Tag: Oracle

Posted on

Supplier Report: 5/8/2020


Photo by Martino Pietropoli on Unsplash

The shadow of COVID19 continues to loom.

Amazon is warning stockholders that they plan to spend $4B in operational expenses protecting employees and combating the strain. Pandemic darling Zoom announced a new cloud contract with Oracle (which makes sense since Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have their own competing video conference platforms).

SoftBank’s financial woes continue and they cannot rely on a strong economy for a rebound. Their investments in WeWork continue to sour due to isolation orders globally and I don’t see things getting better for WeWork or SoftBank anytime soon… but relaxed Japanese banking systems could help.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Intel to buy smart urban transit startup Moovit for $1B to boost its autonomous car division

    Sources tell TechCrunch that the startup — which had previously been backed by Intel Capital in a strategic investment — will become part of Intel’s Israeli automotive hub, which is anchored by Mobileye, the autonomous driving company that Intel acquired for $15.3 billion in 2017.

    It’s not clear yet what Moovit would be doing in that hub, but as a rule, ingesting and actioning reliable, real-time traffic data and intelligent routing — the crux of what Moovit does — are some of the most challenging aspects of getting autonomous vehicle services up and running.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/03/intel-to-buy-smart-urban-transit-startup-moovit-for-1b-to-boost-its-autonomous-car-division/

  • SoftBank to write down WeWork by $6.6 billion, compounding portfolio misery

    The tech conglomerate has poured more than $13.5 billion into WeWork, one of a string of troubled bets by CEO Masayoshi Son that have laid waste to SoftBank’s full-year earnings.

    The group maintained its forecast of a record annual operating loss of 1.35 trillion yen announced earlier this month.

    The darkening future for WeWork with customers in lockdown comes as deep-seated problems from SoftBank’s cash-fuelled push for rapid expansion are being compounded by the coronavirus outbeak.

    SoftBank shares pared gains to close up 0.5% compared to a 2.1% rise in the benchmark index .N255. The group has launched a record 2.5 trillion yen buyback to support its share price. CEO Son uses his SoftBank shares as collateral for loans.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-softbank-group-results/softbank-sees-84-billion-net-loss-on-wework-writedown-idUSKBN22C011

Cloud

  • Oracle wins cloud computing deal with Zoom as video calls surge

    The deal is a big win for Oracle, which wants to catch up with rivals such as Amazon.com (AMZN.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O) that have greater market share, and is selling a new generation of cloud technology after its first generation efforts failed to gain traction.

    Zoom and Oracle did not disclose the size of the deal, but said traffic for “millions” of meeting participants is being handled by Oracle’s cloud service and about 7 million gigabytes of Zoom data per day is flowing through Oracle servers.

    “It’s exciting to be able to come on to a platform and scale very rapidly,” Zoom’s Chief Technology Officer Brendan Ittelson told Reuters in an interview.

    Zoom’s service ran on a mixture of its own data center gear and cloud computing services from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure, but it began working with Oracle about six weeks ago.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oracle-zoom-video-commn/oracle-wins-cloud-computing-deal-with-zoom-as-video-calls-surge-idUSKCN22A1R9
    And now we understand why Larry was saying nice things about Zoom. He was working the deal. It is sad that everybody was expecting news like this because it is so out of character for Ellison to compliment other technology companies not in his pocket.

  • Microsoft signs Coca-Cola to 5-year cloud technology and business software deal

    The companies describe the agreement as a strategic partnership. Microsoft says Coca-Cola’s call center managers will use artificial intelligence in Dynamics 365, for example, to determine which issues are most important for customers such as retailers and vendors in Coke’s supply chain.

    In addition to using Microsoft Teams for smaller meetings and collaboration as many of its employees work from home, the company is using Microsoft 365 Live Events for large-scale video presentations, such as employee town halls.

    The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant reports quarterly earnings on Wednesday afternoon, providing the first official glimpse of its financial performance since the global COVID-19 pandemic began. Analysts expect Microsoft to post revenue of $33.9 billion for the quarter, up from $30.6 billion a year ago, and earnings of 1.28 per share, up from 1.14 per share a year ago.

    https://www.geekwire.com/2020/microsoft-signs-coca-cola-co-5-year-deal-cloud-tech-business-software-deal/

Software/SaaS

  • Celonis pushes beyond process mining into automated workflow tooling

    “We put all of this together — the intelligence, the action, the automation and we solve business goals for certain departments,” Rinke said.

