it more or less as fact. That’s a problem not just when a mistake on a form adds tens of millions of subscribers that don’t actually exist, but when large ISPs overstate their coverage so they don’t have to pay to fill in the gaps.

    Microsoft’s suggestions, which it has made to Members of Congress and the FCC (though it won’t, as I originally wrote here, testify in the Senate on Wednesday) would make it far more difficult to fib on the Form 477, which as written seems to provide enormous leeway for a company to imply coverage that isn’t actually there.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/08/microsoft-says-its-data-shows-fcc-reports-massively-overstate-broadband-adoption/

Other

  • Thousands of Amazon employees ask the company to adopt a climate change plan

    Employees, citing Amazon’s work for oil and gas companies and what they describe as insufficient plans for action on climate change, are asking the company to commit to several goals. Among them, they ask the company to make “a complete transition away from fossil fuels,” and to advocate politically for climate-friendly policies. They also ask the company to adopt a shareholder resolution calling for a climate change plan.

    In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson highlighted company initiatives, like work to reduce the carbon footprint of shipments, and described Amazon’s commitment to environmental issues as “unwavering.”

    “Amazon’s sustainability team is using a science-based approach to develop data and strategies to ensure a rigorous approach to our sustainability work,” the spokesperson said. “We have launched several major and impactful programs and are working hard to integrate this approach fully across Amazon.”

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/10/18304800/amazon-employees-open-letter-climate-change-plan

  • Foxconn is confusing the hell out of Wisconsin

    In February, a Foxconn executive cheerfully likened the company’s vague, morphing plans to designing and building an airplane midflight.

    Such statements have not been particularly reassuring to residents of Wisconsin, where state and local governments have already taken very concrete actions to prepare the way for what was supposed to be an enormous manufacturing facility. Taxpayers have already spent more than $300 million on roadwork, infrastructure, and land acquisition related to the project. In August, Moody’s downgraded Mount Pleasant’s credit rating over the extreme levels of debt it took on for the area’s $763 million incentive package, costs that have since grown closer to a billion, in part because it had to take out higher interest long-term loans after Foxconn’s plans changed. Dozens of residents have been relocated, some under threat of eminent domain.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/10/18296793/foxconn-wisconsin-location-factory-innovation-centers-technology-hub-no-news

  • Google Sued Over Abuse of Search Power, Opening Path for More Claims

    In the suit filed in a Berlin court Friday, Idealo internet GmbH, a leading price-comparison service that is majority-owned by publisher Axel Springer SPR 2.61% SE, alleged that Google made it harder for users of its search engine to find links to Idealo after the U.S. company started promoting its own price-comparison offering, now called Google Shopping. Alphabet’s European entity, Google Ireland Ltd., is also targeted by the suit.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/suit-could-raise-googles-liabilities-in-price-comparison-case-11555056397

  • Net Neutrality Vote Passes House, Fulfilling Promise by Democrats

    But the legislation, the Save the Internet Act, faces long odds in the Republican-led Senate. The Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, said this week that the legislation would be “dead on arrival.” Earlier this week, the Office of Management and Budget advised the White House to veto the law if it reached the president’s desk. The office said in a letter that since the law had been overturned, the broadband industry had thrived, a good sign of how deregulation helped the economy.

    The legislation would prohibit blocking and throttling web traffic and would categorize broadband as a service open to heavy regulation. Supporters say the regulation would prevent companies from blocking or slowing the delivery of content like videos. Opponents say it would strap broadband providers like Verizon and Comcast with heavy-handed restrictions, and could lead to price controls.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/technology/net-neutrality-vote.html

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Posted on

Supplier Report: 4/5/2019

March went out with a fizzle when it came to major tech news, but there are a few trends to be aware of…

The EU continues to regulate complex technology with far reaching effects on European users and the entire global population. If critics are correct, the EU’s Copyright Directive Article 13 could split the internet in 3 (Europe, China, and the rest of the world).

Microsoft is showing more aggression against SalesForce via partnerships with Adobe and SAP to leverage LinkedIn to improve marketing integrations and to ensure customers have an easier time moving their cloud data around.

…And Google is getting back into robotics.

Acquisitions

  • Alibaba has acquired Teambition, a China-based Trello and Asana rival, in its enterprise push

    There were rumors of an acquisition circulating yesterday in Chinese media. Alibaba has now confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch but declined to provide any other details.

