SourceCast: Episode 108: The European Union’s Tech Puppet Masters
Supplier Report: 2/16/2018
Moves are being made this week! Both Oracle and Google (along with Roche and OpenText) announced acquisitions. If you pair that with comments made by Oracle CEO Mark Hurd about the economy, it seems that the M&A drought is subsiding.
Equifax, the company that allowed hackers to gain access to all of the information needed to open a line of credit in your name, announced that hackers probably got even MORE information that initially reported. News also came out this week that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has stopped investigations into the breach.
Amazon is going after UPS and Fedex and also reducing their workforce in certain areas (while increasing headcount in their Alexa and AI departments).
Acquisitions
- Roche to Acquire Healthcare-Software Company Flatiron for $1.9 Billion
Pharmaceuticals firm Roche Holding AG RHHBY 1.16% has agreed to buy the shares it doesn’t already own of Flatiron Health Inc., an oncology software company, for $1.9 billion, the companies said Thursday.
Switzerland-based Roche said the deal is part of an effort to accelerate its development and delivery of medicines for cancer patients. Roche already owns 12.6% of New York City-based Flatiron Health, which was launched in 2012.
- Google to acquire Xively IoT platform from LogMeIn for $50M
Google announced today that it intends to buy Xively from LogMeIn for $50 million, giving Google Cloud an established IoT platform to add to their product portfolio.
In a blog post announcing the acquisition, Google indicated it wants to use this purchase as a springboard into the growing IoT market, which it believes will reach 20 billion connected things by 2020. With Xively they are getting a tool that enables device designers to build connectivity directly into the design process while providing a cloud-mobile connection between the end user app and the connected thing, whatever that happens to be.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/google-to-acquire-xively-iot-platform-from-logmein/
- Oracle acquires cloud security startup Zenedge
Oracle announced today that it reached an agreement to acquire Zenedge, a company that provides firewalls and denial-of-service mitigation to enterprises.
The deal is part of Oracle’s overall work to build out its cloud platform, providing customers with security features for their applications that help them stay secure and running in a hostile web environment. Zenedge fits in with the company’s previous acquisition of Dyn, a domain name system (DNS) provider that helps determine how traffic gets directed between different applications.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/15/oracle-acquires-cloud-security-startup-zenedge/
- Consolidation in the cloud as OpenText buys Hightail and Carbonite grabs Mozy from Dell
Mark J. Barrenechea, who holds several titles at OpenText including vice chairman, CEO and CTO, says the addition of Hightail helps them meet yet another content management use case. “The acquisition of Hightail underscores our commitment to delivering differentiated content solutions in the cloud that enable marketers and creative professionals to share, produce, and securely collaborate on digital content,” Barrenechea said in a statement.
This could allow them to compete with Adobe, at least on the file sharing side. Adobe has a big stake in the creative market and providing solutions for creating and sharing the large files they produce.
Today’s acquisition comes on the heels of the sale of another early cloud company when Dell sold Mozy to Carbonite yesterday for $145 million. Mozy, a cloud backup service, which launched in 2005, was sold to EMC in 2007 for $76 million. You may recall that Dell purchased EMC in Oct 2015 for $67 billion. That deal closed in September 2016.
- Equinix acquires Infomart Dallas hub for $800m
Equinix, which was recently listed as the top data centre operator in the world by Cloudscene’s latest leaderboard rankings, will benefit greatly from the acquisition of the 1.6 million gross sq ft landmark facility. The highly interconnected hub will further strengthen Equinix’s global platform.
The Dallas metro represents one of the largest enterprise and colocation markets in the Americas and the eight Equinix IBX data centres house more than 100 network service providers—more than any other data centre provider in the Dallas metro area.
http://www.capacitymedia.com/Article/3787932/Equinix-acquires-Infomart-Dallas-hub-for-800m
Cloud
- LinkedIn still hasn’t moved to Azure, continues to run its own data centers
However, despite Microsoft owning LinkedIn, the company has no obligation to adopt Azure, a pattern seen before. Last year, Amazon acquired Whole Foods in a $13.7 billion deal, and the company made no public announcement of adopting AWS. At the time of acquisition, Whole Foods ran on Azure.
Still, Microsoft is the “preferred” cloud vendor for some heavyweight companies including Adobe and Columbia Sportswear. However, if companies don’t adopt Azure, Microsoft often boasts enterprise customers through its SaaS solutions.
- Oracle to Launch 12 Cloud Data Centers Around the World
Oracle announced Monday a plan to add 12 locations to the list of availability regions hosting its new enterprise cloud platform. Today, the platform is hosted in two locations in the US and one in Europe.