    For starters, that involves supply chain and finance, but there are plans for building even more applications this year and beyond. The way it works for starters, is it connects to the company’s transactions systems, whether that’s SAP or Oracle or something similar. This is where the Banyas acquisition really comes into play,

    “You can basically put these applications on top of your transaction systems and tell them which business goals you have — like I want to preserve cash or I want to pay on time — and then we analyze the enterprise’s entire processes towards these business goals, and then drive everything, automate things towards these business goals intelligently,” he said.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/28/celonis-moves-beyond-process-discovery-into-automated-workflow-tooling/

  • Can API vendors solve healthcare’s data woes?

    While hospitals, urgent care facilities and health systems have stored patient records electronically for years thanks to laws passed under the Clinton administration, those records were difficult for patients themselves to access. The way the system has been historically structured has made it nearly impossible for an individual to access their entire medical history.

    It’s a huge impediment to ensuring that patients receive the best care they possibly can, and until now it’s been a boulder that companies have long tried to roll uphill, only to have it roll over them.

    Now, new regulations are requiring that the developers of electronic health records can’t obstruct interoperability and access by applications. Those new rules may unlock a wave of new digital services.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/28/can-api-vendors-solve-healthcares-data-woes/

Other

  • Zoom admits it doesn’t have 300 million users, corrects misleading claims

    The misleading blog was edited on April 24th, a day after the numbers made headlines worldwide. After The Verge reached out for comment from Zoom, the company added a note to the blog post admitting the error yesterday, and provided the following statement:

    “We are humbled and proud to help over 300 million daily meeting participants stay connected during this pandemic. In a blog post on April 22, we unintentionally referred to these participants as “users” and “people.” When we realized this error, we adjusted the wording to “participants.” This was a genuine oversight on our part.”

    Zoom’s growth has been impressive, but the company has not actually provided a daily active user count. Zoom usage has soared from 10 million daily meeting participants back in December to 300 million this month. Rivals like Microsoft Teams and Google Meet appear to be closing the gap, though. Microsoft said yesterday it now has 75 million daily active users of Teams, a jump from 70 percent in a month. Microsoft also recorded 200 million meeting participants in a single day this month.

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/30/21242421/zoom-300-million-users-incorrect-meeting-participants-statement

  • Amazon says it’ll spend $4 billion or more dealing with COVID-19

    One of the more interesting bits from Bezos’ statement was that Amazon has a team of current employees that are working to build “incremental testing capacity.” So far, the team has built a lab to pilot tests for its frontline employees, and it pledges to share any progress the team makes to the greater effort against COVID-19.

    Amazon’s Q1 2020 performance fell in line with its guidance from late last year, with $4 billion in operating income. Its net sales were at $75.5 billion, which outpaced the growth that it expected last quarter. AWS, its cloud computing services, saw a huge increase year over year, bringing in $10.2 billion this quarter, which is up from $7.7 billion in the same quarter in 2019.

    Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, these numbers reveal that Amazon — at least so far — is rolling with the punches and keeping up with the unprecedented demand seen for orders around the globe.

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/30/21243112/amazon-q1-2020-earnings-covid-19-coronavirus-jeff-bezos

Posted on

Supplier Report: 4/24/2020


Photo by Gabriel Benois on Unsplash

This truly must be the end of days because Larry Ellison complimented a company that wasn’t Oracle. Ellison gave conferencing tool Zoom (which has had major security issues since their rise to fame) a shout out in a recent news article stating the technology was transformational…

Speaking of security issues, several governments around the world are using technology to track the covid virus and the people infected. Some watch groups are concerned about eroding rights in a time of crisis.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Airbnb Gets $1 Billion Loan, Bringing Coronavirus Funding to $2 Billion

    The San Francisco-based company didn’t disclose Tuesday the terms of the loan or the names of the investors. According to a person familiar with the matter, the loan is five years, and the interest rate will be 7.5%, plus a benchmark rate known as the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.

    Airbnb had planned to start trading publicly this year. Instead, it faced escalating losses as travel ground to a halt, forcing it to raise money privately at a lower valuation than the $31 billion price tag of its last fundraising round in 2017, people close to the company have said.

    Last week, Airbnb said it was raising $1 billion from private-equity firms Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners. That investment came with a steep price tag: an interest rate of 10%, plus Libor, according to people familiar with the deal.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/airbnb-gets-1-billion-loan-bringing-coronavirus-funding-to-2-billion-11586929819

Security/Privacy

  • How Coronavirus Is Eroding Privacy

    Authorities in Asia, where the virus first emerged, have led the way. Many governments didn’t seek permission from individuals before tracking their cellphones to identify suspected coronavirus patients. South Korea, China and Taiwan, after initial outbreaks, chalked up early successes in flattening infection curves to their use of tracking programs.

