Supplier Report: 7/26/2019


Photo by Chris Hall on Unsplash

Microsoft has been performing very well in the cloud space, beating expectations and increasing profits. Other companies like IBM… not so much. In fact IBM’s performance (while growing) is causing some analysts to call Big Blue a “zombie company”.

The drama between the Pentagon, Amazon, and Oracle may not be over. The suppliers that were down-selected (Oracle and IBM) likely complained directly to President Trump (he is friendly with Safra Catz) and he has vowed to “look into it”.

And it looks like Broadcom isn’t so interested in buying Symantec. That deal is said to be dead.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • VMware acquires ML acceleration startup Bitfusion

    VMware today announced that it has acquired Bitfusion, a former participant in our Startup Battlefield competition. Bitfusion was one of the earliest companies to help businesses accelerate their complex computing workloads on GPUs, FPGAs and ASICs. In its earliest iteration, over four years ago, the company’s focus was less on AI and machine learning and more on other areas of high-performance computing, but, unsurprisingly, that shifted as the interested in AI and ML increased in recent years.

    VMware will use Bitfusion’s technology, which is vendor- and hardware-agnostic, to bring similar capabilities to its customers. Specifically, it plans to integrate Bitfusion into its vSphere platform.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/18/vmware-acquires-ml-acceleration-startup-bitfusion/

  • Symantec and Broadcom cease deal negotiations: Sources

    People familiar with the matter added that Broadcom indicated in early conversations that it would be willing to pay $28.25 per share for Symantec, but that following due diligence knocked that figure down below $28.

    Symantec had surged earlier this month after it was revealed that Broadcom was in advanced talks to acquire the security software vendor. Faber had reported the two sides were negotiating a price and had seen possible synergies of $1.5 billion.

    Symantec shares dropped 12.8% to $22.30 on Monday.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/15/symantec-and-broadcom-cease-deal-negotiations-sources.html

Cloud

  • Microsoft’s Cloud Business Drives Record Sales

    Revenue rose 12% to $33.72 billion from the year-earlier period, the company said Thursday, beating Wall Street estimates. Profit also topped expectations.

    The results for Microsoft’s fiscal fourth quarter ended in June reflected continued strength in corporate spending on the cloud services that have revolutionized business computing over the past decade. Companies increasingly are paying subscriptions for software and renting computer power, rather than buying applications that run on their own servers.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsofts-cloud-business-drives-record-sales-11563481232

  • IBM Revenue Lags as Cloud Pivot Remains a Challenge

    Revenue fell 4.2% from a year earlier to $19.16 billion. Profit rose 3.9% to $2.5 billion, as the company worked to scale back its exposure to businesses with smaller profit margins.

    IBM has trailed Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. as customers race to do more of their computing in the cloud—online services that free companies from the need to buy and maintain their own systems. As competitors report consistently strong revenue growth, buoyed by sales of their cloud services, IBM has absorbed a string of declines.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-revenue-lags-as-cloud-pivot-remains-a-challenge-11563395020

  • Trump says he’s looking into a Pentagon cloud contract for Amazon or Microsoft because ‘we’re getting tremendous complaints’

    “We’re getting tremendous complaints from other companies,” Trump said in a press pool at the White House during a meeting with the prime minister of The Netherlands. “Some of the greatest companies in the world are complaining about it.” He named Microsoft, Oracle and IBM.

    Since April, Microsoft and Amazon have been the only remaining competitors for the contract after IBM and Oracle were ruled out by the Defense Department. The contract, known as JEDI, is viewed as a marquee deal for the company that ultimately wins it, particularly as Microsoft and Amazon are aggressively pursuing government work for their expanding cloud units.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/18/trump-says-seriously-looking-into-amazons-pentagon-contract.html

    House Republicans to Trump: Stay Out of Pentagon Cloud Acquisition

    “We believe that it is essential for our national security to move forward as quickly as possible with the award and implementation of this contract,” said the Republican lawmakers, who sit on one of the two Congressional committees with Pentagon oversight responsibilities. “It meets only a portion of DOD’s needs for cloud, but it is an important first step. Moving to the cloud will help DOD operate faster, more efficiently and compete with adversaries, like China.

    “Our committee has conducted oversight of this contract from the beginning. As you know, the courts have upheld DOD’s handling of this competition. While it is understandable that some of the companies competing for the contract are disappointed at not being selected as one of the finalists, further unnecessary delays will only damage our security and increase the costs of the contract.”

    https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/07/house-republicans-trump-stay-out-pentagon-cloud-acquisition/158557/

  • Google officially closes ‘Dragonfly,’ its controversial Chinese search project

    Google’s controversial Project Dragonfly has officially been shelved. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this week, Google’s vice president of public policy, Karan Bhatia, said that work on its censored Chinese search engine had been “terminated.” A spokesperson later confirmed that Google has no plans to launch Search in China, and that there is no work being undertaken on such a project.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/17/google-officially-closes-dragonfly-chinese-search/

Security/Privacy

  • Equifax to Pay Around $700 Million to Resolve Data-Breach Probes

    Under the agreement, the credit-reporting firm would pay around $700 million to settle with the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and most state attorneys general, according to people familiar with the matter. The deal would also resolve a nationwide consumer class-action lawsuit, they said.