Most of the expansion will be in Asia, where the new platform, launched in 2016, currently has no physical presence. Oracle’s plan includes new cloud data centers in China, India, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. (It’s expanding in China in partnership with Tencent, according to The Wall Street Journal.)
Oracle is also adding data centers in Europe (Amsterdam and Switzerland), where the platform is currently hosted in Frankfurt, with an upcoming London region.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/oracle/oracle-launch-12-cloud-data-centers-around-world
Security
- Apple intern reportedly leaked iPhone source code
According to Motherboard, the intern who stole the code took it and distributed it to a small group of five friends in the iOS jailbreaking community in order to help them with their ongoing efforts to circumvent Apple’s locked down mobile operating system. The former employee apparently took “all sorts of Apple internal tools and whatnot,” according to one of the individuals who had originally received the code, including additional source code that was apparently not included in the initial leak.
The plan was originally to make sure that the code never left the initial circle of five friends, but apparently the code spread beyond the original group sometime last year. Eventually, the code was then posted in a Discord chat group, and was shared to Reddit roughly four months ago (although that post was apparently removed by a moderation bot automatically).
- Equifax breach may have exposed more data than first thought
The 2017 Equifax data breach was already extremely serious by itself, but there are hints it was somehow worse. CNN has learned that Equifax told the US Senate Banking Committee that more data may have been exposed than initially determined. The hack may have compromised more driver’s license info, such as the issuing data and host state, as well as tax IDs. In theory, it would be that much easier for intruders to commit fraud.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/10/equifax-breach-may-have-exposed-more-data/
32 senators want to know if US regulators halted Equifax probeEarlier this week, a Reuters report suggested that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) had halted its investigation into last year’s massive Equifax data breach. Reuters sources said that even basic steps expected in such a probe hadn’t been taken and efforts had stalled since Mick Mulvaney took over as head of the CFPB late last year. Now, 31 Democratic senators and one Independent have written a letter to Mulvaney asking if that is indeed the case and if so, why.
Reuters sources said that Mulvaney has neither ordered subpoenas against Equifax nor collected any sworn testimony from company executives. Additionally, reviews of how Equifax protects its data and on-site cybersecurity exams of other credit bureaus — which the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency all offered to assist with — have been put on hold. The bank regulators who had offered to help were reportedly told that there were no exams planned and their assistance wouldn’t be needed.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/08/senators-ask-if-us-regulators-halted-equifax-probe/
- Consumers prefer security over convenience for the first time ever, IBM Security report finds
“We always talk about the ease of use, and not impacting user experience, etc, but it turns out that when it comes to their financial accounts…people actually would go the extra mile and will use extra security,” Kessem said. Whether it’s using two factor authentication, an SMS message on top of their password, or any other additional step for extra protection, people still want to use it. Some 74% of respondents said that they would use extra security when it comes to those accounts, she said.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ibm-security-report-security-now-outweighs-convenience/
- ‘BuckHacker’ Search Engine Lets You Easily Dig Through Exposed Amazon Servers
Digging through S3 buckets certainly isn’t new. Chris Vickery, director of cyber risk research at security firm UpGuard, has cornered something of a niche for himself by regularly finding noteworthy datasets in exposed buckets. According to research published in September 2017, some 7 percent of S3 servers may be exposed.
And tools already exist for quickly grinding through leaky Amazon servers: ‘AWSBucketDump’ “is a tool to quickly enumerate AWS S3 buckets to look for loot,” the project’s Github page reads. As the BuckHacker administrator pointed out, you can also find some exposed buckets with a specific Google search.
BuckHacker doesn’t only return results for exposed servers. It also includes entries labelled as “Access Denied”, and “The specified bucket does not exist,” meaning, obviously, you can’t simply go access whatever data they contain. But it may still be useful for scoping out whether a target is using S3 at all.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5bgm3/buckhacke-amazon-server-search-engine-aws-security
- Don’t use Huawei phones, say heads of FBI, CIA, and NSA
During his testimony, FBI Director Chris Wray said the government was “deeply concerned about the risks of allowing any company or entity that is beholden to foreign governments that don’t share our values to gain positions of power inside our telecommunications networks.” He added that this would provide “the capacity to maliciously modify or steal information. And it provides the capacity to conduct undetected espionage.”