    In Europe and the U.S., where privacy laws and expectations are more stringent, governments and companies are taking different approaches. European nations monitor citizen movement by tapping telecommunications data that they say conceals individuals’ identities.

    American officials are drawing cellphone location data from mobile advertising firms to track the presence of crowds—but not individuals. Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google recently announced plans to launch a voluntary app that health officials can use to reverse-engineer sickened patients’ recent whereabouts—provided they agree to provide such information.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-paves-way-for-new-age-of-digital-surveillance-11586963028

Software/SaaS

  • Oracle’s Larry Ellison calls Zoom an ‘essential service’ as coronavirus forces remote work

    Oracle founder and chairman Larry Ellison gave Zoom high praise this week, calling it an “essential service” for his business and others around the world.

    Ellison said in the video posted Monday he believes Zoom will continue to be an important to businesses once workers return to the office.

    “We’re looking forward to the economy being reopened, we’re looking forward to going back to work, but the way we work will never again be the same,” Ellison said. “We will now meet not just face-to-face, we’ll meet sometimes face-to-face and sometimes digitally via Zoom.”

    https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/15/oracles-larry-ellison-calls-zoom-an-essential-service.html
    Larry Ellison actually said something nice about another tech company… wow. He must be an investor.

Other

  • Amazon fires two employees who condemned treatment of warehouse workers

    The user experience designers Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa said on Tuesday they had been fired after internally circulating a petition about health risks for Amazon warehouse workers during the Covid-19 crisis. Costa had worked at the company for more than 15 years and Cunningham had been an employee for more than five.

    “I don’t regret standing up with my co-workers,” Costa said in a statement. “This is about human lives, and the future of humanity. In this crisis, we must stand up for what we believe in, have hope, and demand from our corporations and employers a basic decency that’s been lacking in this crisis.”

    An Amazon spokeswoman confirmed the two employees were fired for “repeatedly violating internal policies”, which prohibit employees from commenting publicly on its business without corporate justification and approval from executives.

    “We support every employee’s right to criticize their employer’s working conditions, but that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies,” the spokeswoman said.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/14/amazon-workers-fired-coronavirus-emily-cunningham-maren-costa

  • IBM age discrimination lawsuit suddenly ends, suggests Big Blue was willing to pay to avoid discovery process

    The judge overseeing Jonathan Langley’s age discrimination lawsuit against IBM has dismissed the case, which was scheduled to go to trial later this year.

    The court order [PDF] closing the case, signed on Wednesday by Judge David Ezra in the Texan Western District Court, cites a stipulation of dismissal by Langley and IBM. That suggests the two parties have agreed to settle confidentially out of court.

    The Register asked IBM to confirm that the case has been settled. We’ve not heard back. Langley’s attorneys could not be reached for comment.

    In 2018, Langley sued IBM, claiming age discrimination. He was laid off at the age of 60 after 24 years at the biz. The lawsuit was filed several months after a report from ProPublica and Mother Jones claimed that IBM had embarked on a company-wide campaign to dismiss older workers, a project said to be called Operation Baccarat.

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/15/ibm_age_discrimination_lawsuit/

Posted on

Supplier Report: 3/20/2020


Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Tired of reading about the Corona virus? Me too.

Unfortunately, the virus is causing major changes…everywhere. In the United States, workers are being sent home, the stock market is a complete roller-coaster, and infection rates are starting to climb.

The one bright spot of all this Corona virus talk is that Xerox seems to be backing off HP (too soon to be making jokes?)

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Unity acquires Dublin-based deep learning startup Artomatix

    The Dublin startup builds developer tools that allow game studios to more easily create deep learning-enhanced textures that scale more convincingly.

    Developers can use the startup’s ArtEngine platform to bring real-world materials to their game worlds, adapting the visual patterns to their 3D worlds more quickly than existing toolsets while eliminating seams and irregularities. ArtEngine uses AI to identify visual flaws in replications and saves developers from having to endlessly tweak environments.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/11/unity-acquires-dublin-based-deep-learning-startup-artomatix/

  • How the coronavirus outbreak will stress-test startups

    According to a Dun & Bradstreet whitepaper released this week, 94% of Fortune 1000 companies have key elements of their supply chain housed directly within the epicenter of the outbreak in China. Supply-side shocks are much more difficult for central banks to contain by moves such as interest-rate cuts or financial stimulus. These typically serve to catalyze demand (through increased cash or borrowing power), but do not directly alleviate the kind of production paralysis capable of hamstringing global commerce.