    Teambition had raised about $17 million in funding since 2013, with investors including Tencent, Microsoft, IDG Capital and Gobi Ventures. Gobi also manages investments on behalf of Alibaba, and that might have been one route to how the two became acquainted. Alibaba’s last acquisition in enterprise was German big data startup Data Artisans for $103 million.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/29/alibaba-has-acquired-teambition-a-china-based-trello-and-asana-rival-in-its-enterprise-push/

  • Daimler Trucks buys a majority stake in self-driving tech company Torc Robotics

    Daimler Trucks is the world’s largest truck manufacturer and a division of the larger Daimler Group.

    Torc, meanwhile, was founded in 2005. For most of its history, it specialized in self-driving software and sensors for commercial, industrial and military use, before recently shifting its attention to consumer vehicles. Earlier this year, it announced a partnership with public transportation company Transdev to create autonomous shuttles that connect people to transit.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/29/daimler-acquires-torc-robotics/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Google is taking a cautious step back into the world of robotics

    The new operation is simply named Robotics at Google and will be led by AI scientist Vincent Vanhoucke. According to the Times, Google is focusing on using machine learning to teach robots how to grasp objects and navigate environments, but it’s far from clear where the company’s ambitions in this area lie.

    Although Google is a pioneer in AI research, its efforts in robotics have produced no commercial successes to date. The company’s last significant foray into the field started in 2013 with a program named “Replicant” led by Android co-founder Andy Rubin. An initial flurry of activity led to the purchase of six up-and-coming robotics companies, including Boston Dynamics and DARPA challenge winner Schaft.

    But these efforts stuttered, likely because the ambitious machines Google purchased were far away from commercialization

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/27/18283645/google-robotics-program-ai-manipulation-vincent-vanhoucke

Cloud

  • Sundar Pichai met with President Trump about Google’s ‘commitment to working with the US government’

    “I just met with Sundar Pichai, President of Google, who is obviously doing quite well,” President Trump tweeted after the meeting. “He stated strongly that he is totally committed to the U.S. Military, not the Chinese Military. [We] also discussed political fairness and various things that Google can do for our Country. Meeting ended very well!”

    Reached by The Verge, Google confirmed the meeting and its subject matter. “We were pleased to have productive conversations with the President about investing in the future of the American workforce, the growth of emerging technologies and our ongoing commitment to working with the U.S. government,” a Google representative said in a statement.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/27/18284415/sundar-pichai-donald-trump-meeting-white-house

  • Microsoft, Adobe and SAP prepare to expand their Open Data Initiative

    The core principle of the alliance is that the customers own their data and they should be able to get as much value out of it as they can. Ideally, having this common data schema means that the customer doesn’t have to figure out ways to transform the data from these vendors and can simply flow all of it into a single data lake that then in turn feeds the various analytics services, machine learning systems and other tools that these companies offer.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/27/microsoft-adobe-and-sap-prepare-to-expand-their-open-data-initiative/

Security

  • Android users’ security and privacy at risk from shadowy ecosystem of pre-installed software, study warns

    The researchers behind the paper, which has been published in preliminary form ahead of a future presentation at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, unearthed a complex ecosystem of players with a primary focus on advertising and “data-driven services” — which they argue the average Android user is unlikely to be unaware of (while also likely lacking the ability to uninstall/evade the baked in software’s privileged access to data and resources themselves).

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/25/android-users-security-and-privacy-at-risk-from-shadowy-ecosystem-of-pre-installed-software-study-warns/

  • How IBM is Rethinking its Data Protection Line-Up

    In this particular case, data protection, you now have two products:

    IBM Spectrum Data Protect: the good, old, TSM. While this product is one of those that have written Backup’s history and supports a myriad of Operating Systems and applications as well as backup, it is complex to operate and designed for large environments. Furthermore, it was designed well before the advent of hypervisors and modern applications, making it really tough to protect this environment efficiently.