These warnings are nothing new. The US intelligence community has long been wary of Huawei, which was founded by a former engineer in China’s People’s Liberation Army and has been described by US politicians as “effectively an arm of the Chinese government.” This caution led to a ban on Huawei bidding for US government contracts in 2014, and it’s now causing problems for the company’s push into consumer electronics.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/14/17011246/huawei-phones-safe-us-intelligence-chief-fears
Datacenter/Hardware
- One Man’s Quest to Make Google’s Gadgets Great
Google could no longer afford to make ho-hum gadgets. Alphabet, its parent company, had become the world’s second-largest corporation by building software that worked for everyone, everywhere, delivered through apps and websites. But the nature of computing is changing, and its next phase won’t revolve around app stores and smartphones. It will center instead on artificially intelligent devices that fit seamlessly into their owners’ everyday lives. It will feature voice assistants, simple wearables, smart appliances in homes, and augmented-reality gadgets on your face and in your brain.
In other words, the future involves a whole lot more hardware, and for Google that shift represents an existential threat. Users won’t go to Google.com to search for things; they’ll just ask their Echo because it’s within earshot, and they won’t care what algorithms it uses to answer the question. Or they’ll use Siri, because it’s right there in a button on their iPhone. Google needed to figure out, once and for all, how to compete with the beautiful gadgets made by Amazon, Apple, and everyone else in tech. Especially the ones coming out of Cupertino.
https://www.wired.com/story/one-mans-quest-to-make-googles-gadgets-great/
Other
- Amazon to Launch Delivery Service That Would Vie With FedEx, UPS
Amazon expects to roll out the delivery service in Los Angeles in coming weeks with third-party merchants that sell goods via its website, according to the people. Amazon then aims to expand the service to more cities as soon as this year, some of the people say.
While the program is being piloted with the company’s third-party sellers, it is envisioned as eventually accommodating other businesses as well, according to some of the people. Amazon is planning to undercut UPS and FedEx on pricing, although the exact rate structure is still unclear, these people said.
- Amazon is cutting hundreds of employees to shift resources to fast-growing businesses
The Seattle Times first reported that Amazon was laying off “hundreds” of employees and “managing out” others as the company consolidates its retail operations.
A person familiar with the matter says the cuts are focused on Amazon’s Seattle headquarters and will affect some workers globally. The layoffs will occur in the consumer retail business, a unit that includes Amazon’s toys, books and groceries units, to make room for head count in businesses that are growing, like Alexa, AWS and digital entertainment. Jeff Bezos, in a statement in the last earnings report, said Amazon would “double down” on Alexa after blowing past projections.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/12/amazon-laying-off-hundreds–report.html
- Oracle CEO Mark Hurd Says Corporate IT Spending Set to Jump
“People have not invested in IT for a decade, so we have old stuff out there,” Mr. Hurd told senior corporate technology managers Monday at the company’s CloudWorld event in New York.
Mr. Hurd said most companies have shied away from spending as U.S. economic growth hovered below 3% in recent years: “If the market is only growing at 2%, that means your business is only going to grow 2%,” he said.
Business spending on IT has been flat “because GDP is flat,” he said, referring to gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic growth. To hedge against lackluster growth, companies have cut IT budgets to improve cash flow, while funneling costs into managing the increasing risk of cyber attacks, breaches and other risks, he said.
https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2018/02/12/oracle-ceo-mark-hurd-says-corporate-it-spending-set-to-jump/
- Cisco to Bring $67 Billion to U.S. After New Tax Law
The networking-gear maker said Wednesday it would repatriate $67 billion of its foreign cash holdings to the U.S. this quarter, in one of the largest repatriation plans yet revealed.
Cisco plans to spend much of the newly repatriated cash on share buybacks and dividends, it said Wednesday while reporting earnings, amounting to about $44 billion over the next two years.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/cisco-returns-to-growth-after-two-year-sales-slump-1518645580
Photo: Anastasia Yılmaz
Supplier Report: 2/9/2018
Companies love to say AI is the future, but some are spending more money on that future than others.
Amazon is going deep on AI within various aspects of their business. A recent Wired article highlights the projects Amazon is building automation and robotics strategies (managing internal process, mining customer data, and selling automated services in the cloud and via smart speakers). These practices are paying off as Amazon reported their largest profit ever.
Amazon isn’t alone, Foxconn is allocating $340M in automation R&D and IBM keeps advancing Watson’s medical abilities recently developing a method to diagnose certain types of mental illness.
Acquisitions
- LogMeIn is buying Jive Communications for up to $357M to step up in enterprise unified comms
Yet more consolidation in the enterprise collaboration software market. Today LogMeIn, the company that offers conferencing services like GoToMeeting and join.me as well as authentication and other online services to businesses and others, announced that it would acquire Jive Communications for $342 million in cash plus up to $15 million based on reaching specific milestones in the next two years.