    Startups are especially vulnerable to such supply-side disruptions, each of which is worth considering independently. Operating through lean organizational structures in which personnel often occupy cross-functional roles, decreases in staff productivity can create significant issues for interdependent activities at startups. The diversion of attention — due alternatively to the need to attend to personal needs (such as family caregiving, healthcare issues, or household concerns) or societal requirements (such as monitoring the development of the virus and state or federal reactions to it) — can make a cumulative impact over the days, weeks, and months of the outbreak.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/10/how-the-coronavirus-outbreak-will-stress-test-startups/

  • Xerox Pauses Campaign to Take Over HP as Coronavirus Pandemic Escalates

    The company said Friday it is postponing additional presentations, interviews with the press and meetings with HP shareholders.

    “In light of the escalating Covid-19 pandemic, Xerox needs to prioritize health and safety of its employees, customers, partners and affiliates over and above all considerations, including its proposal to acquire HP,” Xerox Vice Chairman and Chief Executive John Visentin said.

    The company said it doesn’t consider the market decline since it put out its bid or the temporary suspensions of HP shares in recent days as a result of marketwide circuit breakers as a failure of any condition to acquire HP. Xerox said it would take the same view in future trading halts.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/xerox-pauses-campaign-to-take-over-hp-as-coronavirus-pandemic-escalates-11584105335

  • Oracle Tees Up Another $15 Billion In Buybacks

    The company reported revenue for its quarter that ended Feb. 29 of $9.79 billion, up from $9.61 billion in the comparable period a year earlier. That surpassed forecasts from analysts polled by FactSet.

    Oracle also reported a profit of $2.57 billion, or 79 cents a share, compared with earnings of $2.75 billion, or 76 cents a share, for the same quarter a year ago. Excluding stock-based compensation and certain other expenses, Oracle reported earnings of 97 cents a share, a penny more than forecasts from analysts.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracle-tees-up-another-15-billion-in-buybacks-11584047813
    JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup and other major banks suspend stock buybacks due to pandemic

    Bank stocks have been pummeled so far this year as the virus has spread around the world. Shares of JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley are both down more than 25% since the start of 2020, while shares of Citi have fallen more than 36%.

    As the pandemic has sharply slowed down economic activity in certain industries, such as travel, major companies like Boeing have announced that they will draw down their major credit lines from banks.

    “The decision on buybacks is consistent with our collective objective to use our significant capital and liquidity to provide maximum support to individuals, small businesses, and the broader economy through lending and other important services,” the Forum said.

    https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/03/15/jpmorgan-bank-of-america-citigroup-suspend-stock-buybacks-due-to-pandemic.html

Software/SaaS

  • Oracle-SAP Showdown: Will Larry Ellison Rip Huge ERP Customer from SAP as Promised?

    Oracle announces its fiscal-Q3 earnings tomorrow afternoon. That would be the ideal time for it to disclose this cutover customer whose defection from SAP will trigger, according to Ellison, a mass move of other big SAP ERP customers to Oracle.

    Adding to the drama is SAP’s complete dismissal of these claims, which I wrote about several weeks ago in Oracle-SAP Showdown: SAP Calls BS on Larry Ellison Claim of Snatching Huge SAP Customer.

    While the public wrangling between these two head-on competitors still run by founders with very healthy egos and little love for the other has been going on for years, it’s never taken a twist quite like this one about an imminent Pied-Piper wave of defections.

    Ellison’s predictions about trouble brewing for SAP came in Oracle’s mid-December earnings call, during which Ellison claimed that “SAP’s customer base is up for grabs.” And before a quick recap of Ellison’s promise about a showcase customer defection, bear in mind that SAP co-CEO Christian Klein totally dismissed such a possibility, saying “And actually we double-checked and honestly, I couldn’t find any customer who moved away from SAP ERP.”

    https://cloudwars.co/will-oracle-steal-huge-erp-customer-from-sap-larry-ellison/

  • Microsoft Teams goes down — just as everyone starts working from home

    The technology giant left a cryptic message — which at least is more than its users can do right now — on Twitter, stating that it’s “received reports that impact associated with TM206544 is ongoing.”

    “We’re investigating the issue,” said Microsoft.

    It’s Microsoft Team’s second outage in as many months after the software giant forgot to renew a TLS (HTTPS) certificate, forcing the service offline and users unable to communicate with colleagues for hours.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/16/microsoft-teams-down/

Other

  • France Fines Apple $1.2 Billion for Antitrust Issues

    France’s competition regulator, which had been examining wholesalers who sell Apple’s products in the country, said the company had unfairly divided products and customers between two wholesalers, Tech Data Corporation and Ingram Micro. The regulator accused Apple of making its wholesalers charge the same prices for products offered in Apple’s own retail stores and abusing its broad economic power over the firms.