    The settlement could be announced as soon as Monday, the people said. The amount Equifax ultimately pays could shift based on the number of consumer claims that are eventually filed, they added.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/equifax-to-pay-around-700-million-to-resolve-data-breach-probes-11563577702

  • Hackers breach 62 US colleges by exploiting ERP vulnerability

    The vulnerability is in Ellucian Banner Web Tailor, a module of the Ellucian Banner ERP that lets universities customize their front-facing web applications. The vulnerability also impacts Ellucian Banner Enterprise Identity Services, a module for managing user accounts.

    Earlier this year, a security researcher named Joshua Mulliken discovered a vulnerability in the authentication mechanism used by the two modules that can allow remote attackers to hijack victims’ web sessions and gain access to their accounts.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/hackers-breach-62-us-colleges-by-exploiting-erp-vulnerability/

  • Florida DMV sells your personal information to private companies, marketing firms

    The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles told the I-Team under the law, it must provide driver information but said federal privacy laws and its own rules limit how outside companies can access Floridian’s personal information.

    One of the data brokers accessing Florida DMV information is Arkansas-based marketing firm Acxiom, which has an agreement with the state to buy driver and ID cardholder data for a penny a record.

    On its website, Acxiom claims it has collected information from almost every adult in the United States.

    https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-news/i-team-investigates/i-team-florida-dmv-sells-your-personal-information-to-private-companies-marketing-firms

Software/SaaS

  • IBM is a ‘zombie company’: Analyst

    Yes, IBM’s cloud business is growing, but it pales in comparison to the competition. Its second-quarter cloud revenue climbed 5%. Microsoft’s Azure enjoyed revenue growth of 64% in the company’s fourth quarter of its fiscal year, while AWS jumped more than 41% in its first quarter.

    Just this week AT&T inked a reported $2 billion deal with Microsoft to move most of its internal business applications used by its largest unit to Microsoft’s Azure cloud. As part of the agreement, AT&T’s (T) employees will use Azure’s productivity tools and services.

    The deal came one day after IBM said that AT&T would move internal applications used by its business services unit to IBM’s Cloud. The exact terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but an IBM spokesperson describes it as a “multi-billion dollar deal.”

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-is-a-zombie-company-analyst-122944734.html

Other

  • EU opens Amazon antitrust investigation

    The EU’s Competition Commission has opened a formal antitrust investigation into Amazon to investigate whether the company is using sales data to gain an unfair advantage over smaller sellers on the Marketplace platform. The Commission says it will look into Amazon’s agreements with marketplace sellers, as well as how Amazon uses data to choose which retailer to link to using the “Buy Box” on its site. The announcement comes on the same day that Amazon announced changes to its third-party seller service agreement in response to a separate antitrust investigation by German regulators.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/17/20696214/amazon-european-union-antitrust-investigation-third-party-seller-marketplace

Supplier Report: 7/19/2019


Photo by Runde Imaging on Unsplash

Remember when Foxconn was supposed to bring 13,000 jobs to Wisconsin? The number is down to 1,500 according to the current Governor. Meanwhile Amazon thinks they are going to have a talent shortage in the future and is committed to re-training 1,000 workers in more advanced technical skills.

Oracle has lost their legal challenge to the Pentagon over their treatment in the never-ending JEDI cloud contract. With this ruling, Oracle is officially done and everyone can move on with our lives.

Finally – Facebook got fined $5B for all the security flaws and election issues it caused over the last few years (Facebook made $55B last year).

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Cisco to Buy Acacia Communications for About $2.6 Billion

    Acacia, a Maynard, Mass.-based maker of optical interconnect technologies like modules and semiconductors, derived roughly 14% of its $339.9 million in revenue last year from Cisco. Acacia was formed in 2009 and went public in May 2016.

    Cisco said Acacia’s technology will enable users of its hardware to drive more data over high-speed internet networks. Cisco executives said the company is looking to take advantage of a growing trend of customers migrating to pluggable technology from chassis-based systems. Pluggable modules give network operators a more efficient way to increase the data that runs over networks.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/cisco-to-buy-acacia-communications-for-about-2-6-billion-11562675698

  • Google acquires enterprise cloud storage provider Elastifile

    Google today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase Elastifile, a Santa Clara, California-based provider of enterprise cloud file storage solutions, for an undisclosed price. (CTech cited an anonymous source as saying Google is paying around $200 million.) Assuming the acquisition passes regulatory muster, the search giant expects it to be completed later this year, at which point the Elastifile team will join Google Cloud.