Jive Communications is not to be confused with Jive Software, the Slack competitor in enterprise collaboration that itself was acquired last year for $462 million by Aurea. However, it is also in a bigger area of enterprise communications, and underscores how we are continuing to see a lot of M&A and general growth in that market. This is a strong exit for Jive Communications, a Utah-based startup that had raised only around $31 million since it was founded in 2006.
- Qualcomm rejects Broadcom’s $121 billion bid
Qualcomm’s board of directors issued a statement on Thursday saying that they are turning down Broadcom’s $121 billion bid to buy the competing chipmaker.
According to the release, Qualcomm “unanimously rejected” an “unsolicited proposal” to buy all of its shares at $82 each, of which $60 would be cash and $22 stock. Broadcom made the revised offer on Monday, up from the previously proposed deal price of $70 per share.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/08/qualcomm-rejects-broadcoms-121-billion-bid/?ncid=rss
Artificial Intelligence
- IBM’s New AI Can Predict Psychosis in Your Speech
The group built on the findings of a 2015 IBM study demonstrating the possibility of using AI to model the differences in speech patterns of high-risk patients who later developed psychosis and those who did not. Specifically, they quantified the concepts of “poverty of speech” and “flight of ideas” as syntactic complexity and semantic coherence, respectively, using an AI method called Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Their AI then evaluated the speech patterns of patients that researchers instructed to talk about themselves for an hour.
- Foxconn to plug at least $340M into AI R&D over five years
According to Nikkei, Foxconn intends to recruit up to 100 top AI experts globally. It also said it will recruit thousands of less experienced developers to work on building applications that use machine learning and deep learning technologies.
Embedding sensors into production line equipment to capture data to feed AI-fueled automation development is a key part of the AI R&D plan, with Foxconn saying earlier that it wants to offer advanced manufacturing experiences and services — eyeing competing with the likes of General Electric and Cisco.
The company has also been working with Andrew Ng’s new AI startup Landing.ai — which is itself focused on plugging AI into industries that haven’t yet tapping into the tech’s transformative benefits, with a first focus on manufacturing — since July.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/03/foxconn-to-plug-at-least-340m-into-ai-rd-over-five-years/?ncid=rss
Mentioned this last week, here are some more details. - Inside Amazon’s Artificial Intelligence Flywheel
Amazon loves to use the word flywheel to describe how various parts of its massive business work as a single perpetual motion machine. It now has a powerful AI flywheel, where machine-learning innovations in one part of the company fuel the efforts of other teams, who in turn can build products or offer services to affect other groups, or even the company at large. Offering its machine-learning platforms to outsiders as a paid service makes the effort itself profitable—and in certain cases scoops up yet more data to level up the technology even more.
It took a lot of six-pagers to transform Amazon from a deep-learning wannabe into a formidable power. The results of this transformation can be seen throughout the company—including in a recommendations system that now runs on a totally new machine-learning infrastructure. Amazon is smarter in suggesting what you should read next, what items you should add to your shopping list, and what movie you might want to watch tonight. And this year Thirumalai started a new job, heading Amazon search, where he intends to use deep learning in every aspect of the service.
“If you asked me seven or eight years ago how big a force Amazon was in AI, I would have said, ‘They aren’t,’” says Pedro Domingos, a top computer science professor at the University of Washington. “But they have really come on aggressively. Now they are becoming a force.”
https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-artificial-intelligence-flywheel/
- Is artificial intelligence killing Japan’s banks? (Thanks JD!)
Due to Japan’s zero interest rate policy, domestic banks can’t make money on loans, so they’ve become clearinghouses for other financial companies’ products, be it mutual funds or insurance policies. Banks are basically salesmen who collect handling fees for delivering products and services. Once that task is automated or otherwise rendered obsolete by new technology, what’s the point of a bank?
Cloud
- Is Google Losing to Amazon?