    Isabelle de Silva, the president of the French Competition Authority, said in a statement that dividing duties among the wholesalers also had the effect of “sterilizing the wholesale market for Apple products.” Tech Data and Ingram Micro were each fined millions of euros.

    An Apple spokesman, Josh Rosenstock, said in a statement that the company plans to appeal the decision.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/technology/france-apple-antitrust-fine.html

  • Bill Gates to Leave Boards of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway

    Most recently, Mr. Gates spent a lot of his time at Microsoft on devising tools that could make businesses more productive, said S. Somasegar, a former Microsoft corporate vice president who left in 2015 and is now a managing director at Seattle venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group. Microsoft has been one of several tech companies to promote so-called low-code tools to make it easier for regular employees to write software applications.

    Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett, who has a long-running friendship with Mr. Gates, said former American Express Co. CEO Kenneth Chenault would replace Mr. Gates on the conglomerate’s board. Mr. Chenault, who joined Facebook Inc.’s board in 2018, won’t seek re-election, the social-media company said Friday.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/bill-gates-to-leave-boards-of-microsoft-and-berkshire-hathaway-11584135172

Posted on

Supplier Report: 3/6/2020


Photo by Jérémy Stenuit on Unsplash

The COVID-19 virus – which is rapidly earning pandemic status – has already caused massive disruption to the IT industry. As the virus spreads globally, companies are cutting back travel and pulling out of conferences.

The physical supply chain continues to be impacted with no timeline or solutions emerging other than “wait until after April”.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • DocuSign acquires Seal Software for $188M to enhance its AI chops

    DocuSign says it will continue to sell Seal’s analytics tools. What’s surely more important to DocuSign, though, is that it will also leverage the company’s AI tools to bolster its DocuSign CLM offering. CLM is DocuSign’s service for automating the full contract life cycle, with a graphical interface for creating workflows and collaboration tools for reviewing and tracking changes, among other things. And integration with Seal’s tools, DocuSign argues, will allow it to provide its customers with a “faster, more efficient agreement process,” while Seal’s customers will benefit from deeper integrations with the DocuSign Agreement Cloud.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/27/docusign-acquires-seal-software-for-188m-to-enhance-its-ai-chops/

  • Xerox Edges Closer to Fixing Its HP Printer Jam

    Were HP to become the acquirer, the new firm would emerge with significantly less debt. The Xerox offer as it stands would likely load the new entity with debt representing at least five times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. In the unlikely event that HP were to pay cash for Xerox (there would almost certainly be a stock component), then it would have debt of less than four times Ebitda.

    That includes the impact of a $15 billion buyback that HP announced today. The biggest risk for Xerox was that HP would essentially become the counterbidder for itself. By using his own balance sheet to boost shareholder value, Lores is doing just that. A $15 billion repurchase might buy back 50% of the shares, based on HP’s valuation before Xerox’s first bid. That could lift the share price well above the $24 a share of Xerox’s most recent offer.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/xerox-edges-closer-to-fixing-its-hp-printer-jam/2020/02/25/b1c61f82-57e8-11ea-8efd-0f904bdd8057_story.html

Artificial Intelligence/Robotics

  • IBM and Microsoft support the Vatican’s guidelines for ethical AI

    The pledge, presented to Pope Francis today, calls for AI that safeguards the rights of all humans, especially the underprivileged, and for new regulations in areas like facial recognition. It asks tech leaders to “humanise technology and not ‘technologise’ humanity,” Novena News reports.

    “The Vatican is not an expert on the technology but on values,” Francesca Rossi, IBM’s global AI ethics leader, said in a statement. “The collaboration is to make the Vatican and the whole society understand how to use this technology with these values.”

    The pledge is part of a larger workshop on ethical AI led by the Pontifical Academy for Life in the Vatican this week. The Academy hopes governments, NGOs, industry leaders and other associations will join the “Rome Call for AI Ethics,” along with tech companies like IBM and Microsoft.

    https://www.engadget.com/2020/02/28/ibm-microsoft-vatican-ai-ethics-pledge/

Cloud

  • Oracle has been outed as a donor for the Internet Accountability Project

    Database software giant Oracle Corp. has been outed as one of the donors of the Internet Accountability Project, which is a conservative organization that’s been throwing its weight behind a growing call for tougher privacy rules and stronger regulation of big tech companies.

    The IAP had always refused to say who was funding it, but it revealed in a disclosure on its website that Oracle donated between $25,000 and $99,000 last year, according to a Bloomberg report Tuesday.