    Perhaps uncoincidentally, this news comes on the heels of the launch of Elastifile File Service on Google Cloud Platform, a fully managed version of Elastifile optimized for Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian wrote in a blog post that Elastifle will be integrated with Google Cloud Filestore in the coming months.

    https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/09/google-acquires-enterprise-cloud-storage-provider-elastifile/

  • IBM closes Red Hat acquisition for $34 billion

    IBM originally announced its intent to acquire the Linux developer in October of last year. The U.S. Department of Justice gave its stamp of approval in May, and the last big potential roadblock was removed when the EU gave its unconditional approval at the end of June.

    IBM says that Red Hat will stay under the watch of CEO Jim Whitehurst, with Whitehurst joining IBM’s senior management and reporting directly to IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/09/ibm-closes-red-hat-acquisition-for-34-billion/

Artificial Intelligence

  • AI smokes 5 poker champs at a time in no-limit Hold’em with ‘relentless consistency’

    With six players, the possibilities for hands, bets and possible outcomes are so numerous that it is effectively impossible to account for all of them, especially in a minute or less. It’d be like trying to exhaustively document every grain of sand on a beach between waves.

    Yet over 10,000 hands played with champions, Pluribus managed to win money at a steady rate, exposing no weaknesses or habits that its opponents could take advantage of. What’s the secret? Consistent randomness.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/11/ai-smokes-5-poker-champs-at-a-time-in-no-limit-holdem-with-ruthless-consistency/

Cloud

  • Oracle loses court challenge to $10 billion cloud contract

    Federal Claims Court Senior Judge Eric Bruggink dismissed the company’s argument that the contract violates federal procurement laws and is unfairly tainted by conflicts of interests.

    Bruggink said that because Oracle didn’t meet the criteria for the bid, it “cannot demonstrate prejudice as a result of other possible errors in the procurement process.”

    The decision is a major blow to Oracle, which risks losing a share of its federal defense business if the Pentagon awards the contract to another cloud company. The ruling also eliminates a headache for the Pentagon, which has been fending off challenges to its winner-take-all strategy in the cloud contract for more than a year.

    https://www.unionleader.com/news/business/oracle-loses-court-challenge-to-billion-cloud-contract/article_95e0b592-3b67-539f-923a-523fa9ced138.html

Security/Privacy

  • Facebook’s $5 billion FTC fine is an embarrassing joke

    That’s actually the real problem here: fines and punishments are only effective when they provide negative consequences for bad behavior. But Facebook has done nothing but behave badly from inception, and it has only ever been slapped on the wrist by authority figures and rewarded by the market. After all, Facebook was already under a previous FTC consent decree for privacy violations imposed in 2011, and that didn’t seem to stop any of the company’s recent scandals from happening. As Kara Swisher has written, you have to add another zero to this fine to make it mean anything.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20692524/facebook-five-billion-ftc-fine-embarrassing-joke

Other

  • Amazon to Retrain a Third of Its U.S. Workforce

    Amazon’s promise to upgrade the skills of its workforce—reported by The Wall Street Journal Thursday—represents one of the biggest corporate retraining initiatives on record, and breaks down to about $7,000 per worker, or about $1,200 a year through 2025. By comparison, large employers with 10,000 workers or more that were surveyed by the Association for Talent Development reported spending an average of $500 per worker on training in 2017.

    Amazon said it would retrain 100,000 workers in total by expanding existing training programs and rolling out new ones meant to help its employees move into more-advanced jobs inside the company or find new careers outside of it. The training is voluntary and mostly free for employees and won’t obligate participants to remain at Amazon, the Seattle-based company said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-retrain-a-third-of-its-u-s-workforce-11562841120

  • Foxconn will only create 1,500 jobs, says Wisconsin governor

    The Foxconn factory in Wisconsin will only create 1,500 jobs when it starts production next May, Gov. Tony Evers told CNBC yesterday. That’s the same number Foxconn has been saying since it shifted plans for the factory a few months ago, and far short of the 13,000 jobs that were promised when President Trump broke ground a year ago. Evers has been negotiating with Foxconn since he replaced former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, and he says he now has “clarity” on Foxconn’s plans.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20689021/foxconn-wisconsin-governor-jobs-tony-evers-manufacturing

  • The Fortune 500 has a new woman CEO: Accenture’s Julie Sweet

    The consulting company said Thursday that Sweet, 51, will take the top job in September. She’s currently the head of Accenture’s North America business, which accounts for almost 50% of the company’s global revenues.