But profitability isn’t why investors favor the retailer over the search engine. Google’s $26.1 billion of operating income last year is about 40% more than Amazon has earned in its entire existence. Nor is it the propensity to make big gambles. The difference is that Amazon has figured out how to make more of its big gambles, such as Prime and its AWS cloud service, drive its accelerating growth. Since 2010, Amazon’s larger revenue base has averaged 28% growth annually while Alphabet’s has averaged 21%.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-google-losing-to-amazon-1517662800
- Amazon Reports Largest Profit Ever
Amazon’s sales rose 38 percent to $60.5 billion in the quarter, also beating estimates. Its North America revenue jumped 42 percent to $37 billion, while international sales grew 29 percent to $18 billion. Revenue from subscription fees grew 49 percent to $3.2 billion. Advertising and other revenue rose 62 percent to $1.74 billion.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) continued to be the fastest-growing and most profitable business of the company. The unit posted a 45 percent rise in sales, jumping to $5.1 billion, and saw its profit margin expand from the third quarter. AWS sales accounted for a whopping 64 percent share of Amazon’s total operating income.
http://chronicleofnews.com/amazon-reports-largest-profit-ever/
Security
- Crucial iPhone source code posted in unprecedented leak
Critical, top secret Apple code for the iPhone’s operating system was posted on Github, opening a new, dangerous avenue for hackers and jailbreakers to access the device, Motherboard reported. The code, known as “iBoot,” has since been pulled, but Apple may have confirmed it was the real deal when it issued a DMCA takedown to Github, as Twitter user @supersat noted.
iBoot is the iOS code that ensures a secure boot by loading and checking that kernel is properly signed by Apple before running the OS. The version that was posted to Github, supposedly by a Twitter user named @q3hardcore, was for iOS 9, but much of it likely still exists in the latest version, iOS 11.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/08/crucial-iphone-source-code-posted-in-unprecedented-leak/
Software/SaaS
- Oracle’s cloud bravado masks its database despair
No, we’re not going to see Oracle’s database revenue fall off a cliff. But that might not be because its customers remain committed to the database leader. Instead, they may simply continue to pay for stuff they don’t actually use. As a recent Rimini Street survey showed, as much as 74 percent of Oracle customers are running unsupported, with half of Oracle’s customers not sure what they’re paying for. These customers are likely paying full-fat maintenance fees for no-fat support (meaning they get no updates, fixes, or security alerts for that money).
- Where Barry Padgett Plans to Lead Ariba
The number one lesson by far is that you need to go in with the right drivers. The wrong driver is, “I have a bunch of data. How do I make money on the data?” There are a lot of examples where platforms have come out of the desire to monetize a resource or an asset that you already have, and that is a terrible model — number one, because you end up building the wrong set of services, and, number two, in general, you find over time that people aren’t really willing to pay for it. So you end up doing a bunch of pivots to figure out what your platform story really should be.
When you go into platform transformation, you really need to do it from the lens of the customer. You have to think about “How does the customer get value out what they’ve already bought from you?” rather than, “How do I charge the customer more, or how do I take what the customer’s generating and create more opportunity for myself financially?” When you really think about it from a customer value perspective, you build out the right set of services in the right way.
http://spendmatters.com/2018/02/07/creating-legacy-sap-beyond-barry-padgett-plans-lead-ariba/
- Microsoft is reportedly shifting its Windows strategy as it tries to outmaneuver Apple and Google
Thurott reports that Microsoft will no longer offer Windows 10 S as a standalone operating system. You could never buy it yourself, but computer manufacturers (OEMs, or “original equipment manufacturers” in industry parlance) could license it from Microsoft to pre-install on the computers they sold to customers.
Instead, Microsoft will push a so-called S Mode onto all versions of the Windows 10 operating system, reports Thurott. When enabled, S Mode will make any version of Windows 10 act like Windows 10 S, with all of the benefits and tradeoffs therein.
Microsoft had previously said that S Mode would be coming to Windows 10 for businesses in future updates; this would just bring it to all of the consumer versions, too.
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-windows-10-s-dead-or-alive-2018-2
Datacenter
- Why Mainframes Aren’t Going Away Any Time Soon
The focus on Linux isn’t the only motivator behind the upsurge in mainframe use in data centers. Increasingly, enterprises with heavy IT needs are finding many advantages to incorporating modern mainframes into their plans. For example, mainframes can greatly reduce power, cooling, and floor space costs. In markets like New York City, where real estate is at a premium, electricity rates are high, and electricity use is highly taxed to reduce demand, these are significant advantages.
“There was one customer where we were able to do a consolidation of 25 x86 cores to one core on a mainframe,” Santalucia said. “They have several thousand machines that are ten and twenty cores each. So, as far as the eye could see in this data center, [x86 server workloads] could be picked up and moved onto this box that is about the size of a sub-zero refrigerator in your kitchen.”
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/hardware/why-mainframes-arent-going-away-any-time-soon
Other
- Akamai has laid off 400 workers or 5 percent of global workforce
Akamai, the Cambridge Massachusetts content delivery network and network services provider, announced they had laid off 400 people in their earnings call with analysts yesterday.