    Oracle has been funding the IAP as part of its long-running campaigns against tech rivals such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google LLC. Oracle has been gunning for Amazon and its cloud business for years, while it’s also involved in a lengthy legal battle with Google regarding the use of patents relating to the Java programming language it owns.

    https://siliconangle.com/2020/02/26/oracle-outed-donor-internet-accountability-project/

Security/Privacy

  • ICE has run facial-recognition searches on millions of Maryland drivers

    U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have been permitted to run facial-recognition searches on millions of Maryland driver’s license photos without first seeking state or court approval, state officials said — access that goes far beyond what other states allow and that alarms immigration activists in a state that grants special driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants.

    More than 275,000 such licenses have been issued statewide since 2013, when the state became the first on the East Coast to defy federal guidelines and allow undocumented immigrants to obtain a license without having to provide proof of legal status. The technology now under scrutiny could let an ICE official run a photograph of an unknown person through the system and see if any potentially undocumented immigrants are returned as a match.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/26/ice-has-run-facial-recognition-searches-millions-maryland-drivers/

Software/SaaS

  • Oracle to pay $12 million to settle ERISA suit

    Oracle Corp. agreed to pay $12 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed against the firm for allegedly breaching its fiduciary duties in managing its $16.5 billion 401(k) plan.

    The suit, filed in 2016, alleged that Redwood City, Calif.-based Oracle caused participants of its 401(k) savings and investment plan “to pay unreasonable record-keeping and administrative fees” to its record keeper, Fidelity Management Trust Co.

    https://www.pionline.com/courts/oracle-pay-12-million-settle-erisa-suit

  • Expedia cuts 3,000 jobs, including 500 at new Seattle HQ

    Expedia said at the time that it was targeting $300 to $500 million of annual cost savings, but hadn’t previously announced explicit plans for job cuts.

    The layoffs come across the company and globe. About 500 people will be let go in Seattle, where Expedia recently moved to a new 40-acre waterfront campus and employs more than 4,000 people. Expedia said it will eliminate certain projects and activities, and reduce the use of vendors and contractors. It will provide impacted workers with severance packages that include extended healthcare.

    “Moving forward, we will exert more discipline in setting priorities and allocating resources, simplify our business processes and inter-dependencies, raise the bar on performance standards, and demonstrate and demand accountability for results,”

    https://www.geekwire.com/2020/expedia-cuts-3000-jobs-including-500-new-seattle-hq-read-internal-email-employees/

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Apple Loses Pair of Key Operations, Supply Chain Executives

    Nick Forlenza, a vice president of manufacturing design, has retired from Apple, while Duco Pasmooij, another vice president who worked on operations, is discussing an exit in the near future, according to people familiar with the moves. Pasmooij left the operations team over a year ago, moving into a role reporting to the company’s head of augmented reality efforts, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing personnel.

    Apple has about a hundred vice presidents across the company who help Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook and the senior executive team run one of the world’s most profitable companies. An Apple spokesman declined to comment. Forlenza and Pasmooij didn’t respond to requests for comment.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-27/apple-loses-pair-of-key-operations-supply-chain-executives

Other

  • Disney’s Iger Is Now in a Rare Role: Executive Chairman

    Such arrangements work when an executive chairman cedes enough control to give the new CEO autonomy, while remaining present as a sounding board, says Anthony Abbatiello, who heads the leadership and succession-planning practice at Russell Reynolds Associates, an executive-search firm. Transitions can crumble if the newly installed chairman insists on micromanaging operations, he said.

    When Jim McCann, the founder and longtime CEO of 1-800-Flowers.com Inc., became executive chairman in 2016 and handed the reins to his brother, Chris McCann, he says he tried to clearly separate the roles. He stopped attending some meetings and quarterly gatherings of managers, and refrained from participating in corporate earnings calls. Instead, he took on projects focused on innovation and better serving customers, leaving his brother to handle day-to-day operations.

    A mentor advised the two executives to never let others drive a wedge between them. “That’s rung in our ears,” Jim McCann said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/disneys-iger-is-now-in-a-rare-role-executive-chairman-11582840014

  • Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block steps down

    Block stepped into the co-CEO role in 2018, after a long career at the company that saw him become vice chairman, president and director before he took this position. Block spent the early years of his career at Oracle . He left there in 2012 after the release of a number of documents in which he criticized then-Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, who passed away last year.