    “Julie is the right person to lead Accenture into the future, given her strong command of our business and proven ability to drive results in our largest market,” David Rowland, the company’s interim CEO and incoming executive chairman, said in a statement.

    Sweet joined Accenture (ACN) in 2010. She served as the company’s general counsel after 10 years as a partner at the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

    https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/12/business/accenture-julie-sweet/index.html

Supplier Report: 7/12/2019


Photo by Maria Teneva on Unsplash

The 4th of July is over, people are back to work, and the tech industry is picking itself up after a rough couple of weeks.

Old school software companies Corel and Symantec are likely to be acquired. Broadcom is interesting in Symantec and KKR has agreed to purchase Corel. Fans of the “off-brand” (see WordPerfect and PaintShop Pro) software company will be happy to know KKR is looking to invest in Corel’s product line.

The U.K. doesn’t seem to have the issues with Huawei that the U.S. does. The Chinese company has been helping British telecom companies build out their 5G networks… interesting.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Broadcom Is in Advanced Talks to Acquire Symantec

    Broadcom could reach an agreement to buy the Mountain View, California-based company within weeks, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the matter isn’t public. No deal has been finalized and the talks could fall through, the people said.

    A representative for Symantec declined to comment. A representative for Broadcom didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-02/broadcom-is-said-to-be-in-advanced-talks-to-acquire-symantec

  • KKR confirms it has acquired Canadian software company Corel, reportedly for over $1B

    The terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed, but when the first rumors of a deal started to emerge a couple of months ago, the price being reported was over $1 billion.

    Corel has brought itself into the modern era, with acquisitions like Parallels — a virtualization giant that lets businesses run far-flung and very fragmented networks as if they weren’t — underscoring that strategy. And that is where KKR appears to be putting its focus. In the memo that a source passed us yesterday, Corel’s CEO Patrick Nichols assured staff that there would be no layoffs and that this acquisition would mean a significant new infusion of capital both to expand its existing business as well as to make more acquisitions to grow.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/03/kkr-corel-vector-parallels/

  • Oracle buys Brazilian firm Oxygen Systems

    Created in 2017 as a spin-off of Chilean IT integrator Sonda, Oxygen Systems is focused on the localization of the systems offering under Oracle’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) Netsuite.

    Oracle’s low-key announcement simply states that the acquisition, which has been completed, “strengthens Oracle NetSuite support for international and global customers, delivering a seamless ERP localization experience in Brazil.”

    Small and medium enterprises represent 20 percent of Oracle’s business in Brazil and over the last couple of years, it has been focusing on chasing more clients in that space.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/oracle-buys-brazilian-firm-oxygen-systems/

Cloud

  • It was a really bad month for the internet

    What can we learn? For one, internet providers need to do better with routing filters, and, secondly, perhaps it’s not a good idea to run new code directly on a production system.

    These past few weeks have not looked good for the cloud, shaking confidence in the many reliant on hosting giants — like Amazon, Google and more. Although some quickly — and irresponsibly and eventually wrongly — concluded the outages were because of hackers or threat actors launching distributed denial-of-service attacks, it’s always far safer to assume that an internal mistake is to blame.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/05/bad-month-for-the-internet/

Security/Privacy

  • China has been secretly installing spyware on some tourists’ Android phones

    Chinese border agents have been installing spyware on phones from tourists who enter the country through certain crossings in the Xinjiang region, an area where China is known to be conducting intensive surveillance of the largely Muslim ethnic minority groups who live there. The spyware was reported today by a group of publications, including The Guardian, Motherboard, The New York Times, and more.

    Border agents in the region have been requiring tourists to hand over their phones and passcodes before entering, according to the reports. The agents will then disappear with the phones in order to snoop through them. For iPhones, that reportedly includes plugging them into a machine that scans through the phone’s contents. For Android phones, it goes further, with border agents installing a spyware app that scans the phone and collects data.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/2/20679053/china-spyware-tourists-android-phones-xinjiang

  • 7-Eleven Japanese customers lose $500,000 due to mobile app flaw

    Approximately 900 customers of 7-Eleven Japan have lost a collective of ¥55 million ($510,000) after hackers hijacked their 7pay app accounts and made illegal charges in their names.

    The 7pay mobile app was designed to show a barcode on the phone’s screen when customers reach the 7-Eleven cashier counters. The cashier scans the barcode, and the bought goods are charged to the user’s 7pay app and the customer’s credit or debit cards that have been saved in the account.