    IBM Data Protect Plus: a new product designed from the ground up for modern environments, including hypervisors, NoSQL DBs and more. It has a very modern snapshot-based design that pairs nicely with VMWARE CBT (change block tracking) for example. It’s easy to use and can be adopted by IT organizations of all sizes.

    https://gigaom.com/2019/03/29/how-ibm-is-rethinking-its-data-protection-line-up/

Software/SaaS

  • Adobe, Microsoft team to take on Salesforce

    Adobe (ADBE) today announced an extension of its partnership with Microsoft and a new integration with LinkedIn that will accelerate account-based experiences (ABX) through new marketing solution integrations. Adobe and Microsoft are aligning key data sources to populate account-based profiles in Adobe Experience Cloud, including Marketo Engage and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales. This will empower B2B marketers and sellers to easily identify, understand and engage B2B customer buying teams. This partnership will drive better orchestration, measurement and delivery of targeted content for a more personalized experience at both the individual and account level on key B2B platforms like LinkedIn.

    https://seekingalpha.com/news/3445688-adobe-microsoft-team-take-salesforce

  • Cisco CEO: ‘People Didn’t Think We Could Do’ Network Subscriptions

    Robbins says the company is “on track” to meet its pledge to have software and services account for 30 percent of its revenue over the next three years.

    Cisco’s focus on software and services is helping ePlus not only gain new customers, but go deeper with its existing client base, he said. It’s also making the renewal process a “nonevent.”

    “When you start selling software in a multi-year fashion, you don’t want to sell services only when it’s time to do the renewal,” he said. “The solutions we are selling today are taking a different course in terms of how we interact with customers to make them successful.”

    https://www.crn.com/news/networking/cisco-ceo-people-didn-t-think-we-could-do-network-subscriptions

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Tech companies not ‘comfortable’ storing data in Australia, Microsoft warns

    This week the Australian tech industry renewed calls for further amendments to controversial encryption-cracking legislation at an industry forum in Sydney.

    Also on Wednesday, Labor’s spokesman on the digital economy, Ed Husic, told the StartupAus forum in Sydney he wished he could “turn back time”, expressing regret for Labor’s role in passing the bill and explaining the opposition feared it would be blamed for a terrorist attack over Christmas if it refused.

    In Canberra, Smith told the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia the law had not yet changed Microsoft’s operations in Australia, but the company was worried about the law’s “potential consequences”.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/27/tech-companies-not-comfortable-storing-data-in-australia-microsoft-warns

Other

  • Europe is splitting the internet into three

    Despite setbacks, the most controversial clauses of the Copyright Directive — Article 11 or the ‘link tax’ and Article 13 — have remained pretty much intact.

    Article 11 lets publishers charge platforms like Google News when they display snippets of news stories, while Article 13 (renamed Article 17 in the most recent draft of the legislation) gives sites like YouTube new duties to stop users from uploading copyrighted content.

    In both cases, critics say these well-intentioned laws will lead to trouble. Article 13, they say, will lead to the widespread introduction of “upload filter,” that will scan all user content uploaded to sites to remove copyrighted material. The law does not explicitly call for such filters, but critics say it will be an inevitability as sites seek to avoid penalties.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/27/18283541/european-union-copyright-directive-internet-article-13

  • IBM purged “gray hairs” and “old heads” as it launched “Millennial Corps”: lawsuit

    “In 2015 and 2016, IBM doubled down on its efforts to replace its long-tenured, older employees with the younger Millennials it sought to recruit,” the suit alleged. “IBM made presentations to its senior executives calling for IBM to evaluate its long-term employees more harshly, to use those negative evaluations to justify selecting long-term employees for lay-off, and to replace these employees with ‘EPs’– IBM management short-hand for ‘early professionals.’”

    A 2016 presentation concerning one section of the company “specifically called for managers to exempt all ‘early professional hires’ from layoff, regardless of performance,” the suit claimed. “The long-serving, older employees were provided no such exemption.”

    https://www.denverpost.com/2019/03/28/ibm-ageism-lawsuit-millennial-corps/

  • Amazon To Create 800 New Jobs At Austin Tech Hub

    In a press release, Amazon said the jobs will be in the areas of software and hardware engineering, research science and cloud computing. Amazon said that since it opened its Austin Tech Hub, it has created more than 22,000 full-time jobs in Texas and has invested more than $7 billion in the state, including on infrastructure and compensation to workers.

    “In the last four years, we have created more than 1,000 jobs in Austin,” said Terry Leeper, general manager of Amazon’s Austin Tech Hub, in the press release. “With a strong pool of technical talent in Austin and a dynamic quality of life, we are excited to continue to expand and create more opportunity in this vibrant city.”

    https://www.pymnts.com/amazon/2019/austin-tech-hub-jobs-ecommerce/

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