    Industry pundits saw his elevation to the co-CEO role as a sign that Block was next in line as the company’s sole CEO in the future (assuming Benioff would ever step down). After this short tenure as co-CEO, it doesn’t look like that will be the case, but for the time being, Block will stay on as an advisor to Benioff.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/25/salesforce-co-ceo-keith-block-steps-down/

  • Amazon tells employees to pause nonessential travel in U.S. due to coronavirus

    Amazon sent the notification to employees on Friday. In a separate internal communication, Dave Clark, who runs Amazon’s retail operations, told employees to hold off on planning group or team meetings that require travel until at least the end of April, when he estimated that the company will have a better sense of the virus, its spread and its impact.

    In January, Amazon said it was restricting employee travel to China “until further notice” amid the coronavirus outbreak. The company also recommended that employees who are expected to travel back from one of the affected provinces of China work from home for two weeks. Amazon urged employees who experienced any symptoms to seek medical attention before returning to the office.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/amazon-pauses-non-essential-travel-in-us-due-to-coronavirus.html
    Coronavirus concerns prompt cancellation of Facebook F8 developer conference

    “This was a tough call to make — F8 is an incredibly important event for Facebook and it’s one of our favorite ways to celebrate all of you from around the world — but we need to prioritize the health and safety of our developer partners, employees and everyone who helps put F8 on,” Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook’s director of developer platforms and programs, said in a statement.

    https://www.cnet.com/news/coronavirus-concerns-prompt-cancellation-of-facebook-f8-developer-conference/
    GDC 2020 has been canceled

    In recent days, nearly all of the event’s top corporate sponsors announced that they would not be sending employees to the event due to concerns surrounding coronavirus. Microsoft, Unity, Epic, Amazon, Facebook and Sony had all bowed out of the event. GDC’s statement did not reference the virus.

    The company behind GDC detailed that they will be refunding conference and expo attendees in full, though a blog post details that the group hopes to host a GDC event later in the summer, noting, “We will be working with our partners to finalize the details and will share more information about our plans in the coming weeks.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/28/gdc-has-been-postponed/

Posted on

Supplier Report: 2/21/2020


Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash

It was a random week in tech: Larry Ellison is looking to make friends with President Trump (one of those the enemy of my enemy situations against Bezos perhaps?).

Xerox is still thirsty for HP Inc. and it looks like a hostile takeover is at least a possibility?

IBM is doubling down on communication platform Slack (thus shunning Microsoft) while Oracle and SAP are looking a little long in the tooth?

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Google closes $2.6B Looker acquisition

    While Kurian was happy to announce that Looker was officially part of the Google family, he made it clear in a blog post that the analytics arm would continue to support multiple cloud vendors beyond Google.

    “Google Cloud and Looker share a common philosophy around delivering open solutions and supporting customers wherever they are—be it on Google Cloud, in other public clouds, or on premises. As more organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy, Looker customers and partners can expect continued support of all cloud data management systems like Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Teradata,” Kurian wrote.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/13/google-closes-2-6b-looker-acquisition/

  • Xerox Raises Its Bid to Acquire HP

    Xerox Holdings Corp. XRX -1.13% raised its offer to buy HP Inc. HPQ +0.34% to $24 a share and said it would launch a public takeover bid early next month.

    In November, Xerox made an initial stock-and-cash offer of $22 a share for the maker of computers and printers. It said Monday that the latest offer isn’t tied to financing or due-diligence conditions.

    HP had rejected the initial bid as too low and questioned Xerox’s ability to finance a deal. In January, Xerox said it had secured up to $24 billion debt financing but HP again said the bid undervalued the company.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/xerox-raises-offer-for-hp-plans-to-launch-takeover-bid-in-early-march-11581342655

  • Infosys is acquiring Simplus for $250M to grow its Salesforce consulting arm

    The acquisition follows the purchase of Fluido, another Salesforce consulting shop, in 2018. The moves suggest that Infosys wants to build deeper expertise around Salesforce and make that a key piece of its consulting operations moving forward.

    Brent Leary, a CRM industry veteran, who is owner at CRM Essentials, says that Simplus is well-positioned in the Salesforce ecosystem to capture lucrative cloud integration services, and it should help expand Infosys’s Salesforce consulting arm. “By acquiring Simplus, it allows Infosys to grab more market share, while extending Salesforce capabilities to offer existing clients,” Leary told TechCrunch.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/11/infosys-is-acquiring-simplus-for-250m-to-grow-its-salesforce-consulting-arm/

Cloud

  • Google to restructure Cloud business, with some roles eliminated

    The restructuring is primarily meant to realign focus on international markets and affects fewer than 50 employees, according to a person close to the company. The company would not comment on how many employees are affected or which areas within the Cloud business would be affected, only saying it is working with internal “mobility teams” to find the employees new roles within the company.