    However, in a mind-boggling turn of events, the app contained a password reset function that was incredibly poorly designed. It allowed anyone to request a password reset for other people’s accounts, but have the password reset link sent to their email address, instead of the legitimate account owner.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/7-eleven-japanese-customers-lose-500000-due-to-mobile-app-flaw/

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Huawei is helping all the UK’s top carriers build their 5G networks

    British carriers apparently aren’t put off by US pressure to ditch Huawei for their 5G network deployments. The Guardian’s sources understand that all four of the UK’s largest wireless providers (EE, O2, Three and Vodafone) are all using Huawei to build their 5G networks. The Chinese firm is reportedly involved with six out of Vodafone’s seven initial 5G cities, while it’s also helping with “hundreds” of EE sites. O2 and Three have also awarded contracts to Huawei, according to the tipsters.

    There might be reasons to take a chance on Huawei, apart from the lack of publicly available evidence of surveillance. Assembly’s Matthew Howett noted that reliance on a single supplier for a cellular network is dangerous. A major failure in Ericsson equipment left O2 users without 3G and LTE service for a full day — if everyone had been using similar hardware, the UK as a whole might have suffered the same problem. It might also delay launches by as much as two years, Howett said. Like it or not, Huawei could be useful in helping some countries offer 5G in a timely and reliable fashion.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/06/huawei-gear-in-uk-5g-networks/

 

Supplier Report: 7/5/2019


Photo by Trent Yarnell on Unsplash

Former Equifax CIO Jun Ying is going to prison for insider trading.  He sold off stock prior to the breach announcement (but he was well aware of) avoiding over $100K in loses… finally someone is getting held accountable.

Google’s peers are petitioning the US Government to hold the company accountable for anti-trust behavior. It is one thing for the government to investigate but I do find it troubling when other companies start pointing the government at one of their competitors. I certainly don’t think they have end user’s best interests at heart.

Finally the EU, who collectively are very sensitive to monopoly behavior, are allowing IBM to move forward with their acquisition of Red Hat.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • EU Gives Unconditional Green Light to IBM’s $34B Purchase of Red Hat

    The Commission said the acquisition would not create any competition problems in relevant markets.

    In its investigation, the commission looked at the impact the transaction would have on the markets for middleware and system infrastructure software. Middleware is software used for making and operating enterprise application software, such as online payment processing. System infrastructure software allows companies to control hardware resources, such as servers, across enterprise application software.

    The commission found that the merged company would continue to face significant competition from other players in all potential markets.

    https://www.law.com/2019/06/27/eu-gives-unconditional-green-light-to-ibms-34b-purchase-of-red-hat-292-48931/?slreturn=20190530072301

Artificial Intelligence

  • Google will now tell you how crowded your bus or train is likely to be

    Google is basing these details on past rides. For months, Google has been asking some people who use Google Maps to provide additional details about the level of crowdedness of their transit trips. After completing their trips, riders were given four options: many empty seats, few empty seats, standing room only, or cramped standing room only.

    Now, the company has collected enough data that it can begin offering predictions to customers who use Google Maps to plan their daily commute. The new feature is available starting today in 200 cities around the globe. (About one-quarter of cities are in the US, according to The Wall Street Journal.)

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/27/18761187/google-maps-transit-crowded-delays-predictions-train-bus-subway

  • Amazon’s Facial Analysis Program Is Building A Dystopic Future For Trans And Nonbinary People

    As Os Keyes, a PhD student at the University of Washington, writes in their 2018 study of the subject:

    If systems are not designed to include trans people, inclusion becomes an active struggle: individuals must actively fight to be included in things as basic as medical systems, legal systems or even bathrooms. This creates space for widespread explicit discrimination, which has (in, for example, the United States) resulted in widespread employment, housing and criminal justice inequalities , increased vulnerability to intimate partner abuse and[35], particularly for trans people of colour, increased vulnerability to potentially fatal state violence.

    https://jezebel.com/amazons-facial-analysis-program-is-building-a-dystopic-1835075450

Cloud

  • The Real Cloud Wars: The $6 Billion Battle Over The Future Of Weather Forecasting

    For decades, private weather forecasting has been a cozy industry, dominated in the U.S. by AccuWeather, The Weather Company (founded as The Weather Channel in 1982 and bought by IBM for $2.3 billion in 2016) and DTN, which focuses on industrial concerns and was purchased by a Swiss holding company for $900 million in 2017.

    But now a perfect storm of macro-trends—ever cheaper processing power, cloud computing, vastly improved AI and a proliferation of low-cost sensors—has opened up the field to a fresh crop of ambitious startups. In aggregate, they have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, who think the incumbents look vulnerable to creative new business models.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/06/24/the-real-cloud-wars-the-6-billion-battle-over-the-future-of-weather-forecasting/#1dcd097d298f

Security/Privacy

  • U.S. May Outlaw Messaging Encryption Used By WhatsApp, iMessage And Others, Report

    Politico cited several unnamed sources in reporting that “the encryption challenge, which the government calls ‘going dark,’ was the focus of a National Security Council meeting Wednesday morning that included the No. 2 officials from several key agencies.” The discussion focused on the lockdown of messaging apps, billed as “a privacy and security feature,” which “frustrates authorities investigating terrorism, drug trafficking and child pornography.”