On the call, Akamai CEO Tom Leighton indicated that the 400 people represented 5 percent of the company’s 8000 worldwide workforce. “As part of our effort to improve operational efficiency, we reduced headcounts in targeted areas of the business, most notably in areas tied to our Media business. Overall, we have removed about 400 positions or 5% of our global workforce,” Leighton told analysts.
He went onto to say that the layoffs actually began at the end of last year and have spilled over into this week. The company sees this as part of an effort to get leaner and cut costs, an effort that predates Elliott Management buying a 6.5 percent stake in the company in December.
- Best Buy will stop selling CDs as digital music revenue continues to grow
Despite no longer selling CDs, Best Buy will still sell vinyl for the next two years, which Billboard says is part of a commitment it made to vendors. Sources suggested that Best Buy’s music CD arm was only generating $40 million annually.
As we’ve previously reported, during the first half of 2017, streaming services accounted for 62 percent of revenue from the US music market. The decline of CD sales has also sparked Warner Music Group to offer voluntary buyouts to its 130 staff working in physical product, according to Billboard.
It’s not surprising that we’re no longer buying CDs — at least not for new music. The best-selling CD in 2016 was a Mozart boxset, which contained 200 CDs that were individually counted as a separate sale. Users who don’t buy music prefer to stream it via services like Spotify and Apple Music, and gadget makers aren’t really making CD players anymore.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/6/16973538/bestbuy-target-cd-sales-vinyl-cassette
Photo: Adam Fossier
Supplier Report: 1/12/2018
The tech industry is still dealing with the fallout of the Spectre and Meltdown bugs as companies scramble to patch the vulnerability.
A consequence of such hasty actions is that the patches are 1.) introducing new bugs, 2.) breaking some AMD-powered computers, and 3.) most computers that are patched will see permanent performance impact.
There is a rumor that IBM is looking to reduce global services headcount by another 10,000 employees as news of a new CFO is announced.
To complete this wonderful news cycle, it seems that Boston might be the front-runner to host Amazon’s HQ2.
Acquisitions
- Verizon acquires autonomous threat detection startup Niddel
Niddel’s primary product, Niddel Magnet is a subscription service that uses machine learning to locate infected or compromised machines inside an organization. It works completely autonomously and doesn’t require customers to generate their own code, rules, searches or even any kind of content.
“Using machine learning to improve information accuracy significantly reduces false positives and significantly improves our detection and response capabilities,” Alexander Schlager, Verizon’s executive director for security services explained in a statement. Those capabilities were one of the primary reasons the company made the acquisition.
- Google acquired Redux, a U.K. startup focused on audio and haptics
Alphabet, the umbrella corporation of Google, Inc. etc., has quietly acquired a UK-based startup called Redux, reports Bloomberg.
Redux was founded in 2013 out of Cambridge, and built technology that uses vibrations to turn surfaces of phones or tablets into speakers or provide haptic feedback.
The acquisition is reflected on Crunchbase, and in confirmed transfer of shares within U.K. regulatory filings. Google has made no mention of the acquisition as of yet.
- Accenture: Large-scale agency M&A is ‘not our game’ as we have ‘amazing momentum’
However, Pierre Nanterme, the chairman and chief executive of Accenture, gave a strong signal on his most recent quarterly earnings call that he is not interested in large-scale M&A.
“This is not our game at Accenture,” he said in response to a question from a Wall Street analyst about whether Accenture Interactive might make “larger deals, rather than tuck-ins”.
Nanterme explained: “Our game is to drive organic growth on top of acquisitions of very specific companies with very specific and differentiated capabilities.
“And then what Accenture is offering to these companies we’re acquiring is our unique access to the best brands in the world and our unique geographic footprint.”
https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/accenture-large-scale-agency-m-a-not-game-amazing-momentum/1453907
Accenture to acquire Germany based visualization firm MackevisionAccenture has entered into an agreement to acquire Germany-based Mackevision, a leading global producer of 3D-enabled and immersive product content. The acquisition will add visualization capabilities to Accenture Interactive’s digital services portfolio – strengthening its ability to create compelling, next-generation customer experiences and industrial, extended reality applications. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions. Financial terms of the transaction are not being disclosed.
Artificial Intelligence
- Japanese scientists just used AI to read minds and it’s amazing
But the scientists from Kyoto developed new techniques of “decoding” thoughts using deep neural networks (artificial intelligence). The new technique allows the scientists to decode more sophisticated “hierarchical” images, which have multiple layers of color and structure, like a picture of a bird or a man wearing a cowboy hat, for example.