    Kurian this week outlined the company’s strategy, which included targeting five industries: retail, health care, financial services, media and entertainment, and manufacturing.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/14/google-to-restructure-cloud-business-with-some-roles-eliminated.html

  • YouTube shines but Google ads continue to slow

    YouTube’s ad sales in the last three months of 2019 rose 31% year-on-year to $4.7bn (£3.62bn), Alphabet said. Overall Alphabet revenue increased by 17% year-on-year to $46bn – the slowest rate in more than two years.

    While YouTube is rapidly growing, Alphabet’s cloud business lags rivals.

    For years the business did not publish revenue figures for its various divisions, to the concern of investors and regulators. When Sundar Pichai took over as Alphabet chief executive last year the policy changed, although it is still not releasing profit figures for individual units.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51364853

  • Japan to hire Amazon to build government cloud

    The government aims to put systems currently operated by different ministries and agencies on the cloud in four to eight years. It is expected to officially choose industry leader Amazon Web Services this spring to build 20 core government wide systems to kick-start the process, due to its pricing and quality of services.

    Cloud-based systems are expected to cost a third of the current set up to maintain. It would also free up manpower, helping to boost productivity.

    Noncore systems, such as those specific to the pension system or to a specific ministry, will be launched as they become ready and meet government standards. The government wants cloud service providers to have data centers in Japan due to security concerns, which means it cannot work with Chinese companies required to manage data at home.

    https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Japan-to-hire-Amazon-to-build-government-cloud

Software/SaaS

  • IBM picks Slack over Microsoft Teams for its 350,000 employees

    While this new rollout makes IBM Slack’s biggest customer to date, it has been the company’s biggest customer for years according to Slack. “IBM has been Slack’s largest customer for several years and has expanded its usage of Slack over that time,” reveals an SEC filing from Slack, which appears to downplay the news.

    In a statement to The Verge, Slack says IBM has more than 300,000 users and “has scaled its Slack deployment so it can offer it to every employee at IBM.” This is a significant increase from the 165,000 IBM users that Slack last reported in 2019 after the launch of its Enterprise Grid service. It’s not clear whether IBM is using the paid version of Slack for all of its employees or a mix of the free and paid options, though.

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/10/21132060/ibm-slack-chat-employee-rollout-microsoft-teams-competition

    I am not sure if it is about “trust”… I am sure it helps that IBM already has AI integrations with Slack and they have been using the product for a few years…

  • Oracle and SAP – going soft in their old age?

    Both, it seems, have woken up to the fact that firms like Salesforce, Workday, Coupa, Google and Amazon represent existential threats they are both hard put to push back against. In short, while neither are going away any time soon, both are long in the tooth and need to reinvent themselves if they are to stay relevant.

    Reinvention is never easy, especially when you’ve enjoyed a long period of success. After all, who wants to rock the proverbial boat when the cash register is singing along? But in these companies’ case, change is a-coming and not just in the product lines where both have been slow to understand the impact of technology shifts.

    https://diginomica.com/oracle-and-sap-going-soft-their-old-age

Other

  • Target’s Delivery App Workers Describe a Culture of Retaliation and Fear

    So it’s not enough to deliver the customer’s order from Target, now if you want to keep getting good ratings and more work you have to take out their trash and walk their dogs. Cool system! The article also details how Shipt workers worry about the company retaliating against them for posting negative comments or asking pointed questions on internal message boards and Facebook groups. One worker described being temporarily deactivated after criticizing the company’s new logo.

    And then there’s the issue of pay: Shipt workers told Motherboard that the company recently switched from a straightforward per-order pay structure to a confusing algorithm that considers… some factors… to determine how they’re paid. You will be shocked to hear that the new algorithm does not favor the workers; some report their pay has dropped by 50 percent since Shipt made the switch.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dygxzw/target-shipt-delivery-app-workers-retaliation

  • Larry Ellison Joins Peter Thiel In Trump’s Camp

    Increasingly, Ellison’s company is competing with the cloud computing wing of Amazon.com Inc., and he does it with zeal. Oracle funded an anti-Amazon group called the “Free and Fair Markets Initiative” to attack Amazon. Oracle also worked desperately to derail Amazon’s bid for JEDI, a lucrative Defense Department cloud contract, going for far as to sue the federal government for illegally favoring Amazon.

    Now, Ellison is making friends with his enemy’s enemy, who happens to be the President of the United States. On Wednesday, Ellison will host a fundraiser for President Donald Trump at his home in Rancho Mirage, California. Top contributors are expected to shell out $250,000 for a photo, a golf outing and a round-table discussion.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-14/larry-ellison-joins-peter-thiel-in-trump-s-camp