    The challenge for governments, the U.S. included, is that the privacy of messaging has become a central theme in the ongoing debate around privacy, data security and information integrity. People around the world are shifting from public social media posting to closed groups, and messaging platforms have been a major driver of that. Even Facebook has put messaging security and privacy at the center of its new strategy.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/06/29/u-s-may-outlaw-uncrackable-end-to-end-encrypted-messaging-report-claims/#2fb8053c6c87

Software/SaaS

  • Oracle Hot Takes: Workday “Not Competitive,” SAP a Time Bomb, Microsoft Valued Partner

    Here’s Hurd’s reply about a competitor that’s growing faster than Oracle in the cloud:

    “I think Workday does – again, my sense of Workday is they do a decent job in upmarket HCM where they can divorce the HCM buyer from the ERP buyer. When the ERP buyer and the HCM buyer are aligned and combined, they’re really in a position with no chance because they don’t have much of a financials product,” Hurd said.

    **

    “What that means is, they have to roll up a big new build to move to this thing Larry called earlier, HANA. It’s a big damn build and so the poor CIO or CFO or whoever this guy is, has to show up to the board, and says to the board of directors, ‘We’ve got a $500-million build to move to HANA.’”

    Hurd continued: “So yeah, I mean, I think it’s an incredibly interesting strategy on their part to put all their customers at play. Do we get calls from customers that we haven’t been called or talked to in 20 years? The answer is yes, and is it because – and remember… that when we sold to customers 15 years ago, they never really talked to SAP after that and vice versa, because you’re expected to stay with these ERP systems forever.

    https://cloudwars.co/oracle-workday-not-competitive-sap-time-bomb/

  • Bill Gates accidentally makes the case to regulate the hell out of platform companies

    The important thing to know is that it’s well-established that the network effect enables the winning platforms to achieve massive scale and preclude competition. It’s a devastating combination that Gates calls “complete doom.” There’s a reason so many tech markets tend toward monopoly or duopoly, like Android and iOS, or Google search, or Facebook, or Uber and Lyft — the network effect makes it basically impossible to build a competitor because you can’t populate the network. And you can’t buy your way out of this problem: Microsoft famously paid app developers to write Windows Phone apps when there weren’t enough users to otherwise draw developer attention, and… it didn’t work.

    Gates might be saying this to describe why Windows Phone didn’t succeed — it didn’t have the app ecosystem to compete with Apple and Android — but what he is describing is the exact reason regulating tech platforms is the subject of so much conversation around the world: you can’t count on competition to keep these companies in line, because it’s virtually impossible to build a competitor. Even Microsoft couldn’t do it!

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/24/18715702/bill-gates-regulate-platforms-network-effect-android-mistake-microsoft

    Don’t buy Bill Gates’ outrageous claim that Microsoft just missed out on dominating the smartphone market

    But his comments this week were a bit self-serving. And I almost choked when he said: “We knew the mobile phone would be very popular so we were doing what was called Windows Mobile. We missed being the dominant mobile operating system by a very tiny amount.”

    And things became laughable when he went on to claim: “We were distracted during our antitrust trial. We didn’t assign the best people to do the work. So it’s the biggest mistake I made in terms of something that was clearly within our skill set. We were clearly the company that should have achieved that – and we didn’t.”

    Utter rubbish.

    https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/opinion-analysis/113849252/dont-buy-bill-gates-outrageous-claim-that-microsoft-just-missed-out-on-dominating-the-smartphone-market

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Apple will reportedly manufacture its $6,000 Mac Pro in China

    According to Wall Street Journal sources, Apple will work with Quanta Computer Inc., out of a factory near Shanghai. That facility is close to other Apple suppliers, which could help the company lower its shipping costs, and manufacturing labor costs in China are still much lower than those in the US. Apple has a long-standing relationship with Quanta, which makes MacBooks and Apple smartwatches at its other facilities.

    The decision to move Mac Pro production to China comes even as trade tensions between the Trump administration and China escalate. The proposed 25 percent tariffs on imports from China would affect all of Apple’s major devices. The company has asked suppliers to study shifting assembly of some products out of China, and Foxconn said it could produce US-bound iPhones outside of China if necessary.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/06/28/apple-manufacture-mac-pro-china/

  • Huawei can buy from US suppliers again — but things will never be the same

    All told, Huawei founder and chief executive Ren Zhengfei said recently that the ban would cost the Chinese tech firm — the world’s third-larger seller of smartphones — some $30 billion in lost revenue of the next two years.