“We have been studying methods to reconstruct or recreate an image a person is seeing just by looking at the person’s brain activity,” Kamitani, one of the scientists, tells CNBC Make It. “Our previous method was to assume that an image consists of pixels or simple shapes. But it’s known that our brain processes visual information hierarchically extracting different levels of features or components of different complexities.”
Cloud
- Why Oracle can’t buy its way to success in the cloud wars
For such modern cloud applications, Oracle proves a poor fit. Not only does the company offer a comparatively malnourished catalog of cloud services compared to leading vendors like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, even its former strengths become weaknesses in the brave new cloud world. For example, one of its best selling points—vertical scale—proves its Achilles Heel in modern application infrastructure, where horizontal scale at levels simply impossible in an Oracle environment becomes the norm.
Oracle’s immediate answer seems to be to stick to its old game plan, leveraging its legacy database to broker a role in modern workloads. It’s not working. As Rishidot Research’s founder and chief research advisor Krishnan Subramanian has called out, “[Oracle] needs to shore up higher order services…to compete effectively with AWS and Azure. They cannot just rely on their database service as the path to cloud success and they need to compete with AWS on the breadth and depth of higher order services.”
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-oracle-cant-buy-its-way-to-success-in-the-cloud-wars/
Datacenter
- Intel reveals possible slowdowns from ‘Meltdown’ processor fix
Your personal computers will be less than 10 percent slower after you install the Spectre/Meltdown fix, Intel has revealed in a blog post. Intel has come to that conclusion after assessing the performance changes in computers using 6th, 7th and 8th Generation Intel core processors with Windows 10. Systems equipped with 8th generation (Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake) chips and SSDs will be the least affected, with the expected impact being less than 6 percent. Devices using the 7th Gen Kaby Lake-H mobile processors will be around 7 percent slower, while the performance impact on systems with the 6th Gen Skylake-S platform is approximately 8 percent.
Depending on how you use your computer, you may not even notice a difference. Based on Intel’s benchmark results, though, you will notice some slowdown if you browse the web and use applications, and it’s safe to say that most people do. Obviously, if you use your computer for heavy applications, the slowdown will be more noticeable.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/11/intel-reveals-meltdown-processor-benchmark-slowdown/
Software/SaaS
- Why Microsoft’s Cosmos DB may displace AWS’s cloud databases
While Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server stand supreme at the top of the database heap, their cloud competitors have been gaining steam—and fast. It’s probably not yet accurate to say that databases like DynamoDB and Azure Cosmos DB are gaining ground on the old guard, given that Oracle remains more than 100 times as popular as Cosmos, for example. But for new applications largely born in the cloud, these cloud-first databases dominate.
This matters because, as Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman has written, there’s a pronounced (and accelerating) shift from private datacenters to public cloud environments: “New stuff tends to go to the public cloud, while doing old stuff in new ways tends to go to private clouds. And new stuff is simply growing faster.” Not just a little bit faster, either: We’re talking about a 20X growth rate for the public cloud versus a 3X growth rate for private datacenters, by his analysis. Of course, legacy workloads dwarf these new cloud-friendly applications, but that won’t be true for long.
- Barry Padgett Appointed as New SAP Ariba President
SAP announced two leadership changes Thursday, with Alex Atzberger moving to president of SAP Hybris and Barry Padgett taking over the helm at SAP Ariba, according to a press release. SAP Hybris solutions “comprise the omnichannel customer engagement and commerce business at SAP” and include offerings for commerce, marketing, sales, service and revenue. Padgett, who joined SAP through the acquisition of Concur, will focus on the oversight of SAP’s business network strategy as Ariba’s new president.
“Positioning these proven leaders, both with deep customer empathy and a business vision rooted in a beautiful customer experience, will have a tremendous, positive impact for customers worldwide,” said Robert Enslin, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE and president of Cloud Business Group, SAP. “The business acumen and expertise both Alex and Barry bring to their respective roles, coupled with the engineering innovation agendas already underway, will greatly advance SAP’s leadership pursuits in the areas of procurement, customer engagement and commerce.”
- Signal Partners With Microsoft to Encrypt Skype Messages
The newest Skype preview now supports the Signal protocol: the end-to-end encrypted protocol already used by WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Allo, and, of course, Signal. Skype Private Conversations will support text, audio calls, and file transfers, with end-to-end encryption that Microsoft, Signal, and, it’s believed, law enforcement agencies cannot eavesdrop on.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/skype-finally-getting-end-to-end-encryption/
Security
- Intel Fumbles Its Patch for Chip Flaw
Intel is quietly advising some customers to hold off installing patches that address new security flaws affecting virtually all of its processors. It turns out the patches had bugs of their own.