    Now, however, the Trump administration has provided a reprieve, at least based on the President’s comments following a meeting with Chinese premier Xi Jinping at the G20 summit this weekend.

    “US companies can sell their equipment to Huawei. We’re talking about equipment where there’s no great national security problem with it,” the U.S. President said.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/29/huawei-us-supplier-ban-lifted/

Other

  • Former Equifax executive sentenced to prison for insider trading prior to data breach

    The Justice Department announced this week that former Equifax CIO Jun Ying has been sentenced to four months in prison for insider trading. He pled guilty earlier this year for for selling his stock in the company prior to the announcement that it had been hit with a massive data breach in 2017.

    The Security and Exchanges Commission charged Ying with insider trading last year. The Department of Justice says that in August 2017, after learning about the breach, he began researching the impact that a similar breach had on another company’s stock price. Later that morning, he promptly exercised and sold all of his stock options, earning nearly a million dollars from the sale. In doing so, he avoided a loss of $117,000 that he otherwise would have incurred when the company’s stock price dropped after the disclosure. More than 150 million people had their personal information leaked in the incident.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/29/20056655/jun-ying-equifax-breach-jail-time-insider-trading-department-of-justice

  • Google’s Enemies Gear Up to Make Antitrust Case

    The stable of Google critics includes TripAdvisor Inc. and Yelp Inc., which accuse the search giant of unfairly favoring its own content.

    Oracle Corp. , which has a long-pending copyright case against Google, has briefed European antitrust regulators about Google’s use of data to target ads and was part of a successful coalition of plaintiffs against Google’s alleged anticompetitive behavior in its Android operating system for smartphones, which led to a record fine issued by the European Commission last year, of €4.3 billion.

    News Corp , which owns The Wall Street Journal, and other publishers say Google and other tech platforms siphon ad revenue from content creators.

    All these companies say they would welcome further antitrust scrutiny. They and others are expected to seek out Justice Department officials as they prepare a Google probe, according to industry executives and antitrust lawyers.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-enemies-gear-up-to-make-antitrust-case-11561368601

  • Jony Ive leaving Apple after nearly 30 years to start new design firm

    Apple’s chief design officer Jonathan Ive will depart the company later this year, bringing an end to a tenure spent crafting some of technology’s most influential products, including the iPhone. Ive, who has led Apple’s design team since 1996, is leaving “to form an independent design company which will count Apple among its primary clients.” The company is called LoveFrom, and Ive will be joined by famed designer Marc Newson on the new venture. Despite stepping down from his executive position, Ive and Apple both claim he will still work “on a range of projects with Apple.”

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/27/18761736/jony-ive-apple-leave-iphone-chief-design-officer-lovefrom-company-quit
    History Will Not Be Kind to Jony Ive

    Ive’s Apple has been one in which consumers have been endlessly encouraged to buy new stuff and get rid of the old. The loser is the environment, and the winner is Apple’s bottom line. Apple has become famous for its design, and Ive has become famous, too. Let’s hope the next great consumer electronics designer is nothing like him.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywyjmw/history-will-not-be-kind-to-jony-ive

Supplier Report: 6/28/2019


Photo by Craig Sybert on Unsplash

Automation and artificial intelligence will likely change the world, for both good and bad.

The dark side of automation is making itself known through robocalls. We all get them, including hospitals. Many help lines are getting clogged with robocalls which are preventing people with urgent care needs from getting through.

Meanwhile, Oracle is on a roller-coaster ride this month. Their financials are up, but people are calling out financial engineering due to $36B in stock buy back.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Blue Prism acquires UK’s Thoughtonomy for up to $100M to expand its RPA platform with more AI

    Blue Prism, which helped coin the term RPA when it was founded back in 2001, has announced that it is buying Thoughtonomy, which has built a cloud-based AI engine that delivers RPA-based solutions on a SaaS framework. Blue Prism is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange — where its market cap is around £1.3 billion ($1.6 billion), and in a statement to the market alongside its half-year earnings, it said it would be paying up to £80 million ($100 million) for the firm.

    The deal is coming in a combination of cash and stock: £12.5 million payable on completion of the deal, £23 million in shares payable on completion of the deal, up to £20 million payable a year after the deal closes, up to £4.5 million in cash after 18 months, and a final £20 million on the second anniversary of the deal closing, in shares. Thoughtonomy had never raised outside funding, although that was not for lack of interest.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/18/blue-prism-acquires-uks-thoughtonomy-for-up-to-100m-to-expand-its-rpa-platform-with-more-ai/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Microsoft PowerPoint gets an AI presentation coach

    Microsoft’s AI can’t tell you if your jokes will land, of course, but the new coaching feature gives you real-time feedback on your pacing, for example, tells you whether you are using inclusive language and how many filler words you use. It also makes sure that you don’t commit the greatest sin of presenting: just reading the slides.