The glitch underscores the complexity of Intel’s challenge as it scrambles to fix the unprecedented vulnerabilities, which were disclosed more than a week ago.
In a confidential document shared with some customers Wednesday and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Intel said it identified three issues in updates released over the past week for “microcode,” or firmware—software that is installed directly on the processor. The updates are separate from patches produced by operating system companies such as Microsoft Corp.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/intel-warns-its-patches-for-chip-flaws-are-buggy-1515715212
- AMD Hits a Snag Over Patch for Chip Flaw
Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday said some customers found their AMD-powered computers were unusable after applying the latest security patches for the Windows operating system.
On an online support page, Microsoft said it would “temporarily pause” sending updates to some devices running AMD processors. After investigating, the software giant said it found “some AMD chipsets do not conform to the documentation previously provided to Microsoft.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/amd-hits-a-snag-over-patch-for-chip-flaw-1515528197
- Oracle app server hack let one attacker mine $226,000 worth of cryptocoins
These attackers aren’t stealing data from victims, however—at least as far as anyone can tell. Instead, the exploit is being used to mine cryptocurrencies. In one case, according to analysis posted today by SANS Dean of Research Johannes B. Ullrich, the attacker netted at least 611 Monero coins (XMR)—$226,000 dollars’ worth of the cryptocurrency.
The attacks appear to have leveraged a proof-of-concept exploit of the Oracle vulnerability published in December by Chinese security researcher Lian Zhang. Almost immediately after the proof of concept was published, there were reports of it being used to install cryptominers from several different locations—attacks launched from servers (some of them likely compromised servers themselves) hosted by Digital Ocean, GoDaddy, and Athenix.
Other
- China Swats Jack Ma’s Ant Over Customer Privacy
Chinese internet regulators scolded the country’s leading mobile-payments company for compromising its customers’ privacy, putting pressure on firms to better protect personal data in a society subject to heavy state surveillance.
The Cyberspace Administration of China said Wednesday that it had summoned representatives of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. affiliate Ant Financial Services Group to dress them down for automatically enrolling users in its credit-scoring system.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-swats-jack-mas-ant-over-customer-privacy-1515581339
- IBM names James Kavanaugh as CFO
IBM chief financial officer Martin Schroeter will move to a new role and will be replaced by company veteran James Kavanaugh, effective immediately.
Schroeter, who has been with the company for more than 25 years and has been finance chief for the last four years, will become senior vice-president for global markets.
His replacement, Kavanaugh, joined IBM in 1996 from AT&T and is currently a senior vice-president heading IBM’s transformation efforts.
While the announcement was unexpected, the logic behind the move is not and Kavanaugh would be a logical replacement for Schroeter, said Stifel analyst David Grossman.
- IBM reportedly will reassign 30,000+ staffers in services division and possibly cut 10,000 jobs
According to a report in The Register Thursday, IBM is planning to reassign more than 30,000 staff from its Global Technology Services division, which primarily offers hardware and infrastructure consulting services, to other roles within the company.
That amounts to about 30 percent of GTS’ overall staff, who are set to be “productively redeployed,” according to a leaked document (pictured). About 10,000 of the affected staff are said to be based in the U.S., The Register added.
The staff reassignments, expected to take place later this year, could ultimately see about 10,000 jobs lost through “attrition,” with no plans to replace departing employees. However, the overall head count could be even higher, as a document leaked to The Register shows that 5,000 staff have yet to be assigned new positions, which means they could ultimately be laid off. And of those that have been reassigned, some may only be moved to “short term” positions, said one unnamed employee.
https://siliconangle.com/blog/2018/01/11/ibm-reassign-30000-staff-gts-division-10000-jobs-lost/
- Amazon could be leaning toward Boston for new HQ2
Boston has already been floated as a prime candidate for the new HQ2 because it is one of the U.S. cities where Amazon has research and development operations. Amazon, according to The Business Journals, has almost 1,000 workers in Boston who focus on Amazon Web Services, Audible, Alexa and speech-recognition software. Later this year, the opening of its Fort Point office will add 900 employees to the company’s Boston ranks.
https://www.constructiondive.com/news/amazon-could-be-leaning-toward-boston-for-new-hq2/514674/
Photo: Robert Szadkowski