    After your rehearsal session, PowerPoint will show you a dashboard with a summary of your performance and what to focus on to improve your skills.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/18/microsofts-powerpoint-will-use-ai-to-make-you-a-better-public-speaker/

Security/Privacy

  • Robocalls are overwhelming hospitals and patients, threatening a new kind of health crisis

    “These calls to health-care institutions and patients are extremely dangerous to the public health and patient privacy,” said Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (N.J.), the Democratic chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who has put forward legislation to try to clamp down on robocalls. “The FCC and Justice Department need to go after these criminals with the seriousness and urgency this issue deserves.”

    The absence of immediate relief spells particular trouble for medical professionals. Scammers often adopt a technique known as spoofing to cover their tracks, a practice that results in people receiving calls from numbers that look similar to their own. For a hospital, that often can mean calls appear to come from local area codes, tricking health care workers into thinking it’s a nearby patient in need of care.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/17/robocalls-are-overwhelming-hospitals-patients-threatening-new-kind-health-crisis/?utm_term=.3184fc47f8f7

  • Your used Nest camera could be spying on you

    A member of the Facebook Wink Users Group discovered that after selling his Nest cam, he was still able to access images from his old camera—except it wasn’t a feed of his property. Instead, he was tapping into the feed of the new owner, via his Wink account. As the original owner, he had connected the Nest Cam to his Wink smart-home hub, and somehow, even after he reset it, the connection continued.

    We decided to test this ourselves and found that, as it happened for the person on Facebook, images from our decommissioned Nest Cam Indoor were still viewable via a previously linked Wink hub account—although instead of a video stream, it was a series of still images snapped every several seconds.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90366910/your-used-nest-camera-could-be-spying-on-you

Software/SaaS

  • Oracle shares rise on bullish earnings report

    Good numbers: Oracle Corp. shares rose 7.5% to $56.63 Thursday after the business software maker reported a bigger-than-expected 14% rise in quarterly profit driven by growth in its cloud services and license-support business. The shares closed Friday at $56.12.

    http://www.startribune.com/market-recap-oracle-shares-rise-on-bullish-earnings-report/511662182/
    Oracle investors breathe a sigh of relief on rising sales

    “We are focused on our star products and our star products are now driving the top line higher,” Ellison said on the call. “We have these other businesses that are melting away and we just don’t care.”

    Cloud licence and on-premise licence sales increased 12 per cent to US$2.52 billion, suggesting that Oracle is doing a good job of signing on new customers. The company said that revenue from NetSuite grew 32 per cent, and Fusion HR and financial suites gained by the same amount.

    https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/technology/oracle-investors-breathe-a-sigh-of-relief-on-rising-sales
    Oracle spent $36 billion in one year buying its own stock back, and it raises some uncomfortable questions about how it’s spending its cash

    For example, in contrast to the $36 billion spent on stock buybacks, Oracle spent $1.66 billion on capital expenditures in 2019, down from the $1.73 billion it spent in 2018.

    Remember, Oracle is trying to build itself into a cloud computing giant to take on the likes of mighty Amazon Web Services and, more importantly, keep itself relevant in an age where its customers want the cloud.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-stock-buybacks-growth-cloud-investors-2019-6
    The New Oracle Looks Like the Old IBM

    Oracle is an aging tech company that lacks real growth engines and repeatedly props up its earnings with buybacks. It’s stuck in the same downward spiral as IBM used to be, and it lacks the motivation of IBM under Ginni Rometty to break the cycle. Therefore, I’d avoid Oracle and stick with stronger tech companies — like Amazon or Microsoft — even though they trade at higher valuations.

    https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/06/20/the-new-oracle-looks-like-the-old-ibm.aspx

Other

  • IBM CIO Focuses on User Experience to Keep Staff Happy

    New employees expect that the IT services they use at work will be as good as or better than the technology they use at home, he said. To be competitive and attract talent, “we have to create an environment where talented engineers want to work,” he added.

    To that end, Mr. Previn and the design team have created new ways for employees to get and set up new devices. Device provisioning, or the act of assigning employees laptops, desktops and mobile phones with the appropriate encryption, email and productivity software, can be costly and time-consuming for IT departments.

    Mr. Previn’s user-research team oversaw a monthslong project in which they observed how much friction was involved for employees setting up their laptops. Many of the steps are now automated and cloud-based, similar to the way a consumer would be able to set up a device out of the box. “That’s materially different from an experience standpoint,” Mr. Previn said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-cio-focuses-on-user-experience-to-keep-staff-happy-11560984488